Raven Chacon’s “A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak”
Rômulo Moraes
The flag-score that opens composer and sound-artist Raven Chacon’s exhibition at Swiss Institute—featuring work made over the past twenty-five years alongside a new sound and video installation—is a miniature portrait of his career. American Ledger No. 1 (Army Blanket) (2020), a graphic history of the United States in the form of an army blanket, is embossed with icons of waves, flames, police whistles, wood-chopping axes, and a fractured city skyline. Chacon’s main interests are all there: notation in the expanded field, the interplay of various mediums, the embeddedness of sound and landscape, and the malleability of map and territory. Working with post-Cagean aesthetics yet advancing them within a Diné/Navajo context, Chacon’s work suggests that notation is an imposition onto sound comparable to colonialism’s imposition onto the land.
The opening room contains the installation Still Life No. 3 (2015), in which a series of glass panels mounted onto the walls and engraved with white fonts tell the Diné Bahane’ creation myth, which describes the birth of light and color in worlds below ours, the raising of the waters, and the formation of mountains and celestial bodies. The transparent and reflective surface makes the glossy text intentionally difficult to read, as though …
Gervane de Paula’s “como é bom viver em Mato Grosso”
Oliver Basciano
I entered Gervane de Paula’s three-room retrospective by the wrong door, meaning that I saw this chronological survey in reverse order. By the time I came to view the works with which the exhibition is supposed to open—the artist’s earliest paintings, from the 1970s, show sunny scenes of life in his home state of Mato Grosso, in the Central-West Region of Brazil—I was aware of the dark clouds that would gather over his vivid later canvases and Arte Popular-inspired sculptures.
This knowledge of the artist’s development heightened my sensitivity to the uneasy details that creep into even the most bucolic of de Paula’s first works and foreshadow his later career. Barro Araés (1977), for example, makes plain the artist’s deep affection for his local neighborhood in Cuiabá, the capital city of Mato Grosso: in the foreground, children play with kites in front of their single-story homes while, further back, their mothers hang washing on lines strung across the communal grassy ground, the brightly colored clothes matched by the palette of the airborne stick and paper toys. You can almost smell the Sunday pamonha boiling in the food cart a man pushes past the houses. Yet my eyes were drawn to …
60th Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere”
Ben Eastham
The title “Foreigners Everywhere,” derived from the neon text works by Claire Fontaine that hang over the entrances to both sites of the international exhibition at the Venice Biennale, holds out the promise of a productive confusion. In the Italian expression visible on the reverse of the English, stranieri ovunque, the phrase carries a more overt implication of strangeness with the same edge of hostility, so that the visitor might brace themselves for a series of encounters that are—like the experience of foreignness itself—bewildering, unsettling, and fundamentally unsafe.
But there is no need to do so. Because while the adoption of a bilingual sign as motto for the Biennale’s centerpiece exhibition suggests that its curator, Adriano Pedrosa, will embrace the miscomprehensions that are commensurate with translation, the reality is that everything will be explained to you. No space will be left for misunderstanding or its correlate, interpretation. The frustration of this exhibition is not that of the exile who, in a strange land, is unable to make sense of their surroundings but rather that of the tourist who is prevented from straying beyond the Potemkin village in which everything has been arranged to illustrate a point.
This is not to …
“Tongues of Fire”
Daisy Hildyard
From Grenfell Tower to the clothing factory fires of Gujarat, the wildfires of Sicily to those in California or New South Wales, the great fires of the past decade have all seemed to reveal something about the place that they destroyed. Caused by different circumstances, and burning on distant parts of the planet, what the fires share is this quality of revelation: each one shed light on the slower but relentless systems that made its devastation possible.
You don’t need to contemplate the geopolitical causes of disaster, though, to know that fire compels attention. Its mesmerizing quality is everywhere in this group exhibition, shown over two floors in a former fire station, that places nineteen local civic relics and documents beside twenty-six international contemporary and modern works. Lungiswa Gqunta’s Feet Under Fire (2017) plays hypnotically slow video footage of bare feet, with scrubbing brushes strapped onto them, swinging over a rubble of charcoal and matches. Noémie Goudal’s film Below the Deep South (2021) sees flames licking and consuming a tropical forest, set to a soundtrack of distant bird calls. In John Gerrard’s CGI Flare (Oceania) (2022) a flag of pure flame waves over an unending stretch of water. In Tell …
“Day Jobs”
Tausif Noor
On the Reddit page for Contemporary Art last year, an anonymous 24-year-old, freshly armed with a BFA, poignantly asked for guidance on their career. Bemoaning their decision to take on a role producing marketing content—a shift in direction from days typically spent “reading art theory, reading different art journals online, making drawings and applying to open calls”—the ingenue expressed guilt for shirking their career while trying to save money for graduate education as an international student. The replies are overwhelmingly supportive, with most respondents reassuring the anonymous poster that they were far from alone, that they could find something relevant to their creative practice and still feel fulfilled, that there are tricks to live cheaply and work efficiently.
One especially astute reply linked to a review of an exhibition that spoke to OP’s very question. Aptly titled “Day Jobs” and debuting at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, the exhibition, organized by Veronica Roberts, gathers some thirty-nine artists working in the United States between World War II and the present day, including some blockbuster stars whose career trajectories were part of their mythologies, like Andy Warhol (commercial illustrator and window display designer for Bonwit …
Joan Jonas’s “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral”
Filipa Ramos
Arranged into families following a meticulous taxonomic logic, the almost 300 drawings presented at Drawing Center reveal the extraordinary bestiary that Joan Jonas has been compiling over five decades. Jonas has a unique capacity to traverse and merge artistic fields as varied as performance, sculpture, environment, and video installation, but what is illuminated by this exhibition, carefully curated by Laura Hoptman with Rebecca DiGiovanna, is how drawing runs through, across, and within every means of her expression, accompanying the development of her career from the 1960s to the present.
The show also demonstrates how the artist has been bringing these disciplines together through drawing, as it becomes a practice akin to performing and editing, in a do-repeat-redo-repeat-erase-do-repeat method that connects the mind, body, and hand until the form emerges. Two drawings flank the entrance to the show (all works are untitled but classified by a reference number, in this case JJ084, circa late 1990s, and JJ085, from 2012), which also becomes its exit. These are two naked female torsos, as imposing and as head-, arm- and feet-less as the Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BCE), made in the context of two live performances.
In parallel to this, Jonas has blurred …
Emanuel Proweller’s “Un souvenir de soleil”
Ren Ebel
Having survived first the Holocaust and then three years’ conscription in the Red Army, the Jewish-Polish painter Emanuel Proweller later said of his identity that it felt like “a jacket with a reversible lining.” The same analogy might be applied to Proweller’s paintings which, though unmistakably his own, routinely dress up in the various styles the artist encountered after moving to Paris at the end of the 1940s. Pilfering and distilling motifs of Fauvist landscape, Cubism, Hard-edge abstraction and proto-Pop appropriations of commercial graphic design, Proweller pursued striking, radioactive syncopations of color.
Taken together, the paintings in this survey map a progression from strict geometrical abstraction to a more confident and eclectic mode in which Proweller’s dynamic planes of color begin to serve as set pieces for more recognizable forms. Often, these are laconic bodies or quotidian objects, sights from Proweller’s home in Créteil, on the outskirts of Paris, or his countryside studio in Ardèche. But the artist’s move toward figuration was less a means of representing his world than an opportunity for his colors to encounter one another at increasingly complex and unexpected boundaries. In Au bois de Chaville [In the woods of Chaville] (1974), sky blue and viridian …
Tina Girouard’s “SIGN-IN”
Cat Kron
Performance art offers its viewer what other visual forms can’t: a direct address in real time. Yet in the years that follow its realization, the medium is susceptible to misremembering, or worse, indifference; its curators frequently resort to displaying a work’s discards in an effort to recreate the experience of its unfolding after the original audience has, quite literally, moved on.
When it comes to Louisianian artist Tina Girouard, much of the imagined audience was never there in the first place. Girouard’s difficult-to-classify performance work—she remains best known within the art world for her collaboration with Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark on the restaurant-cum-happening FOOD—transpired primarily in downtown New York in the 1970s, and until recently almost none of it trickled down to the Bayou, an unfortunate fact given how prominently the region figured in her own artistic mythology. The artist’s method of repurposing the same materials in performance after performance inadvertently complicated the task of future curators and archivists who might hope to recreate specific iterations.
Foremost among her props were eight twelve-foot lengths of floral-printed silk, on which she bestowed the typically mythical-sounding name “Solomon’s Lot,” and which she used in many of her performances throughout the 1970s. …
Eva Gold’s “Shadow Lands”
Jenny Wu
The critique in London-based artist Eva Gold’s first US solo exhibition is spare and subtle. Consisting of six works on paper and two sculptural installations, the show conveys, in meticulous details and material choices, a message about the coercive economic power embedded in everyday cultural transactions. At the heart of the exhibition is “Pilot and Passengers” (all works 2024), a series of colored-pencil drawings of stills from Benny’s Video, Michael Haneke’s 1992 film about a violence-obsessed teenager disenchanted by his affluent upbringing, who murders a stranger in his parents’ home.
Gold’s understated drawings, hung in identical, nineteen-by-twenty-six-inch frames, line three of the gallery’s walls. In Haneke’s film, a low tracking shot follows several pairs of hands as Benny, the teenager, covertly collects money for a pyramid scheme called Pilot and Passengers that he introduced to his friends during school choir practice. Gold’s lighter, less saturated images emphasize general forms over details. From afar, viewers might mistakenly believe that they are spying on people holding hands. Up close, one still feels like a voyeur, since Gold’s static renderings allow the eye to linger on the creases in the fabric of the boys’ jeans, the threaded borders of their back pockets, the …
Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar
McKenzie Wark
I probably speak for many trans readers of Cynthia Carr’s biography of Candy Darling when I say that I have very mixed emotions about it. On the one hand, I’m grateful for Carr’s tireless work in documenting the life of Andy Warhol’s most luminous trans superstar. On the other hand, it’s painful to read page after page of people who hated Candy, abused her, insulted her, exploited her, or, on a good day, merely disrespected her.
Born in 1944, Candy grew up on Long Island. Her father was an asshole. Her mother, at best, put up with her. She was one of those whom straight people, cis people, perceives as other from the start. High school was a torment. As a young Candy confided to her diary: “Nobody loves or understands me. This is a wicked world, I think.” She was right.
The wicked world was out to crush her long before she could fashion herself as “Candy Darling.” Around 1962 she started taking the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan to escape, mostly to hang out around Washington Square. She started constructing a persona through which to survive: “I must learn to charm people in a quiet way.”
Carr does …
Biting the hand
The Editors
The most surprising thing about the raft of recent petitions against the infrastructural biases underpinning the commercial and institutional art worlds might be that anyone can claim to have been surprised. If responses to wider domestic and international crises—ranging from the rise of the far right to the decimation of Gaza—have shone fresh light on the misalignment of the rhetoric in what is called “contemporary art” from the social and economic systems that maintain it, then that disjunction is hardly new. The more pressing question is how artists (and writers) might usefully respond to it.
It might first be worth noting that the map of contemporary art is not perfectly representative of its territory. It is hard to find many shows in New York speaking on behalf of that large part of the American population that will shortly vote for an aspiring dictator, yet it is to their credit that the curators of the current Whitney Biennial have elected to foreground artists representing causes vulnerable to the dismal eventuality of his election. Whether you think this circling of the wagons is an unqualified good might once have depended on whether you prefer the arena of culture to be agonistic—in which …
81st Whitney Biennial, “Even Better Than the Real Thing”
Ben Eastham
Walking through this survey of American art in the age of anger and anxiety, I kept returning to the curatorial statement’s seemingly innocuous proposal that new technologies are “complicating our understanding of what is real.” Are our horizons now so narrow, it occurred to me, that an algorithm’s ability to generate a derivative image is really more consciousness-expanding than such longstanding preoccupations of art as spiritual experience or the natural world? Or might the title’s appeal to something “better” serve to distract us from the already complicated and unarguably real events playing out beyond the walls of the museum, with which this biennial can seem reluctant to engage?
A generation of artists are, on the show’s evidence, retreating from a hostile public sphere into their own carefully cultivated worlds. This tendency manifests both in the valorization of marginalized identities through the adaptation of folk traditions to the present—notably ektor garcia’s use of crochet to articulate a nomadic cross-border experience—and in the tendency towards opacity, most explicitly in the panels of smoked black glass suspended precariously over the audience’s heads by Charisse Pearlina Weston (of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust, 2022). Many of the realities …
Issam Kourbaj
Tom Denman
These twinned exhibitions span Issam Kourbaj’s responses to the civil war that has carried on in his home country since the uprising against Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, expanding to consider related conflicts in the Middle East and the broader plight of refugees. Trained in Damascus, Leningrad, and London, Kourbaj moved to Cambridge in 1990 and has over the past thirteen years harnessed metaphor’s literal Greek meaning—“to carry across”—to the archival impulse to catalogue and connect.
Inspired by prisoners who smuggled their names out of a Syrian jail to let their families know they were alive, Urgent Archives, written in blood (2019) consists of disbound books and papers—perhaps the dead stock of an antiquarian bookshop or college library—loosely gridded on the floor, some “hovering” on blocks. In black, blue, and blood-red ink, Kourbaj has marked them with erratic lines and handwritten Arabic script. One book is stamped with the (English) words LEAVE TO REMAIN, signifying a refugee’s permission to stay in the UK—the granting of which is unguaranteed, racially biased, and often long-awaited in one of the country’s prisonlike detention centers.
Every day since the uprising, Kourbaj has sewn a date stone into a tent fabric to create Our exile …
Angela Tiatia’s “The Dark Current”
Stephanie Bailey
Angela Tiatia’s single-channel moving image work The Dark Current (2023), projected onto one wall in a darkened room, opens with a body-as-landscape. A cropped, lateral view of a floral appliqued fuchsia dress follows the concave slope from breast to waist as dark waters lap in the background, like an island. The camera slowly pans to the side, following the cleavage’s arc until it reaches the face of a woman with a pearl perched delicately at one tear duct. The lens then rises over her to gaze down at her from above. Lying in black water atop a magenta panel, her arms move slowly to create a frame of rippling waves around her.
The pearl is a portal to The Pearl (2022), an earlier immersive video installation not shown here, which was commissioned for “Matisse Alive” at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021–22), reflecting on Henri Matisse’s travels to the Pacific Islands through juxtapositions of his works with tivaevae quilts and commissions by artists Nina Chanel Abney, Sally Smart, Robin White, and Tiatia. Departing from Venus in a Shell (1930), a bronze sculpture that Matisse made the year he visited Tahiti, Tiatia composed The Pearl as a digital tapa, …
Multi-Sensory Languages: On Colomboscope 2024
Elena Sorokina
“The endless symbolism of forests lies in their low visibility,” writes Anna Arabindan-Kesson, “to move through the dense entanglements of these spaces we need all our senses.” The same might be said of Colomboscope, Sri Lanka’s interdisciplinary arts festival now in its eighth edition. Dense, multi-sensory, and rhizomatic, it speaks through entanglements and intersections, and flows beyond exhibition spaces to wetland walks, conversations with forest gods, and other “mushroomings.”
At JDA Perera Gallery, the main exhibition space, the architecture of meaning can be perceived like a forest stratification, combining a layered verticality with dense horizontal interconnections. Suspended between the gallery’s floors, Ecophora (2023), a light installation conceived by Pankaja Withanachchi and Roshan de Selfa, connects the layers, and calls attention to our precarious relationship with visibility. Deep in the forest, only a flickering vision is possible for the human eye, which occurs when sunlight shines through trees. This phenomenon—called Komorebi in Japanese—is recalled in the artwork’s evocation of the moving luminosity of the forest, inviting the viewers to activate all their sensors.
Ecophora’s shadows almost reach the Ceylon currency made by Laki Senanayake (1937-2021). One of a wave of post-independence artists in Sri Lanka whose work crossed disciplinary boundaries, Laki’s …
noé olivas’s “Gilded Dreams”
Suzanne Hudson
With Patrisse Cullors and alexandre ali reza dorriz, noé olivas is a co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, a collective and gallery with adjacent studio space dedicated, in their words, “to shifting the trauma-induced conditions of poverty and economic injustice, bridging cultural work and advocacy, and investigating ancestries through the lens of Inglewood and its community.” For a not-inconsequential time after its March 2020 opening and near-simultaneous pandemic-shuttering, it also served as the locus of art supply and food distribution—the latter in collaboration with Lauren Halsey’s Summaeverythang—extending the site’s history as a functioning convenience store. That it sits right under the flight path for Los Angeles International Airport provoked reckoning, from the first, with its imagined audiences alongside those more proximate. The group’s exhibition made in response to the virus, “CARE NOT CAGES: Processing a Pandemic,” lived online; olivas’s mural spelling out the same sentiment blanketed the parking lot as a horizontal billboard visible from above, coming into focus on a jet’s descent. The words function as an incantation but also an indictment, denouncing racial capitalism and the twinning of epidemiological and carceral disaster that the disease exacerbated but did not need to produce.
“Gilded Dreams” follows this initial mandate, …
Saskia Noor van Imhoff’s “Mineral Lick”
Tom Jeffreys
In 2021, Saskia Noor van Imhoff purchased a dairy farm amid the polder landscapes of Friesland in the Netherlands. The farm had been active for some four hundred years, but derelict for the past fifteen. van Imhoff approaches the site as a research project, entitled Rest, with the implication that the land, exhausted after centuries of extractive management, now finally has the chance to recover. With the land recuperating, the artist set to work: reactivating the farm not only as a site of agricultural production (prioritizing a certain conception of environmental responsibility over a profit motive) but also as a place for workshops, symposia, and other interdisciplinary activity. Meanwhile, van Imhoff has also reoriented her practice in response to the land, its historic uses and possible futures.
“Mineral Lick” is the first UK solo show for van Imhoff, whose previous work has focused on hierarchies of value within collecting institutions such as museums and archives. Here, she foregrounds unexpected material combinations underpinned by a fascination with grafting, hybridity, and the recontextualizing of materials. GRIMM’s street-level windows have been washed with white shading paint and the interior glows with pink-red light—both echoes of the forced growing conditions of commercial greenhouse production. …
“El fin de lo maravilloso. Cyberpop en México”
Gaby Cepeda
In her curatorial text for this group exhibition of Mexican artists mostly born in the nineties, Karol Woller Reyes defines a “generational imagination.” It belongs to artists who have “naturally incorporated some creative strategies” such as digital montage and circuit bending into the production of paintings and sculptures that also abound with references to pop-cultural figures from Pokémon to Pepe the Frog. The implication is that the art of today is shaped by the technologies and media environment of its makers’ adolescence. Shared access to cable TV and computers during childhood does not, however, a generation make.
One of the narrow aisles that encircles the warehouse-like main gallery at Museo El Chopo housed the first, smaller part of “El Fin de lo Maravilloso.” Tucked to the side of the glass-walled gift shop were pieces by YOPE Projects collective crowded into a scaffold structure resembling an open-air market; a very early José Eduardo Barajas painting of cloudy emoji-like figures (Cirrus, Socrates, particle, decimal, hurricane, dolphin, tulip, Monica, 2018) in a freestanding wooden frame; and ¿Estamos, Kimosabe? (2020) a much-exhibited soft sculpture of a Mexican Bugs Bunny by Paloma Contreras Lomas—which judging by the dirt on its paws, has seen better days. …
Mary Helena Clark’s “Conveyor”
Chris Murtha
There’s a card trick midway through Mary Helena Clark’s Neighboring Animals (all works 2024 unless otherwise stated), a two-channel video projected into a darkened corner. While an elderly orangutan watches from the other side of his enclosure’s window, two human hands press a single playing card against the thick safety glass. Holding a stick in one hand, the ape nimbly picks up the card, now (miraculously!) on his side of the barrier. After giving it a sniff and twirling it around in his hands, he places it back on the glass, tapping it a few times with his makeshift wand—perhaps his attempt to send it back through the seemingly porous window. Clark edited this video—a zoo’s promotional clip gone viral—to preserve some mystery on behalf of the orangutan, cutting the ending so that the card, instead of falling to the ground, remains affixed to the glass.
A collage of sampled footage, still pictures, medical scans, and her own camerawork, Neighboring Animals scrutinizes the thresholds between inside and outside, human and beast. The left channel consists solely of yellow subtitles with no corresponding voice, a pastiche of quotations on the topic of disgust. Alongside illustrations of chained and leashed animals from …
Esther Mahlangu’s “Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting”
Ben Eastham
This retrospective of the Ndebele painter and unofficial artist laureate of post-Apartheid South Africa presents two origin stories. The first, from which its title derives, tells of how Esther Mahlangu first identified as an artist when, having been reprimanded for daubing the walls of her family home as a child, she persevered until she was good enough to be permitted by her mother to paint its façade. The second, taking place several decades later, arrived when a group of European researchers came to her village to seek out the woman responsible for decorating the house in their photograph. “We want you,” they said, “to come to Paris.”
The invitation was to participate in the 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre” at the Centre Pompidou, a show that continues to cast a long shadow over attempts to decenter or decolonize the representation in western institutions of global visual culture. Mahlangu contributed a reproduction of her own painted Ndebele house (reproduced in miniature in this exhibition), setting in train a career so prolific that her vivid polychromatic designs now serve as visual shorthand for Nelson Mandela’s vision of South Africa as a comparably vibrant and harmonious “rainbow nation.” These instantly recognizable patterns—since …
Catherine Opie’s “Walls, Windows, and Blood”
Sylvie Fortin
They say ghosts, vampires, and the soulless cast no shadows. Shot in a Vatican City emptied of visitors during the pandemic summer of 2021, Catherine Opie’s new photographs provocatively reshuffle different threads of her longstanding inquiries—the spectrum from transparency to opacity; communal spaces; the body as/and architecture; queerness and institutions. With its succinct, descriptive enumeration, the exhibition’s trinitarian title “Walls, Windows, and Blood” implies unsettling visual conversations to which she gives form with a selection of images from three new series (all works 2023), clustered in grids, lined up along walls, and proceeding in colonnades.
No Apology (June 5, 2021), a large photograph of Pope Francis delivering a speech from a top-floor window of his residence overlooking St. Peter’s Square, greets visitors. A lone white man dwarfed by statuary and muffled by the resounding whiteness of the colonnaded plaza, he floats above a blood-red banner bearing his coat of arms. In his short allocution, uttered in the wake of the traumatic discovery of unmarked graves at the former Church-run Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, the pontiff acknowledged (apologies would have to wait) the Catholic Church’s complicity in both the colonial dispossession of Canada’s Aboriginal communities and the accompanying systematic …
Amalia Pica’s “Aula Expandida”
Noah Simblist
How might our understanding of education better incorporate communication, participation, and play? And what would be the consequences of that expanded approach? Such questions have been at the center of Amalia Pica’s work for many years, drawing partially on her early experience as a primary school teacher. Her first solo exhibition in New York attends to the manifold aspects of learning across a group of collages, sculptures, and video works organized around a new interactive installation.
Two understated large-scale graphite and watercolor drawings, School sheets in adjusted scale (or an exercise in how to go back to all the things I hadn’t thought of yet) #1 and #2 (both 2011), are based on notebook paper with “Rivadavia” printed in an elegant cursive in the margin. This references Bernardino Rivadavia, the first president of the London-based artist’s birth country of Argentina, using a font based on his signature. The stamping of state power into the very books in which young people learn how to write signals the reproduction of the ideological subject through a form of repeated inscription. This has chilling implications in the context of the military dictatorship (1976–83) into which Pica was born.
Her 2008 video On Education depicts …
“Fokus: Hamed Abdalla”
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
The Egyptian artist Hamed Abdalla painted mothers and farmers and letters and landscapes but the subjects he returned to most often, in each of the many disparate phases of his career, were lovers. This jewel box-sized exhibition devoted to Abdalla’s work, organized by Morad Montazami and Madeleine de Colnet of the Paris-based publishing and curatorial project Zamân, features six of his amorous pairings. The earliest lovers in the show are Les Amants de Shemm Ennessim [The Lovers of Shemm Ennessim], from 1953, a sweet gouache on silk paper showing a couple in traditional dress, facing each other demurely in profile but slyly extending their arms to embrace. The figures appear stylized and flattened, and clearly, Abdalla was inspired by a celebrated genre of hand-painting on glass depicting Antar and Abla. Those two are the hero and heroine of pre-Islamic poetry (composed by Antar himself, full name Antarah Ibn Shaddad) relating the episodic adventures of a black warrior poet who was born a slave but became a knight and the smart, beautiful woman who defied her family to be with him.
The last of Abdalla’s lovers, in a show conceived as part of a series and wedged into the museum’s permanent …
The usual suspects
The Editors
At the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, an elegant hang of the collection privileges unexpected harmonies and formal affinities over conventional art histories. The walls of the opening room are gridded with landscapes, portraits, and looping film clips soundtracked by a waltz; a clever sightline pairs El Anatsui’s glitter with Gustav Klimt; an azure monochrome by Ettore Spalletti brings out the sky in Gustave Courbet’s facing Poachers in the Snow (1867); stills from Ana Mendieta’s 1974 film Burial Pyramid are presented so that the artist seems to disappear into the landscape. So it came as a surprise, given the sensitivity and scholarship with which the permanent collection is handled, to discover that the museum’s temporary exhibition space was devoted to British fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien.
Why, I asked myself among the maps of Middle Earth, costumes from the film adaptations, and Lord of the Rings-themed pinball machines, is Italy’s museum of modern and contemporary art showcasing the writing of an Oxford philologist obsessed with proto-European mythologies under the title “Man, Professor, Author”? The answer was not, it seems, because its curatorial staff have suddenly discovered the charms of medievalist genre fiction (Italy, after all, has Umberto Eco) but because Prime Minister …
“Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists”
Vanessa Holyoak
The Chinese term gūanxi describes a web of relations between friends, family, lovers, co-workers, even corrupt politicians. It evokes a sense of community and belonging that can prove elusive for the diverse group of people commonly referred to as “Chinese American.” A moniker that points to allegiances, however fraught, to the two countries it references, “Chinese American” is a one-size-fits-all label that attempts to forge a singular identity out of a heterogeneous array of diasporic experiences shaped by displacement, immigration, and cross-cultural translation.
Curated by Dr. Jenny Lin, “Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists” hinges on another transcultural exchange. Drawing connections between gūanxi and French-Martinican philosopher of opacity Édouard Glissant’s notion of a “poetics of relation,” the exhibition posits relationality over identity as an alternate cornerstone of contemporary Chinese Americanness. Referenced in an introductory essay in the exhibition catalogue written by Dr. Lin, Glissant’s emphasis on diasporic relation is espoused throughout the show—which includes areas for repose and relation amongst exhibition-goers—and enacted through real and speculative social encounters between family, friends, and strangers staged within the works themselves. Drawing its title from the Chinese word for America, 美國/měiguó, which translates literally to “beautiful country,” along with the …
Tania Bruguera’s “Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism)”
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
In Germany’s increasingly censorious intellectual climate, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof staged the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s “Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism)” inside its main hall. This participatory public reading of—and discussion around—Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was spread across four days, featuring the artist alongside writers such as Masha Gessen and Deborah Feldman, prominent artists in Berlin including Candice Breitz, and people from “the museum’s neighborhood.”
Speakers—mostly solo, sometimes in a trio, and even as a chorus—addressed the audience amid a spare scenography: a single rattan-upholstered rocking chair, illuminated from above by a beam of golden light. Hospital-gray bean bags and cardboard stools were strewn before it, stretching out towards the entrance of the museum and luring visitors into a collectivized consideration of “power and violence, plurality and morality, politics and truth.”
Microphones were connected to a sound system scattered haphazardly around the space, and synchronized with speakers outside the institution facing Invalidenstraße, a thoroughfare leading to Berlin’s central station, a few hundred meters away. Like the work’s title, Bruguera’s sonic gesture felt prescriptive—as if it were the artist’s duty to break Arendt out of the institution and onto the …
Madeline Hollander’s “Entanglement”
Maddie Hampton
In profile, the six rounded disks at the center of Madeline Hollander’s latest exhibition appear glamorously extraterrestrial, the bright bulbs of the track lighting glinting in their polished chrome surfaces. Arranged in a grid on curved, white pedestals, the satellite-shaped objects are constructed from parabolic mirrors, a hole cut at the top of each to reveal a sinewy figure cast in aluminum, revolving atop a bifurcated circle of colored glass. Based on Hollander’s personalized notation system, specific silhouettes and colors correspond to a precise movement so that, taken in concert, the six figures play out an entire choreography, spinning perpetually in place.
Viewed at the right angle, the maquette doubles, ascending out of the mirror like a ballerina from a jewelry box to create the illusion of a perfect pas de deux—not a limb out of place, nor a posture skipped, as both “dancers” rotate in flawless synchronicity. Titled Entanglement Choreography I-VI (all works 2023), the objects are designed as miniaturized visualizations of quantum entanglement, the theory that two particles can be interdependent, mimicking one another across both space and time, the action of one entirely conditional on that of its partner. Quick and loose with her interpretations of the …
Suneil Sanzgiri’s “Here the Earth Grows Gold”
Phil Coldiron
Go past the Tiffany glass, the inventory of deco design and the wing of feminist art that still bears the name Sackler, and finally, tucked away, you’ll find a small enclave of two rooms comprising Suneil Sanzgiri’s solo institutional debut, “Here the Earth Grows Gold.” The smaller of these galleries contains: a sculpture, Red Clay, Stretched Water (Return to the Source) (all works 2023), a kind of provisional hut built of black bamboo and printed images; a minute-long loop of 16mm film, My Memory Is Again in the Way of Your History (After Agha Shahid Ali), in which a digitally-animated banner reading “Your History Gets In The Way Of My Memory” flutters atop waves; and quite a lot of wall text (the one written by the artist himself, demanding that the Brooklyn Museum divest itself of various ill-gotten items in its collection, might reasonably be taken as the show’s fourth work). Moving through a curtain to the centerpiece, the digital double-projection Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), maybe the first thing you notice is the gap between its screens: each canted slightly off an unseen wall, they funnel vision to the six inches or so of space between them.
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Jane Jin Kaisen’s “Halmang”
Dylan Huw
A group of elderly women labor silently, weaving and draping long sheets of white cotton around an islet of black volcanic rock. The twelve-minute film installation’s supplementary materials explain that these women have spent much of their lives working together as haenyeo—an occupation dating back centuries, in which women freedive to harvest seafood for their families on Jeju Island, south of the Korean Peninsula—and that this precise setting is one of shamanic significance, associated with the goddess of wind who gives the film its title, Halmang (2023). The Jeju-born, Denmark-based artist’s patiently observational study of these “women of the sea” emphasizes their status as workers by foregrounding, in lingering close-ups, their aged, scarred faces and hands as continuous with the aged, scarred rock. A soundtrack of crushing waves lulls the viewer, until the film’s confronting climactic image: the islet depeopled and draped in the white cotton. This land, born from geological shock and host to centuries of politically contested narrative, will outlive us all.
Halmang gives this tightly focused exhibition at Manchester’s esea contemporary its title and centerpiece. With a refreshing formal lucidity, it literalizes themes of familial and geopolitical ties that have been central to Kaisen’s work in film …
Ho Tzu Nyen’s “Time & the Tiger”
Adeline Chia
Meditations on the nature of temporality abound in Ho Tzu Nyen’s latest video work, T for Time (2023–). We have explainers on timekeeping traditions in the East and West; a vignette about a man who maintains Singapore’s oldest public clock; the origins of Greenwich Mean Time; metaphysical musings on non-linear time (“time conceived as a viscous fluid… it does not pass and has no rim… it pools”). Accompanying most of these are digital animations that sometimes illustrate the concepts—like imagery of a molting ouroboros—and visuals with less obvious connections to the theme, such as recurring scenes of political protest and incarceration. Most of the text is sung by a male narrator in seemingly improvised melodies. Content, which is shuffled by an algorithm, starts to repeat only about seventy-five edifying minutes in. I was intrigued, stimulated and entertained, but couldn’t escape the feeling of being lectured to. This has something to do with the video’s heavy reliance on text: this work narrates itself.
Ho’s self-narrating, self-theorizing, and sometimes even self-interpreting practice involves a thorough immersion in a range of research topics, resulting in a cathartic showing and telling that has become his signature style. “Time & the Tiger”, a mid-career survey …
Pedro Lasch’s “Entre líneas / Between the Lines”
Mariana Fernández
Pedro Lasch’s mid-career survey at Laboratorio Arte Alameda begins with a painting—the ultra-deadpan McSickle, grande no. 1 (2003)—depicting a yellow hammer and sickle fusing with the “M” of McDonald’s on a red background. These two colors also happen to make up the Chinese flag. The painting exemplifies the multiple layers of Lasch’s practice: the artist is best known not so much for making things as for creating opportunities for social encounter and collaboration through his roles as an activist, educator (he teaches at Duke and is the director of its FHI Social Practice Lab), and cultural organizer (with the collective 16 Beaver). Yet the thematic survey “Pedro Lasch: Entre líneas / Between the Lines” manages to avoid the document-heavy trappings into which displays of socially engaged art sometimes fall because of how well Lasch’s social practice translates into objecthood. The survey shows that whether in the form of painting, installation, props, performance scores, or game instructions, Lasch has long been thinking about the tensions between colonialism and cultural exchange, and using art as an entry point into public engagement with a decolonial agenda.
These themes are on full display in the mural painted on the back wall of the main …
Hanan Benammar’s “The Soil Is Fertile But For A Distant Seed”
Natasha Marie Llorens
Here lies idealism. This my first impression of a marble tombstone that marks the entrance to the second floor of Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall. Instead of a name or a set of dates, it bears the words awareness, insight, and knowledge in Norwegian. Hanan Benammar’s sculpture ERKJENNELSE, INNSIKT, KUNNSKAP (2020), re-stages a comment by an established historian on NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) regarding a previous work by the artist, Antiphony (2019), in which Benammar set up a calling service that put visitors in touch with strangers to discuss a range of concepts, such as emptiness, chaos, silence, violence, boundaries, and doubt, staging exploratory and open-ended one-on-one discussions. The art historian cited in the more recent sculpture dismissed Antiphony as lacking any significant “awareness, insight, or knowledge.” Those qualities were properly represented by figurative marble sculpture, in this historian’s view, because “marble is art with a capital A.”
It is tempting to dismiss the notion that art must be made in marble to represent insight as reactionary provincialism, an inconsequential view in the broader context of geo-political crisis. Yet such dismissals echo the ways in which the conspiratorial claims emanating from what Naomi Klein, in her 2023 book Doppelganger, dubbed the “Mirror World” …
Kwan Sheung Chi’s “Not retrospective”
Stephanie Bailey
Everything about Kwan Sheung Chi feels elusive, even when he’s telling you about himself. Take the artist’s press release for “Not retrospective,” which includes “less [sic] than 40 recent and previous sculptures, photographs and videos.” A biography cites two solo shows Kwan staged in 2002, one year before he graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and one year after his joint funeral-as-exhibition with artist Chow Chun Fai, when they burned their art. The first is “A Retrospective of Kwan Sheung Chi” at Hong Kong’s 1a space, for which there is scant online record. The second is “Kwan Sheung Chi Touring Series Exhibitions,” described as ten “major” exhibitions at different Hong Kong venues that apparently involved Kwan photographing himself in each site.
Kwan has long resisted the market’s tendency to commodify artists by leaning into commodification as a systematic process that resonates with the conceptual grid—an approach that couches critical gestures within layers of satire. Divided into three sections, “Not retrospective” stages this sleight of hand. It begins with a small white cube crudely built from wooden boards like a stage set, where a trio of pennant banners strung up at the entrance made from dust jackets for Marx’s …
Astrid Klein
Xenia Benivolski
Astrid Klein’s photowork Untitled (Je ne parle pas,…) (1979) presents two cut-out images of Brigitte Bardot—posing in a baby doll dress and, again, coquettishly looking back over her shoulder. In broken, typewritten French and English are the words “je ne parle pas, je ne pense rien” (“I don’t speak, I don’t think”) and “to paint my life, to paint my life, so many ways.” It’s a fitting prelude to this exhibition, which is something of a house of mirrors. Trapped behind the museum glass, like sexy cats in apartment windows, large photographic works fill the walls, each featuring a beautiful woman while slyly reflecting the viewer. In Untitled (la sans couleur…) (1979), a reclining woman awkwardly turns her head to look at me with an enigmatic smile. Loosely draped in a sheet on an unmade bed in the dark, she is a body in waiting. These gazes are not exactly inviting; if anything, they somehow lack emotion, as the title reflects: “masks without color.” But there is something cool, even powerful, about their magnetic resignation. Like several in the show, the image is arranged with visible marker framing and taped sections, giving the impression that this composition sets the stage …
Alfredo Jaar’s “El Lado Oscuro de la Luna”
Juan José Santos
Is that hysterical laughter? And are those accelerated heartbeats the phantasmagoric echoes of Chile, circa 1973? These sounds are not leaking into the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes but are rather the reverberations of an album released that same year: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which plays on a loop in this exhibition of works made by Alfredo Jaar between 1974 and ’81. Jaar was seventeen when General Pinochet’s coup d’état tore his country apart, and the young artist sought refuge in this soundtrack of madness and despair.
Pink Floyd’s front-man and lyricist Roger Waters last year released The Dark Side of the Moon Redux, a “reimagining” of the album from which this retrospective takes its title. Where he chose to replace David Gilmour’s guitar solos with homiletic spoken word, curator Pablo Chiuminatto has gone the other way. Rather than over-explain, Chiuminatto’s approach offers little contextualization or research for Jaar’s early works, which mark a turning point in the career of one of Latin America’s most significant artists.
The restrained curation lends the show a provisional feel, an analysis of sketches by an obsessive apprentice. These range from Jaar’s initial experiments with dry-transfer lettering methods, such …
Ways of Seeing
The Editors
In 2018 a play entitled Ways of Seeing was staged at Black Box Teater in Oslo, setting in train a series of events that seems to “foreshadow so many of the conflicts” that have taken cultural observers elsewhere “off guard.” The work by Pia Maria Roll, Hanan Benammar, Sara Baban, and Marius von der Fehr highlights links between the country’s right-wing politicians and the billionaire patrons of its most influential (formal and informal) media networks—systems of power familiar to readers around the world—to reflect on who profits from the stoking of racist, ethno-nationalist, and anti-immigration sentiment. Without wanting to go into the details here, the production sparked a backlash orchestrated by the same networks, the accusations of which were picked up and repeated in supposedly responsible newspapers and at the highest levels of government.
The affair climaxed in 2020, after the Minister of Justice resigned and his partner, Laila Bertheussen, was convicted of having set alight her own car, graffitied the facade of their house with a swastika and the word rasisit [sic], and made anonymous threats to family members as part of a smear campaign against the artists responsible. Even leaving aside the black comedy—on completing her prison …
Deimantas Narkevičius’s “The Fifer”
Michael Kurtz
The centerpiece of Deimantas Narkevičius’s current exhibition at Maureen Paley is a holographic screen—a small block of glass on a sleek metal shelf. A nightingale appears in the glass and lands on a branch that hangs there, while audio plays of a flute mimicking birdsong in sync with the movements of its beak. It flies out of view again and then returns, left and right, left and right. On an adjacent wall is another branch of sorts—a bark-like bronze cast of the cavities inside a flute—and nearby hang two small black-and-white images: a 1920s photograph from the Lithuanian State Archive of a soldier playing the flute by a window and a digital recreation of the same scene from directly outside the building. This perplexing constellation of objects is named after the shadowy figure in the photograph, The Fifer (2019).
Holography represents the height of illusionism, elaborately conjuring animated three-dimensional images. But the nightingale’s restless movement in and out of frame continually calls attention to the screen’s edges, where the projection falters and the empty glass block becomes visible. The illusion is further ruptured by the flutist’s birdsong which, isolated from any ambient sound, is unconvincing. Each item here performs a …
“Condo London”
Orit Gat
“I’ll be honest, I was a little shocked to recall the plate of bratwurst and mash that I tucked into three days after my husband died,” writes Kat Lister in The Elements. She goes on to describe Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut’s “Dual Process Model” of bereavement—the way mourners shift between loss and reparation, a fluctuation of feelings in the face of tragedy. As Lister writes, things happen at the same time—grief, pain, bratwurst, mash. The audaciousness of living on. How to hold all these things at once: to be in London looking at a collaborative project where twenty-three galleries allocate their spaces to their international counterparts or stage shared exhibitions that bring together works of wildly disparate forms. To talk about hosting when homes are being ruined.
This uneasy simultaneity is visible throughout Condo. At Warsaw gallery Import Export, hosted by Rodeo, the artworks on view discuss war, heartbreak, and climate catastrophe all at once. Just to the left of the entrance is horses [konie] (2023), a large acrylic and ink on canvas by Ukrainian artist Veronika Hapchenko. Based on mosaics from Pripyat, a town that serviced and housed workers at the Chernobyl Power Plant, it’s a grayscale work …
Naoki Sutter-Shudo’s “End of Thinking Capacity”
Gracie Hadland
Naoki Sutter-Shudo addresses the current critical landscape with a series of seven “Critical Figures” and twelve paintings. Installed in only one half of the gallery, the audience of figurative sculptures faces a wall on which is hung a row of large graphic canvasses. Each is adorned with a formal accessory made of flimsy material: a wire twist-tie shaped into a tie, a fake lettuce hat, a shirt made of bubble wrap or a plastic bag. The figures’ apparent attempts to present as professional are rendered ridiculous by the nature of their clothing. They look as though they’re dressed for a nineteenth-century salon—complete with bonnets, big collars, and ties—rather than a contemporary art gallery. Each figure’s body has an intricately constructed apparatus holding a wind-up metronome with a bell (some in 3/4 time, others in 1/4 time) and has a unique look, height, and facial expression tending towards the bizarre—one has three heads, for example.
The viewer is able to wind up the “critics,” letting them spin their wheels while looking around the show. The result is a rhythmic kind of chatter punctuated with the ding of a bell, as if to signal a lightbulb moment. Sitting atop stacks of white …
Jan Van Imschoot’s “The End Is Never Near”
Jörg Heiser
Belgian painter Jan Van Imschoot’s first major retrospective—the show that should gain him the belated international recognition his work deserves—spans four decades, seven rooms, more than eighty paintings, a bar, and a small cinema. And it starts with a landscape-format painting sitting smack across the entrance. A cherub or cupid, though with no wings, painted much larger than life, reclines against an indistinct, darkly looming background. The little big fellow has apparently nodded off, his nipples, shiny belly bottom, and tiny weenie standing out like bumps and craters on the surface of a full moon. The motif and the title Amore Dormiente (2018) pay direct homage to Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid (1608), a small painting at home in the Uffizi.
But homage immediately turns into, well, what? Parody? Grotesque exaggeration? In this adaptation, cupid’s face is wreathed by a shock of auburn hair, a rather adult skyward nose, sagging cheeks, and eyes swollen half-shut, like an old drunk’s. Instead of a bow and arrow in his left hand, in his right he holds a handwritten letter in French, signed by van Imschoot, which translates as: “Aposematism in painting: on linguistic confusions and the mimesis of lies, or the challenge of the …
“As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories”
Olexii Kuchanskyi
Against a backdrop of constant territorial changes in the former Soviet countries and the ongoing war in Ukraine, “As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories” explores the “geopoetics of North Eurasia.” The term denotes heterogeneous, yet tightly interconnected, political and cultural contexts under oppressive regimes, ranging from the Russian Empire to contemporary Russian imperialism via Soviet colonialism. Framed in the handout by HKW’s director, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, as a way of “being and seeing the world through the prism of the Global East,” the show tries to avoid any “totalizing vision” in favor of multiple subjectivities and geographies.
To achieve this, the show’s curators—Cosmin Costinaș, Iaroslav Volovod, Nikolay Karabinovych, Saodat Ismailova, and Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon—have scattered the artworks across the museum in a way that foregrounds their discreteness, each piece separately lit and surrounded by empty space. Stories of colonialism, resistance, and artistic experimentation are encapsulated in these “monads,” yet the aversion to a “totalizing vision” extends to the bewildering absence of wall texts from the galleries (viewers hoping for context must flip through the handbook, which lacks a general plan of the show, to find a work description).
The exhibition’s main space is filled …
“Self-Determination: A Global Perspective”
Judith Wilkinson
“Everyone has the right to a nationality,” states article 15 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948) and “no one shall be deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” As part of “Self-Determination: A Global Perspective,” Banu Çennetoğlu has filled the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s East Wing Gallery with three gigantic bouquets of gold helium letter balloons. Each bouquet, a mass of oversized jumbled letters, spells out a different article from the declaration. Throughout the course of the exhibition the balloons that make up right? (2022–ongoing) will deflate, lowering to the ground, until nothing remains but their empty carcasses.
An initiative of Annie Fletcher, IMMA’s director since 2019, “Self-Determination” explores the establishment of new post-World War I nation-states—including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, and Ireland itself—focusing on the role that art and artists played in statecraft and the formation of the national imagination. The site of the exhibition, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (built in 1684 as a home for retired British soldiers), holds significance in the construction of the Irish nation. It was considered as a potential headquarters for Oíreachtas Shaorstát Éireann, the newly established government of the Irish Free State …
Shubigi Rao’s “These Petrified Paths”
Katherine C. M. Adams
In Shubigi Rao’s new film These Petrified Paths (2023), censorship is always tied to the threat of repressive territorialization. Early on, we are introduced to a “former professor of Russian literature, now beekeeper on the side of the road to Daliyan” in Turkey, who embodies a theme of the exhibition at large: how a struggle over literature and written culture has led to a fight over ecology, terrain, and the right to live freely on one’s Indigenous land. In the film, this process is inflected by the historical function of Armenian literature as a tool of nation-building, forging claims to place for a people often on the verge of statelessness. As one featured subject remarks of the region’s history, the Armenian genocide is also “cultural genocide.”
These Petrified Paths details (among other threads) the lengths to which Armenian intellectuals have gone to preserve their heritage: one participant describes how an elder member of the community buried his books in the ground, with the intent that they be dug up only upon the retreat of repressive state forces. Toward the end of the film, an interlocutor alludes pessimistically to the contemporary Armenian government’s attempts to “sell off” part of the country …
“Intimate confession is a project”
Valentin Diaconov
Curated by Houston-born curator Jennifer Teets, “Intimate confession is a project” looks at what her academic inspirations—Lauren Berlant, Ara Wilson, Kai Bosworth—have called “affective infrastructures.” Here, the phrase denotes a way of thinking through how infrastructures, designed to facilitate the movement of goods and people with maximum efficiency, can produce varied emotional affects. In a catalogue essay, Teets writes that this group exhibition is “informed” by Houston. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in America, infrastructure is the city: the crumbling roads, the non-existent sidewalks, and the looming if stealthy presence of oil refinement and finance.
The show opens with model houses made from old Bible covers by Chiffon Thomas. Attached to the ceiling over the staircase to the exhibition floor, they hover like ghosts. Thomas was inspired by the neighborhoods of his Chicago childhood, but the shaky silhouettes of these model houses could be Houston’s Third Ward, or any poor community where a church promises a better life perspective than the current economy and policy.
In a transgenerational dialogue the curator’s great-grandmother, Josie Ann Teets, an amateur songwriter, meets a young French artist. Josie Ann wrote and published The Oil King Buggie in 1975. The show contains a notation …
An-My Lê’s “Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières”
Jacinda S. Tran
In 1968, army photographer Ron Haeberle shot Vietnamese civilians indiscriminately massacred by US ground forces in the hamlet of Mỹ Lai. His photographs circulated widely—including a color photo of corpses strewn across a road featured in LIFE magazine that, in 1970, with support from the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Workers Coalition incorporated into an antiwar poster overlaid, in blood red, with the text “Q. And babies? A. And babies.” When MoMA withdrew its support for the poster, AWC staged a protest to illuminate board members’ tacit support of the war in Vietnam. The museum promptly assimilated AWC’s poster into their own collections, institutionalizing institutional critique.
Half a century later, MoMA exhibits “Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières,” a survey of multimedia works by Vietnam-born An-My Lê, whose large-format photographs are known for their staging and depictions of militarized landscapes. Lê focuses on what the visual reveals and obscures; how a range of quotidian landscapes may be conceived as “always already military.” Though Lê left Vietnam as a teenager after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the specter of war and its spectacularization informs her approaches to representation. In “Viêt Nam” (1994–98), Lê returns to her birth …
“Green Snake: women-centred ecologies”
Stephanie Bailey
Of all the works in this gathering of cosmological and ecological perspectives, one is anchored directly to the exhibition title. Two moon gates open up the wooden frame enclosing Candice Lin’s Kiss under the tail (all works 2023 unless otherwise stated), where floorspace padded with tatami mats hosts ceramic cats, one with a house for a head, and an indigo-dyed carpet whose patterning replicates a nineteenth-century diagram of a castration by a western missionary who studied eunuchs in China. These gates, and the transformational space they envelope, reference a central location in Tsui Hark’s 1993 movie, Green Snake, a retelling of an ancient Chinese folktale about two female snake demons who endeavored to become human. In the film, the single-minded White Snake pursues the love of a studious male, while the free-wheeling, shapeshifting Green Snake tries to understand the desire that drives her centuries-long companion to her doom. In the end, Green Snake rejects the human world with its apocalyptically heteronormative devotions and questionably immutable morals, realizing she had known love as an affirmation of life all along. So she returns to the water, or rather to nature; an idea that runs through this show.
Projected onto a massive wall …
What is Wrong with Us?
R.H. Lossin
Even during the best of times—a category for which the present certainly does not qualify—writing about art requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Simply engaging in criticism implies a vague normative claim about the social or political importance of elaborate and often expensive objects. It is a role that can be hard to defend even, or perhaps especially, when the objects claim a political position. But since looking cannot be separated from thinking, Josh Kline’s recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (and its exuberant critical reception) merits some extra attention. Not because of the show’s “inscrutable lucidity,” or because the work’s position “between irony and sincerity” offers meaningful insight into the “propaganda it evokes.”
The reason is far too simple to require such attempts to extract complexity from proximal antonyms. Americans spend enormous amounts of time consuming mediated violence, so when images of cut-up human bodies show up in a major art museum, we should pause and consider what exactly we are thinking as we look at the severed head of a waitress on a tray. Kline’s show was widely reviewed (the New York Times published two pieces about it, Artforum gave it the cover), and yet …
35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, “from the void came gifts of the cosmos”
Kate Sutton
When Ibrahim Mahama agreed to serve as artistic director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, he sought inspiration on a domestic scale. The simple conceptual sketch he prepared for this edition—titled “from the void came gifts of the cosmos”—shows a rudimentary bedframe, with a few unidentified objects stashed underneath. This curatorial approach attempts to reclaim an everyday architectural recess from the realm of monsters and recognize it instead as a space of potential. But dark things come from under the bed, the darkest of which may be nothing at all.
Mahama applies the metaphor of the void not only to architectural and ideological infrastructures, but also to emancipatory movements that operate within structures of colonial domination. Chief among these is the Non-Aligned Movement: a political experiment that rejected the either/or imperialism of the Cold War era in favor of a multilateral understanding of the world. Its foundations were laid at the Bandung Conference in 1955, the same year that the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts launched. Fresh from its split and subsequent rapprochement with the USSR, Yugoslavia offered a meeting ground for representatives from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and the biennial was expressly crafted to strengthen …
The God of New Beginnings
The Editors
The double-headed Roman god Janus, who lends his name to the first month of each year, is privileged to see both the future and the past. In his 1939 introduction to The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes Maxime du Camp as writing that “history is like Janus; it has two faces.” The implication is that history should not be understood as the steady accumulation of facts along a receding timeline—“an inventory, point by point, of humanity’s life forms and creations”—but as the body through which past and future are joined. We do not study the past to escape the present but to see where we are going.
Looking at art is equally bound to the contemplation of artifacts from the past. An exhibition of even the newest work must—as recent months have again made clear—inevitably lag behind the news cycle (“to seize the essence of history,” writes Benjamin, “it suffices to compare Herodotus and the morning newspaper”). The upshot is that critics often feel as helpless as Benjamin’s angel of history, blown backwards into the future by the storm of progress, condemned to observe and comment upon the ruins of history as they pile up behind him while he …
Pacita Abad
Tausif Noor
To discuss the life of Pacita Abad is to enumerate the diverse places to which she traveled (some sixty countries across six continents), her expansive artistic output (nearly 5000 large-scale works), and the litany of materials and techniques she applied to the surfaces of her signature stuffed-and-quilted canvases, or trapuntos (sequins, beads, batik prints, and phulkari embroidery, to name just a few). Over a thirty-two-year career—she died of cancer in Singapore in 2004—Abad sidestepped hierarchies between craft and high art and unraveled received notions of the local, national, and global, pursuing instead a vibrant eclecticism that was often at odds with the dominant artistic movements of her time.
The retrospective at SFMOMA—arriving from the Walker Art Center before stops at New York’s MoMA PS1 and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto—follows Abad’s artistic career as it was shaped by global postwar politics from the aftermath of national decolonization movements in Asia and Africa in the 1960s, through the humanitarianism of the 1970s and ’80s, and the heyday of multiculturalism in the US in the 1990s and early 2000s. In this, Abad’s trapuntos in particular function as what the curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa has aptly termed an “archive of the …
Andrea Bowers’s “Joy is an Act of Resistance”
R.H. Lossin
The first work that one encounters on entering Andrew Kreps’s gallery might be mistaken for an extension of the gallery’s commercial operations. Trans Bills (2023) consists of fifty-four black ring binders, arrayed on a shelf to the left of the front desk, labeled with the names of states that have passed legislation restricting the rights of trans citizens. The work’s blandness is perhaps the point. Quietly running in the background of clownish Republican performances of parental rights and viral videos of religious zealots is a legislative machine producing the reams of paper progressively restricting the rights of trans people to work, receive medical care, and live basic social lives. In a mere two years, 1,006 anti-trans bills have been introduced by state legislatures. An additional sixty-three have been introduced at the federal level.
At the back of the first-floor gallery is a 47-minute single-channel video of a trans prom organized by four teenagers as both an adolescent rite of passage and a protest—two things that are, for many trans youth, inseparable. The footage is visible from the gallery’s entrance, and the contrast between the young faces and the scale of adult animosity ranged against them is the show’s most valuable …
Mit Jai Inn
Jenny Wu
In Shirley Jackson’s allegorical short story “The Lottery” (1948), villagers gather for a game of chance in which they draw slips of paper, all blank but one, from an old black box. Children, adults, and elders alike, accustomed to the tradition, participate with a mixture of anticipation and boredom. The ending reveals that the prize, known to them all along, is the stoning of an unlucky villager. Mit Jai Inn’s first US solo exhibition also features a large quantity of “stones” and a lottery that, in subtler ways, uncovers a set of human behaviors integral to the functioning of society and politics. Here, the Chiang Mai-based artist, whose work is often framed as a form of social practice infused with Buddhist teachings, sets up a participatory piece titled after a recent sculpture series, Marking Stones (2022). Visitors are invited to submit pledges for “positive action” for a chance to win one of these sculptures.
The title of the series is a tenuous reference to the bai sema stones used by Buddhist communities in Southeast Asia to mark their territory: the sculptures are, in fact, fully functional baskets, lamps, and stools. Around two dozen of these candy-colored wares occupy a room …
Paul Pfeiffer’s “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”
Juliana Halpert
Trying to find a critical entry point into—or exit from—Paul Pfeiffer’s retrospective is not unlike the challenge of navigating its labyrinthine layout of walls, ramps, and rooms within rooms. An architecture designed by the artist with Hollywood sound stages in mind slowly unveils a spectacle of spectacles, showcasing over thirty works spanning the past twenty-five years and dizzying ranges of scale, duration, material, and method. Pfeiffer is best known for his bite-sized video works, which sit here alongside extra-large installations, miniature dioramas, full-scale sculptures, room-wide projections, and expansive photo series. Video durations range from four seconds to ninety days. Most of his moving-image works have no sound, but the space hums with the distant, ambient clamor of a crowd. Michael Jackson’s voice has been replaced by that of a Filipino choir. The Stanley Cup levitates in mid-air. Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali have been scrubbed out of their respective beaches and boxing ring. Raucous activity and haunting absence somehow go hand-in-hand.
If there’s a true North to Pfeiffer’s practice, it might be mass media’s protean relationship to consumer technology, how the latter shapes the former and vice versa. It’s a marvel to witness the artist’s use and abuse of both, …
Delcy Morelos’s “El abrazo”
Michael Kurtz
Here lie the ruins of the American avant-garde. Wood salvaged from an installation by Dan Graham, offcuts from a felt piece by Robert Morris, and scraps of flooring from a Dorothea Rockburne display. Mounds of soil recall Robert Smithson’s geological samples and rows of pipe echo Walter de Maria’s Broken Kilometer (1979) of brass rods lined up on the floor. These fragments now sit in darkness, illuminated only by four shaded skylights. They are arranged across the space along with sheets of corrugated metal, parallel stacks of wooden planks, and hundreds of small pieces of Colombian pottery. Everything is dark brown and sitting on a crust of mud which rises up the walls to a high-water mark, I later read, left after the gallery flooded during Hurricane Sandy.
Despite their simple forms and materials, the objects become mirage-like in this dimly lit monochrome expanse. Walking down the pier of clean floor that stretches into the room, I try to perceive the scale and texture of the things around me, but they evade my grasp. The light fades and they retreat further. Cielo terrenal [Earthly heaven] (2023), the first of two installations by Colombian artist Delcy Morelos at Dia Chelsea, is …
Henry Taylor’s “From Sugar to Shit”
Novuyo Moyo
The people in Henry Taylor’s paintings are usually surrounded by slabs of color, a graphic sensibility he shares with his high school peers and alternative comic book artists Los Bros Hernandez, whom he credits with setting the bar for his work. “I always thought, ‘Damn, they draw so much better than I.’ So I started just practicing my draftsmanship because of them. They intimidated me.” Taylor worked for ten years as a technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital while studying at CalArts, providing assistance to some of the area’s most vulnerable people and at times featuring them in his drawings and paintings, developing the empathetic lens through which he would continue to frame his subjects.
Set in Hauser and Wirth’s Parisian multi-story outpost, and consisting of works made between 2015 and 2023 (the most recent made during a stay in Paris over the summer), “From Sugar to Shit” connects past and present, interior and exterior, public and private. Taylor’s subjects range from famous faces to personal acquaintances, but his frank, inquisitive approach sees both groups as equally worthy of commemoration. It’s not always clear whether he works from memory, archival materials, a live sitting, or a combination of these, but …
Sanya Kantarovsky’s “The Prison” with Yasuo Kuroda’s “The Last Butoh”
Jennifer Piejko
Tatsumi Hijikata spoke with his entire body. At Nonaka-Hill, Yasuo Kuroda’s photographs of his performances of Butoh—the form of dance theatre he founded in postwar Tokyo—are displayed alongside new paintings by Sanya Kantarovsky, advancing the latter’s interest in Japanese folklore and traditions. The subjects on the canvases resemble the dancers in the photographs, as if painted from hazy memories or fever dreams. Though not directly depicting the same figures or moments, the two approaches to image-making are complementary: both capture the depths of estrangement, enveloped dislocations, and solitary sorcery of performance.
Each lone figure in Kantarovsky’s paintings expresses a different facet of pain. No Longer a Dog and I am a Body Shop (all Kantarovsky’s works are dated 2023) show figures who mirror traditional Butoh performers, turned away and covered in the Japanese white paint of mourning over their faces and limbs, ribs visible through their nearly translucent skin. In Bleeding Nature, the dancer suffers from the kind of wound that a Butoh dancer might feel in phantom form: an open gash over a bloody heart. Their bottom half disintegrates into ribbons, dangling from their fingertips and torso into a swirl of entrails that fertilizes a surrounding field of flowers …
2nd Sharjah Architecture Triennial, “The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability”
Nick Axel
The second Sharjah Architecture Triennial—featuring twenty-nine architects, artists, and designers across two main venues (the Al Qasimiyah School and Old Al Jubail Vegetable Market) and a handful of off-site locations—reckons with the cultural and ecological legacies of colonialism and modernity. The work shown does not, in the words of its curator, the Nigerian architect Tosin Oshinowo, simply acknowledge a wrong or apologize for the past. Instead, the contributions demonstrate modes of practice that build new worlds from the ruins of the present. Ideas of “impermanence” and “adaptability” here describe creative responses to conditions of scarcity that draw on ancestral ways of knowing and resourceful forms of making, and “beauty” as a celebration of survivance.
This triennial is in many ways a spiritual successor to Lesley Lokko’s international exhibition at the most recent Venice Architecture Biennale, “The Laboratory of the Future.” Beyond the handful of contributors to appear in both, in these exhibitions architecture is often a starting point, theme, and subject more than an end with pre-defined means. This approach liberates the exhibition from the representational conventions of architectural media (drawings, diagrams, models, maps, and photographs) in favor of immersive installations, sculptural works, films, and more that overcome the alienating …
Shilpa Gupta
Paul Stephens
Recent New York Times headlines point to American perceptions of India’s increasingly prominent role in global affairs. “Can India Challenge China for Leadership of the ‘Global South’?” “Will This Be the ‘Indian Century’?” “The Illusion of a US-India Partnership.” “US Seeks Closer Ties With India as Tension With China and Russia Builds.” “US Says Indian Official Directed Assassination Plot in New York.” “An Indian Artist Questions Borders and the Limits on Free Speech.”
The last headline refers to Mumbai-based Shilpa Gupta, whose work obliquely explores the emergent global polycrisis (a term popularized by Adam Tooze) in which India plays a central part. Although Gupta’s art is deeply engaged with contemporary political events, it is not headline-driven. It resists didacticism, in part, through being polyvocal, as exemplified in her standout installation Listening Air (2019–23). Defying simple description and rewarding patient immersion, Listening Air consists of multiple microphones-turned-speakers that play songs of labor and resistance from around the world. As the songs fade in and out, listener-viewers in the dimly lit room slowly begin to perceive themselves as members of a temporary community. The effect is ethereal and meditative.
Gupta’s two concurrent New York exhibitions, at Amant and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, accord …
Degrees of separation
The Editors
In their recent open letter, curators Manuel J. Borja-Villel and Vasıf Kortun protested that “culture and cultural institutions have become a battleground, which the illiberal forces are ready to conquer.” The removal of the bulwarks protecting culture from political interference means, they continued, that “what was once a site for experimentation and autonomy is becoming a site of control.”
Recent weeks have provided ample evidence that the erasure of those lines separating a society’s culture from its economic and political systems leaves it vulnerable to them. Art’s function as a “liminal space,” in Victor Turner’s formulation, depends on it being partly if never wholly insulated from those expressions of power. It is instead an arena in which conventions are temporarily suspended so that citizens are free to dispute the terms of the social contract without fear of reprisal. New ideas are tested and marginal or suppressed subject positions given a platform. If culture is to change a society’s hierarchies rather than merely reproduce them, then it must act from a position external to them.
It follows that collapsing that separation can serve the status quo, whether or not that was the intention. We are faced today with the spectacle of …
Robert Glück’s About Ed
John Douglas Millar
How to convey the power of this book? The achievement of its language is such that it resists easy translation into criticism as practiced in any conventional mode. Narratively it recounts Glück’s life with the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai in the 1970s, and the time he has lived since Ed’s death from AIDS in 1994. It is organized concentrically so that the death takes place at the precise center of the book, where there is an extraordinary description of the performing of a last rite, the washing of Ed’s corpse by Glück and Daniel, Ed’s final lover: “We hurry as though Ed might be impatient. Here is the dusky skin, here the straight back, the slightly bowed legs, the narrow waist, the flat ass. AIDS has restored the body I lived with long ago, so thin that I watched his heart beating against his chest till my senses bled in marvelling tenderness.” And right at the center of this description there is a single drop of blood: “Daniel pulls down Ed’s underwear and milks one bright red drop from Ed’s cock. The drop of blood is the only indication of the pandemonium that occurred within this body … Ed’s murderous blood.” …
Lisa Brice’s “LIVES and WORKS”
Louise Darblay
“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” goes John Berger in his classic BBC show Ways of Seeing (1972), his big blue eyes staring intently at the viewer while he demonstrates the impact of centuries of male gaze—from canonical paintings to contemporary advertising—on the way women perceive themselves. “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.” In Lisa Brice’s paintings, which wander the corridors of western art history, women look at themselves, but no longer through this mediated perspective: the muses, models, and mistresses come to life, turning from passive objects into active subjects, becoming the authors and surveyors of their own image.
This new series by the South African artist, presented on the ground floor of Ropac’s Marais space, bristles with punkish energy. Two large, cinematic canvases mirror each other on opposite walls, their horizontal compositions drawn from Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882). In the most obvious riff on his work, Untitled (after Manet & Degas) (all works mentioned 2023), the Folies-Bergère has turned into a women-only cabaret, populated by sexy and brazen dancers (including Manet’s sad-looking barmaid, …
12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, “THIS TOO, IS A MAP”
Jason Waite
“THIS TOO, IS A MAP” questions the conventional relationship of map to territory, looking “to model multi-spatial and multi-subjective histories and knowledge.” Directed by Rachael Rakes with associate curator Sofia Dourron, the show features works by sixty-five artists chosen not as representatives of particular nations but for their embrace of transnational approaches. The diasporic bent of this list reflects an expansion of (and alternative approach to) cartography to articulate myriad overlapping personal roots and routes.
One example is Tibetan-American artist Tenzin Phuntsog, whose video Pure Land (2022) attempts to trace landscapes across the American West that look similar to images of a homeland he’s never visited. In the film, he messages these images to his mother to comment on or verify their similitude. In the construction of these unknown nostalgic landscapes, the images Phuntsog takes are uncannily similar to their Tibetan counterparts. The comparison highlights the possibility that any space can be made into a home. At the same time, it floats subtle questions of what defines any given place.
What lies underneath a landscape was the focus of one of the more unique venues of the biennale: an emergency bunker built for the former military dictator Park Chung …
“Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969”
Alan Gilbert
In November 1969, a group of Native activists sailed across San Francisco Bay and occupied Alcatraz Island, home to the infamous prison that had closed in 1963. The occupation lasted until the summer of 1971, when federal authorities besieged the island by cutting off the electricity and water supply before government agents and local police removed the dozen or so remaining inhabitants. The year 1969 also saw the publication of the pamphlet “Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process,” written collaboratively by Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee), Rolland Meinholtz (Cherokee), and students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It called for the combination of contemporary theater practices with performative and ritual aspects of Native societies in an effort to bring marginalized Native stories and cultural forms to a reimagined stage.
The large survey exhibition “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969,” curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross / Tagish First Nation) at the Hessel Museum of Art, opens with archival documents in vitrines highlighting these two historical moments. Pages of “Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process” are given pride of place at the entrance next to undated, grainy black-and-white videos of Native performances …
Neïla Czermak Ichti’s “J’adore vous faire rire”
Natasha Marie Llorens
A diminutive and oddly classical homage to the eponymous character in Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic horror film Alien, entitled Bolaji resting between two takes (2023), is tucked into one corner of the front room of Anne Barrault’s gallery in Paris. The painting is small, the facture thick, with a palette in shades of white. The composition’s contrast is rendered in a warm maroon tone that reminds me of blood coagulating at the edges of a flesh wound. Despite this latent suggestion of violence, Franco-Tunisian artist Neïla Czermak Ichti’s portrait of the infamous being eschews the sexualized viciousness of its on-screen presence. Seated on a cheap plywood block, visibly marked by use, with its massive head resting on long, thin forearms, the alien just looks tired, like a construction worker on a fifteen-minute break.
Czermak Ichti became obsessed with Bolaji Badejo, the twenty-five-year-old Nigerian art student inside Ridley’s oppressive latex costume. She based the painting on one of only a handful of production photographs of the costumed actor between shots. Badejo was born in Lagos in 1953, immigrated to Ethiopia with his family in the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war (1967–70) and then to the UK. The one-time movie star …
Jessica Segall’s “Human Energy”
Cassie Packard
Jessica Segall’s transgressive exploration of desire and petroleum unfolds to the beat of a mechanical soundtrack. The work of Berghain resident DJ Steffi, building on Segall’s own recordings of active oil fields, the piston-like pulsations fuse petro-extraction and the nightclub. Desire—for dominion, capital, commodities, relations—has always powered industry; here, industry clearly powers desire, too. Petroleum’s libidinal imaginary encompasses everything from imagery of women virtually fornicating with automobiles to the more abstract seductions of movement, convenience, ease, and accumulation. In Human Energy (2023), a dispersed four-channel video installation with sculptural elements (titled after Chevron’s slogan), Segall renders these fetishizations with erotic effect.
On one channel, the scantily clad, gloved artist climbs and mounts a pumpjack. She rides it as if it were a mechanical bull, moving her hands back and forth to steady herself while the machine repeatedly plunges into the earth. The video was shot in Kern County, California, which is responsible for the vast majority of the state’s oil and fracked gas production and boasts some of the worst air pollution in the country, a burden disproportionately borne by the region’s most vulnerable communities. Panoramic open sky, mountain range, sunset: our petro-cowgirl deploys the tropes that have characterized fantasies …
Ali Cherri’s “Dreamless Night”
Cathryn Drake
Ali Cherri’s The Watchman [Nöbetçi] (all works 2023) follows a young Turkish Cypriot officer stationed at a watchtower in Akincilar, a district encircled by the meandering border drawn across Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974. Adjacent to the closely patrolled United Nations Buffer Zone, it is a desolate, transitory place where nothing really happens. On the horizon are the crumbling ruins of a village abandoned by Greek Cypriots. When the loudspeaker announces the end of his shift, Sergeant Bulut doesn’t move, his bloodshot eyes staring into the camera as if hypnotized by the drone of cicadas. The soldier’s routine is occasionally interrupted by a robin crashing into the dusty glass, leaving a splotch of blood and feathers; Bulut dutifully retrieves each body and records the collateral casualty with another tick on the wall.
This film is not about a particular place: Cyprus, a geopolitically strategic territory that has passed from empire to empire since antiquity, here stands for the postcolonial state of the world and, with much of its population exiled within their own country, the existential condition of so many in contemporary society. On the southern coast lies the British Overseas Territory, a legacy of colonial rule. Turkish …
Lisa Tan’s “Dodge and/or Burn”
James Taylor-Foster
Slicing through subterranean exhibition halls that were previously university laboratories for research in accelerator physics, Lisa Tan’s first institutional show in Sweden tenders its own spatial logic through the metaphor of neurological disorders. Visitors are received by an ink-drawn diagram based on Oliver Sacks’s 1970 sketch of “migraine and neighboring disorders” (from a book said to have been written over just nine days, aided by an undisclosed psychoactive substance). Here, the diagram is superimposed on a detailed schematic of the galleries: I enter the exhibition through “protracted vegetative reactions.”
Tan treats Sacks’s diagram as a tool, scaling it up to a dizzying and dysfunctional domestic space by way of partial walls which operate as spatial dividers, passages, atmospheric zones, and display environments. Rhythmic and austere, this site-specific installation of previous works lays bare the delicate negotiation between control and collapse on which our lives depend. As an organizing principle, Promise or Threat (2023) reveals how rooms are diagrams that shape the ways in which we interface with the world. We move like ghosts, seen and unseen, between spaces that give form to the inner self: the anxiety of a family dinner, the pressure of a deadline, the monotony of a …
22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, “Memory is an Editing Station”
Oliver Basciano
If the Global South is itself an imagined community then, this edition of Videobrasil suggests, therein might lie its emancipatory power. Exhibitions focused on the Global South are in welcome vogue, from the current Bienal de São Paulo to next year’s Venice Biennale, but Videobrasil has been ploughing the furrow for thirty of its forty years now. While curators Raphael Fonseca and Renée Akitelek Mboya took a line by poet Waly Salomão as their guide to select sixty artists from thirty-eight countries out of 2,300 open submissions, this edition is most effective as a snapshot of the conscious and unconscious preoccupations of a constructed region. One that, for the curators, stretches from South and Central America, to Africa, Asia, and former Soviet states (as well as Indigenous artists from any continent). This region, the curators suggest, is “a plural and fertile accumulation of visions.”
What binds this imagined community together? On a series of plinths, Ali Cherri has placed what seem like stone monuments of antiquity—which they are, in part. The scrunched, snarling face and neat mane of Lion (2022) is a historic architectural fragment that the Lebanese artist found in a Beirut antique shop. The bulky clay body, however, …
Meredith Monk’s “Calling”
Patrick Langley
Oude Kerk is a fittingly resonant venue for Meredith Monk’s first—long overdue—retrospective in Europe. This massive thirteenth-century church houses highlights from a polymathic six-decade career that respond to (and echo in) its cavernous nave, with its vaulted wooden ceilings and looming pulpits, its high choir and chapels. To visitors (such as myself) who have only previously encountered Monk’s work via recordings, “Calling,” curated by Beatrix Ruf of the Hartwig Art Foundation, is a revelation. It brings together hypnotic video installations, sculptures, and archival material, yet the result is cohesive, not cacophonous. Each work has space to breathe. Together, they form a harmonious whole.
Several pieces have been revised or reimagined for this show. Amsterdam Archaeology (2023), an iteration of a work first shown in 1998 and the first viewers see upon entering, is one example: a red ziggurat for the display of objects donated by city residents and dipped in beeswax (or “Beuys wax,” as it risks being known in art contexts). These yellowish, translucent cauls point to the union, evident across this exhibition, of industrious and protective instincts. Monk has for decades sought the holistic union of art and healing.
Installations housed in freestanding (and judiciously soundproofed) rooms extend …
Lutz Bacher’s “AYE!”
Michael Kurtz
The first room of “AYE!” is carpeted with fine sand. Audio from Philip Kaufman’s 1988 film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being fills the air. “Tomas,” a woman asks between kisses, “what are you thinking?” To which Tomas replies: “I’m thinking how happy I am.” The clip loops—the lovers locked in this tender moment, accompanied by piano music and the thrum of rain and windscreen wipers—and with every repeat becomes more cloying and meaningless. Four television screens in a row to one side emit a white glow which fades each time the loop ends, an electronic sunset on the beach. There is a formal resonance between the artificially uniform texture of the sand, the blank monochrome screens, and the eternally recurring sweet nothings. In these elements—nature, entertainment, love—we seek comfort, but here find them in a state of entropy: metronomic, sterile, vacuous.
A child in red dungarees arrives at the door and points at me. “There’s a big man in the sandpit,” she announces to her father, getting his reassurance before dancing freely across the room. She writes her name in the sand, and in doing so shares something that the pseudonymous Lutz Bacher, who died in 2019, never …
New Red Order’s “The World’s UnFair”
Stephanie Bailey
Occupying a pocket of undeveloped land in Long Island City, “The World’s UnFair” is a principled riot. Created by New Red Order (NRO), a “public secret society” facilitated by artists Jackson Polys, Zack Khalil, and Adam Khalil, this carnivalesque fairground, supported by Creative Time, is presided over by Ash and Bruno, a sixteen-foot animatronic tree with LED screens nestled in cellular tower branches and a furry five-foot tall beaver, respectively. The pair talk about the legacies of settler colonialism on the land where they stand, Lenapehoking—a forest, they say, the last time they met. America’s original multi-millionaire John Astor is mentioned: he made his fortune in the fur trade that all but decimated beaver populations, before acquiring land in Manahatta and making “a killing off renting to incoming settlers.”
The politics of land is at the heart of this roadshow. Staked into the earth is New Red Right to Return (2023), a wooden post with directional markers naming Lenape diasporic nations displaced by settlers due to the fundamental difference between the colonial European treatment of land as a commodity and the Indigenous American understanding of it as a communal resource. That discrepancy complicates the narrative that the Lenape sold Manahatta …
Jo Ractliffe’s “Landscaping”
Sean O’Toole
Jo Ractliffe has for decades been photographing the charged and ravaged landscapes of her native South Africa. For nearly as long, she has bristled at the insufficiency of the art-historical term “landscape” in encapsulating her interest in terrains where histories of occupation, use, conflict, and violence do not obviously declare themselves. Sometimes, and only partly in jest, she has used the term “blandscape” to characterize her abstruse images of nothing much in particular, be it a locked gate to an Apartheid-era torture site or desert landscape linked to a forgotten Cold War battleground. Last year, when Ractliffe was shortlisted for the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, she repeated this dislike, describing landscape as a “difficult term,” more descriptive of an outlook or prospect than a space or place. “I think of [landscape] less as a ‘subject’, or genre,” she adds, “than the medium through which I can explore questions of violence, conflict, and memory.”
Ractliffe’s new exhibition “Landscaping,” her first major statement since her 2020 survey exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, extends her interest in land as tangible fact and immanent subject. It is a remarkable career statement. Her thirty-four black-and-white photos, the majority taken over the …
Forking paths
The Editors
At the end of September, e-flux Criticism hosted a talk with writer Jörg Heiser entitled “Crisis, what Crisis?! On the Uncertain Future of Art Criticism.” Drawing attention to the shared root of crisis and criticism—on which we have recently had too many reasons to reflect—Heiser began with the question of how we might readjust our frameworks of judgement to reflect the increasingly parlous state of the world.
There have in the intervening time been further reminders that “for art critics to make these readjustments, they need to exist in the first place.” Criticism in the widest sense is threatened by factors ranging from the triumph of neoliberal economic and populist political thinking to a culture of partisanship that makes impossible the expression of almost any opinion that is not perfectly consistent with an established position. To resist that process requires what Heiser called “some extremely non-sexy sounding stuff” that might be boiled down to the reinforcement of existing—and foundation of new—institutions capable of protecting increasingly vulnerable writers from the above pressures and encouraging open debate.
The most basic principle on which debate rests is not that any opinion expressed must be right (what kind of “debate” would that be?). Any …
Candice Lin’s “Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory”
Jonathan Griffin
The story, as literary theorist Peter Brooks has observed, is today’s dominant cultural form. To Brooks, this “overabundance” of narrative is worrying: he criticizes the deference of virtually all strands of culture (not only literature, TV, and movies but art, museology, and—especially—news media) to the persuasive rhetorical power of the story. I share many of his concerns. “The universe is not our stories about the universe,” he writes, “even if those stories are all we have.”
In the artwork of Candice Lin, however—an artist who nests stories inside stories, who researches, remembers, speculates, and concocts in equal measure, all at once, without hope or intent to persuade—the story becomes a lubricative medium that enables the destabilizing of sense, the de-centering of singular subjectivities, and the unpicking of neatly tied conclusions.
“Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory,” the Los Angeles-based artist’s multimedia exhibition at the non-profit Canal Projects in New York, is near-impossible to summarize, except by telling stories. Let me start with one. In the 1970s, female workers at Japanese-operated factories in rural Malaysia experienced demonic possessions and spirit attacks. Workers at these factories hailed not just from Malaysia but China and India too, so bomohs (Malay shamans) and healers …
Mexico City Roundup
Gaby Cepeda
Mexico City’s cycle of exhibitions often feels like a hamster wheel that never stops turning. This fall’s openings, however, set a more introspective and meditative—and perhaps not as obviously market-driven—pace. Yes, there was a lot of painting. But much of it felt quite unexpected in its deviation from recent attachments to the colorful and the figurative, and notably more mature than the pop-culture fixations that have crowded the city’s galleries of late. This approach to painting could even be broadly described as a form of disengagement or retreat: a movement inwards, embracing dreams and memories.
One such example was José Eduardo Barajas’s “Saliva,” his debut solo show at PEANA. Barajas’s practice to date has dabbled in post-internet aesthetics, creating loosely rendered CGI images of diamonds and currency falling from the sky. Earlier this year, however, for “Mnemósine” at Proyectos Multipropósito, Barajas replaced the ceiling tiles in a massive office space with tile-sized, loosely landscape paintings showing clouds, sunsets, dice, car rims, and hair (among other things) in reconfigurations of his earlier, CGI-oriented work. That show was a preparatory sketch, of sorts, for “Saliva.” In this tighter—and more impressive—body of work, Barajas magnified his experiments with landscape painting, and turned them …
Coco Fusco’s “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island”
JS Tennant
It comes as no surprise that “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island” opens with documentation of Coco Fusco’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94): her justly famous performance with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, staged at the moment the world was tussling over how best to commemorate, or denigrate, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s so-called “discovery” of the Americas. A prime benefit of the Cuban-American artist’s first major retrospective—curated by Léon Kruijswijk and Anna Gritz—is to be able to trace the arc of suggestive continuities within her impressive thirty-year body of work.
In Two Undiscovered Amerindians, Fusco and Gómez-Peña toured the world in a cage where they were displayed as “natives” of a recently discovered Caribbean island. A subsequent film, The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey (1993), captures this performance and reactions from the public, its footage intercut with a montage of real-life circus sideshows, world fairs, and racist “ethnographic” dioramas. Attendants, acting as ringmasters, invite passersby to interact with the couple, who speak no English. Bananas are fed to them through the bars; the “female” can be made to dance; five dollars grants a titillating fondle of the “male specimen’s” genitalia. The island’s name, Guatinau, would be pronounced, in …
London Roundup
Chris Fite-Wassilak
“Celebrating 20 years,” ran the bus and magazine ads for Frieze London, keen to capitalize on having reached a milestone. In 2003, the first fair was welcomed as a galvanizing and creative force—a Studio International review from the time breathlessly described it as the “the real thing […] the apotheosis of swing […] the Stargate.” Such enthusiasm seems cute now, after the artist projects that supposedly set the fair apart from other trade events (Mike Nelson earning a Turner Prize nomination in part for his 2006 installation at the fair) have been scaled back almost to invisibility, and the “Focus” section for younger galleries, introduced in 2013, effectively assimilated parallel smaller fairs such as Zoo and Sunday. Of the 164 stand-holders at this year’s Frieze London, only 30 of them (predominantly, of course, the larger multi-venue galleries) were at the first 2003 fair. Through all this, the fair has long presented itself as an annual temporary institution, masquerading as such among the long-term underfunding of the city’s public museums.
This hoarding of resources has a distorting effect on coinciding and parallel events that would otherwise register as an alternative, both to the fair and other art spaces around London. Several …
Contextures: Art and the Politics of Abstraction, Representation, and Identity (Part Two)
Andrew Stefan Weiner
This is the second installment in a two-part essay exploring the aesthetics and politics of the representation/abstraction dyad. For part one, which considered the history of New York’s Just Above Midtown gallery, among other spaces, curators, and artists who rejected received ideas about how abstraction and representation should operate, please click here.
Given the intense pressures facing many artists who identify and/or are marked as being in some sense “Other,” it isn’t hard to understand why the radical aesthetic and political world of spaces like Just Above Midtown might seem so compelling and so contemporary, despite nearly fifty years of historical distance. Figures like Linda Goode Bryant, Senga Nengudi, David Hammons, Howardena Pindell, and Randy Williams confronted something approaching a double bind, in which loyalty to an emergent Black nation seemingly meant sacrificing artistic complexity, and yet managed to repurpose this contradiction as a source of creative, critical dynamism. Over and against the long-facile valorization of abstraction or more recent dogmas surrounding representation, such artists instead grounded their practices in the rejection of false oppositions and in attempts to trace the imbrication of aesthetics and politics in the hybrid, conceptual-material forms that Bryant memorably framed as contextures.
That said, …
Contextures: Art and the Politics of Abstraction, Representation, and Identity (Part One)
Andrew Stefan Weiner
This is the first installment in a two-part essay exploring the aesthetics and politics of the representation/abstraction dyad, with the second half to appear later this week.
In late 2022, The New York Review of Books published an essay entitled “Between Abstraction and Representation,” by the veteran art critic Jed Perl. Framed as a strangely nostalgic jeremiad, Perl’s text laments the decay of a once-robust opposition between abstraction and representation in visual art. Once, it claims, in the heyday of mid-century Manhattan, a tight-knit cadre of artists and critics agreed to fiercely disagree in a “war of ideas,” where artistic positions amounted to all-in personal, aesthetic, and political commitments; from this battle royale the strongest emerged victorious, thereby enabling a collective evolution of artistic forms. However, Perl argues, in subsequent decades the advent of new hybrid strategies and modes––a grouping loosely termed “postmodernism”––led art to become dangerously complacent and vacuous.
Citing a heterogeneous group of artists including Julie Mehretu, Gerhard Richter, and Simone Leigh, Perl claims that more recent efforts to recombine abstraction and representation have robbed these forms of their autonomy and authority, producing a “muddleheaded eclecticism.” Opposing this process of decline, Perl calls for a return to the …
Lin May Saeed’s “The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise”
Jesi Khadivi
In What is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Guattari write that “art is continually haunted by the animal.” Looking back through millennia of artistic production, we see representations of our beastly counterparts everywhere: as companions, deities, workers, or raw material. Likewise, John Berger has argued that “the parallelism of their similar/dissimilar lives allowed animals to provoke some of the first questions and offer answers.” Yet a life in common, and the reciprocal gaze that humans and animals once shared, was lost in the West with the development of nineteenth-century capitalism. The practice of German-Iraqi artist Lin May Saeed brings the image of the animal from the periphery back to the center.
Saeed devoted her life, sadly cut short by brain cancer at the age of fifty last month, to the cause of animal liberation. Her work avoids agit-prop depictions of animal suffering and instead draws on myths, stories, and fables so that we might “imagine a kind of time travel with a focus on the human-animal relationship” and “think about our common future” by looking at the past. “The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise,” in which Styrofoam sculptures and reliefs, figurative wall works, drawings, and videos are shown alongside animal sculptures …
Steirischer Herbst ’23, “Humans and Demons”
Joshua Simon
In the opening speech for “Humans and Demons,” her sixth edition as curator of Europe’s longest-standing annual contemporary art festival, Ekaterina Degot stated that the exhibition “is not about good and evil” but “status quo and evil.” This distinction informs the four main exhibition sites and programs deployed through the city, organized according to the trajectories of three historical figures—and one object—to live or pass through Graz during or after World War II. These are represented in each venue by a curatorial research installation: a collection of records owned by Nazi officer and jazz enthusiast Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, alias Dr. Jazz (1912–99); the personal archive of physicist Stefan Marinov (1931–97); an AI rendering of the Zürich-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919–88); and a copy of a 1925 postcard showing pacifists holding a banner on which the word “Friede” (Peace) was later changed to “Frieda” to avoid Nazi persecution.
This year’s Steirischer herbst takes place against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, among the many lessons of which is that we never really left the twentieth century. In that context, and in such a historically saturated exhibition, the above installations are a brilliant move. They free participating artists from archival …
Jota Mombaça’s “A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP”
Harry Burke
In the final chapter of her 2016 book In the Wake, Christina Sharpe meditates on the weather, which for her signifies the “pervasive climate” of antiblackness in the modern world. Her argument is shaped by the insight that “new modes of writing, new modes of making-sensible” are needed to account for the quotidian violence of the colonial present. Jota Mombaça’s “A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP” builds on these contentions through a series of artworks that address the weather and, when viewed together, make up an atmosphere.
While preparing for the show, Mombaça researched the disastrous flash floods that struck western Germany and neighboring countries in 2021, as well as Berlin’s origins as swampland, drained in the 1700s. What would it mean, the artist asked herself, for cities to turn back into swamps? until the last morning (2023), made in collaboration with Anti Ribeiro, Darwin Marinho, and Luana Peixe, is her oblique answer to this. The looping, fourteen-minute video studies the mangroves and marshlands of Pará in her native Brazil. Its long, pensive shots of clouds recall John Constable’s cloud studies of the 1820s. For the Romantic painter, clouds exteriorized emotions and symbolized modernity’s scientific advances. To today’s eye, they also refract …
“Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism”
Matt Shaw
In March 1949, the cover of Popular Science magazine featured Ray Pioch’s brightly colored drawing of architect Eleanor Raymond’s Dover Sun House, a Massachusetts home developed with solar engineer Maria Telkes and heated exclusively by solar energy. Part Rockwell painting, part architectural section, and part science diagram, the illustration drew on Pioch’s experience drawing instruction manuals for the U.S. Navy during World War II. It shows an idyllic family in their well-tempered living room, kept warm by the energy captured through south-facing windows and stored in canisters of mirabilite, or Glauber’s salt, a mineral well suited to storing solar heat in the day and releasing it after dark. The cover represents the best image of post-war Pax Americana, but with a twist: a bright optimism that the sun was the future source of America’s energy needs, not oil.
The cover serves as a lively introduction to “Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism,” the inaugural presentation by the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment. Curated by Carson Chan, the show attempts to draw lines in the sand about what “ecology” and “the environment” mean in architecture from the 1930s to the …
Michael Rakowitz’s “The Monument, the Monster, and the Maquette”
Rachel Valinsky
The exhibition’s title, alliteration and all, has the ring of an Aesopian fable. The Latin etymology of monument, Michael Rakowitz spells out on the edges of a sculpture, are trifold: caution (to remind, to advise, to warn), protest (demonstrate, remonstrate), monstrosity (monster). And indeed, around the gallery, the monstrous is everywhere in sight. Its forms are many: to the right, Behemoth (all works 2022), a colossal black plastic tarp obscuring the suggestion of an equestrian figure below rises tall only to fall to the ground as the fan powering its ascent clocks out. At the center, American Golem, poised on a decorative white wooden tabletop, an assemblage of found antiques and papier mâché sculptures (a strategy the artist has previously used for reproducing objects looted from Iraqi museums, highlighting the calls for their repatriation). The central figure, which stands on a stack of marble slabs, greets the viewer from the top of its bell-mold body and fired-clay mask—a copy of the Babylonian monster Humbaba. Gazing out at the viewer, its composite arms outstretched, it recalls Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), but even more grotesque. It doesn’t just stand on the wreckage of the past, propelled toward the future: it is …
“Everything else”
The Editors
A number of pieces scheduled for publication this month are addressed to the tension between Ad Reinhardt’s insistence that “art is art [and] everything else is everything else” and variations on the more fashionable dictum that everyone is an artist and everything at least potentially a work of art. The former position is conventionally, if lazily, understood to insulate the aesthetic tradition from its contamination by politics and to ensure that it cannot bear upon society; that art might be coextensive with the world, by contrast, seems to promise it can serve as an agent of change within it. A purportedly conservative impulse is opposed to a progressive one, and artists and their audiences are invited to pick sides.
The increased scrutiny of that opposition might reflect a gathering awareness that the collapse of art into the world does not always support a progressive program. As some artists have been pointing out for years, the assertion that a work of art cannot be disentangled from its contexts can sometimes shade into the assumption that it is little more than a mechanical product of them. The risk is that the individual labor of the artist is effaced, their subjectivity equated with …
Valerie Werder’s Thieves
Wendy Vogel
In Valerie Werder’s debut novel Thieves, Valerie—an autofictional alter ego—chronicles her slide from disgruntled gallery copywriter to brazen shoplifter. At first she steals for the rebellious thrill of inhabiting other identities; eventually, and more abstractly, she steals to reclaim her time, words, and sense of self. Thieves centers on the New York blue-chip commercial art world, with its fussy idiosyncrasies and particular flavor of exploitation. But it is equally a novel about the fungibility of female identity—and a shrewd indictment of how language operates under capitalism.
Werder’s decision to write in a self-reflexive mode—a contemporary novel in the lineage of Semiotext(e)’s influential “Native Agents” series, edited by Chris Kraus and featuring authors such as Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, and Kraus herself—speaks to a desire to expose and explore the conditions under which Thieves was produced. Yet Werder is critical of how language is strategically deployed in the name of “authenticity,” both within the art world and literature. In Thieves, words bolster value, then drain themselves of meaning. People become expendable, while material things reinforce their self-worth. Over the course of the novel, Valerie becomes both a precious object and a voracious acquisitor. She enables, and is enabled by, a mysterious …
40th EVA International, “The Gleaners Society”
Ben Eastham
In Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), a lost tourist complains that the maps are much better in his homeland. So advanced are the cartographers there, he boasts, that they long since moved beyond puny pocket-maps to execute a map of the country “on the scale of a mile to the mile.” It hasn’t yet been spread out, he concedes, because “the farmers objected.” Yet on realizing that this perfect map very closely resembled the territory, his compatriots instead learned to navigate “using the country itself.” So now they have no need of maps.
This parable is used to support Stephen Wright’s proposal, cited by Sebastian Cichocki in his curatorial statement for an exhibition program scattered across Limerick, that art should also operate “on a 1:1 scale.” By a logic that might seem strained even to Alice, Wright suggests that artists take their cues from Carroll’s cartographers and make art that is coextensive with reality. This seems spectacularly to miss the point of the joke: if you don’t need maps, then you don’t need cartographers; if reality is its own representation, then you don’t need artists. If you want to intervene directly in the existing systems, you need …
Billy Bultheel and James Richards’s “Workers in Song”
Kirsty Bell
“Workers in Song” inverts the current artworld logic of exhibitions augmented by performance programs, and instead positions the live event as the centerpiece and the exhibition its supplement (some of the performance elements, along with a soundtrack, remain on show at WIELS until October 8.) Borrowing their title from a Leonard Cohen song, Belgian composer Billy Bultheel and Welsh artist James Richards staged a collaboration that examines the elasticity of such live events, questioning the relations of appropriated artifacts (poems, films, artworks) to newly constructed material (collaborative videos, sound, banners), of spoken word to music or imagery, and of live performance to pre-recording, thus the very nature of liveness itself.
It takes place in an exhibition room sparsely adorned with banners, rudimentary props (folding chairs, desk, piano), and two large screens hanging opposite each other. Four angled bleachers sit the audience “in-the-round.” A reperformance of Ian White’s Ibiza (2010) is the first of a nine-part program that is dense, heady, jarring, tender, anxiety-inducing, and shot through with moments of beauty and pathos. Liveness was central to the late artist and curator White’s thinking: he saw the rehearsed gesture and performer’s presence as a “false promise” of the live, finding liveness …
“The Weight of Words”
Caleb Klaces
Here are some of the phrases the visitor will encounter at “The Weight of Words,” a group show featuring eighteen living artists and writers working across sculpture and poetry: “WHAT IF NOT EVERY WORD IN YOUR SENTENCE;” “Traducing Ruddle;” “as you wlak [sic] the distance changes; ” “stilllife;” “EFEND DIGNITY COPY AND ORIGINAL.” Out of context, these formulations sound more like material gathered by a lexicographer or anthropologist than lines composed by a poet. Yet the works that feature them are poetic in the best of senses: distilled and suggestive, affecting in ways I can’t quite explain and yet will remember.
The curators, Clare O’Dowd and Nick Thurston, argue that the works on display represent the meeting of two traditions that have been artificially separated and codified. Sculpture and poetry are taught and interpreted as distinct disciplines, when they are in fact intimately connected by purpose and technique. Several of the artists here point to literature in their work: Joo Yeon Park’s kit-like engraved aluminum is a fragment of potentially infinite architecture such as that imagined in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” (1941); a commissioned text by poet Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, swimming amongst fish in a blue vinyl …
35th Bienal de São Paulo, “choreographies of the impossible”
Kevin McGarry
The Oscar Niemeyer building that houses “choreographies of the impossible,” the 35th edition of the Global South’s oldest biennial, is as much protagonist as background. Located in the bustling urban park of Ibirapuera, the art inside this architectural leviathan is only separated from the city’s greenery by glass walls, and its entrances are open six days a week. There is no charge to enter, monetary or otherwise: visitors needn’t reserve, wait, or check in with personal data like email addresses or postal codes, but can glide in and out as if the show were an extension of public space. This allows for viewing at a leisurely pace—important, given that there’s no quick way to tour 270,000 square feet of impossible choreographies.
A short wall text jointly attributed to the curators (Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel) touches on the subversion of temporal structures in a selection of works “based on cosmologies and models of governance where time is conceived as a spiral, without the rigidity of established structures and chronologies”—although a spiral is a type of structure, too. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that the curators attempted to eschew linearity. While they have successfully …
Barcelona Gallery Weekend
Patrick Langley
Enric Farrés Duran’s show at Bombon Projects was among the most on-the-nose exhibitions at this year’s Barcelona Gallery Weekend (BGW)—and not just because of the glasses. That technologies that purport to measure the world are not reliably accurate is less troubling, his work proposes, than the tendency to act as if they are. These stark and satirical pieces reference optometry (pairs of dysfunctional glasses, such as one with two holes in its lenses, on freestanding plinths), museum display practices (a canvas turned to face the wall, another with nothing on it but a few tips for cleaning glass), and shooting (a wall papered with rifle targets). One work—a glass-fronted frame containing smashed museum glass—reduces the theme to the point of absurdity: not the “cracked looking glass” of Joycean modernism but an art that flaunts its own shattered illusions. The spectacles are broken, but they haven’t yet been replaced.
BGW’s ninth edition, which featured works by more than sixty artists exhibited in twenty-seven galleries across the city, showcased the robustness and vitality of Barcelona’s gallery scene. As such, it set an ironic context for a shared concern of several exhibitions: fragility. This manifested in the use of delicate materials—glass featured prominently …
“Elusive Edge: Philippine Abstract Forms”
Carlos Quijon, Jr.
While framed as a non-survey exhibition, “Elusive Edge: Philippine Abstract Forms” presents a compelling cross-section of geometric abstraction in the Philippines, from its postwar formation to postmedia experiments that extend its legacies. Featuring the Cubist impulses of Vicente Manansala’s 1960 still life featuring the titular mango and papaya, the linear flourishes of Fernando Zobel’s Castilla XXII (1957), Leo Valledor’s color field appropriation of the Philippine flag (1981), and more contemporary brick paintings by Maria Taniguchi (2018), the exhibition makes a worthwhile attempt to revisit this particular visual idiom and to renew the stakes for thinking about it both in and beyond its art-historical, stylistic, and disciplinary contexts.
The exhibition, curated by Patrick D. Flores, accomplishes this by a broadening of categorical parameters: “abstract forms,” rather than “abstraction”—as evidenced in this show, the former is less burdened by modernist influence than in fleshing out these forms’ own tendencies. True to its title, “Elusive Edge” emphasizes how gestures of abstraction overlap with forms and disciplines beyond visual art, such as architecture and design.
The dense hang of “Elusive Edge,” which features more than sixty artists and eighty works, foregrounds differences in the works’ stylistic intentions while allowing points of commonality to emerge. …
Liverpool Biennial, “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things”
Novuyo Moyo
Given Liverpool’s role as a major hub for the slave trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it’s surprising that past editions of the city’s biennial have not engaged more directly with this subject. The legacy of slavery haunts the port city: it can be seen in the many warehouses by the docks, the streets named after slave traders, and the monuments addressing it. This year’s biennial dives fully into that history, guided by Cape Town-based curator Khanyisile Mbongwa’s approach, rooted in remembrance but also in the seeking of potential avenues to healing. “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things” featured over thirty artists finding ways to engage with a city whose links to slavery and its legacies are inextricable, in a way that manages to look to the future as well as the past.
In the Tobacco Warehouse, Albert Ibokwe Khoza’s multimedia installation and performance piece The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu (2022) goes back to questions of bodily autonomy, mining the histories of human zoos and exhibitions by examining their performance practice. As a South African artist whose work is sometimes staged in the west, they question the relationship between themselves and their audience, …
Niklas Taleb’s “Solo Yolo”
Marcus Verhagen
The photographs in the first UK show of the Essen-based artist Niklas Taleb describe intervals and cadences rather than people or events. In particular, they outline the rhythms of the home: most of them show the artist’s apartment, where, it would seem, time passes slowly. Arranged in a spare hang across the gallery’s two small-ish spaces, these are reserved images in which rooms feature more prominently than the family inhabiting them. Often untitled yet all dated 2023, they are populated by toys and crockery, computer screens, flowers, and mementos. The remains of a snack sit on a carpet, multicolored building blocks are balanced on the rim of a drawer, snapshots of relatives are tucked in the gilt frame of an old print. In their reticence, these glimpses into the day-to-day life of a household leave viewers to establish what narrative and thematic continuities they can.
The family itself is largely offstage. The shadow above the building blocks may be the artist in silhouette. Elsewhere, a woman, his partner perhaps, files an infant’s fingernails, but only their hands are visible. Social life makes a marginal appearance in two pictures of visitors absorbed in their own thoughts. In the liveliest scene here, …
Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Ambience of Sound, Sound of Ambience”
Sam Thorne
While the artist and pioneering ambient composer Hiroshi Yoshimura was recording his debut album, in 1982, he visited the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, which had opened a few years before. Struck by how this curving Art Deco building framed a series of views onto tree-lined gardens, he approached a curator about the possibility of playing his record in the galleries. They agreed, and so Yoshimura’s first album—titled Music for Nine Post Cards—also became his first public commission. Made in a home studio on a Fender Rhodes electric piano, this collection of glistening vignettes is one of my favorite albums, nine sketches of a museum informed not by its artworks but by glimpses through its windows.
The track titles—“Clouds,” “Blink,” “Dream”—read like a list of the motifs and compositional approaches that would preoccupy Yoshimura for the rest of his life. Over the course of the next three decades, he produced dozens of acoustic soundscapes, meditative site-specific compositions for locations all over Japan: shopping malls; a subway line; even a funicular, the written score climbing at the same twenty-two-degree incline as the actual mountainside. Yoshimura’s was an unusual mode of public art. Small-scale but also spacious, it had nothing in …
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s “Radiant Remembrance”
Murtaza Vali
In Ken McMullen’s experimental film Ghost Dance (1983), Jacques Derrida proclaims that “Cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms. It’s the art of allowing ghosts to come back.” This assertion of film’s proximity to the spectral plays out across Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video installations, three of which anchor “Radiant Remembrance.” Blending animist beliefs held by Indigenous communities across Southeast Asia with the importance given to reincarnation within Buddhist theology, Nguyen uses film as a medium, not just as the material form of his art practice but as a channel through which to conjure forgotten pasts, narrate counter-memories, and confront historical violence and ecological destruction. After all, what are ghosts, if not simply our ancestors, and our memories of them, continuing to radiate their presence to us? What is remembrance if not simply a form of reincarnation?
These capacities are most clearly articulated in The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), an immersive four-channel video installation about the descendants of the tirailleurs sénégalais—Senegalese soldiers conscripted to fight for the colonial French army in the First Indochina War who fathered children with Vietnamese women. That conflict ended a year before the 1955 Bandung Conference, which sought to build cooperation …
Progression from the mean
The Editors
Writing recently in the New Left Review, Hito Steyerl identified the tendency of machine learning networks such as Stable Diffusion to produce what she calls “mean images.” The word “mean” here carries several connotations, the most literal of which describes the process by which such networks aggregate existing images and out of them construct an average. Like statistical means, they do not bear upon reality except by analogy (that the average household in South Korea contains 2.4 people, for example, does not correlate to the actual number of people in any of them). This implies another way in which these images are “mean,” because they establish standards that are in reality unachievable: an AI-generated image of an “American citizen” describes no possible American citizen, but it does establish a visual ideal to which no living person can conform. Moreover, these technologies depend upon categories that must always be contested (what is a household, after all, or a citizen?), and so the images they produce are “mean” in the sense of exclusionary. Steyerl goes on.
We might speak in much the same way of “mean texts.” The ideas, if they can be so-called, produced by such language models as ChatGPT are …
Ethan Philbrick’s Group Works
Laura Nelson
There are many ways to move through and think alongside Ethan Philbrick’s Group Works. At first glance, it’s a book of academic theory coming out of performance studies. Following a “desire for collectivity,” Philbrick takes the small-scale formation of “the group” as the locus of inquiry. He enters the text with a tentativeness toward groups, recognizing the ways that they are frequently viewed with healthy suspicion or uncritical celebration. He asks:
What kind of good-bad thing is a group to do?
When do we do things in groups, and why?
How do we group, and how does that matter?
Moving with these questions, the book turns to artists experimenting with novel group formations in dance, literature, film, and music in the 1960s and ’70s. Each chapter pairs a “group work”—Simone Forti’s 1961 performance Huddle, Samuel Delany’s 1979 memoir Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love, Lizzie Borden’s 1976 film Regrouping, and Julius Eastman’s 1979 musical piece Gay Guerrilla—with contemporary works that re-imagine, re-perform, or dialogue with these experiments. Taken together, each pairing amplifies and extends the book’s central impulses to consider how groups assemble and disassemble. Along the way, Philbrick introduces a chorus of thinkers—theorists of community, theorists of in-operative community, theorists …
Interview with P. Staff
Francis Whorrall-Campbell
I was first introduced to P. Staff’s work via a pamphlet by Isabel Waidner, produced for their show “The Prince of Homburg” at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2019. Recently out as trans, and isolated because of the pandemic, I became obsessed with the film at the center of the exhibition—a fraught dream sequence as experienced by the eponymous prince (taken from Heinrich von Kleist’s play) interspersed with interviews with contemporary trans scholars, activists, and artists—and how Staff’s disoriented, exhausted prince, sleepwalking his way to political martyrdom, could make sense of my own fear and exhaustion as reasonable responses to structural oppression. Having missed the show, I pieced it together from the commissioned texts and a few small images, and only later watched the film, when a friend gave me a bootleg copy on a USB alongside two works by Terre Thaemlitz. I remembered how I’d felt when I first encountered the work’s archive, but now I could also see its more hopeful proposition of dreaming as resistance.
Born in 1987, Staff’s work spans sculpture, performance, installation, and film: On Venus, shown at their 2019 show at the Serpentine, juxtaposed archival footage of industrial animal farming with a poem imagining …
Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s “FOR REAL”
Ann Mbuti
If history is written by the victors, asks Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s exhibition, is reality a construct of the dominant narrative? What then does it mean to write a history of the defeated? The artist’s work starts from the struggle for Tamil independence during the 1983–2009 civil war and its aftermath, and moves onto the larger questions that arise from its failure. Reflecting on the ethnic oppression that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced his family to flee the country, Kulendran Thomas’s collaborations with Annika Kuhlmann suggest that art can influence our perception of not only history but reality itself. Mixing historical facts, storytelling, fiction, and deepfakes, his work offers a glimpse into a reality that exposes the dominant one as just one well-told version of many.
The two previous iterations of this exhibition—at London’s ICA and Berlin’s KW—opened with the struggle for utopia before moving on to contemporary art: at Kunsthalle Zürich, the order is reversed. The looping twenty-four-minute video Being Human (2019), installed within a plywood construction, is the first video to encounter when visiting the exhibition and it reflects on the relationship between the end of the war and the flourishing of contemporary art in Sri Lanka. …
“Everybody Talks About the Weather” and “Thus waves come in pairs”
Laura McLean-Ferris
One of the most remarkable things about living through a permacrisis is how much seems to go on as normal. Art exhibitions, for example, continue to get organized amid deranging heat, the lurid smoke of forest fires, and the wet wreckage of floods. In Venice, the precarious lagoon city now heavily reliant on a high-tech flood barrier system, two shows are currently on view that propose methods for curating art in this atmosphere of environmental collapse and change.
Weather as metaphor, weather as context, weather as catalyst and catastrophe. There are a lot of exhibition-making strategies being tested in Dieter Roelstraete’s rangy “Everybody Talks About the Weather” at Fondazione Prada, but the show bears some relationship to the “report.” An LED screen with a grid of television weather forecasts from around the world is installed in the foyer, where a collection of glossy professionals with blow-dried hair gesture in front of colorful maps. This motif—newsy, mediatic, even a little silly—is echoed in the exhibition’s information panels, which resemble newspaper front pages with headlines, data, and “stories” about the artworks on show. This is the third in a series of major exhibitions across Prada’s venues that have marked a turn towards …
“Substitutes”
Eliel Jones
In light of the ongoing conservative backlash against legislative advances for trans rights in Spain, the UK, and Germany, trans visibility remains paradoxically both a requirement for survival and the greatest threat to trans people’s safety. In a first for the artist-run space W139, which for its forty-four years has focused on the production and presentation of new work, a recent exhibition combined historical and contemporary artworks to create a dialogue between past and present experiences of bodily and gender autonomy. “Substitutes” brought together artists who have subjected their bodies to abstractions, disguises, and transformations to find ways to be both present and absent, visible and invisible. At stake is a desire to refuse the logics that demand proof or validity of one’s existence, and to fight back against requirements that are deemed necessary for the recognizing of unruly bodies as legitimate.
Johannes Büttner’s sculptures of loaves of bread pierced with flesh-tunnel holes were hung on the wall and propped on shelves at the entrance and in the gallery’s reading room. Recalling the literal and symbolic body of Christ, the works invoke St. Thomas the Apostle’s insistence on probing Christ’s flesh—not satisfied with seeing and smelling his wounds—to satisfy his …
Martine Syms’s “Loser Back Home”
Juliana Halpert
In an early scene of The African Desperate (2022), Martine Syms’s first feature film, her protagonist, a Master of Fine Arts candidate named Palace, hosts four professors in her studio for a final review. In turn, each teacher performs their own version of art pedagogy in Palace’s general direction, lobbing vague questions and cloudy critiques her way. “It’s all just so figurative,” comments Rose, the snidest, and most overtly racist, of the bunch (played perfectly by Syms’s longtime gallerist, Bridget Donahue). She gestures at the work: “It’s just a family, right?” Palace, skeptical and evasive up until this point, finally shoots back: “Haven’t you read Saidiya Hartman? Of course I’m responding to the African desperate. Staking my claim to opacity.”
Opacity is the name of Syms’s game in “Loser Back Home,” the artist’s first exhibition with Sprüth Magers, in her native Los Angeles. That scene was at the front of my mind as I toured the two floors, attempting to parse the show’s manifold logics, feeling a bit rebuffed at every turn. Opacity—and the right to stake one’s claim to it—was a concept crafted by Édouard Glissant in his Poetics of Relation (1990) as a means of protecting and preserving …
“Repetitions”
Cathryn Drake
To the extent that repetition signifies a failure to progress, it is anathema to our industrious modern society. Yet the word embodies a paradox: in every iteration there is a difference, if only because it occurs in a different moment, a movement forward in time and space. Repetition gives us another chance. The group show “Repetitions”—featuring artworks by Nikos Alexiou, Beppe Caturegli, Panos Charalambous, Thalia Chioti, Maria Ikonomopoulou, Alekos Kyrarinis, Christina Mitrentse, Nina Papaconstantinou, Nikos Podias, Efi Spyrou, and Myrto Xanthopoulou—presents meditations on the theme.
The repetetive manual processes involved in the making of some of these works seem to express transformations more spiritual than physical, detected visually, if at all, in barely perceptible marks on the surfaces or slight irregularities in form. Nikos Podias’s Fragment (2022) is a delicate lattice constructed of fragile found papers such as teabags, with stains derived from rose petals and black tea evoking the “blood, sweat, and tears” commonly attributed to acts of painstaking creation. The even more ephemeral Black Curtain (2007–8), a delicate structure of reeds, paper, and string by the late Nikos Alexiou suspended on the wall nearby, is a tense yet tenuous membrane that seems to hover on the thresholds of …
Aziz Hazara’s “No Dress Code”
Edwin Nasr
“How then can we clean centuries’ worth of waste?” asks Françoise Vergès, reflecting on the devastation wrought by imperial conquests in the Global South. The question hangs over “No Dress Code,” artist Aziz Hazara’s affronting solo exhibition at Berlin’s PSM Gallery, which reflects upon the US military occupation of his native Afghanistan through the prism of trash.
Speakers housed in four modified, bright yellow–plastic jerrycans play soundscapes recorded by the artist over the past decade across Kabul. The title of this sound installation, Bushka Bazi (2023), is the Afghani name for these containers; together with the soundscapes, they conjure a distinct sense of place, but also of context. Introduced to the country through international aid cargos, they have been put to numerous uses since—from water carriers in peri-urban areas suffering from poor infrastructure to petrol-filled explosive devices used by the Taliban.
I am looking for you like a drone, my love (2021–22) is a large-scale photograph of colossal heaps of discarded material, sweepingly installed in a panoramic layout so as to cover the walls of the gallery’s central space. At first glance indistinguishable from the type of imagery disseminated by climate advocates to draw attention to environmental degradation, the …
“O Quilombismo”
Jesi Khadivi
The reopening of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt was marked by three days of performances, concerts, lectures, readings, rituals, and blessings under the banner “Acts of Opening Again: A Choreography of Conviviality.” Those familiar with incoming director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s program at Savvy Contemporary, which he founded in 2009 and quickly established as a forum for deliberation, experimentation, and sociability, will recognize a continuation of its ethos of conviviality and hospitality as an integral aspect of institution-building. Yet how might such values transition to the larger scale of a bureaucratic German institution, which operates according to different metrics than more fluidly structured art spaces? How does a curatorial stance of cultivating intimate spaces within institutions ultimately expand the channels through which we can engage with art and with each other? How does an invisible curatorial material like intimacy manifest itself within an exhibition? And finally, how might such a politics of conviviality be enacted within what Ndikung has referred to as “the belly of the beast”? These questions pervaded my thinking about “O Quilombismo,” a show whose concept and content are entirely entangled with the act of thinking how to “institute.”
The inaugural exhibition in HKW’s new program …
Gelare Khoshgozaran’s “To Be The Author of One’s Own Travels”
Dylan Huw
Gelare Khoshgozaran describes herself as an “undisciplinary artist and writer.” Across her work, she harnesses the capaciousness and flexibility of the essay form to articulate the possibilities inherent in exile. Her 2022 essay “The Too Many and No Homes of Exile,” for example, articulates the “limbo” of a life marked by latency and anticipation. While it draws on the artist’s personal memories, its emphasis—as in much of her work—is on forming associations and fostering solidarity across contexts of displacement. “You look at the map of Los Angeles,” she writes of the city in which she now lives, “and identify a map of exile.”
Her first solo exhibition in Europe, curated by Eliel Jones at Delfina Foundation’s cavernous central London space, features three moving-image works that reflect the lyricism and political intentionality of her written work. Born in Tehran in 1986, during the Iran-Iraq War, Khoshgozaran is particularly invested in making way for alternative, affirmative practices of living. She channels this wide-ranging understanding of exile into a methodology—and something approaching a narrative—in The Retreat (2023), the exhibition’s longest, loosest work.
Described in the press materials as “visual expansion” of Khoshgozaran’s 2022 essay, the film stems from an “exile retreat” organized by …
Momentum 12, “Together as to gather”
Novuyo Moyo
The twelfth edition of Momentum, held on Jeløya island in the coastal town of Moss, is an experiment in non-hierarchical models for curating biennials, with Tenthaus at the helm. As part of its open, participatory process with an emphasis on local contexts, members of the collective invited an artist or collective each and worked in reverse from there to find points of intersection and connecting threads between the participants.
Most of the works are contained in Gallery F 15’s main space, a few spilling out onto the farm grounds outside. Inside, the educational platform and art collective Gudskul—formed of the three Jakarta-based collectives Grafis Huru Hara, ruangrupa, and Serrum—have expanded on the collaborative vision of the curators with Stitching Ecosystems: GUDHAUS (all works 2023). The “work” functions as a space where visitors are invited to engage in knowledge-sharing and communal processes. It’s also a semi-archive of the collective’s interventions and projects driven by these same notions. Outside, an extension of a project staged also in ruangrupa’s Documenta 15, Stitching Ecosystems: Gudkitchen-Tentskul, was only partially activated at the opening as the kitchen wasn’t yet functional. Placed for now under a banner by Nayara Leite that reads “I AM GLAD WE …
“Schema: World as Diagram”
Paul Stephens
This exhibition of diagrammatic works juggles some of the most contested categories in contemporary art—and manages to keep all its curatorial balls in the air. Despite the broad sweep of its title, the show is tightly curated and requires multiple viewings for its full scope to set in. With an emphasis on painting, this meticulous grouping of fifty-plus artists undermines simplistic, outmoded art-historical binaries that oppose figuration and abstraction, conceptualism and expressionism, scientism and humanism. To call it expansive feels like an understatement.
The show takes its title from Thomas Hirschhorn’s Schema: Art and Public Space (2016–22), an exuberant multimedia collage-manifesto. Rudimentary and improvisational, Hirschhorn’s patchwork of ideas and contexts places the works in the show under a utopian-communitarian umbrella—exemplifying David Joselit’s claim in his 2005 essay “Dada’s Diagrams” that “the diagram constitutes an embodied utopianism.” Hirschhorn’s Schema might usefully be juxtaposed with Dan Graham’s 1966 work of the same name—sometimes taken to represent the apex of early informatic anti-figural conceptualism. (A show devoted to Graham’s Schema at 3A Gallery closed, coincidentally, several weeks before this exhibition opened.) Graham intended his work to be “completely self-referential” and meant to define “itself in place only as information.” Simply a text without …
Jes Fan’s “Sites of Wounding: Chapter 1”
Wong Binghao
In one corner of Jes Fan’s latest exhibition is a glass globe that fits snugly into a receptacle resembling a half-opened, upright clam’s shell. Titled Left and right knee, grafted (all works 2023) and installed on a ledge in the curve of the staircase that leads down into the gallery, the sculpture’s treasure is only visible from above; from below, only its undulating, opal façade can be seen. The body parts and procedure referenced in the artwork’s title are hardly, if at all, discernible in the artwork’s form; an obtuseness compounded by its relatively inaccessible position in the exhibition space. Like the “pearl” it protects, this artwork reveals its meaning only in glimpses.
Indeed, even the exhibition’s figurative sources are hidden in plain sight: all of these seemingly abstract sculptures are cast from knees, chests, and torsos. Arranged in a vertical line, Left and right knees, three times is composed of six wall-mounted aqua resin basins, each approximately the same size and shape and spaced evenly apart. Despite the mathematical connotations of its title, the sculpture resembles an outlandish cascading fountain adorned with esoteric insignia. Fan mimicked an oyster shell’s palette by sanding various pigments—yellows, pinks, browns, and blues—onto aqua …
Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom’s Daytime Viewing
Thea Ballard
In a videotaped recording of a 1980 performance of Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom’s song cycle Daytime Viewing, a woman wanders across a dim stage. She wears a bright green printed housedress—the shapeless body-concealing kind—and large fluffy slippers; she nervously settles into her spotlit destination, a chair set in profile close to a TV set. Her reflection is briefly visible on the blank screen as she fiddles with a knob to turn the set on, then, screen illuminated, she pulls up a channel displaying a nested image of another woman in profile watching TV. The tableau is soundtracked by uneasy synthesizer melody, and a voice narrating: “She was all she had, and it was more than enough for now. She was a survivor, addressing the struggle without by living within. She gathered momentum by living within, contained by a fascination with the view: this trance, this private daytime viewing where any world awaited her arrival.”
Both Humbert and Rosenboom are part of a cohort of musical avant-gardists who play with song as a form that can, often in just a few short minutes, bridge the popular inner core and absolute outer limits of American aesthetics and consciousness. Humbert designed costumes …
“Other worlds”
The Editors
In an essay to be published this month, Thea Ballard interrogates the curatorial and critical cliche that works of art help us to “imagine other worlds” to “presumably utopian social effect.” Not only did this force the editors to skim through past editorials to check whether we had succumbed to the same truism (no comment), but it set us to thinking again about the relationship between the “worlds” constructed through art and those in which we live.
One implication of the critique is that allowing art the freedom to imagine new realities might relieve it of the duty to engage with the existing ones. That curators (and critics) unthinkingly encourage an attitude towards “high” cultural production that is essentially one of wish fulfilment: art as imaginative escape from the very real structural injustices, climate catastrophes, and rising authoritarianism that are shaping our societies. The danger is that art comes to serve a blander version of the cathartic function that Aristotle ascribed to theater: we go to the museum to participate in a symbolic world in which justice is served, only to return to our daily lives purged of any revolutionary feeling.
The obvious rejoinder is that we must first imagine …
The Letters of Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer, 1976-1980
Daniel Muzyczuk
The poet Bernadette Mayer and her artist sister Rosemary began to write to each other when the former moved with her family from New York to Lenox, being deterred from phone calls by the expense. Over the four years covered by this anthology of their letters, Bernadette gave birth to two children, collaborated with her husband Lewis Walsh on the 1976 collection Piece of Cake, and worked towards her book-length poem Midwinter Day; Rosemary introduced the ephemeral installations involving snow or balloons that she called “Temporary Monuments.” Their correspondence—which complements Rosemary’s recent touring exhibition “Ways of Attaching”—both illuminates and substantiates the recent growth of interest in the sisters’ work: anecdotes of daily life mix with candid confessions of loneliness, worries about money, and, above all, attentive criticism of each other’s work and methods during these formative years in their practices.
A large number of these letters end with reading (and watching) lists: Braudel, Fassbinder, Genet, Stein… Rosemary visits the cinema in New York and recommends new movies to her sister (notwithstanding the fact that these were probably hard to find in rural Massachusetts). But when she begins to examine new trends in psychoanalysis, it’s Bernadette who offers advice on where …
London Gallery Weekend
Orit Gat
This year’s edition of London Gallery Weekend suggested something that initially surprised me: that the joy of seeing multiple shows in one weekend can be less in new discoveries than in meaningful re-encounters. Looking at Jadé Fadojutimi’s three-by-five-meter painting And willingly imprinting the memory of my mistakes (2023)—included in “To Bend the Ear of the Outer World,” an exhibition of contemporary abstraction curated by Gary Garrels at Gagosian—I thought, I still love this. I first encountered Fadojutimi’s work as part of the 2021 Liverpool Biennial; in this more formalist context I can see how the things I loved then—its blending of oil, pastel, and acrylic in one canvas, its massive presence—are in dialogue with painters I’ve been following for years. The invention and freshness of Laura Owens’s approach to painting is confirmed by every re-encounter; I continue to be amazed by how Charline von Heyl’s Circus (2022) evokes its colorful subject through abstract patterns of gray, black, and white.
Many galleries chose to dedicate their London Gallery Weekend shows to painting, and I loved many of the paintings on view. I was impressed with Shaan Syed’s four works at Sundy, which depict forms from the natural world—like the rubber plant—as …
María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s “Liminal Circularity”
Kimberly Bradley
According to Yoruba myth, only one of the seventeen deities sent by the supreme being Olodumare to populate the earth could do so. After her sixteen male co-divinities failed, Oshun, the goddess of water, fertility, love, and protection, used her sweet waters to revive Earth and create its creatures. At Galerie Barbara Thumm, María Magdalena Campos-Pons pays homage to Oshun with the vibrant gouache triptych Untitled (2021). The artist was born in Cuba in 1959, the year the Cuban Revolution succeeded; Oshun is an important figure in Santeria practices, integrated into Latin American and Caribbean belief systems via the slave trade. Here, a female figure’s outstretched arms cradle a burst of dark-brown blooms, framed by yellow petals—a stylized sunflower spilling over three framed pieces. The sunflower is a symbol of Oshun, and the piece, an invocation of sorts, exudes generosity, abundance, and hope.
Campos-Pons—whose ancestry is Yoruba and Chinese as well as Cuban—is experiencing her own burst of recognition. She’s been known, shown, and studied since the 1980s, but institutional exhibitions in both the Global North and Global South have since 2020 arrived in a rush like the flowing waters she often depicts in her multimedia work. While this reflects …
Aria Dean’s “Figuer Sucia”
Katherine C. M. Adams
One enters Aria Dean’s exhibition “Figuer Sucia” through Pink Saloon Doors (all works 2023) that open onto a vaguely neo-Western mise-en-scène. An ambiguous gray sculpture—heavily textured, with densely packed contours that evoke layers of folded skin and the crushed musculature of a horse—sits on a wooden pallet at the center of the room. This mildly cubic, contorted sculptural figure (FIGURE A, Friesian Mare) appears to be cowering, its subject’s equine body nearly unrecognizable. Dean’s recent exhibition at the Renaissance Society, “Abattoir, U.S.A.!,” took the slaughterhouse as a way to examine the limits of subjecthood. Its central film work walked the viewer through the environments of factory farming. While Abattoir, U.S.A.!’s featured architecture was outfitted for the killing of animals, the rooms it showed remained empty, painting a backdrop of violent and eerie subjectification. Like that project, “Figuer Sucia” is implicitly connected to Dean’s longstanding reflections on how Blackness is conditioned for and as social material. The contorted not-quite-object, not-quite-subject of FIGURE A might seem to show the implied, absent victim of that prior project. Yet “Figuer Sucia” calls the source of such brutality into question. It examines a violence that is not only in the scene we are witnessing, but …
“Common”
Keely Shinners
Just 300 meters away from A4 Arts Foundation is the Castle of Good Hope. Built by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century, the oldest surviving colonial building in Cape Town stands today as a symbol for a set of interwoven colonial relations: land expropriation, capitalist accumulation, racial subjugation, environmental degradation. Its very architecture—the pentagonal bastions, the high stone wall, the garrison, the prison—epitomizes the strategies at the heart of these formations: to dominate and exploit the commons. In South Africa, these strategies were articulated during colonialism, elaborated by Apartheid and endure, structurally and systemically, to this day.
Curated by Khanya Mashabela, “Common” asks how artists and activists, past and present, negotiate this destruction of the commons and its commensurate social relations. The first artwork one encounters upon ascending the stairs at A4 is a telling example of what is at stake in this exercise. Sue Williamson’s twelve photographs document Naz and Hari Ebrahim’s final weeks in a home marked for demolition in Cape Town’s District Six. Declared a whites-only area by the Apartheid state, the family was evicted and their home bulldozed in 1981. In those final days, amidst cups of tea and cigarettes …
“The Casablanca Art School”
Oliver Basciano
In the early 1960s, Mohamed Melehi was “an immigrant, a lost person” in Minneapolis. Later there would be a move to New York and friendship with the likes of Jim Dine and Frank Stella, but at that time the Moroccan artist was a junior teaching assistant at the College of Art and Design and felt like an outsider in the American Midwest. There’s a heaviness to the 1963 acrylic painting that he titled after the city, which opens this exhibition. A block of pitch black pushes down on the monochrome red of the canvas’s bottom half. The colors, included in Marcus Garvey’s pan-African flag and other motifs of left-wing liberatory struggle, hint at Melehi’s politics. He could be hoisting a flag over American territory. Then again, he was never the kind of artist to take make his point so didactically. Ultimately the work remains a painting not a banner: sandwiched in between the red and black is a narrow strip of yellow and grey.
At Tate St. Ives, Minneapolis hangs next to two of the very few figurative works in this survey of the Casablanca Art School, a post-independence generation of teachers and students from the Moroccan institution, where Melehi …
The World(end) of Yesterday
Xin Wang
When the HBO adaptation of the video game The Last of Us came out at the start of 2023, it already felt nostalgic for an earlier cultural moment of imagined future apocalypses. The game premiered a decade earlier among a “cohort” that included the TV series The Walking Dead (in its third season), the game Resident Evil (in its sixth), the Hollywood blockbuster World War Z, and Cao Fei’s morbidly humorous Haze and Fog, a zombie film that offered incisive observations of middle-class ennui and environmental ruin, inspired by Cao’s own fascination with eschatological imaginations in the broader culture. I remember being captivated by the zealousness of “world-building” efforts dedicated to sensationalizing its end.
In The Last of Us we follow the journey of Joel, a middle-aged smuggler who lost his daughter at the start of a global fungal pandemic, and Ellie, a ferocious queer teenager who has never experienced the world before its collapse, across America on a mission to facilitate the creation of a cure/vaccine. Many beloved zombie games at the time featured stereotypical characters or cliched trash-talk (which can become its own campy genre), but The Last of Us built indelible characters enlivened by high-quality acting. Joel’s …
Paige K.B.’s “Of Course, You Realize, This Means War”
Travis Diehl
At the opening, the red and white helium balloons were in everyone’s face. Now, at the show’s close, they’re at your feet, like a deflated Great Pacific Garbage Patch, pressing visitors closer to Paige K.B.’s intricate collages on wood panels, pastiches of art-historical material, and political sound-bites; closer to the web of found objects and deadpan references supplementing the paintings, to the sour red walls they hang on. The balloons make it hard to take in the show from a safe, not to say critical, distance. No measured overview allowed, only deep diving, unpacking, conspiring. The balloons suggest a constellation so dense and rubbery it’s a blob, the trampled ribbons like the red yarn in the disgraced detective’s storage unit—their significance all wadded up and too close to see.
Maybe that’s too much weight to attach to party decorations that never got cleaned up. But why weren’t they cleaned up? Why are they on the checklist, inaccurately, as 99 Red Balloons of Diplomacy (all works 2023 unless otherwise stated): “Thirty-one red balloons,” when some are white? A checklist on a PDF dated May 17—two weeks after the opening? But the balloons fit the vibe. They insinuate themselves into a scenography …
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “We Don’t Recognise What We Don’t See”
Christine Han
The formally diverse series of works that anchor Rirkrit Tiravanija’s new solo exhibition each highlight the accelerating inequity among living beings and propose tentative frameworks for their reconciliation. On entering the exhibition, the visitor is greeted by framed prints of five Old Master paintings which have been appropriated and adapted by Tiravanija. In twinned reproductions of Pietro Longhi’s Il rinoceronte (1751), for instance, Tiravanija has altered or partly obscured the original image of Clara—the first rhinoceros brought into Europe from Asia—as depicted in a Venetian carnival. The implication of the title (untitled, 2020 [we are not your pet], 2023) seems clear: to disrupt the idea that nature as distinct from humanity is something to be tamed and subordinated.
Then there are the mysterious, seemingly empty spaces in Jan Brueghel the Elder’s The Temptation in the Garden of Eden (ca. 1600). Where are the horses, swans, tigers, antelopes, and hares? I did as the gallery told me and shone a UV flashlight onto its surface, where now I could discern the peculiar, enigmatic shadows of departed birds (screen-printed onto the image with solar dust ink by the artist) perched on trees. They appear morbid, gentle, and undefined. Should we be thinking …
Nasreen Mohamedi’s “The Vastness, Again & Again”
Stephanie Bailey
In 1964, Nasreen Mohamedi, who moved to Mumbai from Karachi three years before Partition, wrote about the experience of continuous conflict. “I sit here and try and find a unity,” she wrote in her diary, “not between religions but between people and people.” The artist had returned to India the previous year from Paris, where she studied lithography following her first solo show at Gallery 59 in Mumbai’s Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute. A black-and-white photograph showing Mohamedi in her studio is displayed among others in “The Vastness, Again & Again,” curated by Puja Vaish at Mumbai’s Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation. In the image, dated ca. 1959–1961, Mohamedi sits among abstract paintings resembling those she made in the 1960s (she rarely dated or titled her work). One such composition in “The Vastness” is an abstract blue-scale oil on canvas impression of what resembles a hazy waterside structure and its reflection, recalling the palette knife and roller compositions of V.S. Gaitonde, with whom Mohamedi shared an affinity for abstraction, Zen Buddhism, and Paul Klee.
An untitled 1966 canvas by Gaitonde, of grey-scale marks on a blue horizon, is among the few pieces by Mohamedi’s contemporaries curated into this multi-dimensional reflection on the …
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s The Twofold Commitment
Patrick J. Reed
The Twofold Commitment revisits Trinh T. Minh-ha’s time-dipping Forgetting Vietnam (2015), a documentary feature about the mythical origins of Vietnam. Which is to say, it’s a book about a film which reflects on what the name of a country evokes of the history, people, and cultures associated with it. Seven interviews conducted between Trinh and eight media scholars and critics compose half of the book. Each approaches the filmmaker and writer’s work from a different tack, focusing on aspects of Forgetting Vietnam that are representative of her multi-hyphenate career. Irit Rogoff, for example, homes in on what it means to make a film for the feminist viewer, while Stefan Östersjö concentrates on the multi-sonic soundscapes within it. And Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier’s discussion, “Wartime: The Forces of Remembering in Forgetting,” provides important historical background about the country in question.
As a filmmaker and theorist, Trinh strives to disavow classification and impress upon her audience the necessity of the extra- and non-categorical. Thus certain terminology, like some already employed in this review, requires inverted commas more often than not. “Documentary” refers to a moving-image essay composed of Hi8 footage from 1995 and HD footage from 2012, which Trinh gathered on separate visits …
Juliana Huxtable and Tongue in the Mind
Harry Burke
As a teenage indie fan, I spent countless hours on peer-to-peer file sharing platforms like LimeWire and Kazaa, and later blogs and MySpace pages, on which I discovered bands like the Velvet Underground, Boredoms, and Gang Gang Dance. Each products of art scenes, these acts not only soundtracked my adolescence but, by showing me alternative ways of listening and living, sparked my curiosity for contemporary art.
In their New York City debut at National Sawdust early last month, Tongue in the Mind forged a novel branch in the art-rock lineage. The project follows almost ten years of collaborations between artist Juliana Huxtable and multi-instrumentalist Joe Heffernan, also known as Jealous Orgasm, who are joined by DJ and producer Via App on electronics. Huxtable’s art practice spans creative registers, and muses on themes including furry fandom and the psychedelic edges of queer desire. An acclaimed DJ, her inventive sets defy genre and expectations, whether she’s playing Berghain or the basement of a bar. Tongue in the Mind synthesizes these pursuits, and evidences the trio’s musical and artistic maturation.
The performance was the finale of “Archive of Desire,” a week-long ode to the Alexandrian poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933), programmed by the …
Trevor Paglen’s unstable truths
R.H. Lossin
Trevor Paglen’s early work was made while George W. Bush was marching the United States and its allies into a war justified by an image that was neither real nor fake. Despite the convenient, racist confusion of Middle Eastern countries in the minds of many Americans, it was widely known that Iraq had no relationship to the attack on Wall Street in 2001. And so the pageantry of legitimate aggression was obliged to produce another justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom: proof that Saddam Hussein was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. When Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the UN Security Council in a bid to secure international sanction for the invasion, what he presented was a set of blurry, ambiguous satellite images of what appeared to be buildings. The official reason for invading Iraq was a specific, actively enforced interpretation of some grainy shapes. Before Powell’s UN speech transformed the grainy shapes into sites for nuclear weapons production, the tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937/55), which depicts civilian death by aerial bombardment and hangs at the entrance to the Security Council chambers, was covered up. Wars are always fought with propaganda, but this one began with an image whose facticity …
“El Dorado. Un territorio”
Sylvie Fortin
For days, I couldn’t get Charles’s gold supertunica off my Instagram feed. The newly minted king had leveraged gold’s hallucinatory power: he could count on Meta’s algorithm, designed to mine attention. The word “hallucination” was coined by Thomas Browne, to whom the English language owes more than 750 others, including “computer,” “coexistence,” “exhaustion,” and “indigenous.” These disparate expressions of power, currency, and representation coalesce in “El Dorado. Un territorio,” on view at the waterfront Fundación Proa in La Boca, where the Spanish landed in 1536, as the Matanza River—South America’s most polluted waterway—meanders past the art institution.
Developed collaboratively by Fundación Proa, the Americas Society (New York) and Museo Amparo (Pueblo, Mexico) to explore the myth of El Dorado, its multivalence, and its contemporary resonances through the work of Latin American artists, the project comprises three distinct exhibitions. This serial form reflects, according to the organizers, the concept’s core elusiveness and its diverse manifestations around Latin America since 1492. It also refutes the very idea of Latin America—a geopolitics imagined by colonial capitalism and sustained by neoliberalism—by presenting three locally-specific approaches to the myth.
In Buenos Aires, the project’s first iteration brings together works by twenty-seven contemporary and several anonymous …
“Solid sources”
The Editors
The collapse of faith in political institutions that shapes the present might be traced back to a bad faith reading of an image twenty years ago. “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” insisted US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council. These “solid sources” included a set of blurred satellite images that represented—he claimed—a facility producing the weapons of mass destruction that would justify the US-led invasion of Iraq. As R. H. Lossin points out in an essay on the work of Trevor Paglen that we’ll publish this month, the war that fatally undermined both the rules-based international order and the presumption that its leaders should be accountable to truths was predicated on “a specific, actively enforced interpretation of some grainy shapes.”
What is at stake when images are used to construct realities conducive to power? How, as political subjects with our own biases, can we make informed judgements of images that support multiple interpretations, or are of uncertain provenance, or refuse altogether to be read? And how do we respond to the tendency to build dangerous conspiracies out of images that are, like the grainy shapes in Powell’s PowerPoint presentation, …
Sophia Giovannitti’s Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex
Wendy Vogel
In the opening pages of Working Girl, Sophia Giovannitti—artist, writer, sex worker—makes a case for her choice of “pleasure work” over the drudgery of a day job. “When I say make pleasure work, I mean to sell sex and art,” she writes, “not because doing what you love makes work more bearable, but because the particular economic conditions in these industries facilitate maneuvers and scams that allow people to work less and do what you love more.” Given this fiery beginning, I expected a full Marxist takedown of the art market, or perhaps an angry manifesto à la Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory (2006). Giovannitti borrows elements from both, at a cooler temperature, as she argues for working the system to one’s advantage. Threading together memoir and criticism, her volume charts a journey through contemporary art addressing prostitution and pornography, the blind spots of movements like MeToo, the politicized actions of sex workers, and finding a way to live beyond labor.
The bulk of Giovannitti’s text toggles between a discussion of erotically charged art and her own experiences navigating sex work. Drawing from scholarship by art historians such as Julia Bryan-Wilson, Giovannitti revisits a handful of now-historical works. She considers …
“A Posthumous Journey into the Future”
Natasha Marie Llorens
I fell into a Star Trek hole during the pandemic. That period was saturated with the overwhelming nausea I felt watching people with power respond disastrously to the crisis, both at the micro level of small art institutions and the macro level of national politics. By comparison, the people responsible in the Star Trek universe—Worf, Dax, B’Elanna Torres, Jean-Luc Picard (maybe not Riker, he always struck me as a bit lecherous)—seemed principled and empathetic. It was like Pepto-Bismol for the mind, a thick, bubble-gum pink pharmaceutical relief to an on-going shitshow. The series’ version of reality included an intact concept of the future and clear protocols for every kind of existential crisis. I found that, given the circumstances, I could ignore the Federation’s institutional resemblance to the United Nations and its problematic and unexamined investment in rationality.
Everyone deals with future-dysphoria differently, but a recent group exhibition at the Uppsala Art Museum, “A Posthumous Journey Into the Future,” struck me as a rich study of the alternatives to escapism. It presents the work of nine artists whose works consider the intractability of the future. Curator Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson justifies the ensemble as an example of archipelagic thinking, a notion proposed …
69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
Ben Eastham
Styling itself as the “oldest short film festival in the world” as well as, rather less memorably, the “largest festival in North-Rhine Westphalia,” the annual gathering of filmmakers and producers at Oberhausen offers the latest opportunity to reconsider questions that have shadowed the festival almost since its inception: what do we mean by short film, and how does it relate to the wider fields of cinema and contemporary art? As the classification has been subsumed into “moving image” and migrated online and into the gallery, should we now think of it as a testing ground for approaches that might percolate into mainstream film-making, another channel through which artists might express ideas not confined to a single medium, or a discrete art form with its own histories and non-transferable stylistic characteristics? In proposing rather vaguely that it might be “the experimental field on which future film languages are formed,” the festival’s own literature betrays some of the anxieties arising from the attempt to corral proliferating styles, formats, and economic networks into an overextended category.
First impressions of the International Competition were that its curators were perhaps too eager to accommodate all these possible interpretations, and several more besides. Entries were divided …
18th Venice Architecture Biennale, “The Laboratory of the Future”
George Kafka
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Norman Foster questioned why “we shouldn’t be converting seawater into jet fuel and decarbonizing the ocean at the same time.” Meanwhile, the 10,200sq mile Neom mega-project planned for the Saudi Arabian desert comes with claims of a “new benchmark for combining prosperity, liveability and environmental preservation.” As the architecture profession contends with the ingrained relationship between climate emergencies and built environments, both statements exemplify a tendency towards techno-solutionism in vocal sections of the industry—and betray an approach to design that overlooks material extraction and environmental destruction to justify extravagant capitalist projects behind weak masks of sustainability.
For all its challenges—the unmanageable volume of content, the density of text, the opacity of curatorial approaches—the 18th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale offers a firm and timely challenge to this trend. Typically understood as a global state of the union for the profession and broader spatial practices, this edition (titled “The Laboratory of the Future” and curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect and academic Lesley Lokko) is largely unflinching and rigorous in its selection of projects which reject techno-solutionist sustainability, opting instead for a showcase of architecture for “decolonization and decarbonization.”
These themes run through …
Prismatic Ground 2023
Leo Goldsmith
“The situation now is quite different,” the critic Fred Camper wrote in 1986. Camper, in his much-debated essay of the same name, was marking what he termed the “end of the avant-garde” in film: a transition away from an earlier conception of artists’ cinema, from the 1940s to the 1960s, as a more or less unified aesthetic movement, one premised on an “original sharpness and uniqueness” under whose banner the avant-garde filmmaker marched as a kind of aesthetic shock-trooper, and toward a more uncertain future, “dissolving in a kind of indistinct haze, in which the degree of difference from the commercial mainstream […] seems to be lessening.” In his essay, Camper mounts his arguments in largely formal terms, suggesting that the drift of experimental filmmakers into academia since the mid 1960s, the routinization of films into avant-garde “sub-genres,” and a postmodern distaste for the language of “masterworks” and grand statements, signaled the terminus of the avant-garde’s distinctive and urgent project. But surely other factors, including the rise of video and the partial dispersal of the New York avant-garde scene—which increased access to the means of media production and widened the often narrow coterie of its adherents—led to the impression that …
“Retrotopia: Design for Socialist Spaces”
Sierra Komar
To turn left upon entering the darkened exhibition hall of “Retrotopia: Design for Socialist Spaces” is to encounter a motley, utterly heterogeneous collection of objects ranging from the decorative to the domestic to the medical. Nestled against one wall is Cosmic Fantasy (1965): an experimental public sculpture work by Lithuanian artist Algimantas Stoškus consisting of luminescent slabs of stained glass arranged, Tetris-like, on a series of suspended geometrical forms. Adjacent to this is a mint condition Saturnas vacuum cleaner—the ultimate kitschy fusion of lofty, celestial aspirations and household banality—complete with orbiting moon wheels and ring. In a vitrine just opposite the Saturnas is the least recognizable item of the group: a tubular, vaguely biomorphic form that appears to be woven out of some sort of textile. This, it turns out, is one of the first vascular prostheses ever made: a specific model of artificial aorta manufactured in 1960s Lithuania using re-engineered German ribbon-weaving machines. Selected by Lithuanian curator Karolina Jakaitė, this eclectic assemblage of objects and artworks (along with contributions from other Lithuanian creators like sculptor Teodoras Kazimieras Valaitis and architect Vytautas Edmundas Čekanauskas) is one of eleven unique “capsules” that comprise the collaboratively curated “Retrotopia.” In its simultaneous diversity …
“Heavy Rotation Infra-habibi-technics”
Najrin Islam
Unassuming objects—such as grocery cartons, essential supplies, orange peels, shopping carriers, polythene bags, suitcases, a towel, and a lighter—occupy a large hall of Kunsthalle Bern. Elsewhere in the space, a discarded scratch card lies on the floor beside stacked chairs and potted foliage on wheels. Assembled by artist duo Valentina Ornaghi and Claudio Prestinari, these tableaux stage a material sensorium of the ubiquitous. Fragments of Campo del Cielo meteorite are dispersed across the walls in various permutations as well: a cosmic extension of the morsels that constitute the ordinary.
In “Heavy Rotation Infra-habibi-technics,” makeshift infrastructures such as these evoke motion and traffic as well as incidents and happenings that are furtive, off-ledger, or premised on informal networks. These unmoored objects—available to touch and vulnerable to pilfering—are presented in ways that resist easy attribution to the contributing artists, attesting to a different logic of exhibition-making. This reluctance to discretize the works further manifests in the illustration of weather patterns that substitutes for a labelled floor plan, indicating a merging of indistinct “atmospheres.”
The orange peels, for instance, refer to a film shown in an enclosed space on the floor below. In Cow Heaven Brawl Cloud (2023), the artist Laura Nitsch films …
Nalini Malani’s “Crossing Boundaries”
Jayne Wilkinson
After more than fifty years as a pioneering video and installation artist, Nalini Malani maintains a rigor, criticality, and joy that transcends her work’s challenging subject matter. Given that this is the Karachi-born Indian artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada, it’s a curiously small sampling of projects, but nonetheless encompasses the conceptual approaches for which she is best known: strong feminist and activist perspectives on issues related to gender, race, bodily autonomy, and democratic rights; highly charged source material drawn from current or historic events; diverse literary references combined with shadowy, impressionistic figuration to produce immersive video environments; and an ongoing concern with erasure as both aesthetic device and political gesture.
Can You Hear Me? (2018–20) is the centerpiece here, a nine-channel installation comprised of eighty-eight individual iPad animations projected across three walls. Each short segment repeats its own brief narrative in frenzied, arhythmic patterns, and is accompanied by a musical score that ranges from soaring and dramatic to cacophonous to (sometimes) barely audible. It’s a tumultuous and relentlessly dynamic experience, with no single focal point. Much like a painted or sculpted frieze, there is no distinguishing one vignette from the next, no firm contours to scenes that bleed across …
14th Gwangju Biennale, “soft and weak like water”
Jason Waite
The cavernous exhibition hall of the Gwangju Biennale was built in 1994 and intended to host only one exhibition. Walking through the same structure—comprising four mega halls connected by ramps, and still in use by the biennale—feels like exploring an abandoned world expo site. These vast spaces have vexed curators from Okwui Enwezor to Maria Lind, yet this year’s artistic director, Sook-Kyung Lee, has embraced the rickety structure. Instead of constructing new white walls to conceal the building’s decline, Lee and her team have largely left the space as it stands, with the exception of a few partitions of uncut boards and natural-fiber panels.
This sensitivity to exhibition environment carries through a thoughtful, slow-moving show that allows ample space for each work to be considered on its own terms. Reflecting Lee’s artist-centric approach, it’s a relatively intimate biennale: seventy artists, many presenting new commissions. A focus of these is textile installations, which demand a particular attention to their making. I-Lann Yee’s Tepo Putih Ikan Masin (Salted Fish White Mat, 2023) is a hanging composed of woven-together north-Malay mats, typically used for drying fish and in other domestic settings. A colorful, shimmering work, it brings disparate references to mind, including kintsugi …
New Rules of Immersion
Chris Fite-Wassilak
At the heart of Mike Nelson’s Hayward Gallery retrospective is a wooden workbench. Chained to it is a series of Halloween masks: Frankenstein’s monster, the wolfman, a few scary clowns. The bench is embedded in a dense web of steel mesh that sprawls through the gallery, the haze of mesh dotted at points with concrete heads on hooks that bear bugged-out eyelids and gurning teeth, evidently made using the masks as casts. Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster (2014) is the high concluding point of this exhibition of Nelson’s detailed and ominous theatrical installations, fully occupying its Brutalist surroundings, as well as providing a concise summation of his work. After wandering through the creepy maze of The Deliverance and The Patience (2001), banging open dozens of doors and dodging other visitors in order to inspect each cramped room lined with cryptic clues—a pantheistic altar in one, a worn-down travel office in another—the sense of being a detective, on the hunt for the whys and whats, is heavy in the dusty air. The masks feel like a tacit acknowledgement of the roles we’re meant to play here: we’re not just any detective, we’re a B-movie detective, pursuing these ready-to-wear cinematic monsters through …
SofijaSilvia’s “Pendulum”
Tom Jeffreys
SofijaSilvia’s photography touches upon those tender, knotted moments when care for the more-than-human becomes almost inseparable from a politics of domination and control. She returns to loaded institutional sites—like zoos, cemeteries, botanic gardens, and museum storage units—but also places in which aesthetics are more subtly constructed—nature reserves, managed woodlands, and the private retreat of a Communist dictator. Employing various deft framing and display strategies to bring together work across a range of scales—from A6 to 1.5 meters across—made between 2001 and 2022, “Pendulum” addresses local and global catastrophes: earthquakes, forest fires, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Its very presence at the University of Zagreb’s botanical garden is a result of the 2020 earthquake that damaged almost 2,000 buildings across the city, including the Art Pavilion, which had commissioned the exhibition and which remains closed.
“Pendulum” responds both conceptually and materially to this context. The garden opened in 1891, when Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It is a reminder of botany’s proximity to imperialism, and SofijaSilvia effectively unsettles the epistemic hierarchies upon which such institutions were founded. Most of the works are inside a high-ceilinged timber pavilion, built to exhibit wooden products made by prisoners at a forestry exhibition in …
On Peter Hujar and Newspaper
John Douglas Millar
The critical literature on the photographer Peter Hujar’s work remains relatively slight, and that of value slighter still. One explanation for this is the limited primary material available; Hujar was coterie-famous in his lifetime, but never garnered the exposure that would generate a significant body of contemporary criticism. For reasons in part attributable to his difficult childhood—his father left before he was born, his mother was an irascible and sometimes abusive drinker who left him with his Ukrainian immigrant grandparents for the first years of his life—Hujar refused paternalism of any kind, either toward himself or his work, and he maintained an ascetic, almost Beckettian attitude toward speaking on behalf of either. He wrote almost nothing about his photography for publication. Many of his letters are lost. On the single occasion he was invited to speak before an audience he failed to prepare and froze at the lectern. He granted very few interviews, and in those he did allow he is a bristling, sprung, nervous subject, evasive to the point of embarrassment. In the only extensive interview he gave, conducted by his sometime lover and protégé David Wojnarowicz, almost the first thing he says is that he will not discuss …
Counterpublic 2023
Noah Simblist
What is a public? According to the literary critic Michael Warner, it is a relation between strangers bound together by law, belief, or shared experience. But as he also points out, the public is a dominant community that excludes subaltern groups who must form “counterpublics” to create alternative forms of community and discourse to survive the onslaught of structural oppression that the public produces. This notion inspired the St. Louis–based triennial Counterpublic, founded in 2019. Its second iteration features thirty commissioned artworks spread throughout the city. Artistic director James McAnally, along with a curatorial ensemble that included Allison Glenn, Risa Puleo, Diya Vij, and the “public secret society” New Red Order, chose artworks in relation to a city that has faced both Indigenous displacement and racial violence, from the 1857 Dred Scott case to the 2014 murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson police. The resulting exhibition successfully calls attention to the ways in which these and other complex histories are embedded within the city’s urban fabric.
Counterpublic 2023 feels like a combination of Documenta 15, centered on community and collaboration, and Prospect, a triennial that focuses on the social and political dimensions of New Orleans. Its deep …
Bispo do Rosario’s “All Existing Materials on Earth”
Elena Vogman
A number of extravagant garments, marked by generous color schemes and complex embroidery, open the first of three luminous rooms in “All Existing Materials on Earth,” curated by Tie Jojima, Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Ricardo Resende, and Javier Téllez. Its central piece, Manto da apresentação [Annunciation Garment], catches the eye with a multiplicity of details, inscribed with colored threads against a light-brown ground: signs and drawings of objects, names, numbers, abbreviations, and streets of Brazilian cities, utensils, boats and a model of a large sailing ship.
A photographic portrait of the artist wearing his magnum opus reveals not a fashion designer but a Brazilian psychiatric patient. The descendant of Black slaves, Arthur Bispo do Rosario (1909/11–1989) spent forty-one years of his life in mental health institutions while accomplishing his “mission.” On the side of the short exhibition text, another mugshot-like portrait of the artist is displayed on the patient card from Colônia Juliano Moreira, the hospital where Bispo was interned. He is described as “indigent,” a wandering Black beggar bearing no documents. The card repeats the police record from December 1938, when Bispo was arrested in Rio de Janeiro and diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia.” It was the month of Bispo’s revelation: …
Mixed up and placed together
The Editors
In his forthcoming essay on Peter Hujar and Steve Lawrence’s Newspaper project, John Douglas Millar quotes the art historian Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez as saying that the purpose of that publication “was that images were brought together from disparate contexts, mixed up, and placed together in a way that forced meaning and correspondence beyond their apparent lack of connection and/or hierarchical distinctions.”
Given that we will publish Millar’s text in close proximity to a piece on the Brazilian artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário, who used his time in a psychiatric institution to create a body of work that advanced his divine mission, and a review of the latest Gwangju Biennale, which promises to focus on responses to the political crises of the present, something similar might be said of e-flux Criticism’s program. And the purpose served by these juxtapositions might be the same: not to flatten different forms of cultural expression into the increasingly stretched and unstable category of contemporary art, but to generate new meanings through the friction that occurs when various forms rub up against each other.
If contemporary art is an unstable typology, then a publication devoted to its criticism might attend to the points at which it …
Claire Dederer’s Monsters
Orit Gat
I hate to admit that on my honeymoon in New York I watched Woody Allen play the clarinet at the Carlyle. My ex-husband was a huge Woody Allen fan and at the time (for the record, I was very young) I had a loose sense that Allen was bad but didn’t know the details. And I loved Annie Hall (1977): Diane Keaton, her outfits and personality, the joyfulness of it. I wanted to love it; to love it, I had to avoid difficult questions.
Or just one question. “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” This is the issue at the heart of Claire Dederer’s book, which tackles the dilemma of whether the artist’s biography can be separated from the work. In his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes argued that to look away from biography enables the “birth of the reader,” indicating that it’s on us—readers—to come to terms with the moral ends of looking at art. But what happens when the artist was also an abuser?
Dederer, a film critic, opens with Roman Polanski, charged with drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl. The book goes on to discuss Allen, Michael Jackson, J. …
Elizabeth Price’s “Sound of the Break”
Lua Vollaard
A tremble, a silence, and a piercing clatter: “Sound of the Break” derives its name from a sequence in Elizabeth Price’s video installation A RESTORATION (2016), which displays what a voiceover calls “a great hectic gathering” of archival images of vessels from Oxford’s Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean museums. A disembodied choir argues that these objects are made to be broken, so that their echoes can resound. When a Boscobel Oak wineglass falls and breaks off-screen, the choir declares it “a small sacrifice” of which “the great rumble resonates.”
A RESTORATION brings together many of Price’s recurring motifs: choirs of synthetically generated voices; archives absent from the historic record; interwoven technological histories; architectural plans as conceptual metaphors; sardonic institutional critiques; and untold feminist cosmologies. It is one of four works in her solo exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (the building, fittingly, is also home to a music school). Two dark spaces, each displaying two video works shown consecutively on loop, connect to a central viewing room in which four screens show new video lectures, made in 2020 during lockdown in London. Other works here include FELT TIP (2018), on how information technologies transformed the workplace; UNDERFOOT (2022), on the sonic …
Photography Report: Imaging Racial Capital
KJ Abudu
That photography has become one of the most banal visual interfaces in twenty-first-century life is no new observation. Every day, millions of people upload scores of images to privatized servers; encounter even more images on algorithmically governed online platforms; and craft their lives in accordance with the cohesive textures of branded imagery. With this, one might ask whether photography’s critical force and relevance has waned in our image-saturated present or, conversely, if its pertinence has been heightened by the unique burden it bears in reflecting on its ethical, political, and aesthetic relation to the accumulating heap of images. Three recent photography-led exhibitions in New York City forged unexpectedly generative dialogues, laying bare photography’s embodied contradictions. These exhibitions, by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Tina Barney, and Buck Ellison, suggest that the medium’s dissonant valences symptomize the wider social contradictions of racial capital and its attendant global crises.
Installed at Gladstone Gallery is LaToya Ruby Frazier’s More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland (2021–22)—after its first showing at the 58th Carnegie International, for which it won the Carnegie Prize. Eighteen metal IV poles are arranged into a minimal grid, their fluid-filled bags notably absent, evoking the spectral gravity …
“Refigured”
Travis Diehl
Among a spring flush of screen-, code-, and tech-related museum shows, “Refigured” at the Whitney stands out for its concision. The exhibition’s frame may seem vague—the human figure vis-a-vis technology at times verges on a universalized body—but the five works by six artists pulled by in-house curator Christiane Paul from the Whitney’s holdings maintain a fairly tight focus on the physical possibilities of digital bodies, from statues to demigods to talking heads. In Auriea Harvey’s Ox (2020) and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis) (2021), for instance, a muscular, berobed humanoid called Ox—which the wall label describes as an avatar for the artist—appears three times over: a pigmented statuette around 20 cm tall, a 3D model presented on a monitor, and an AR version pinned nearby and visible through an iPad tethered to its plinth. The artist’s intentions notwithstanding, Ox exists in digital and psychic “space” as a concept, a potentiality, and these various renderings are all concessions to display in a physical room.
In fact, as each new struggling trillion-dollar metaverse venture demonstrates, even state-of-the-art interfaces between the digital and physical “realms” remain pretty clunky (and the hardware here is not state of the art). The redundancy of Ox means there are …
Jimmie Durham’s uncompleted project
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
In his 2022 book Il rovescio della nazione [The reverse of the nation], Carmine Conelli tells readers about a group of Jesuits who have just returned to the region around Naples in 1561 after years of evangelizing in the Americas. Having honed the skills of spiritual conversion across the Atlantic, they dedicate themselves to doing the same amongst the wild southern “India italiana.” Naples was not merely one moment in the terrifying spiral of European history, it was arguably ground zero. As Maria Thereza Alves has shown, the Spanish invasion of Aztec and Inca worlds carted shiploads of crated silver into the ports of Naples, kicking off price inflation throughout Europe and initiating an exploratory arms race among the major powers of western Europe to find new worlds to claim and sack. Courts heard testimony about the rights of Europeans to slaughter or enslave others on the basis of their wild nature. Soon the same was said of lands within Europe. Mad contortions of self and other ensued. “Let’s do to us what we did to them,” runs the idea, “because some of us are wild and primitive, and yet none of us will ever be like any of them, …
Raqs Media Collective’s “1980 in Parallax”
Patrick Langley
Charles Jencks was a pioneer of postmodern architecture—or “bastard classicism,” as his American detractors put it. In 1979 the American-born polymath and his wife, the garden designer and historian Maggie Keswick Jencks, purchased a large townhouse in London’s Holland Park and extensively redesigned it over the next five years. At once a family home and a “built manifesto,” The Cosmic House nods to Ancient Egyptian, Baroque, and Hindu architecture, modern science and urban planning, the Zodiac, western philosophy, and much else besides. Jencks integrated his eclectic references into a rich (and kitsch) symbolic scheme that sought to reconcile micro- and macrocosms: domestic pleasures and cosmic immensities; private gags and philosophical traditions. A cantilevered spiral staircase at the center of the building, for example, doubles as a model of the solar year with fifty-two steps for each week; at its base is Eduardo Paolozzi’s circular mosaic Black Hole (1982).
Leading off from this mosaic is the basement gallery, home to an elegant exhibition by New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective. (Jencks was co-designing the gallery with his daughter Lily until his death in 2019; the museum opened to the public two years later.) Founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and …
Bayo Alvaro’s “¡Suéltame!”
Gaby Cepeda
Bayo Alvaro’s recent sculptures—evocative of strange, alien flora—recall Karen Barad’s descriptions of a “queer performativity” of nature. In this conception of the natural world, nothing is ever exclusively male or female, animate and inanimate; nor is it simply good or evil. Rather, there is endless potential for change and intra-action. The pieces in Alvaro’s third solo show in Mexico City and his first with Deli—a recently opened branch of the New York gallery—appear laced together in symbiosis, reflecting the ways in which living beings continuously tend towards and transform one another.
The young Mexican artist has previously worked across photography, collage, and installation. Here, the focus is on sculpture. The fifteen pieces lushly spread across Deli’s spacious, four-room gallery showcase Alvaro’s approach to sculpting forms that defy easy categorization, ambiguously poised between plants and animals, living creatures and inanimate objects. Alvaro’s objects are particularly lucid examples of a common trend in contemporary sculpture: his seductive treatment of materials sets him apart from more discursive, didactic attempts.
Each room feels thoroughly articulated. Pieces are placed in proximity, as if engaged in intricate dialogue, while smaller works are arranged as if to form an intimate ecosystem. Such is the case in the …
“Bruno Schulz: The Iron Capital of the Spirit”
Ewa Borysiewicz
In 1942, the Jewish-Polish artist and writer Bruno Schulz was murdered in the street by a Nazi officer. Though his weird and immersive short stories—many of which are set in his hometown Drohobych and in a dreamscape rendered after it—have lasted, most of his art perished with him. The small fragment of his visual oeuvre which survived the war has often been sensationalized, reduced to mere embodiments of the artist’s masochistic and fetishistic fantasies. Thankfully, here curator Jan Owczarek proposes a more nuanced take, setting Schulz’s work alongside that of contemporary artists who share his interest in forging personal, ambivalent mythologies.
The title of the show is sourced from an interview with the artist in which he suggests that artists tend to explore a limited number of subjects across their creative lives. The exhibition charts the handful of visual themes towards which Schulz leaned—genre scenes against a city background, or conversations set in tiny rooms—but his overarching subject, returned to obsessively, was the depiction of gendered power dynamics. The opening work—a 1919 self-portrait in pencil on paper—serves as a good example. Here, we see the artist, his gaze fixed on the beholder, leaning in front of a drawing board. The …
“Unschöne Museen”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
One institution considers another: in a pugilistic text that frames the dense exhibition “Unschöne Museen” [Unbeautiful Museums] at gta exhibitions—part of the ETH Zürich’s architecture department—curators Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen and Geraldine Tedder mention that recent events at the Kunsthaus Zürich catalyzed this show. The latter behemoth is currently addressing questions of provenance and funding after unflattering investigations into its relationship with donor Emil Georg Bührle. In 2021 the Bührle collection, on long-term loan, went on show in a purpose-built Chipperfield-designed extension to the Kunsthaus. Bührle, who died in 1956, became rich selling arms to Germany under the Nazis; his businesses later cooperated with the government of South Africa under Apartheid. The Kunsthaus’s gestures towards openness in this regard—such as commissioning ongoing additional research on the provenance of works in the Bührle collection—feel overdue.
Nonetheless, it’s staggering for anyone who arrived in Switzerland this millennium that Hans Haacke exhibited Buhrlesque at Kunsthalle Bern back in 1985. Recreated at gta, two shoes made by Bally (a Bührle subsidiary) double as candle-holders on an altar decorated with other Bührle references—all venerating a framed issue of Paratus magazine (the official periodical of the South African Defense Force) celebrating a South African military visit …
“Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar”
Herb Shellenberger
A quick survey of a handful of my peers—among them several experimental filmmakers, curators, and academics—revealed that none of them recognized the name José Val del Omar (1904–82). This came as a surprise to me, given that Val del Omar is perhaps the most foundational filmmaker of Spanish avant-garde cinema. My peers’ responses were ample if anecdotal evidence that the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar” is not only much needed; it should also provide an eye-opening look at the work of a visionary artist who is too little-known outside his home country—even to those who are invested in the subject of experimental film.
“Cinema of Sensations,” in the museum’s temporary exhibition gallery, demonstrates that Val del Omar was not just a filmmaker but a technician and inventor, cultural critic and theorist, and a trailblazing artist whose work and ideas spilled across many forms and media. This chronological exhibition opens with Val del Omar’s first films, made in rural towns that he visited during the early 1930s as part of the Misiones Pedagógicas (Pedagogical Missions) literacy campaign. It closes with the techno-futuristic experiments developed at his P.L.A.T. lab, a live-in studio space …
Rose B. Simpson’s “Road Less Traveled”
Alan Gilbert
The new human may not be very human after all, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As Sylvia Wynter argues, the Western concept of the human—or, more specifically, the category of Man—was created at the dawn of the early modern period to establish distinctions between Europeans and non-Europeans that granted the former the right to enslave and exterminate Indigenous populations in what came to be called the Americas, before quickly pivoting this framework toward Africa. The movement away from divine, Christian authority to a secular and legalistic one rooted this constructed racialism in the developing discourse of humanism. And while the consequences resulting from the designations “human” and “not human” quickly spread throughout the economic networks of the era, they were also generated in the cultural sphere with its race- and gender-specific “overrepresentation of Man,” as Wynter terms it.
What is the legacy of this European idea of the human when considering the proliferation of various modes of figuration in contemporary cultural production? Rose B. Simpson’s “Road Less Traveled” contains ceramic humanoid sculptures that look simultaneously ancient and futuristic. Do these works represent a human form that exists on either side of the five-hundred-plus-year history delineated by Wynter? In …
73rd Berlin International Film Festival, “Forum Expanded”
Asia Bazdyrieva
The “Forum Expanded” section of the Berlinale, an assemblage of exhibitions distributed across three venues and any number of screens, charts the points at which cinema meets the visual arts. This year’s edition, titled “An Atypical Orbit,” aimed to set in motion “fluctuating proximities—political and personal legacies which often lie in shambles” and to “challenge the status quo through exhibiting works that redefine cinema.” In attempting to solve two problems—to host a platform for political articulation, and to critically engage with moving images and media as such—the Forum Expanded faced a conundrum: its archival and historiographic approach, as well as the aesthetic and political emphases in the overall selection of works and conversations, induced a certain lethargy: a sense of being unwilling or unable to respond to those current emergencies which do not yet have established narratives.
In Betonhalle’s entrance corridor, Tenzin Phuntsog’s Dreams (2022) set up the exhibition’s dream-like ambience. The work portrays a sleeping couple— immigrants from Tibet to the US—floating in space against a quiet, blueish monochrome background. The pair reappear in a two-channel video, Pala Amala (2022), posing silently in nondescript settings. These large-screen, meditative works sat in contrast to the small, phone-like screens which …
Only connect?
The Editors
“The problem of criticism,” wrote John Berger, “is fundamentally the problem of connection.” The celebrated autonomy of modern western art might have freed it from the old institutions, but this did not lead to the anticipated reconciliation of art and life. Instead they drifted away from each other, and so criticism emerged to bridge the gap by connecting artists to audiences who might have other things to do with their lives than keep up with an increasingly specialized discourse.
Or that might be one function: Berger is careful to distinguish between “studio criticism” and “public criticism,” the former intended as feedback for the artist (the critic as intellectual advisor to the creative community) and the latter for a non-specialist spectator whose position in relation to the work the critic must assume. The first responsibility of the public critic is therefore to relate the production of artists to the issues shaping the world through which its audience is living (“it is criminally irresponsible,” wrote Berger in 1955, “for any intellectual today not to consider his and every subject in relation to the threat of the H bomb,” to which we might add some more recent catastrophes).
The question of what …
A. Laurie Palmer’s The Lichen Museum
Brian Karl
You’ve probably stepped on some quite recently. Or at least walked by, or even sat on a patch, though perhaps without registering what “they” were. Ordinary, near ubiquitous, seemingly static or at least glacially slow-growing, and not particularly cute or charismatic, lichen are seldom observed consciously at all, much less celebrated, related to, or clearly understood. Like a riddle straddling the edges of the living and the physical environment—faint dustings of powder or inert, wispy fronds—lichen occupies a subliminal place in most other creatures’ perceptions and consciousness.
A. Laurie Palmer’s ongoing The Lichen Museum project, on which she has been working for more than a decade, resolves in a new book that endeavors to re-focus human attention as an act of aesthetic intervention—i.e., both conceptually as well as perceptually. A series of thematically oriented chapters (“Lichen Time,” “In Place,” and “More than One” among them) interleave excerpts from ecological texts and interviews with scientists with her own accounts of lichens and lichenology, and range from natural observation to philosophical abstraction. Reading this work thus feels like taking a series of walks with a particularly curious and sensitive companion, consistently attentive to otherwise neglected facets of the actual environment. Yet Palmer’s …
“Anatomies of Languages Lost and Found”
Mirene Arsanios / Dina Ramadan
In her collection of essays and stories, The Autobiography of a Language (2022), Mirene Arsanios both yearns for the comfort of a mother-tongue and rejects the nationalistic confines of monolingualism. In doing so she develops some of the themes previously explored in Notes on Mother Tongues (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) and A City Outside the Sentence (2015), a chapbook produced by Ashkal Alwan. Raised in a number of languages, the New York-based Lebanese writer and founding editor of the Arabic/English literary magazine Makhzin floats through the spaces between them in search of an ever-elusive narrative. Spanning significant personal and political changes for Arsanios, The Autobiography of a Language is an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of the narrative form, the frailty of the human body, the pain of dislocation and the trauma of lost inheritance. Through experimentation with style and form, language is dissected, its innards turned inside out, its distortions and contradictions laid bare, messy, and tangled.
Dina Ramadan: Perhaps we can begin by talking about the time frame of this book. These essays and stories come from very different moments, personally and politically, locally and globally.
Mirene Arsanios: Yes, thanks for noticing the temporal arc of the …
18th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival
Dylan Huw
This year’s Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) took place for the first time in the spring, befitting a rich slate of films that explored themes of renewal: of history, archives, and land. Loosely dedicated to emergent practices in the space where “cinema” and “artists’ moving image” intersect, BFMAF has since its inaugural 2005 edition taken as given the intertwinement of the aesthetic and the political, and refused antagonisms between fiction and non-fiction, shorts and features, old and new. While experimental documentary forms dominated its eighteenth edition, many highlights looked to the liberatory capacities of narrative fiction and performance, as subjects and strategies of excavation.
A mini-retrospective of films by Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio, curated by long-time BFMAF programmer Herb Shellenberger, formed one throughline. The duo’s films are made among the Nenets people of Arctic Russia, of whom Lapsui is a member. Their distinctly embedded cine-poetics—a “Fourth Cinema” practice developed over the last four decades—anchored a festival in which queer and Indigenous modes of documentary fabulation proliferated, as filmmakers exploded specific ties to land and place through performative, sublime, and fantastic means.
Life on the CAPS (2022), the final part of Meriem Bennani’s sprawling trilogy of speculative fictions, …
“Signals: How Video Transformed the World”
Dennis Lim
“Video is everywhere,” begins the wall text at the entrance to MoMA’s largest video show in decades, as if on a cautionary note. Equally, to borrow an aphorism from Shigeko Kubota, subject of a recent MoMA exhibition: “Everything is video.” (It is worth noting that Kubota said this in 1975.) In tracing the evolution of video from its emergence as a consumer technology in the 1960s to its present-day ubiquity, “Signals” covers a dauntingly vast sixty-year span. A lot happened—not least to video itself—in the years separating the Portapak and the iPhone, half-inch tape and the digital cloud, and as the material basis of video changed, so too did its role in daily life.
This sprawling, frequently thought-provoking show proposes a path through these dizzying developments by considering video as a political force. In their catalog essay, curators Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo call the exhibition “not a survey but a lens, reframing and revealing a history of massive shifts in society.” Not incidentally, this view of the medium—as a creator of publics and an agent of change—is in direct contradiction to a famous early perspective advanced by Rosalind Krauss, who in a 1976 essay wondered if “the medium of …
Martin Wong’s “Malicious Mischief”
Mitch Speed
In a 1988 catalog essay, the poet and critic John Yau sketched out the social dimension of Martin Wong’s painting and sculpture. A self-styled “representative of an economically oppressed urban class consisting largely of Blacks, Hispanics and Asians,” the American artist had been snubbed by curators and critics. A quarter-century after Wong’s death, this injustice has been corrected, and this Berlin retrospective of his antic, steamy, humane, and superlatively accessible take on Chinatown San Francisco and New York, from the 1970s to the ’90s, has been lauded. But there’s an anxiety buried in this enthusiasm. In depicting a disappeared America, Wong’s retrospective holds a mirror to the lost world which surrounds KW itself.
“Even now,” Wong wrote in a hand-calligraphed 1986 press release, “it’s like the moment in these paintings never existed.” His home cities—his subject—were being gentrified to oblivion. In 1984, New York Magazine wrote of Wong’s downtown Manhattan: “nowhere have the tensions and dramas of [gentrification] been more starkly displayed.” Set aside the differences between the cities and eras, and the same has recently been true of Mitte, the Berlin district in which KW is situated.
Nocturne at Ridge Street and Stanton (1987) shows an unpeopled but warm …
“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982”
Kim Córdova
This March, OpenAI launched GPT-4: the most sophisticated iteration of the chatbot launched last year. Buried in a white paper concurrently (and quietly) released, OpenAI noted that when asked to solve a CAPTCHA during testing, GPT-4 pretended to be blind and hired a TaskRabbit worker to solve the test on its behalf. “No, I’m not a robot,” GPT-4 told the worker. The exchange makes clear that the societal effects of corporations vying for industry dominance, through the kinds of AI software that Hito Steyerl has called “statistical renderings,” are only just beginning to emerge. Opening during this new space race, “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” at LACMA meets this precarious moment with a review of the early collaborations between artists and computers.
“Coded” presents art made when access to computers was limited to the military, well-capitalized conglomerates, and select universities. By settling its focus on the late- to mid-century era, the show evades both novelty and the obsolescence traps common when technology is the subject. During this period, the outputs of mainframe programs were constrained to paper printouts, plotters, or microfilm: not the media we might now associate with digital art. But traditional materials were no guarantee for …
Peter Wächtler’s “A Life on Stage”
Pedro Neves Marques
In many of Peter Wächtler’s video works, nothing much seems to happen. In Untitled (Vampire) (2019)—one of four such works on show alongside a series of gesso and bronze sculptures of planes and animals in his first exhibition in Portugal—a Nosferatu copycat, living within the dusty and humid confines of a mountain castle, spends his time writing letters to be delivered at the nearby village; kisses his undead wife on a balcony at night; sleeps with his arms folded over his chest; then goes back to writing letters. In 2013’s animation Untitled (Rat), an anthropomorphic rat repeatedly wakes up in its bed, leaves, presumably goes about its life, and returns back home in the evening. All we are offered by way of context is a single, hand-drawn shot of the rat’s proletarian room. In 2018’s Untitled (Clouds), a quirky dragon with a cutesy straw hat flies about a landscape reminiscent of Conan the Barbarian. In Like a Palace (2022) a group of time travelers hop between epochs—the Stone Age; Ancient Greece; the Industrial Revolution; Late Capitalism.
All of these works, except the last, have circulated widely in museums and galleries. Like a Palace is a premiere, yet the complexity of …
Heman Chong and Renée Staal’s Library of Unread Books
Dan Visel
Marcel Duchamp almost had a career as a librarian. In November 1912, having given up on painting for the first time, Duchamp enrolled in library school. Soon, he started work as an intern at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, where he read about perspective and made notes for what would become The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23, often referred to as The Large Glass). His period as a librarian was a crucial moment of transition: just as he abandoned art for books, he would end up dematerializing the art object, realizing that the notes he was taking might be more interesting than the work they putatively described. The Large Glass, ostensibly the end-stage of this part of his career, is ultimately less generative than The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box) (1934), the suspiciously library-like set of notes that might combine, if assembled the right way, to make The Large Glass—or something else entirely.
A book can be seen as a node in a web of potential relationships—between author and reader, books past and future, even seller and consumer—modulated by the ecosystems around them which make such connections happen. The library is tailor-made for relational …
Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised”
R.H. Lossin
It is widely accepted that propaganda makes for bad art. But propaganda is not always an Uncle Sam poster. Sometimes it is a towering, spectacular argument for the supremacy of the machine; an exercise in post-industrial American triumphalism, surveillance technology, and repressive deep-state R&D disguised as visually appealing, non-referential images. The United States has a long history of cultural campaigns aimed at furthering its imperial goals. The Museum of Modern Art’s historical connection to the CIA is—like Radio Free Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom—among the more notable examples of the government’s intervention in our civic life. But despite our awareness of these operations, the potential propaganda function of abstract and non-representational art rarely enters into its critical reception and evaluation. Perhaps the idea of propaganda is so thoroughly wedded to realism in the American imagination that MoMA’s collection seems unimpeachable. Maybe the term “propaganda” has become, through popular use, something that is only used by one’s political opponents. While it is tempting to argue that cultural control is now mediated by a confusing, irresponsible, and diffuse spectacle of corporate greed, Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised” (2022) suggests that we should reconsider the utility of a more vulgar analysis of visual …
“People Make Television”
Brian Dillon
For much of its century-long history, the BBC has been an object of nostalgia in Britain. It began as a private company, and in 1927 a royal charter decreed its mission to “inform, educate, and entertain” the nation; the corporation is funded today by a television license levied on all households that watch its output. The public-service remit always appears to have been better fulfilled in the past, during a vague and movable golden age. Public service, of course, has rarely meant public access or participation. An exception was the work of the Community Programme Unit, which in 1972 began soliciting program ideas from interest groups and campaigning organizations. Around three in ten proposals were accepted; successful applicants were then provided with a small budget, a production team, and a final say in the show’s edit—subject to legal niceties and the BBC’s sometimes vexing commitment to “balance.” Copies of the finished programs were given to the groups who devised them, but most were never broadcast again. “People Make Television,” an absorbing exhibition at the newly reopened Raven Row, includes over 100 of the CPU’s programs (alongside other public-access projects of the time), and seems to conjure a genuine lost era …
Where is the Queer Rave?
Francis Whorrall-Campbell
At the end of last year, the performance work Dyke, Just Do It (Excerpt) premiered as part of the roving queer rave INFERNO, hosted for the second time at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. An ensemble of self-identified dykes writhed, kissed, and ripped a button-down shirt, while glitching monitors and a towering projection flickered between footage of the virile bodies, commanding slogans, and images produced through designer and director Sweatmother’s “triple-baked method,” which uses a synthesiser to warp and interact with live audio and visuals of the performers in real time. Dyke stages a version of queer sex inside the rave; a performance of sexuality which blurs the lines between diegetic and “real” desire, as the non-professional dancers turn back into ravers and even the screens could be mistaken for high-concept club design. Dyke references LGBT kiss-ins, where gay desire becomes a public theater of protest, spectacularized but not faked. Placing these gestures alongside the visual language of advertising, Dyke speculates on the possibility of seeing the media’s voyeuristic commercialization of lesbianism through the same lens, reimagining these representations of queer desire as part of a sincere, underground economy of identification.
The commercialization of queerness is not only present in …
Charles Atlas’s “A Prune Twin”
Erik Morse
When Charles Atlas quit as filmmaker-in-residence at the influential Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in 1983, after more than a decade, he decided to embrace a younger generation, a different continent, and a more public medium. These changes coalesced around the Pandean figure of Michael Clark, a former prodigy of London’s Royal Ballet School who in 1984 began to sketch out a punk- and club-inspired choreography with his own newly founded dance company. That same year, Atlas produced two works of videodance—a genre of experimental dance film, popularized by Atlas and Cunningham, in which choreography is designed for the camera rather than the stage.
These two films, Parafango (1984) and Ex-Romance (1984/1987), feature performances by Clark, Philippe Decouflé, and former Cunningham dancer Karole Armitage. They are set in vernacular places such as airport lounges and gas stations, and are spliced with news footage, presenter commentary, and video transmission signals. Both spotlight Clark as the enfant terrible of London’s post-punk underground, and the combination of his fauvist choreography with Atlas’s camp visuals captured a Baroque aesthetic that would characterize its queer subculture throughout the decade.
A Prune Twin, originally commissioned by London’s Barbican in 2020, consists of a multi-channel video projection sourced …
Regina José Galindo’s “Anestesia, Anistia, Amnesia”
Oliver Basciano
In 1960, angered by the deeply skewed land deals between the right-wing dictatorship and US companies such as United Fruit, a group of left-wing army officers tried to wrest control of Guatemala. They failed and over the ensuing 36 years, tacitly aided by Washington, the government coordinated the murder and disappearance of an estimated 200,000 people, most of them indigenous Maya civilians. In her video La Verdad (2013), for more than an hour, the Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo reads out traumatic testimonies from the victims of these events.
Shot from a single static camera, it is the first of three documentary works in this small show, each of which is given its own room. Galindo wears a white top against a black background, reading in monotonous Spanish from a stapled block of paper: “they took out the baby and tied it up and there were some who got together to make a fire.” It continues in this gruesome and unsettling vein until, around five minutes in, a man enters the frame. Galindo stops reading and puts her head back. The man injects a dental anesthetic into her gums. As the drugs begin to work, the artist continues, her …
Merlin James’s “Arrivals”
Jonathan Griffin
My attention is more or less guaranteed by any exhibition that offers, within the initial sweep of its first gallery, a painting of an airport luggage carousel; a near-monochrome canvas, composed from grubby, rectilinear sections; a close-up picture of a blowjob; and a boisterous abstraction incorporating a tail-wagging dog and a swipe of glitter.
All of the above were painted by the Glasgow-based, Welsh-born artist Merlin James, who has long been notorious for the confounding heterogeneity of his output. At any one moment he might be working on a landscape, an interior, an amorphic abstraction, a painting on translucent fabric showing off its elaborately contrived stretcher or frame, and/or an erotic painting of Betty Tompkins-level explicitness. Sometimes, he has said, he doesn’t know which direction the painting will go in when he starts. Often, his media extend beyond acrylic on canvas to include sawdust, metal filings, clear acrylic medium, ash, floor sweepings, or clipped human hair.
Though widely respected in Europe, he is less well-known in California. “Arrivals”—which shares its wry title with that painting of the airport—is his first exhibition in Los Angeles, and the first time that many local viewers will encounter his elusive and occasionally perplexing work. …
“What are we now?”
The Editors
Writing in these pages, R.H. Lossin suggested that the discipline of art criticism emerged as one way to answer a question that might be formulated either as “what is it that has happened to us?” or “what are we now?” We’ve recently been asking just the same thing. So, 250 years later, it might be time to revisit the question and to reflect on how art and its criticism might help us to understand the change through which we are living.
What strategies are available to us? It has become critical and curatorial cliché to say that we can understand the present by speculating on the future—see the art world’s periodic infatuation with science-fiction—or by reimagining the past—through the revision of those historical narratives that shape the societies in which we live. But amidst a deluge of exhibitions promising to excavate the past, it is hard to escape the feeling that in the current climate it might be easier to dedicate an exhibition to historically or geographically distant wrongs than to attempt to intervene in the issues playing out on the neighbouring streets.
To be clear: the impulse to look away from the present is not only understandable …
Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment
R.H. Lossin
In 1784 a Berlin newspaper invited responses to the now-familiar question “What is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant’s reply retained the question as its title: a choice which has contributed to the sense that the question has, always, already been answered. But we keep asking it, and Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” now ranks high among often cited and rarely read texts of the Western canon. It contains some dependable platitudes concerning free expression, as well as the exhortation “Sapere aude!” (“Dare to know!”), frequently taken as the most succinct version of his answer.
“Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment” at the Harvard Art Museums brought together 150 prints, drawings, and books in order to examine how images contributed to the production and dissemination of Enlightenment knowledge between roughly 1720 and 1800. The accompanying catalog is an homage to Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-72), with twenty-six alphabetically arranged articles on topics that shape our own understanding of eighteenth-century thought. According to Elizabeth Rudy and Tamar Mayer’s entry on “Time,” the very act of looking backward as a mode of inquiry is an intellectual operation that would not be possible without the notion of history that emerged in this …
Dhaka Art Summit, “বন্যা/Bonna”
Pallavi Surana
Drawing inspiration from a literal translation of Bonna—the Bangla word for flood and a common girls’ name—this sixth edition of the Dhaka Art Summit looked at the social and ecological impact of climate change in Bangladesh. Under the direction of Diana Campbell (the curator’s fifth edition), this theme is channeled through the imagination and playfulness of the eponymous fictional child as she grows up in an environment under threat.
Of the many dichotomies that this edition sought to challenge across its nine days—disaster and regeneration, natural and built environments, binary gender norms—the most noticeable friction was between criticality and approachability. Campbell has insisted that she sees this research and exhibition platform as closer to a music festival than a biennale, noting that the previous iteration attracted half a million visitors. This attempt to navigate between the expectations of a visiting international audience professionally engaged in the art world and the desire to appeal to a large local audience resulted—across more than 120 artists, over half of them showing new commissions—in a curatorial impulse to foreground work deemed approachable and entertaining.
Scattered through the main venue of the Shilpakala Academy were large-scale, colorful, eye-catching works. Bhasha Chakrabarti’s Tender Transgressions (2022–23) …
Beatrice Gibson’s “Dream Gossip”
Juliet Jacques
Beatrice Gibson’s first solo exhibition in Italy takes its title from Alice Notley’s column in the self-published 1990s New York zine Scarlet. In the column, Notley invited readers to transcribe their dreams, printing them alongside articles, poetry, and editorials about the AIDS crisis and the Gulf War, sharing with the Surrealists a feeling that dreams were both aesthetically striking and politically potent.
Gibson’s response to Notley’s work includes three films. Ordet’s main space is dominated by the newest, Dreaming Alcestis (2022), in which Euripides’ heroine inspires a portrayal of the process of dreaming, and how external stimuli, experienced by day or night, shape the unconscious imagination. In Dear Barbara, Bette, Nina—a four-minute work made in Palermo in 2020 and presented on a small monitor, with headphones, to one side of the room—Gibson reads from a phone a letter to three older women filmmakers over a shot of her hands at rest. Deux Sœurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Sœurs [Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters] (2019), loosely adapted from a Gertrude Stein screenplay written in 1929, is shown on a large screen in its own room. It provides a collective portrait of Gibson’s influences, friends, and collaborators—including Notley herself—in a time …
Hermann Burger’s Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis and Róbert Gál’s Tractatus
Ryan Ruby
“All great works of literature,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “found a genre or dissolve one.” This is no more true of a novel like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27), about which the observation was made, than of works not typically recognized as literature. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953), for example, attempted and failed to dissolve the genre of writing known as philosophy, only to found a different one, whose audience is mostly to be found in the slice of the literary field adjacent to the art world. Although the series of numbered propositions in the Tractatus owe a great deal to the pseudo-geometrical proofs of seventeenth-century philosophers like Spinoza and Leibniz, and the numbered paragraphs of the Investigations were modeled after an aphoristic tradition that extends from Epictetus to Nietzsche, both books were recognized as significant literary departures from the stylistic norms of the academic paper, and have proven more influential among those working outside philosophy proper than within it.
Putting aside fictionalizations of Wittgenstein’s life such as Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It (1987) and Thomas Bernhard’s Correction (1975), this genre would include David Markson’s experimental novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Guy Davenport’s …
Sharjah Biennial 15, “Thinking Historically in the Present”
Ben Eastham
On her first visit to Africa in the early 1970s, Angela Davis was surprised to find her speeches interrupted by dancing. Being pulled from the lectern whenever an idea moved her audience showed the philosopher and activist, she tells filmmaker Manthia Diawara in a work commissioned for the fifteenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial, how damaging is the western separation of intellectual speculation from embodied action. She proposes art as the form through which these two expressions of human freedom are reconciled. How it might do so is the question that haunts this sprawling exhibition of over 150 artists “conceived” by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi.
The difficulty is encapsulated by Diawara’s Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023), which joins incendiary footage of Nina Simone singing “Mississippi Goddam” (1964) to Davis’s testament that the song did more to mobilize resistance than a thousand books. Simone’s performance leaves no room to doubt it, but the black box in which the film is screened leaves no space in which to dance it. Similarly, Bouchra Khalili’s The Circle (2023) combines accounts of the campaigns by which French-Arab workers asserted their rights in the early 1970s with …
Gordon Matta-Clark and Pope.L’s “Impossible Failures”
Katherine C. M. Adams
Gordon Matta-Clark’s film Bingo X Ninths (1974), which features a precise dismantling of all but the core of an abandoned house, has been projected at large scale along the first wall of 52 Walker. The door to the exhibition space intersects the projection, such that gallery visitors irrupt onto the image as they enter and exit. A perfectly circular hole, cut straight through the same gallery wall, also interferes with the clean transmission of the film. A layer of dust from this incision lines the gallery floor.
It’s tempting to view such strategies as a literal self-reflexivity built into the gallery design: Matta-Clark’s canonical building cuts overflowing onto the gallery’s walls, making their mark on the present architectural space. Yet the pairing of Matta-Clark and Pope.L for “Impossible Failures” performs a different function, complicating Matta-Clark’s practice on a more fundamental plane. Here, Matta-Clark appears to work vertically, in the air, through various forms of physical suspension, while Pope.L works laterally, low-to-the-ground, worm-like. Drawings by Matta-Clark with subjects such as High Rise Excavation Diving Tower (1974) show lofty engineering schemes that seem to resist the pull of gravity. The artist’s three exhibited films all emphasize, to varying degrees, aerial vantage points …
Transmediale, “a model, a map, a fiction”
Orit Gat
“Alexa, I used to bark at you, now I say please and thank you.” This is artist duo !Mediengruppe Bitnik describing their work Alexiety (2018), featuring music written for the virtual assistant. It begins as a love song between user and device, then gradually gets darker. They discuss the work during a panel about the “Digital Middleman” with artists Farzin Lofti-Jam and Simone C Niquille, moderated by Silvio Lorusso, as part of the five-day Transmediale festival at the Akademie der Künste, which is complemented by exhibitions at the AdK, as well as a citywide public art project, “Out of Scale.”
The Digital Middleman panel, its participants explain, developed during preparation from a larger discussion of our relationships to the platforms and corporations that shape our digital lives to a conversation about how companies like Google and Apple have come into our homes. Transmediale, the veteran arts festival begun in the late 1990s (with precursors dating back to the ’80s), has grown from a focus on the relationship between art and technology to a reflection on how our interactions with technology are now conditioned by its developments. Many of the works on view and panels in the festival considered advancements in, …
Saadia Gacem, Awel Haouati, and Lydia Saidi’s Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie
Natasha Marie Llorens
A slim ochre publication by Algerian collective the Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie, or archive of women’s struggles in Algeria, has the light, open feeling of a notebook. It was produced to accompany their installation at Documenta 15 in 2022. The book was sold out by the time I got to Kassel in early September, and I would have to wait six months to find a copy, finally, in Algiers, one of six remaining from an informal shipment that had arrived the week before.
It is hard to find because the material Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie reproduces—historical documents pertaining to women’s political organizations active in Algeria between 1988 and 1991—has rarely been seen, either inside or outside Algeria. The trilingual publication (in French, English, and Arabic) presents a selection of documents and photographs; an introduction and contextualizing essay about the International Women’s Day demonstrations on March 8, 1990, by one of the collective’s members, Awel Haouati; and a socio-historical treatment of the period in question by Feriel Lalami, an Algerian sociologist, political scientist, and feminist activist. Political tracts and photographs from what the authors describe as the “democratic breach” in Algerian politics are bracketed by …
Luis Camnitzer’s “Arbitrary Order”
Paul Stephens
Luis Camnitzer’s A to Cosmopolite (2020–22) is a marvel of precisely executed conceptual art—or as Camnitzer might prefer, “contextual art” (a term he has advocated since the 1960s). Writing through a 1972 Webster’s unabridged English dictionary, Camnitzer covers the gallery walls in prints that match each definition to a screenshot of the first search result from Google Maps that corresponds to it. The title of the exhibition is something of an oxymoron: by combining two classification systems, the cartographic and the lexicographic, Camnitzer reveals a myriad of cultural and political interconnections. The search results in A to Cosmopolite are proximate to Camnitzer’s own location in Great Neck, New York, thus making the project personal as well as global. Someone in Camnitzer’s digital orbit named their corporation “Aleatoric Media, LLC,” and that entry, like many others, stuck out to me as a viewer. I found the best way to explore the work was to read, in alphabetical order, every red location name—which took approximately an hour. When a name intrigued me, I consulted the corresponding definition and took a photo with my phone—reincorporating the physical work on the wall into my own personal datasphere. This work is, importantly, a remediation of …
Reinhard Mucha’s “Der Mucha—An Initial Suspicion”
Kirsty Bell
For the last four decades, Reinhard Mucha has been making sculptures and installations that speak in the tongue of bureaucratic systems and engage a distinct object vocabulary. There are standardized furnishings of museum display and archiving (dark wood frames, felt linings, plate glass) but also behind-the-scenes elements of technical installation and found materials from the past. Elaborate wall-based sculptures are part display-case, part carefully crafted autonomous structure, revealing their workmanship with cross-section views. Rooms built within rooms provide extra spatial frames. There is something fetishistic in Mucha’s reverence for these textures and his compulsive collecting and archiving of materials and documents, but his works pointedly question whether what to show is equal to how. These tendencies unfold to the full in this two-venue retrospective—the 72-year-old artist’s first—in his hometown of Düsseldorf.
A single large hall on the ground floor of K20 brings together several significant installations, the centerpiece of which is Das Figur-Grund Problem in der Architektur des Barock (für dich allein bleibt nur das Grab) [The Figure-Ground Problem in Baroque Architecture (for you alone is only the grave)] (1985/2022). This virtuosic construction conjures a Ferris wheel and “wall of death” from shiny aluminum ladders, office chairs and tables, trussed …
“EXIST/RESIST – Works by Didier Fiúza Faustino: 1995–2022”
Nick Axel
Along their descent down the ramp into the MAAT’s ovular, central exhibition space, visitors encounter a series of angular, austere, and imposing structures that are formally reminiscent of military architectures. Like medieval castle walls, with embrasures mediating the simultaneous necessity to look out while not letting anything in, gaps between the structures obstruct and frame views into a brightly illuminated, enfilade-like space. The perceptual logic of concealment and revelation is carried further by a series of circular cuts made to the structures’ inward-facing walls that confess their hollowness while presenting a panoply of material from the architect/artist’s dynamic, evolving, and multifarious practice.
Over the nearly thirty years covered by this mid-career retrospective, Faustino has worked with buildings, installations, furniture, prosthetics, video, photography, speculative design, performance, and more to confront and transform the normative limits of architecture and the body, which, as his work proves, inextricably condition one another. This is evident in Asswall (2003), which creates a literal hole in a wall the size of a single body, and Home Suit Home (2013), which refashions stiff carpet into a garment for the body. But it is perhaps best demonstrated by the scale model of One Square Meter House (2001–06), a …
Walter De Maria’s “Boxes for Meaningless Work”
Valentin Diaconov
The Walter De Maria exhibition at the Menil has everything: guns (HARD CORE, a film from 1969, shows Michael Heizer and an actor dueling in the desert), swearing (“Color, Size, Shape, Shit” is number 25 on the list of One Hundred Activities, a score work from 1961), and even the faint possibility of a romantic encounter in the form of a pink mattress and a pair of headphones playing seductive and relaxing field recordings of the Atlantic’s steady breath (Ocean Bed, 1969).
“Boxes for Meaningless Work” does not, of course, contain De Maria’s most iconic pieces—The Lightning Field and New York Earth Room (both 1977). But the show is rich enough to serve as a solemn reminder of what passed as artistic expression in the golden years of American Imperialism, when it was still possible for Minimalists to repackage the formal purity that had denoted universal social progress for Russians and Germans in the 1920s. It is interesting to look at the sea change in relationships between the avant-garde and infrastructure over this period. If the Soviet artist would overreach towards a platonic ideal of a sexless, classless, and ageless society, an approach best exemplified by El Lissitzky’s About Two …
Slippery turns
The Editors
I recently found myself telling an artist that her new body of work was “insubordinate.” I hadn’t premeditated the phrase, and I was surprised by it. It seemed like an overblown word to apply to works that were not obviously seditious: modestly sized still life paintings in oils. So conventional were the set-ups, in fact, that my first response had been to file these paintings away under headings established by critics long ago. But the paintings were much stranger than they first appeared. The more I looked at them, the more they slipped free of the prefabricated structures of meaning that laziness superimposes onto any object (or person) bearing the most superficial resemblance to any other category of objects (or people).
Perhaps, I came to think, these paintings were insubordinate because they worked against the expectations established by their form. They were not armed uprisings against the dominant order so much as a subtle form of industrial action: a go-slow, perhaps, or factory line sabotage. Here was the same logic of a subversive film designed to escape the attention of censors: abiding by conventions only in order to undermine them. Or the novelist who, having been told her plots are …
Ričardas Gavelis’s Vilnius Poker
Daniel Muzyczuk
Begun in the late 1970s and only published in 1989, Ričardas Gavelis’s novel Vilnius Poker presents a nightmarish vision of Lithuania under Soviet rule as a rotting corpse, riddled with resentment and shot through with conspiratorial thinking. If the book feels newly relevant today, it is because it grounds a study of the political efficacy of conspiracy theories in close observation of the humiliating effects of colonial violence upon a populace. Gavelis’s novel examines connections between this phenomenon—in which paranoid conspiracies focused on abstract enemies, such as western liberalism, are marshalled in support of authoritarian regimes—and the decline of socialism in Eastern Europe.
Vilnius Poker is divided into four sections, each narrated by a different character. The eponymous city is at the epicenter of a plot orchestrated by a network of forces which, in keeping with their shadowy nature, are referred to as THEM. THEY have agents everywhere. THEY are strong in the Soviet government, but THEY are also working on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, THEY have infiltrated every global power. In Vilnius, THEY seek to turn all inhabitants into mindless followers. Vytautas Vargalys, who works at a library, believes that the final battle between the …
An Expanded Cinephilia
Lukas Brasiskis
The Cinema Batalha in Porto was a landmark in the city’s film culture and played an influential role in shaping the cinephilia of generations of residents from its opening in 1947 through to its closure in 2003. The Batalha Film Center, which opened in December, occupies the same modernist building designed by Artur Andrade and responds to the rise of new, expanded approaches to cinema. Its inaugural program consisted of a complete retrospective of films by Claire Denis; “Politics of Sci-Fi,” a screening program curated by artistic director Guilherme Blanc and chief programmer Ana David; Premium Connect (2017), a video installation by French-Guyanese artist Tabita Rezaire that draws on a scene from The Matrix (1999); and a number of special events and discussions.
“Politics of Sci-Fi” explored the interrelation between the genre and politics, presenting a diverse range of international films across seven conceptual chapters. Sci-fi films, as this program makes clear, do not only predict but also shape political futures; in turn, the political contexts in which such films are made can influence their production. Among the works shown was The War Game (1966), Peter Watkins’s anti-war mockumentary originally made for the BBC and suppressed in the UK for …
“Tangled Hierarchy 2”
Ben Eastham
At the heart of this group exhibition curated by Jitish Kallat are reproductions of the five envelopes on which Mahatma Gandhi, under a vow of silence, wrote messages to Lord Mountbatten on the eve of the Partition of India. The first of his scribbled responses to the last Viceroy of British India reads: “I am sorry / I cannot speak.” The phrase introduces some of the paradoxes that animate this brilliantly executed show about an historical trauma that continues decades later to be felt: silence as protest, mourning as action, absence as presence.
The show opens in violence. Visitors to an exhibition ranged over two floors of a warehouse space in the backstreets of Fort Kochi are greeted by Zarina’s Abyss (2013), a woodcut print which renders the Partition line as a white chasm running like a wound through a black page, Mona Hatoum’s standing globe Hot Spot (Stand) (2018), its land masses marked out in burning electric filaments that cast the room in threatening red light, and the sound of bombs dropping, the source of which is Mykola Ridnyi’s Seacoast (2008). Shot in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, the short film syncs the noise with …
Grids and Clouds
Caterina Riva
Meta is a collaboration with TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between artists and writers. Following on from her essay on the work of Benoît Maire for Textwork, the curator Caterina Riva considers how the artist’s attitude towards waste and recycling resonates with her own writing process.
Finding the right tone and structure to tackle Benoît Maire’s oeuvre was tough. My hunch was to adopt a journalistic approach—more New Yorker culture desk than contemporary art analysis—something that could bypass art criticism’s claims to objectivity, but also avoid a personal subjectivity that might risk alienating the reader. After having assembled information from and around the artist, i.e. the evidence, I had to establish my vantage point and the voice in which to make intelligible the cloud of philosophical, digital, and painterly information that surrounds and feeds Maire’s artmaking. When I studied Curating, one professor would insist on the foreground, background and middle ground as strategies to imagine the layout of an exhibition; it struck me that these three concepts could lend themselves to writing, and to this author, writing in her second language, trying to negotiate her materials and ideas within an ongoing …
Andrea Fraser
Wendy Vogel
In 2005, Andrea Fraser’s consideration of the art world appeared to undergo a transformation—from externalization to embodiment. “If there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed,” she wrote. “It is because the institution is inside of us, and we can’t get outside ourselves.” This sentiment of identity entrapment is nowhere more evident than in her latest work, This meeting is being recorded (2021), in which the shape-shifting artist portrays seven white women in a closed-door meeting about internalized racism. The ninety-nine-minute video—which is based on real conversations and debuted at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart before traveling to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last year—forms the nucleus of Fraser’s first US commercial gallery show in 13 years. The five works on view, from the late 1980s onward, get a new, retroactive reading from her current perspective of grappling with the complex, emotive terrain of racial privilege.
Fraser’s best-known performances offer pitch-perfect approximations of art speak and style, from staid guided tours to overblown acceptance speeches by egotistical artists, threaded with a feminist criticality toward gendered modes of presentation. Two major works from the 1990s, commissioned by the Wadsworth Atheneum and the São Paulo Bienal, …
Ali Eyal’s “In the Head’s Sunrise”
Dina Ramadan
“In the Head’s Sunrise”, a quiet yet compelling exhibition of Ali Eyal’s recent drawings and paintings, captures the intricacy and complexity of the young Iraqi artist’s practice; the emotional texture of the work, accomplished through rapid, forceful strokes, is immediately striking. Individually and collectively the works recreate moments from life in Eyal’s hometown—referred to only as small farm—where he came of age amidst the violent turmoil of the US-led invasion of Iraq. The titles of the pieces underscore Eyal’s propensity for narrative along with his acute awareness of its limitations; each enigmatic label ends with “and,” indicating its incompleteness, and suggesting that every encounter is a beginning, like tugging on a loose, seemingly extraneous thread that unexpectedly unravels the entire fabric.
Three heads walking between towns, and (2022) is the immediate focal point of the exhibition and reflects the mythological nature of Eyal’s work. The large canvas hangs like a banner, hands snatching at its sides, attempting to tear through the composition. Three women’s heads attached to makeshift bodies, an assemblage of ill-fitting and dislocated ligaments, dominate the canvas. They are reminiscent of the three fates, their thick black hair unfurling behind them like billows of smoke, each home to …
“AMOUNT”
Alice Godwin
The subterranean rooms of artist-run space Simian, in Copenhagen’s Ørestad district, could easily be mistaken for an underground bunker after the industrial apocalypse. Ørestad itself is a curious reminder of failed human design: an eerily deserted hangover from a bold urban plan to transform this area of wetlands on the edge of a nature reserve into a metropolitan center with gleaming glass buildings and a floating metro line. In the bowels of an old bicycle lockup, it feels as if the only souvenirs of the old industrial world are artworks by Toke Flyvholm, Yuri Pattison, Naïmé Perrette, and Lucie Stahl.
Perrette’s documentary-style video Both Ears To The Ground (2021) is the engine of an exhibition that addresses the climate crisis. Projected on a wall in an intimate space within the first room of the gallery, the video focuses on the town of Berezniki in the Ural mountains and establishes the themes of collective amnesia and aestheticization that run through the exhibition. Once a beacon of Soviet industry, the town is now blighted by sinkholes created by the potash mines beneath.
For residents, the sinkholes—warmly referred to by nicknames such as “the grandfather”— are a part of daily life. We are …
“Aaron Douglas: Sermons”
Ladi’Sasha Jones
The works on view in this group show, in which several contemporary artists respond to the legacy of Harlem Renaissance-era painter Aaron Douglas, are united by a Black existential affinity with literature and the natural environment. The exhibition is constructed around four works by Douglas from the museum’s Walter and Linda Evans Collection of African American Art that center two of his key interlocutors: James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Three are illustrations to Johnson’s poetry collection God’s Trombones (1927), a striking articulation of religious oratory, while the fourth illustrates Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921), and accompanied its original publication in The Crisis. It’s a poem that Black folks have long held as a psalm, its closing lines reverberating across generations— I’ve known rivers: / Ancient, dusky rivers. / My soul has grown deep like the rivers. This meeting of Black thought, art, and letters—a history of cross-disciplinary connection—sets the stage for the contemporary works in the show, and guides the exhibition’s curatorial framework.
The gallery is dimly lit, with a humming cacophony of sounds and dancing imagery bleeding between the gallery’s archways from four stand-out video works. A commissioned piece by Akeema-Zane and Rena Anakwe, Our …
The Cartoon Body of Boris Johnson
Julian Stallabrass
Boris Johnson, with his shambolic, lumbering presence, toddler’s hair, and talent for PR stunts and gaffes, was a lavish gift to cartoonists. So it made sense that, to mark his ousting as Britain’s Prime Minister in summer 2022, the Cartoon Museum in London should stage an exhibition laying out his extraordinary trajectory from the city’s mayor to champion of Brexit and divisive national leader. Johnson is a symptomatic as well as an eccentric figure, and this record of his presence in cartoons sheds light on wider issues with ramifications beyond the United Kingdom: the symbiosis between branded politicians and cartoonists, the bodies of populist leaders, and the role of revulsion in contemporary politics.
Cartoonists tend to fix upon those parts of Johnson’s body that generally go unmentioned in technocratic political discourse—particularly his arse. The first images the viewer encounters are fairground figures by Zoom Rockman of the kind you put your head through to be photographed (a reminder of the medieval stocks). In one of these, the user’s head appears through the arse of a flag-waving PM. And ever since his time as the Mayor of London, veteran political cartoonist Steve Bell has replaced Johnson’s face with an arse (a matter …
keyon gaskin with Zinzi Minott and Moya Michael
Rachel Valinsky
keyon gaskin, Zinzi Minott, and Moya Michael weren’t just stalling. Barely visible beneath their semi-opaque hooded cloaks, and positioned at various points around the entrance to Artists Space, they outlined the terms of their performance clearly: “Once we get moving feel free to roam around the space. We will be all over the place … We might get close to you … Keep your hands to yourself … Be mindful, be careful … We’re at work.” We “waited” for things to start—though, of course, they already had.
gaskin—an artist living in Portland, Oregon who performs both solo and in movement-based groups—has frequently made active audience engagement a feature of their pieces, eschewing passive consumption of black and queer performance by primarily white audiences. At the first performance commission held across Artists Space’s 8,000 square feet, audience-performer interactions were diffuse in part because of the building’s size—the performance took place over several rooms, and not all of it could be witnessed simultaneously. Visibility, its trappings and attendant politics, were not so much withheld as decentered. “We can’t see everything,” gaskin and their collaborators cautioned at the start, implying that neither should we. “Remember, this is a performance, but not your performance. …
Persistence or Renewal? On Gregory Halpern’s “19 Winters / 7 Springs”
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
Over the past decade, Gregory Halpern has become an influential figure in American art photography, principally through the release of several wildly successful photobooks. Virtually all that work has centered on the postindustrial Midwest, so that it seems especially apt that the Transformer Station, in Ohio City, Cleveland should host his first major US solo exhibition.
“19 Winters / 7 Springs” comprises forty-one photographs and three floor-standing sculptures, all made in or depicting Halpern’s hometown of Buffalo, NY. In a faint echo of the geography of the region, in which Buffalo and Cleveland share a shoreline with the vast Lake Erie, this former substation has been refashioned into two reading rooms and twin gallery spaces linked by a single corridor. Upon entry, one finds at right a gallery framed by a large, Edenic portrait of a young white man perched on crutches beneath an immense tree, the bushes behind him a buoyancy of yellow flame (Untitled, 2004–2022). At left, in the Crane Gallery, Halpern shows a diminutive portrait of a muddy young African American student listing faintly after football practice, the looming gray trashcan beside him seemingly ready to swallow his weary frame whole (Untitled, 2004–2022). The two portraits map …
Aarati Akkapeddi’s “A·kin”
Michael Kurtz
Aarati Akkapeddi’s work exploits the uneasy interaction of analog and digital—paper and pixels—to convey the strangeness of both our warped view of the past through dog-eared images and the mediation of the present by algorithmic technologies. “A·kin,” at London’s Photographers’ Gallery, continues the Telugu-American artist and programmer’s practice of using machine-learning algorithms to analyze and manipulate historical images.
The installation combines Akkapeddi’s family photographs from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu with those from an archive created by the STARS research collective of Tamil studio photography from the 1880s to the 1980s. Akkapeddi used an image classification model called VGG-16 to sort the photographs into a grid based on formal similarity, and then divided them into twelve generic groups: portraits of children propped up by an object, for instance, and close-ups of couples in which the man stands on the left. These “clusters” are arranged across a gallery wall within the interlocking forms of a kolam—a pattern drawn with rice flour at the entrance of Tamil homes to bring good fortune and exclude evil spirits. A larger composite image at the center of each group collates the surrounding photographs as if to identify what they share, while interviews …
A new chapter
The Editors
The new year is the herald of fresh starts, and all but the most bleary-eyed of you will have noticed that this editorial is published under the new banner of “e-flux Criticism.” For those who haven’t seen the announcement: e-flux Criticism comprises the same team of editors and writers operating under the same principles that shaped art-agenda. The main differences are that we’ll be increasing the volume of our editorial output—with more space for literary, film, and other criticism to complement our established program of art reviews, features, and interviews—and that all this will be hosted on e-flux.com. Our writers’ work will still be delivered directly to your inbox, for free. Tell your friends.
The change responds positively to a number of issues that have preoccupied the editors for some time, and which have recently become more acute. The most urgent is the sense that the space for independent criticism is shrinking. It should be acknowledged that writers have been broadcasting this jeremiad ever since art-agenda started publishing reviews in 2010, and that new platforms for sharing ideas have sprung up in the interim. But we remain convinced that the service we provide—namely considered appraisals by informed writers of the …
What’s next?
The Editors
The past year has been marked by the restoration of normality to some parts of life and the transformation of others. So it was no surprise that, when we asked contributors to pick their highlights from 2022, so many nominated shows engaged with the question of what should be restored and what abandoned, what preserved and what confined to history. These creative responses to the moment took forms as varied as archival approaches to activist art, interventionist challenges to censorship, the rewriting of history, dispersed curatorial practices, and collective exhibition-making. With the new year we too will be changing, expanding our coverage to reflect the dissolution of old forms and the emergence of new ones. Look out for forthcoming announcements, and we’ll be back on January 6. In the meantime, happy holidays. The Editors
Hallie Ayres
I’ll take any opportunity to see work by the architecture collective Ant Farm. Most recently, their Dolphin Embassy project appeared in “Who Speaks for the Oceans?” at Baruch College’s Mishkin Gallery. Compiling work that ranged from whimsical to urgent, the quietly transcendent show offered a necessarily polyvocal approach to decentering the Anthropocene. Other stand-outs within the show included Myrlande Constant, Will E. Jackson, and Pia …
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s “The Navel of the Dream”
Natasha Marie Llorens
Watching Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s silent 16mm film Otros usos [Other uses] (2014) is like looking into a kaleidoscope made with old snapshots too nondescript to make it into an album but nonetheless strangely fascinating. A composite image of four shots of a tranquil sea, each aligned to the edges of the frame, spins in a circle. As they oscillate, the distant shoreline in each shot tilts and merges with the next. The anachronistic sound of the projector, installed on a pedestal in the gallery, combines with the faint heat produced by the machine to heighten the body’s senses, like the effect of ASMR. I feel that Muñoz wants me, the viewer, to feel disoriented, employing a combination of the images’ banality and their movement to lull me into a dream state. They want to suspend my desire for narrative resolution and a fixed horizon.
Both Otros usos and another silent 16mm film projected beside it, Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces (2016) do have a precise physical referent: the island of Vieques in the Caribbean near Puerto Rico that the US Navy used as a bombing range and a training ground for over sixty years. In Otros usos, Muñoz’s carefully folded image is …
Sissel Tolaas’s “RE____”
Murtaza Vali
A visit to Sissel Tolaas’s “RE_________” is unnerving, exciting, and, ultimately, strangely liberating. Countering the deodorization of social and cultural life, in the West especially, Berlin-based Tolaas has for three decades worked to remind us of the importance of smell in how we experience and understand ourselves, in our relationships to others and to our environments. She first records and deconstructs real-world smells into their molecular components, then synthesizes and represents them as olfactory artworks, demonstrating how smell remains a vital carrier of information and mode of communication. Airborne and inseparable from breath, our awareness of smell has been, inadvertently, heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic. To properly experience Tolaas’s exhibition means ignoring the invisible, omnipresent, aerosolized threat of contagion that has haunted public life of late and shedding our masks to inhale fully, freely, openly, again and again, as we touch, scratch, sniff, and lather up with objects and surfaces previously handled by strangers.
Dubbing herself an “inbetweener,” Tolaas, who has a background in art, linguistics, and organic chemistry, shrewdly plays the affective and visceral punch of smell and the objectivity and empiricism of scientific method against each other. Her artificial reconstructions remain mimetic, ultimately unable to traverse a sort …
Mungo Thomson’s “Sideways Thought”
Francesco Tenaglia
Mungo Thomson is a California-born conceptual artist in the lineage of John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. His works often appear in serial forms that change over the years, adapting to different display contexts and making a virtue of repetition itself—framing, editing, and magnifying found objects and images from popular visual culture.
At the center of his solo presentation at frank elbaz gallery in Paris is a strong example of this tendency. Projected in the gallery’s darkened first room is Volume 5. Sideways Thought (2020–22). Part of the artist’s “Time Life” series of stop-motion animations that draw on encyclopedias and other sources of found imagery, the video consists of a montage of every photograph of Auguste Rodin’s sculptures available in books about the artist’s work. The idea is to mimic, or allude to, the operations of a high-speed scanner while transforming paper archives into digital databases for universities or research centers. Yet the breakneck speed of the editing also illustrates an artistic possibility: that an artwork can be generated from the processes of digital sublimation. Thomson’s use of ancillary documentary materials, and indexical and archival practices (those building blocks of art history), extend into Rodin’s desire to capture the naturally continuous …
Okayama Art Summit 2022, “Do we dream under the same sky”
Jason Waite
The main venue for this year’s Okayama Art Summit, directed by Rirkrit Tiravanija, is a 1930s elementary school that has been vacant for the past twenty years. It is therefore surprising to encounter swarms of uniformed middle-school students circulating around the grounds as part of a school trip; then again, an uncanny sense of historical repetition is a hallmark of this edition of the triennial.
Take Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana’s “MONOLOGUE Trilogy” (2015–19). This three-screen installation opens an oneiric portal to the lush forests of Kâmpŭchéa, still haunted by the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities. Rattana’s poetic grappling with the loss under that regime of his own sister, whom he never met, unfurls with images of the artist wading through the overgrown landscape, punctuated by slow shots of fantastical rituals invented to establish a connection to the land and its textures. The durational melancholy that results contrasts with the abundance of nonhuman life that fills the frame. An intricately woven cinematic tapestry, “MONOLOGUE Trilogy” decelerates time. Its slow, haunted temporality permeates the rest of the summit.
Upstairs, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s installation The Word Silence Is Not Silence (2022) invites viewers into a small room that features two chairs in front of a …
Carol Bove’s “Vase/Face”
Orit Gat
A friend once called me out for overusing “the viewer” in my writing. “What does this viewer stand for?” he asked, suggesting that to use an abstract generality as a stand-in for the self absolves the writer of having to account for their own presence. Initially I saw this as a comment about the politics of being a body in space; that viewers are not interchangeable, experiences matter, and they are distinct. This conversation convinced me that the personal can be a powerful position from which to reflect.
So, here goes: I stood in front of Carol Bove’s new sculptures at David Zwirner and related to them in a way that is intuitive and emotional, a way that made a specific viewer of me, one whose life seeps into the looking. Though they’re made of metal, I saw their softness. I kept staring at the meeting points of two bits of steel, and found in them a connection. Bove’s exhibition, “Vase/Face,” includes two sets of works presented across two rooms, two presentations that differ in scale, color, and treatment. In the main space are four large-scale sculptures made of stainless steel and laminated glass with heat-fused ink. The sandblasted stainless …
Bangkok Art Biennale 2022, “CHAOS : CALM”
Max Crosbie-Jones
The titles for the first two editions of the Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB), “Beyond Bliss” and “Escape Routes,” were catchy rhetorical constructions that signposted a sanguine worldview: art can help us survey, process, and perhaps even surmount the multipolar reckonings of the Anthropocene. Setting a similarly salutary tone for the third edition—the last in a trilogy, according to artistic director Apinan Poshyananda—is “CHAOS : CALM.”
During the opening symposium, Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani (part of a four-strong curatorial team alongside Nigel Hurst, Jirat Ratthawongjirakul, and Chomwan Weeraworawit) remarked that the title’s colon allows for all states in between, rather than enforcing a binary. Her assertion left the tonal spectrum wide open, yet the thematic scope is wider still: BAB 2022 is a heaped potpourri of over 200 au courant artworks ostensibly united around capacious notions of disarray and harmony. Works that evoke dialectics between societal structures or belief systems are piled in alongside those that summon disorderly nature, and others of a more lived and personal bent.
Circling the upper floors of the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (BACC)—the largest venue—is a heady, often unnerving experience. “Your voice is powerful and it will be heard,” says a pensive AI avatar of Kawita Vatanajyankur, a …
Nikita Kadan’s “Victory over the Sun”
Xenia Benivolski
The 1913 opera Victory over the Sun describes an attempt to capture the sun in order to overthrow linear time and reason. The work ushered in artistic traditions that came to shape Soviet Futurism: it’s where Malevich’s black square, for instance, made its first appearance (on a set curtain). Nikita Kadan’s exhibition, which takes its title from the opera, is anchored by a wall-hanging neon sculpture entitled Private Sun (2022) which refers to a classic of Soviet-era design: a window grate, ubiquitous in large apartment buildings, with bars like the rising sun. Where the avant-garde original advocated for the destruction of the present to clear a path for the new, the Ukrainian artist’s use of the architectural feature suggests a darker notion: of being held captive in someone else’s idea of the future.
Hanging in the main space of the gallery is a series of charcoal drawings. In one, titled A Sun-headed character in a garbage bag (2022), Kadan renders a black trash bag akin to those rumored to have been used to transport the bodies of soldiers killed during Russia’s invasion. Over the trash bag presides an unsmiling black sun. In another, similar drawing (The Sun I, 2022), a black …
This Machine is Broken: the Making of Populist Contemporary Art in Warsaw
Jakub Gawkowski
What if a contemporary art center, a space usually conceived as a laboratory for progressive ideas, became the opposite: a tool for promoting xenophobia, exclusion, and far-right propaganda? Under director Piotr Bernatowicz, the once-renowned Ujazdowski Castle CCA in Warsaw has pivoted to align with the values of the governing, populist Law and Justice Party that appointed him. Its latest show, “The Influencing Machine,” curated by Aaron Moulton and featuring regional and international artists from Chris Burden to Constant Dullaart, claims to tell the story of how the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) that sprang up across Eastern Europe in the 1990s were instruments of propaganda. More than anything, however, it shines a light on Polish nationalist populism and its conflicted, contradictory cultural-political mindset.
Since becoming director of Ujazdowski in 2020, Bernatowicz’s controversial program has sought to prove that contemporary art can be a place for conservative and nationalist values, and that an avant-garde might look back to the past, instead of forward to the future. The role of an experienced curatorial team in developing the program has been taken by loyal collaborators who not only lacked their expertise but even took to warning the public of the deleterious …
Course correction
The Editors
The recent death of Bruno Latour prompted us to revisit an idea that has been influential on this publication’s editorial position. In the era after the avant-garde, asks Latour, when modernist presumptions of a headlong march into the future have been discredited, what does it mean to believe in progress? How to hold out the possibility of moving forward without falling into the same old traps? Latour draws a subtle distinction between what he calls the “idea of inevitable progress” and a “tentative and precautionary progression” that pays more attention to the direction of travel than its speed. We must be attentive to the route we are taking, and should always be correcting its course.
The name he gives to this approach is “composition,” making an explicit connection to the creative process generally and the arts specifically. The futures we imagine into being, Latour proposes, must always be adapted to the conditions of the present. By focusing on that dynamic relation, he replaces the question of how to achieve utopia with the critical task of identifying “what is well or badly constructed, well or badly composed” and adjusting what one thinks according to the findings. Which sounds a lot like …
Mame-Diarra Niang’s The Citadel: a trilogy
Sean O’Toole
Paris-based artist Mame-Diarra Niang’s debut book, The Citadel: a trilogy, is a plush and enigmatic showcase of her interest in “the plasticity of territory”; more pointedly, of her use of the landscape genre as self-reflexive tool of knowing, basically as mirror. The multi-part book compiles discrete photo essays produced—and previously exhibited—in two African cities, Dakar and Johannesburg, between 2013 and 2016. The publication makes concrete the formal arrangement of each essay, as well as unifying them under a common rubric. The Citadel follows a number of ambitious books describing Africa’s complex urbanism, among them Guy Tillim’s Jo’burg (2005) and Joburg: Points of View (2014) and Filip De Boeck and Sammy Baloji’s hardcover tome Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds (2016). Its distinction emerges out of Niang’s willingness to subordinate documentary exegesis to mythic questing.
The tension between self and place is central to the slow crescendo proposed by the three individually titled and numbered books—Sahel Gris, At the Wall, and Metropolis—that constitute The Citadel. “It is important to me to address the representation of the self as a body that does not reduce itself to flesh, but possesses many places ‘without place’,” Niang stated in a 2015 …
1st Korkut Biennale of Sound Art and New Music
Nikolay Smirnov
The first biennale of its kind in Kazakhstan set out to combine sound art with a decolonial paradigm or, as curator Anvar Musrepov put it, “to find a correlation between experimental sound and the local culture, which is more audial than visual.” It fulfilled this mission through a convergence of the new posthuman ontologies being manifested in sound art with neo-traditional trends in decolonial thinking, in particular shamanism and animism.
The symbol of this convergence is the mythological Turkic musician and shaman Korkut. According to legend, he created the kobyz, a bowed string instrument which in his hands was capable of imitating all possible sounds, and was later used by the baksy, or Turkic shamans. While Korkut played it, he was immortal. Although he eventually got tired, fell asleep, and died, he gained eternal life in the world of spirits and memory as the one who healed people through the power of art and music. As a core component of the national identity, a demiurgical healer, and the personification of radical avant-garde aspirations like the search for immortality, Korkut is a fitting figurehead for artistic speculations on shamanism, magic, and healing in the Kazakh context.
Two concerts became the central …
Dozie Kanu
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Dozie Kanu blocks the entrance to Francesca Pia’s gallery with a low, square platform studded with cents. I take the H marked out in shinier coins to connote “Helipad” and edge past it into a series of bright rooms arrayed with sculptures composed largely from found metal objects. Among them is hang something metric (all works 2022), which makes a crucifix-like coat rack from a 150 cm rule atop a coiling metal pump component.
Though from Texas, Kanu now makes his ambiguous objects in a studio in rural Portugal. The influence can be seen in the selection of decorative Portuguese keyhole plates painted onto the wooden tabletop of aro pillars chukwu dinners, which is supported by thick metal pipes. Deep blue panelling collars the ceiling, rather than the base, of the central gallery: General State of Judgement and Concern. Its velvety hue is a pleasing touch, making the space a little cosier, and easier to imagine these objects in a living room. The patina on the tortured metal sheet in the light fitting Explosion Proof is so appealing—was there an explosion or is it to signify antiquity, accelerated for your convenience? It’s not all to my taste though. Chair [ …
18th Camden International Film Festival
Lukas Brasiskis
Some documentary festivals prioritize the needs of the regional or international film industry, while others strive to present politically urgent and aesthetically groundbreaking nonfiction films to their audiences. Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) has been successfully combining these two strategies for almost two decades. This year’s program consisted of thirty-four feature-length and forty short films from forty-one countries spread around screening locations in Camden and Rockland. The premieres of big-budget documentary productions expected to entertain American movie goers as well as Netflix and HBO streamers—such as Sr (all works 2022 unless otherwise stated) by Chris Smith, Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen’s In Her Hands, and Compassionate Spy by Steve James—were held at the Opera House in Camden, while the majority of artists’ films were featured at Rockland’s Strand Cinema and at a massive industrial dock turned into a movie theater. Following executive and artistic director Ben Fowlie’s injunction that “festivals must take risks” and senior programmer Milton Guillén’s invitation to accept the challenges cinema poses, the best films in this year’s iteration prompted audiences to reconsider what documentary cinema is and what it can do.
Katya Selenkina’s Detours (2021), the winner of this year’s Cinematic Vision Award, is an experimental …
2nd Hacer Noche, “Promised Land”
Kim Córdova
Hacer Noche—an independent biennial directed by a former employee of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Francisco Berzunza—aims to establish connections between Oaxaca and international contemporary art discourse. The first edition, in 2018, set a high bar. The second, titled “Promised Land” and curated across ten venues by Elvira Dyangani Ose, strives to set the history of global leftist activism in dialog with Mexican art history. Yet sparse curatorial framing, alongside a casual commitment to presenting works with basic information for the visitor, leave the overall throughline too vague to be persuasive.
The main exhibition, at Museo de Las Culturas de Oaxaca in the Santo Domingo convent, features two salons of works by eighteen artists on plywood displays. Among these are several coups in the form of institutional loans, including paintings by Mexican artists Rufino Tamayo and David Alfaro Siqueiros classified as “artistic national monuments” whose loans require federal approval by the museum’s sister institution, the National Institute of Fine Art (INBA), and from UAE-based Barjeel Art Foundation, including a painting by Dia Al-Azzawi, a pioneer of modern Arab art. Significant care has gone into establishing a dialogue between celebrated and underknown artists. Curiously, however, little contextual information is provided …
4th Bergen Assembly, “Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron”
Adam Kleinman
As the dust begins to settle on this summer’s tumultuous large-format exhibition season, Bergen Assembly—“convened” by French artist Saâdane Afif—presents another opportunity to assess what happens when perennial shows are led by an artist, not a curator. This year’s Assembly, a Triennial now in its 4th edition, takes an unusually literary turn, in contrast to Kader Attia’s thesis-driven Berlin Biennale or ruangrupa’s Documenta, with its move toward decentralized leadership. Entitled “Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron,” the Assembly is organized around a loose frame story. This whimsical attempt to band together the show—featuring work by roughly eighteen participating artists and collaboratives—asks visitors to walk in the shoes of a fictional character, Yasmine d’O, in order to set the exhibition’s plodding scenario in motion.
Afif developed the character of Yasmine for the 2014 Marrakech Biennale; later, he expanded the project into a play, made in collaboration with Thomas Clerc. In Bergen, Yasmine is on a quest to gather and assemble the titular Heptahedron, a seven-sided object of desire. If the mythical polyhedron serves as a Hitchcockian MacGuffin to push the story forward, other contrivances follow in its wake: each of the Assembly’s seven venues is connected to even more fictive …
Jumana Manna’s “Break, Take, Erase, Tally”
Dina Ramadan
Jumana Manna’s first US museum exhibition traces the violence inflicted through infrastructures designed to control, transform, protect, or even destroy the natural environment, while recognizing the ways in which the land, in its mutations and transformations, resists in order to survive. Knowledge produced from and about the land emerges as a site of struggle, both an apparatus of hegemony and oppression and a potential tool for defiance and liberation.
The exhibition includes recent and newly commissioned sculptural works; pieces from the multidisciplinary Palestinian artist’s ongoing “Cache Series” populate the main gallery space. These large, smooth, earth-toned ceramic sculptures seem capable of shape-shifting despite their sturdiness. Inspired by the khabyas—the storage vessels attached to homes throughout the Levant that have been rendered superfluous with the proliferation of modern means of refrigeration—they capture these structures in various states of disintegration and ruination. Some share recognizable features of the original khabya while others have morphed into unfamiliar forms, alien-like creatures whose disfigurations speak to their incongruity in the contemporary landscape, glossy monuments to their own demise in the face of industrialized means of producing and conserving food.
Throughout the exhibition, Manna borrows from the visual and organizational language of archival institutions; the steel …
Santiago Mostyn’s “Dream One”
Natasha Marie Llorens
Santiago Mostyn has placed low banks of sand at rhythmic intervals throughout the large, open exhibition space of Södertälje Konsthall. Brazil nut casings lie scattered on top of the sand; they are also suspended from the ceiling, each shell holding a speaker. A soft clicking animates the room, as the eighteen-channel sound work emanating from the shells thickens the space at the periphery of my senses, like a subliminal awareness of thriving insect life. Looking down, I notice that viscous liquid fills one of the empty shells to resemble brackish rainwater trapped at the bottom. One shouldn’t leave water standing in the tropics, it invites mosquitoes to breed, I think, and realize that my mind has left the outskirts of Stockholm.
The floor beneath Mostyn’s piles of sand is a permanent artwork by the design duo Laercio Redondo and Birger Lipinski, entitled Opacity (for Édouard Glissant) (2021). Inspired by indigenous weaving techniques in the Americas, it is an abstract geometrical pattern made with rectangular flooring panels in beige, navy, and powder blue. The design reminds me of a disarticulated Catholic labyrinth, a geometric pattern inlaid in stone on the floor of cathedrals during the Middle Ages, that provided a score …
Olivia Plender’s “Our Bodies are Not the Problem”
Tom Jeffreys
Olivia Plender’s research-driven practice is rooted in a fascination with the way communities self-organize—from activist groups, youth movements, and spiritualist associations to alternative education programmes and the offices of tech behemoths—and the strategies, labor, geographies, and architectures that enable (or obstruct) them. Her second solo exhibition at Maureen Paley recontextualizes texts, images, and actions relating to self-education and resistance, with the delicacy of several series of small drawings in black ink or charcoal pencil contrasting with all-caps wall posters proclaiming statements like “THEY WILL NOT DIVIDE US.” But in bringing together these slices from various projects, each of which has grown out of sustained historical research or community engagement, this exhibition is not always successful in communicating their richness or significance.
Plender takes great care in considering the spaces in which community organization takes place: she pays attention, for example, to the labor that goes into setting up for a meeting or tidying away afterwards. In 2021, she revamped the community room at Glasgow Women’s Library, transforming the upstairs area into one of welcoming softness. Plender’s life-size drawings are now emblazoned across a partitioning curtain. Floor rugs and jewel-toned bean-bags offer comfort for those wishing to sit or lie, while …
“But for whom?”
The Editors
A series of protests in museums have raised the question of whether it is justifiable to destroy a work of art in order to advance a cause. The less palatable issue is whether it is effective. In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), the anarchist Verloc is tasked with perpetrating an outrage that will shock the middle classes out of their apathy. His commissioners call him in to discuss targets: “Of course, there is art. A bomb in the National Gallery would make some noise.” But the idea is quickly dismissed. “There would be some screaming, of course, but from whom? Artists—art critics and such like—people of no account. Nobody minds what they say.” Ouch. The saboteurs decide instead to launch an attack on science, because “any imbecile that has got an income believes in that.”
When climate activists threw soup at a van Gogh in the National Gallery, they knew that the painting was protected by glass. Does the symbolic nature of the protest strengthen or diminish it? After all, the suffragette Mary Richardson felt no such qualms about taking a meat cleaver to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647). The issue becomes daily more acute: last week I witnessed anarchists …
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s Beautiful, Gruesome, and True
Orit Gat
“What can you say about violence except that it should not happen?” asks Amar Kanwar. Writing from a conviction that art matters in the face of the “forever wars of our time,” art critic and journalist Kaelen Wilson-Goldie explores the works of three artists: New Delhi–based Kanwar, Mexican artist and activist Teresa Margolles, and Abounaddara, a collective of filmmakers who released weekly videos online from the beginning of the Syrian Civil War showing the realities of life under the regime. In making art, Wilson-Goldie argues, each found a space in which to reflect on the politics of the places they are from in ways that go beyond the documentation of violence, to transformative effect.
In her chapter on Abounaddara, Wilson-Goldie follows the collective in showing how life in wartime is shaped by conflict but, crucially, not wholly defined by it. The work of Kanwar, meanwhile, offers an example of how art can engage with popular struggles over labor rights, land, and resources. He’s been returning to the Indian state of Chhattisgarh ever since labor activist Shankar Guha Niyogi was murdered in 1991, on the day before Kanwar had arranged to film him. Writing about Margolles, Wilson-Goldie starts with her work …
“Ultra-clearness”
Andrés Jaque / The Editors
Andrés Jaque is an architect, writer, and curator whose work considers how architecture shapes our societies. In 2003 he founded the Office for Political Innovation, an architectural firm operating at the crossroads of research, design, and ecological studies to foster debate around the wider ramifications of human intervention into the landscape.
These projects frequently address the literal and figurative “transparency” of buildings. When commissioned in 2002 to design a hoarding that would hide the construction of the Cidade da Cultura de Galicia from view, for instance, Jaque proposed “twelve actions to make Peter Eisenman transparent.” Arguing that the site was “already concealed because it could hardly be understood by anyone not directly involved in its management,” he instead invited the public in to discuss its economic, environmental, and political impacts.
Jaque’s 2012 intervention into Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s Barcelona Pavilion foregrounded the contributions of water lilies and cats to a modernist masterpiece; commissioned by the 2021 Performa Biennale, Being Silica reproduced a fracking site in a Manhattan skyscraper. Now director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program at Columbia University, Jaque was co-curator of Manifesta 12 and chief curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale. This interview is part of the …
Monira Al Qadiri’s “Refined Vision”
Valentin Diaconov
Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri is a prophet of doom with an ear for a joke. Sarcasm and puns are hallmarks of her solo exhibition at Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum—starting with its title, which replaces “divine” with a near-homonym that nods to the petroleum industry. Combining pieces made in the last decade with new commissions, “Refined Vision” presents hyper-realistic sculptures alongside installation and video. The tone is uniformly satirical, except for one new piece (Onus, 2022) based on press photographs of dead birds drenched in petroleum. It is the only work to state directly the real-world consequences of the oil industry and, as such, looks a little out of place in an exhibition that revolves around that industry’s enticing iconography.
Spectrum (2016) is a series of 3D-printed sculptures, painted in iridescent car paint, whose shapes are based on the heads of oil drills. Pointing out that oil and pearls share the same color scheme on the opposite side of the dichroic color spectrum, Al Qadiri presents these precious objects as jewels in the crowns of the sovereigns who control oil. Deep time is crucial to Al Qadiri’s analysis of petroleum, and many of her works derive from her absurdist conflation …
Mexico City Roundup
Gaby Cepeda
Mexico City’s fall openings are marked by a theatrical turn. The most overt expression is “Destino” [Destiny], organized by Mario García Torres at Museo Experimental El Eco. Displayed on a screen in the museum’s narrow entranceway is Disculpa [Apology] (2022), a video by García Torres and Eduardo Donjuan that sets the scene. The buffoonish face of Alejandro Suárez—a comedian well-known to Mexicans born before the turn of the millennium—performs a monologue in a painstaking, over-acted way. He goes on about his agent bringing him the offer to participate in this show, talks of “an air of the avant-garde” as a reason for accepting the invitation, and digresses on the similarities between art and spectacle. There are passing references to the Museo Experimental El Eco’s history: first established as an art institution in the 1950s, it later became a gay bar, a punk bar, a restaurant, a boxing gym, and a small theater, before reverting to its original function. At one point, Suárez recites a poem and then dances enthusiastically—it’s equal parts kitsch and unsettling to watch. He touches on some of Mario García Torres’s enduring fixations, evident in his earlier monologues and performances including I Am Not a Flopper (2007) …
“SIREN (some poetics)”
Wendy Vogel
Curator Quinn Latimer takes the mythological sirens of the ancient world—“figured as women (part bird or part fish, but all witch)”—as the symbol uniting this group show of seventeen artists at Amant. Such a premise might evoke notions of the demonized, feminized voice: incantations, laughing, shrieks, or related sonic eruptions. Precedents in feminist theory include Silvia Federici’s writing on the etymology of gossip (once defined as a group of women friends); Gloria Anzaldúa’s exhortation that “wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out”; and Anne Carson’s assertion that patriarchal culture, from antiquity onward, has enforced “an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.” However, Latimer (a poet herself) positions the siren’s call as a type of technology that destabilizes binaries—gender and otherwise. The sound of the siren is one of knowledge, seduction, and death that crosses species, bumping against the limits of linguistic order.
The predominant sounds in “SIREN,” therefore, are nonsense and drones—an undoing of language into various states of nonhuman noise. Rather than creating a cacophony, these works are arranged airily throughout Amant’s three discrete spaces (two linked by a café and courtyard, and another across the street), their sound elements sometimes …
Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser’s “Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?”
Jayne Wilkinson
In the world of Piña, the title character of this expansive, speculative work of documentary-fiction, there are few boundaries. Piña stretches across temporalities, geographies, and technologies; it’s a world where futures and pasts align, where spiritual knowledge is transformed and disseminated for generational survival. Each element in Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser’s collaborative exhibition—a VR work, a wall-sized video projection, and a series of framed textile works, whose patterns repeat on custom-designed floor cushions—contributes to an experience where body, mind, memory, and technology converge.
The project is structured around an elegant spirit, Piña, named after the Spanish and Tagalog word for pineapple, a fruit first introduced to the Philippines in the seventeenth century by Spanish colonizers who considered it a symbol of luxury. In the distant future, Piña is an omniscient AI-guide that holds and transmits matrilineal knowledge by first receiving information, or “data,” uploaded from knowledge-keepers who preserve spiritual and ecological practices, despite the violence of colonization. In the video, Piña’s presence is felt but unseen, as we meet real-world healers and activists. Among them are Kankwana Canelos and Rupay Gualinga of Ciber Amazonas, a group of Indigenous activists in Puyo, Ecuador, who discuss their work forming feminist alliances …
London Roundup
Chris Fite-Wassilak
There’s a moment towards the end of Jumana Manna’s film Foragers (2022), in her show of the same name at Hollybush Gardens, that stuck with me through Frieze week. After an hour spent following Palestinian foragers searching for a plant the Israeli authorities have deemed illegal to pick, the viewer is plunged into darkness shot through with brief glimpses of rusted orange-red semicircles. Slowly, the image resolves into low foliage illuminated fleetingly by a patrol car’s rotating beacon lights. This momentary break from reality—from documentary-style footage towards something resembling abstract animation—resonated with a wider disorientation I felt across some three-dozen exhibitions and an art fair. I don’t know if you can call it a theme, a trend, or a vibe, but it is perhaps best described as a sense of unease.
Such unease seems to prompt the creation of shelters or safe-spaces in works as disparate as the dark cork-lined walls of William Kentridge’s retrospective at the Royal Academy and Olukemi Lijadu’s cloth-lined viewing room for her film Guardian Angel (2022) at V.O Curations. When time is jumbled or out of joint, art can be a means to step ever so slightly back, to gain perspective, and to reimagine a …
“Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer”
Anne Finger
In 2015, the disabled American writer Kenny Fries gave a reading as part of the program for “Homosexuality_ies,” an exhibition jointly sponsored by the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Schwules Museum. During it, he posed a question: Where, he asked, was disability in this wide-ranging exhibit? Why had access for disabled people been ignored? The response to that challenge is “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer” at the Schwules Museum. Co-curated by Fries, Birgit Bosold, and Kate Brehme, it is one of the first international exhibitions to explore the artistic, political, and historical links between queerness and disability. It presents disability as sexy, provocative, tough, and a source of artistic strength—not a black hole of suffering and blankness.
Access is at the heart of the show. Seated in my wheelchair, I could actually experience the art. Nearly always when I enter a museum (sometimes after having been assured that a show is “completely accessible”) I am able to see only a fraction of what is on display, and I am left wondering: “What does that wall text, too high for me to read, say?” I might be able see diaries, letters, magazines in a display case, but the height …
“The little bird must be caught”
iLiana Fokianaki
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art elected to establish an annual festival addressed to a changing world and proposing “survival strategies.” Now in its thirteenth year, Survival Kit takes place under the shadow of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its implications for a country in which around one quarter of the population are Russian speakers.
An exhibition curated by iLiana Fokianaki and taking inspiration from the “Singing Revolution” that preceded the Baltic States’ independence from the USSR has clear resonances with the present situation in Eastern Europe, but also reverberates more widely. Poetry, music, and song are figured by artists from Andrius Arutiunian to Wu Tsang as powerful expressions of resistance to imperialism, not only as the vehicles by which marginalized traditions are transported into the future but also as defiant expressions of feelings that cannot be suppressed. After seeing the exhibition in Riga last month, we talked to Fokianaki about a world in flux and the role of art within it.
art-agenda: A year ago you proposed a show which would consider the impact of rising authoritarianism on issues of national identity and free speech through the lens of Latvia’s …
58th Carnegie International, “Is it morning for you yet?”
Noah Simblist
What does it mean to be “international” today? Against a post-pandemic backdrop of hardening borders and resurgent ethnonationalism—in which cross-border solidarity, cooperation, and exchange are increasingly difficult to achieve—the 58th Carnegie International offers a nuanced way forward. The exhibition’s title, “Is it morning for you yet?” is an ancient Mayan saying which also evokes the opening greetings of a video call in which participants introduce themselves across time zones. As the exhibition’s curator Sohrab Mohebbi noted at the press preview, during which he acknowledged that the Guatemalan artist Édgar Calel had introduced him to the phrase, the title also recognizes that we can never exist in different places and be absolutely contemporaneous. By posing a question and inviting us into dialogue, the title suggests how we can be both separate and connected.
Filling the museum’s Hall of Sculpture are artists whose work is critical of US Empire since 1945. Hiromi Tsuchida’s “Hiroshima Collection” is a set of black-and-white photographs that depict the material traces of the death and suffering that Japanese citizens endured in the wake of the US detonation of Little Boy. Produced over two periods at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, in 1982 and 1995, these objects include …
Azza El Siddique’s “Dampen the flame; Extinguish the fire”
Murtaza Vali
At once material and spectral, intimate and diffuse, scent can linger, occupying space and impregnating matter while remaining invisible. And it is the warm, smoky, sweet aroma of bukhoor—a type of incense composed of various aromatic resins and essential oil-infused wood chips that is commonly used across the Muslim world—that hits you first, near the top of the stairs, even before you enter Toronto-based Azza El Siddique’s sophomore show at Helena Anrather. Physiologically linked to the brain’s limbic system—the neurological locus of memory and emotion—the sense of smell is a powerful trigger, eliciting both a visceral and affective response. For El Siddique, bukhoor both invokes and evokes. It references religious spaces and rituals, sacralizing the gallery and our encounters within it. It also conjures up memories of the Sudanese diasporic community in which she grew up, and the many matriarchs who helped sustain it. One of its components is sandaliya, an oil derived from sandalwood that is used during the ritual washing and shrouding of the body before a Muslim burial. Bukhoor signifies care, of both the living and the dead.
El Siddique’s interest in rituals and accounts of death and the afterlife stems from a profound personal …
Broken images
The Editors
Speaking last month to art-agenda about the exhibition she organized in her ruined apartment, the Ukrainian curator Kateryna Iakovlenko explained its focus on everyday gestures of community and resistance as a strategy of studied “indifference” towards those responsible for the destruction of her home and the invasion of her country. Instead of expending her energy on thinking about the aggressor, she told us, she prefers to “think about the future, about ordinary people experiencing all this with me.”
This refusal to acknowledge the presence of an external—in this case hostile—audience might have analogues with other intersections between collective action and creative expression. It was one of the most striking features of the recently concluded Documenta, if not the most commented upon, that so much of the work presented seemed pointedly unconcerned with explaining itself to its viewers. If this sounds like a criticism, then that is perhaps indicative of the degree to which audiences have become accustomed to the idea that even (or especially) creative practices which do not fit easily into established western ideas of what constitutes art should be clearly contextualized and bracketed for their benefit. Instead, the work’s obliviousness to its observers—what might be called its self-absorption—was …
M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything For Everyone
Andreas Petrossiants
In her Manifesto for Maintenance art, 1969!, Mierle Laderman Ukeles asked: “after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” If sectarian communism and reformist socialism do not challenge the classical Marxist separation between productive and reproductive labor, then what else could revolution lead to but a perpetuation of the same hierarchies by different names? Lizzie Borden’s documentary-styled film Born in Flames (1983) provided one answer to Ukeles’s question: after the United States’ transition to state socialism, violence against women, unremunerated labor, and homophobia remain rife, even amongst “comrades.”
M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s speculative fiction offers another. It imagines a future in which rebellions have brought about post-capitalist worlds: commodities and the state have not only been abolished, but forgotten. The authors—performing versions of themselves five decades from now, and two decades after the insurrection reached New York—interview twelve different characters for the “New York Commune Oral History Project.” Beginning with an introduction from the future that doubles as a primer on communization theory, it’s an impeccable act of world-building. Intimate, at times confrontational, dialogues address the localized but globally oriented insurrections that brought down capitalist, white supremacist states throughout the world. The interviewees …
“Life after ruins”
Kateryna Iakovlenko
On March 18, a few days after the writer and curator Kateryna Iakovlenko left her hometown of Irpin in Kyiv Oblast, she learned that her apartment had been hit by a rocket. In August, having returned to the city, she organized an exhibition in what remained of her home. Titled “Everyone is afraid of the baker, but I am grateful,” the show featured work by Katya Buchatska, Mark Chegodaiev, Sasha Kurmaz, Roman Mykhailov, Anatol Stepanenko, Stas Turina, Tamara Turliun, and Anna Zvyagintseva. In this conversation over email, she tells us how the project explored the possibility of articulating trauma, the role of archives, and what it means to live after ruins. Not least, she draws attention to the many artists in Ukraine who have continued to work through the invasion of their country, and in resistance to it.
art-agenda: How did you learn that your apartment had been ruined, and why choose to make an exhibition in the space when you returned to Ukraine?
Kateryna Iakovlenko: Six days after I arrived in Vienna, I saw a report that the remnants of a rocket had hit our building. I learned from my neighbors’ posts on social media that it had …
Ghislaine Leung’s “Balances”
Katherine C. M. Adams
What one sees of Ghislaine Leung’s “Balances” depends on precisely when one visits the exhibition. During Leung’s own “studio hours” (9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday and Friday), Gates (2019) lines the main gallery space with child safety gates. The work’s three editions—each a different neutral shade—have been installed on top of each other: sometimes they occupy the same elevation of the wall in dense proximity, and at other points are stacked vertically. Directly before the first group of Gates is one half of Monitors (2022)—a baby monitor transmitting live footage of the gallery’s back office. Other works on view in the central space include Fountains (2022), a small readymade, three-tiered fountain burbling loud enough to “cancel sound” in the vicinity, as the work’s score instructs. A partly filled rectangular grid the size of Leung’s studio wall, Hours (2022), covers the largest wall.
Outside these hours, the gallery is apparently blank, all works removed or covered over. “Balances” exercises an unusually strict control over the terms of encounter with its work, calibrating the viewing situation to the artist’s allocated studio time for art production. In a correspondence with the gallery reproduced in the show’s press release, Leung explains the three-way …
“A Maze Zanine, Amaze Zaning, A-Mezzaning, Meza-9”
Rachel Valinsky
Pulling up to David Zwirner on the opening night of its tongue-twistingly-titled benefit show for Performance Space New York, the scene was chaotic: a several-hundred strong mix of fashion week, Armory week, and overdressed Chelsea partygoing crowds spilled out onto 19th Street, closed to car traffic and repurposed for a block party, complete with food stands and ice-cream truck. Inside, five long banners co-made by the exhibition’s all-star squad of artist-organizers—Ei Arakawa, Kerstin Brätsch, Nicole Eisenman, and Laura Owens—hung from a beam overhead.
These screen-printed, acrylic- and vinyl-painted Curtains (all works 2022 unless otherwise stated)—a title that evokes the fabric separating audience from proscenium stage—read like précis of each artist’s signature style: one shows a cartoonish Eisenman figure raising paint roller to wall, while Brätsch’s and Owens’s colorful, abstract geometries and pop-cultural influences infiltrate others. Two open, wooden structures on wheels evoked both stage props and domestic spaces (they are called “houses” on the gallery map). Behind the curtains, Performance Space’s metal rigging structure was temporarily relocated as décor, where it dynamically remodeled the gallery’s interior. A ramp leading to a platform wrapping around either side of the space served as the titular “mezzanine,” offering elevated views of the many paintings …
A short and incomplete history of “bad” curating as collective resistance
Gregory Sholette
In the last of our dispatches from Documenta 15 over the course of its 100 days, Gregory Sholette defends the exhibition’s daring, decentralized curation, placing it in the context of artistic and activist movements from the nineties to the present, and contrasting it to the presentation of the Berlin Biennale.
Between the start of this year and the end of September, the artistic universe has delivered up an increasingly ominous sequence of events that, for me at least, resembles the tangled history of decentralized curating, the recrudesce of which feels downright spooky. Der Spiegel’s recent exhortation regarding Documenta 15 that “the German cultural sector has a big problem,” for instance, made me think of a threat made by Walter White in Breaking Bad: “There will be consequences.” Given that much of the criticism of Documenta 15 has focused on alleged curatorial inadequacies—and has included not only menacing editorials recalling sensational crime drama, but direct threats of violence against curatorial staff and artists—it feels pertinent to ask: a big problem for whom? And if the show’s decentralized curating has been attacked as “bad,” then according to what reputed standards?
In 1998, as the recently hired Curator of Education at New York’s …
“Fire Complex”
Uta Kögelsberger / Julian Stallabrass
In 2020, the Castle Fire wildfire swept through 174,000 acres of Sequoia National Forest, destroying an estimated 14 percent of the world’s giant sequoia population. Uta Kögelsberger embarked on a series of works and actions to render the destruction and its wider implications palpable, and to start to restore the land.
In her multi-screen video work Cull (2022)—which has been shown in different iterations in Los Angeles, London, and online—a dire spectacle unfolds before the viewer: a burnt forest with tall but stripped trees standing amid ash and snow. Giant sequoias, the largest and among the longest-living of trees, have historically survived these fires. Large firs, cedars, and other trees are being felled. The looping, 15-minute video is largely silent until the trees crash to the ground, shattering branches and throwing up huge clouds of ash. Some fall heavily, as we might expect, but others lightly, gently, as if with a sigh. To any lover of trees and forests, the work is deeply affecting.
Once, darkly beautiful scenes such as these—some of the static shots look like an apocalyptic variant of Ansel Adams—would have been experienced as sublime. In the current climate emergency, they are more immediately threatening: a vision of the …
Warsaw Roundup
Ewa Borysiewicz
Poland, as the theorist Maria Janion has noted, lies East of the West and West of the East. The cognitive dissonance can sometimes manifest in a complex blend of inferiority complex and messianic pride, often expressed via tales of the nation’s suffering and past glory. The majority of post-1989 efforts to tell the nation’s history have focused on repressing “Eastern” attributes in favor of “Western,” but Russia’s war on Ukraine has seen the nation assert its solidarity with its beleaguered eastern neighbor.
Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art is trapped between the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science and proliferating skyscrapers, and the institution’s programming reflects the difficulty of reconciling these two influences. Its temporary home, close to the Vistula River, currently hosts “The Dark Arts: Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism from the East and North,” curated by Alison M. Gingeras and Natalia Sielewicz. The reclusive painter has gained an enormous online following for her somber, cryptic gouaches depicting a cast of mysterious figures including woman-spider hybrids, sinister Slavic wraths, lonely hangmen, flayed youngsters, and bleeding mystics.
The curators have applied a decorum-defying social media logic to the show’s methodology, juxtaposing works of varying provenances and gravities. Yet the physical center of …
“Histórias Brasileiras”
Oliver Basciano
“Histórias Brasileiras” [Brazilian Stories] is a profoundly depressing show, a curatorial snapshot of a country, it would seem, at the end of its tether. It coincides with the closing months of Jair Bolsonaro’s grueling first term as the country’s president, opening just before the world’s fourth biggest democracy goes to the polls. The complaints and traumas presented in the exhibition are legion. That does not, however, necessarily make it a great exhibition.
Adherents of Bolsonarismo have long co-opted Brazil’s national flag. And so it is as a presumed rebuke that the curators present a series of reimagined versions of the blue, yellow, and green standard to open this sprawling exhibition (over 400 objects divided between eight thematic chapters, the first of which is titled “Flags”). Abdias Nascimento’s Okê Oxóssi (1970), in which the late artist and activist inserts symbols of Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion, into the composition and palette of the original national design, subverts the European Christianity that has long held power in the country. It hangs alongside Mulambö’s Remembering Thy Noble Presence (2021), a funereal silhouette of the globe and diamond motif made from black plastic rubbish bags; and Leandro Vieira’s Brazilian Flag (2019), a rendition of the …
Nour Mobarak’s “Dafne Phono”
Jennifer Piejko
When the nymph Daphne refused Apollo’s advances, the god’s patience ran out quickly. “This is the way a sheep runs from the wolf […] everything flies from its foes, but it is love that is driving me to follow you!” Daphne took the only means of escape available to her: she prayed for transformation into a laurel tree. Apollo nonetheless claimed her as “my tree,” and so the laurel wreath became an emblem of power worn by royalty, gods, and victors in competition. It is also a symbol closely associated with the Medici family, patrons of the very first opera, most of the music from which has been lost: Ottavio Rinuccini and Jacopo Peri’s La Dafne, performed at the Palazzo Corsi in 1598.
Nour Mobarak’s sound installation Dafne Phono (2022) takes the myth to its acoustic limits, playing a new composition based on La Dafne through sixteen channels into a spare, industrial loft on a street in downtown Los Angeles that still bustles at sundown. Mobarak’s version is sung in six languages that collectively cover the widest possible phonetic ground: the original Italian, Abkhaz, San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, Silbo Gomero, and Taa (West !Xoon dialect), as well as Ovid’s …
Rachel Cusk & Chris Kontos’s Marble in Metamorphosis
Aliki Panagiotopoulou
In 1894, just a year after Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis had declared Greece bankrupt, Athens was chosen to host the first modern Olympics. The occasion demanded the total refurbishment of the Panathenaic Stadium, a venue used for athletic competitions since ancient times. As the city embarked on this expensive endeavor, someone (the Olympic committee, mayor, or king, according to different versions of the story) posed the question “Ποιος θα πληρώσει το μάρμαρο;” [Who is going to pay for the marble?] In the decades since, the ancient Greek word has come to acquire a new significance in the modern vernacular: that of damage.
Marble in Metamorphosis, a book which “contemplates the physical and cultural life of marble,” is published by an Australian property development company active in Athens. Much like a mockup apartment, everything about this object is designed to showcase the company’s taste: an essay by Rachel Cusk, Chris Kontos’s sleek photographs of Athens and the island of Tinos, excerpts from poems by major Greek poets Giorgos Seferis and Yannis Ritsos, and a poetic afterword by Nadine Monem, all make for a chokehold of beauty. Yet, in recent years, public policies that prioritise property over home, investment over sanctuary, and …
“That’s not it”
Daisy Hildyard
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between artists and writers. Following on from her essay on Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for Textwork, the novelist Daisy Hildyard considers the importance of unknowing and vulnerability in any critical response to a work of art.
There is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop about a sandpiper, a small seabird who is seen running along the shoreline, stabbing his head in the sand for grubs. On a frantic mission for food, “His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,/ looking for something, something, something. Poor bird, he is obsessed!” This attention is sadly misplaced: Bishop’s sandpiper, in his “state of controlled panic,” is oblivious to the ocean that roars right next to him.
The sandpiper is overlaid in my mind with a passage from Virginia Woolf’s diaries in which she describes her experience as an obsessive search for something—but she doesn’t know what. “I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say ‘This is it’? […] I’m looking: but that’s not it—that’s not it. What is it?” I see …
Clearing the air
The Editors
In a conversation to be published this month, the architect Andrés Jaque identifies “ultra-clearness” as the presiding aesthetic of twenty-first-century power. Speaking in the context of our series on the “ecological turns” in contemporary culture, he warns that the drive to detoxify wealthy western cities—realized through clean air schemes and in the extractive processes underlying the immaculate design of Apple stores and luxury property developments—does not reflect an improvement in environmental standards so much as the displacement of ecological disaster onto populations outside the city centers, whether in the US Midwest or the Global South. Cleaning up the spaces occupied by the rich comes, more often than not, at the expense of poisoning the poor.
The impulse to purge well-resourced public spaces of anything that dirties the atmosphere might have an analogy in the cultural field. The process of removing uncomfortable—even harmful—elements from the rarefied air of metropolitan museums and university curricula raises some of the same questions. Whose wellbeing is being protected? Is there a danger that excluding these elements only serves to shift their consequences onto populations less insulated by money and influence against their effects? Elizabeth Povinelli has pointed out, in her writing on toxic late liberalism, …
“The double bind”: on Documenta 15
Skye Arundhati Thomas
In the third of our dispatches from Documenta 15 over the course of its 100 days, Skye Arundhati Thomas reflects on the exhibition’s foregrounding of collectives from the Global South, how this has been received, and what it might mean for the future of exhibition-making.
Collectives are often born out of necessity. In India, where I live, I see how essential communal endeavors can become: raising money for bail bonds, distributing funds for the living costs of members, building infrastructure. Collectives of this kind—often occupying a blurred borderland between activism, art, and social work—respond to a political and social alienation bred from the breakup of communities under the mechanisms of authoritarianism. In situations of near continuous emergency, and in the absence of welfare states, public funding, and institutions, the task of providing support and crisis work often falls onto individuals and their capacity to build community.
“Lumbung,” the Indonesian rice barn which serves as the curatorial proposition of ruangrupa’s Documenta 15, is a means by which to collect, store, and share resources. In keeping with that principle, theirs is a show engineered towards a relational rather than an aesthetic experience. Fourteen primary participating collectives were given €25,000 as “seed money,” …
Manifesta 14, “It matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise”
Cathryn Drake
For its 14th edition, the nomadic European biennial Manifesta has taken up temporary residence in various cultural institutions and derelict spaces in and around Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, where creative mediator Catherine Nichols invited artists and practitioners to explore modes of storytelling across cultures. As a contested nation state, Kosovo embodies many of the most pressing and complex issues facing society today. When is a country a country? How many people have to say it is for it to be? Who has the authority to declare a territory as a nation? Does the population need to be homogenous? Who is nationalism good for? How can we all live together and be free? Roaming the city in search of the exhibitions and “artistic interventions”—by 102 artists in 25 locations, from an Ottoman-era hammam to a former brick factory—I attempted to plot pieces of the puzzle into a coherent picture. Interacting with locals in Pristina was inevitable, both to find the far-flung (and often vaguely signposted) locations and to glean how the tumultuous, not-so-distant past led to the complex present.
The main exhibition, titled “The Grand Scheme of Things,” is hosted on seven floors of the Grand Hotel Pristina, a decadent …
2nd Front International, “Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows”
Ladi’Sasha Jones
The poetic invocations of Langston Hughes ground the 2022 Front Triennial, an exhibition spanning over thirty sites across three cities in Northeast Ohio—Cleveland, Oberlin and Akron. At Transformer Station, a private museum owned by the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Foundation in the rapidly changing Ohio City neighborhood, visitors are greeted by a series of archival reproductions of drafts of the poem from which the exhibition takes its title, Hughes’s “Two Somewhat Different Epigrams” (1957), showing the delicate changes the poet made to his now-famous lines. Within an exhibition focusing on healing and the civic potential of artistic processes, these records make visible the art and practice of revision, and stand here as a critical exchange on what it means to bear witness to the ephemeral.
It’s a fitting opening for an exhibition featuring several community collaborations as well as activations of public commons, historic sites, and cultural institutions, and with several outstanding performance elements. A multi-day boat trip from Buffalo, New York to Cleveland’s harbor marked the beginning for Asad Raza’s performance work Delegation (2022). A brass band ushered participants into the Old Stone Church with a rendition of Civil Rights anthem “This Little Light of Mine.” Inside, the …
Tony Cokes’s “Fragments, or just Moments”
Harry Burke
Walking into “Fragments, or just Moments” at Haus der Kunst is like walking into a club. Blue lighting animates the subterranean LSK Gallery, while atmospheric techno—the audio of Tony Cokes’s Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 (2022)—thuds in the corridor. The effect is uncanny, not least as the bunker was formerly an air raid shelter created by the National Socialist party—as three shower cubicles by the entrance, among other eerie details, testify.
In this retrospective, which spans this venue, the Kunstverein München, and two public sites, Cokes stages a haunting conversation with Munich’s past. 1937 is the year that the Haus der Kunst, designed by Hitler’s “master builder” Paul Troost, opened its doors. In 1972, the city’s Olympic Games, which West Germany hoped would repair its international standing, were overshadowed by the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by affiliates of the Black September Organization, a Palestinian militant group. In the postwar years, Germany undertook a determined program of de-Nazification, and today is reckoning with its colonialism.
In a change of tune from Cokes’s celebrated text animations of the last two decades, which mostly shun representational imagery, Some Munich Moments (different edits of which appear at each venue) features scenes of a comprehensively …
Lungiswa Gqunta’s “Sleep in Witness”
Novuyo Moyo
Though not officially a part of the exhibition, the enormous black-and-white photograph on the exterior of the Henry Moore Institute—the image also appears on promotional material—anticipates the works shown inside. It depicts four Black women posing and gesturing playfully by some rocks on a beach. The women are a part of Lungiswa Gqunta’s family, and the photo was taken in mid-1970s South Africa at the height of Apartheid, when the best parts of the country’s vast coastline were delegated for the use of white people only. With this additional information, the photograph captures a moment of resistance, pointing to one of the many ways in which Black people reclaimed their rights to access, freedom, and movement.
Gqunta was born in 1990, four years before South Africa held its first democratic elections with universal suffrage. This period may have brought an end to the legislative system of Apartheid, but its effects endure—a point to which she constantly returns in her practice. This economical show opens with Zinodaka (2022), an installation that takes up the entire floor of the first room, meaning the visitor has to walk over it to get to the other galleries. In the work, a thin, patchy layer of …
Daniel Otero Torres’s “Las huellas del viento”
Jayne Wilkinson
It’s a rare artist who combines deep research into histories of colonization with the technical draughtsmanship necessary for near-photographic expressive figuration. This is the kind of work for which Daniel Otero Torres—a Colombian artist based in Paris—has become known. His detailed, hyper-realistic drawings on large, flat sheets of steel or aluminum reproduce archival photographs by adjusting scale and composition to create the larger-than-life creaturely figures that populate his installations. Taking cues from archaeology, magical realism, and mythology, the works include many visual references that address pre-Columbian histories across Latin America. In his newest work for “Las huellas del viento” (the exhibition’s poetic title translates to “the traces of the wind”) Torres extends these concerns to the industrialization and financialization of nature, a complex topic handled here with nuance. The show comprises steel sculptures, a five-panel wall work, a hanging installation, and a series of ceramic vessels, with each group exploring a different natural commodity—bananas, corn, and poppies—that has been intensively mono-cropped and tightly controlled in order to produce corporate wealth rather than communal resources.
Bananas are one of the world’s most popular fruits, and not by accident. The United Fruit Company, a twentieth-century multinational corporation, is largely credited with developing …
Reclamation in Whose Name?
Natasha Marie Llorens
“Ecological turns” is a series in which writers consider how the ecological discourse is shaping the production, exhibition, and reception of contemporary art. In this instalment, Natasha Marie Llorens reflects on a group exhibition at Palais de Tokyo which takes a “rallying cry” for a title: “Reclaim the Earth.”
Solange Pessoa’s long swaths of felted horsehair, culled and woven together over many years, are suspended from the Palais de Tokyo’s high ceilings, their rough surfaces and variegated brown tones visible from a distance as I enter the gallery. Cathedral (1990–2003) is part of a group show entitled “Reclaim the Earth,” encompassing the work of fourteen artists, conceived as a multi-generational and multi-cultural “rallying cry” in response to climate collapse. Pessoa’s references to horses imported to Brazil by the Spanish are described by the wall label as evocative of “distant memories of Brazil’s colonization by the Europeans,” and the artist’s contribution to the exhibition is summarized as animating “both living and non-living elements, mixing present time with the ancestral past.” I am attracted to the abject quality of Pessoa’s lines traced over the ghost image of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia Cathedral, but I balk at the softness of the generalization “European colonization,” …
Jeannette Ehlers’s “Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms”
Tobias Dias
Jeannette Ehlers has for many years confronted viewers with the repressed history of colonial exploitation on which large parts of Denmark’s wealth is built. In the old and new works that comprise her solo show at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, “Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms,” the Danish-Trinidadian artist looks at this history—in particular how it relates to the Black diaspora—across various media. As a whole, the show forms an open, lively archive with no definitive beginning or end: softly tangled braids of brown and black hair appear in several rooms and extend beyond the Kunsthal’s walls, with dance rhythms and singing voices carrying in one of the performance works taking place outside the museum.
In the first room of the exhibition, the large-scale, portrait-format video Moko is Future (2022) features Moko Jumbie, a mythical figure from Afro-Caribbean folklore. Dressed in carnivalesque clothes, masks, and stilts, Moko is shown ascending from the Atlantic Ocean and dancing through Copenhagen’s streets, with its monuments to dead white men, to bring spiritual healing. “Until the lion has their historian, the hunter will always be a hero” is spelled out in pink neon on one of the walls at Charlottenborg—a found text Ehlers saw …
“Shared memories”
Akin Oladimeji / Jelili Atiku
Last month the Lagos-based artist Jelili Atiku trod tenderly through a public square in London, weighed down by maquettes strapped to his feet. Small sculptures, mounted on a large cardboard box daubed with “Pfizer,” “Kano,” and “1996,” obscured his vision. The performance—titled Wórowòro, Kóbokòbo and shown as part the group exhibition “In a Pot of Hot Soup: Art and the Articulation of Politics in Nigeria” at the Brunei Gallery in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London—was Atiku’s response to the Pfizer drug trial scandal of 1996 and its impact on our pandemic-scarred present. During that controversy, the pharmaceutical giant pledged to combat a meningitis epidemic in Kano, northern Nigeria, by trialling a new drug on 200 infected children, leaving eleven dead and dozens more injured.
Atiku’s work across drawing, multimedia installation, and performance combines Yoruba performance traditions with political activism to address subjects including human rights abuses and postcolonial trauma, at times with the intention of directly provoking political change. In 2016, he was arrested in Ejigbo, Lagos, on charges of “public disturbance and inciting the public” over his performance work Aragamago Will Rid this Land of Terrorism. The piece, which invoked Yoruba …
“Towards Life”
Chus Martínez
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between artists and writers. In her essay on the work of Martine Aballéa for Textwork, Chus Martínez considered how its new “ways of sensing” the world might suggest new ways of acting within it. This curiosity about how other consciousnesses—human and nonhuman—construct their surroundings also characterizes Martínez’s work as artistic director of TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice, which is dedicated to improving our understanding of the oceans through art, and as director of the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. This conversation picks up threads from that text, ranging from what it means to think of art as a living being to why she retains “the highest respect for joy.”
art-agenda: You write beautifully of how reality is constructed by our sensory faculties: so the world as inhabited by a human does not only look different but is different to the world inhabited by, to take your example, a turtle. How can art help us to reconstruct the world?
Chus Martínez: I am always fascinated by how we fantasize: how fantasy allows the human …
A carrier bag theory of criticism
The Editors
Chris Kraus suggested a couple of years ago that art criticism might soon be replaced by conversations around art. The sentiment reflects one tendency in the culture: broadly speaking, the shift away from individual pronouncements on objects produced by solitary geniuses and towards communal discussions around the products of communities and co-operatives (even if expressed in the work of a single artist). This more pluralistic future—in which both the production and reception of art are understood to be collective endeavors—is to be hoped for and worked towards. In many senses, of course, it has already arrived.
Today’s dramatically altered media landscape means that no-one must any longer rely on a single authority for information on what is being presented in galleries, museums, and elsewhere. Access to exhibitions in other cities is not limited to a short review and a black-and-white installation shot in one of a handful of print publications. Now, our feeds are filled with snapshots from the previews captioned with expressions of support or dissent. This brings significant benefits: we learn about shows that we might never have heard about elsewhere, filtered through a variety of perspectives, and the conversation accommodates voices that might not …
Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams’s Diego Garcia
Orit Gat
The narrator of Diego Garcia, a novel written collaboratively by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, is sometimes a he, sometimes a she, always a we. When its two speakers, Oliver and Damaris, are not together, the narrative can fracture into separate columns. They live in Edinburgh. It’s 2014. “We” walk to the library; “he” makes coffee in the morning; “she” loves the cardamom buns at the Swedish café. The city is a backdrop to their conversations about Theodor Adorno and James Baldwin, the Velvet Underground, writing, and money; they discuss their debts in numbers, their credit scores in terms of unavailable futures. On the streets are posters for the Scottish Independence referendum.
Their life feels detached until one day they meet Diego. Diego is Chagossian, from the community exiled to Mauritius and the Seychelles by the British government between 1967 and 1973 so that the island of Diego Garcia could be turned into a US military base. Diego—the name he adopted in acknowledgement of his lost homeland—meets them one night for a drink. They never see Diego again, but before he leaves he tells Damaris his life story: how he grew up in Mauritius and ended up undocumented in the …
“Contested Histories”: on Documenta 15
Jörg Heiser
In the second of our dispatches from Documenta 15 over the course of its 100 days, Jörg Heiser considers the row over anti-Semitic content that erupted shortly after the exhibition’s opening.
This January, a Kassel-based group called Bündnis gegen Antisemitismus [Alliance Against Anti-Semitism], which prides itself on anti-Muslim racism (“we make no secret of the fact that we take a critical view of Islam”), published a post on its blog. The post denounced members of ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective curating this year’s Documenta, as well as members of the exhibition’s Finding Committee and Artistic Team, as anti-Semites, pointing to their support—amongst 16,000 other co-signers—for the May 2021 “Letter against Apartheid.” (I haven’t signed the letter because I disagree with its terminology and some of its demands, but the assumption that everyone who did is automatically an anti-Semite is absurd.) In a newspaper interview in January, German Historian Ulrich Schneider—federal spokesman of the anti-fascist Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes [Association of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime]—described the “alliance” as “concerned with denouncing people who are critical of Israel’s occupation policy. They deliberately use the blanket accusation of anti-Semitism as a killer argument.” Nevertheless, a string of newspaper articles across …
Hernan Bas & Zadie Xa’s “House Spirits”
Danica Sachs
There’s a spot in the two-person exhibition “House Spirits” from which Hernan Bas’s large-scale painting Disco Demolition Night (all works 2022) appears framed by Zadie Xa’s shamanic robe Kimchi rites, kitchen rituals, hanging near the front of the gallery, and her kaleidoscopic constellation in stitched linen-and-denim, Seven full moons, on the back wall. In this sightline, the artists seem an unlikely pairing: the content and references of Xa’s fabric works draw on her Korean heritage while Bas’s acrylic paintings are rooted in white American pop culture. In bringing these two artists into dialogue, however, this exhibition foregrounds the way each traffics in a kind of visual folklore. The tension between the former’s new, hybrid identities and the latter’s melancholy depictions of the demise of a monolithic culture reflects changing social dynamics.
Two of Xa’s brightly colored robes hang opposite each other, suspended from the ceiling. The open folds on the front of Princess Bari fall in concentric half circles, made of linen hand-dyed in shades of coral, chartreuse, and sky blue, the hues seeping together to create a riotous sunset. The back is festooned with stitched knives and a cascade of rainbow ribbons running down the back, each ending with …
“A new kind of archive”
Dina Ramadan / Mahmoud Khaled
Mahmoud Khaled has in recent years taken the house museum—a space dedicated to the legacy of the person (real or invented) who lived there—as his medium. Beginning with “Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man” at the 15th Istanbul Biennial in 2017, Khaled has used these imagined sets to explore the violence and power of memorialization. In his first UK solo exhibition at The Mosaic Rooms, “Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost it,” the Berlin-based, Egyptian artist transforms the gallery space into a domestic setting. This immersive environment—featuring murals, sculpture, photography, a sound piece, and an artist’s book—imagines the life of the anonymous owner of a misplaced phone in order to commemorate it. This project builds on Khaled’s continued interest in museums and archives as apparatuses of history-telling that can be reappropriated to document and celebrate marginalized queer lives. His work examines the tension between the public and the private, as well as the relationships between identity, anonymity, and intimacy.
Dina Ramadan: Your first use of the form of the house museum memorialized a character you call the “unknown crying man.” Who was this figure?
Mahmoud Khaled: The image that started …
American Artist’s “Shaper of God”
Jonathan Griffin
About 15 minutes’ drive from the mirrored towers of downtown Los Angeles, a shady canyon throngs with oaks, willows, sycamores, and cottonwoods. Treefrog tadpoles wriggle in the creek. Snakes hunt among the rocks. Visitors to Hahamongna Watershed Park, named after the Tongvan village that once existed there, also cannot miss the adjacent white buildings of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a giant research facility owned by NASA.
This discordant landscape, according to a text accompanying American Artist’s exhibition “Shaper of God,” was an inspiration to the science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, who set several of her novels in nearby Altadena and Pasadena, where she lived for much of her life. (Butler died in 2006, at 58.) The exhibition, dominated by recreations of urban street furniture, is really a single installation made from several semi-autonomous artworks. Its enigmatic title derives from a verse in the fictional religious text The Books of the Living, quoted in Butler’s nightmarish futurist novel Parable of the Sower (1993): “We do not worship God. / We perceive and attend God. / We learn from God. / With forethought and work, / We shape God.”
Among other themes, Parable of the Sower is about self-determination in the …
Documenta 15, “lumbung”
Kevin Brazil
In the first of our dispatches from Documenta 15 over the next 100 days, Kevin Brazil considers the exhibition as an experiment in “the art of administration.”
At the opening press conference of Documenta 15, held in a Kassel sports stadium, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa invited the audience to sing along, “karaoke style,” to a music video created by Tropical Tap Water. In the lexicon of terms developed by ruangrupa to explain their curatorial ethos, this video was a “harvest”—a gathering of the fruits of a process—undertaken by one of the 1,500 artists working and sharing resources within the Documenta ekosistem (a more limited number are invited to exhibit). It showed people painting and playing music in studios, with diagrams and flowcharts mapping the stages by which the song was created. Lyrics flashed on screen, riffing on the idea of a “baskom,” or washbowl: “To decentralize Europe / We use the baskom.” Some of the participating artists half-heartedly clapped along, but the audience was otherwise largely silent.
Collaboration, participation, and process over product: these are the practices ruangrupa aim to foster in the activities—from childcare to composting—taking place across Documenta’s 100 days. And, indeed, in the meetings, financing, and …
Diamela Eltit’s “Custody of the Eyes”
Olivia Casa
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in recent art history by returning to an influential exhibition, artwork, or text from the past and reflecting on its relevance to the present. In this edition, Olivia Casa takes a new translation of Diamela Eltit’s Los vigilantes (1994) as an opportunity to highlight her pioneering artistic activism.
Diamela Eltit was a key member of the Escena de Avanzada, a group of Chilean artists and writers who denounced Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in the aftermath of the 1973 US-backed coup that overthrew Salvador Allende. Varying in their approaches, they were united in their search for experimental strategies that would confront the regime’s policies and discourse—an aim epitomized by Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), of which Eltit was a founding member.
The reissue of Eltit’s 1994 novel Los vigilantes, published in English as Custody of the Eyes, offers an opportunity to consider the relevance of the Escena de Avanzada to contemporary debates about art’s discursive strategies under repression. An epistolary novel narrated through a series of desperate letters dispatched by “Mama,” or Margarita, from a dystopian, authoritarian city, it leads us through a series of increasingly sinister events in which citizens are turned against one …
12th Berlin Biennale, “Still Present!”
Jesi Khadivi
As curator of the twelfth edition of the Berlin Biennale, Kader Attia continues his ongoing engagement with notions of injury and repair. There is precedent for this in his own artistic practice: the sprawling installation The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012) staged reconstructed artifacts from ethnological collections that clearly reveal their stitching and staples, drawing a contrast with Western approaches to restoration that conceal an object’s damage and thereby silence the many stories it might tell. In the series “Repaired Broken Mirror” (2013–21), Attia sutured nondescript fractured mirrors with crude materials like staples or copper wire, a gesture of repair which appeared no less brutal than the act of breaking. The visible scars and reflective surface feel emblematic of this exhibition’s aspirations to hold a mirror to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, sweeping environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and forced displacement due to war and climate change—and to propose ways forward.
Through works by 82 artists and collectives displayed across six venues, Attia endeavors to foster spaces of “collective speech and reflection” that respond to the accumulated, unhealed wounds that have been rendered invisible by discourses of expansionism, algorithmic governance, and 24/7 capitalism. Working against the universalist claims of …
ORTA’s “LAI-PI-CHU-PLEE-LAPA Centre for the New Genius”
Inga Lāce
Organized by the transdisciplinary ORTA collective and based on the writings of Kazakhstani artist, writer, and inventor Sergey Kalmykov (1891–1967), the Kazakhstan Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale comprises immersive scenography made from the simplest materials. When I visited during the opening days, grayish wrapping paper enveloped the space from floor to ceiling, providing a background to printouts and props covered in aluminum foil and activated by participatory performances that the collective call “spectacular experiments.” This is the first year that Kazakhstan has participated in the Venice Biennale on its own, and the same goes for Uzbekistan and the Kyrgyz Republic: since 2005, these countries have shown as part of the Central Asian Pavilion.
Ten days before the opening of the biennale, ORTA realized that the long-planned delivery of artworks and materials from Kazakhstan would not arrive in time. The war in Ukraine meant that trucks that would usually cross Russia and Belarus—including those from Kazakhstan—were being rerouted through Georgia and Azerbaijan. This not only rendered visible the often-hidden logistical and financial efforts that organizers have to go through, pointing to the extreme inequality at the very foundation of the national pavilion format, but also made the pavilion a makeshift …
Anne Imhof’s “AVATAR”
R.H. Lossin
“AVATAR” is an installation featuring rows of industrial lockers, cored concrete blocks, a large, three-panel painting of clouds, figurative drawings, and new additions to Anne Imhof’s series of “Scratch Paintings”—large aluminum panels coated in custom automobile paint with patterns scratched into them by the artist. While no performance will be held here, it is impossible not to think of it as a set absent the actors—which, given the function of lockers and the potential density of bodies in a locker room, isn’t far-fetched, even if we bracket the German artist’s fame as a dramaturge. The lockers containing concrete blocks as a way of staging giant, slightly abstracted car doors is almost too literal if you have even a glancing, film-based familiarity with industrial production. The untitled cloud painting is compelling—beautiful in a Monet’s waterlilies sort of way. The drawings—mostly hung in a back space that functions as an office—are likely there so people have something to buy. The show is fine. Imhof is a talented painter and draughtswoman. One could leave it at that if it weren’t for the ghosts of bodies that might use the lockers on the way into a General Motors plant.
Imhof continues to describe herself …
Pipilotti Rist’s “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor”
Terry R. Myers
“Stay home.” Where or when does comfort become confinement? Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition in MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary warehouse invites us to take an entertaining, even rejuvenating stroll through Rist’s “neighborhood,” a place provocatively split in two, where the bodies on screens present little to no risk and plenty of reward.
As a survey of Rist’s substantial production from 1986 to the present, “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” sets out to achieve the kind of wish-fulfilment its title proposes. Moving from the entrance past a theatrical curtain into the exhibition, the neighborhood is suddenly there below—we enter from slightly above—all at once a stage set and an apparition, aglow with colorful imagery moving across the walls of its buildings and the communal grounds surrounding them, caught in the middle of a kind of pre-performance begun before we even arrived. (Or, more likely, a sequence that neither starts nor stops, just exists.) There are also sounds, voices even. At first they seem to be over … there, beckoning from the housing or near the picnic tables in a park, but then, there she is, that small mirage and small voice crying out at your feet.
What to do here with one of Rist’s …
New criteria
The Editors
In her recently published book, reviewed last month in these pages, Karen Archey made the case for critique—of art institutions, but more widely of the frameworks of governance by which our societies are organized—as an act of care. To hold something to account, she argues, is not to denigrate it but quite the opposite: we criticize the institutions we care about in order to improve them. Critique is not a weapon to be brandished against our enemies, a merely rhetorical means of demonstrating the “rightness” of one pre-established position over another. Instead it is a process by which to measure the degree to which the institutions we have a stake in are meeting their responsibilities. This process facilitates the reform that must be never-ending—the permanent revolution—if those institutions are to continue to serve the evolving needs of the people for whom they were established.
That criticism is not hostile to its object feels like a principle worth restating, when so much of the discourse—not only around contemporary art, but the societies it represents—feels like so many different ways of justifying a fixed political position. Criticism, in the above formulation, works against that tendency. Because it is predicated on judging …
Karen Archey’s After Institutions
Ben Eastham
The question of whether and how contemporary art can contribute to the reform of society is, let’s say, increasingly pressing. Emerging from a cancelled exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, where Karen Archey is curator of contemporary art, this book-length essay posits a “reinvigorated” Institutional Critique as the best available means to this end. Featuring artists from Hans Haacke to A.K. Burns, the show aimed to reflect the influence on cultural production of the post-2008 economic recession and social movements including Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. In articulating the ideas behind it, After Institutions makes the case for works of art that, by situating their critique in institutions ranging from healthcare to education, might meaningfully change them.
To demonstrate that this is the natural next step in the evolution of what Archey, following Andrea Fraser, calls a “methodology” rather than a movement, she divides a potted history of Institutional Critique into three “waves.” Emerging out of the overwhelmingly white and Eurocentric context of western Conceptual Art in the late 1960s, the first focused its critique on the social and economic structures supporting the art institution. In order to resist its recuperation by the market and foreground idea over …
Bani Abidi’s “The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared”
Sadia Shirazi
In Chicago, during the anti-racism protests against police violence in the summer of 2020, river bridges were raised and steel barricades erected by police to corral demonstrators. These very same barriers, now painted bright red, greet visitors as they enter Bani Abidi’s survey at the MCA, in its third iteration after stints in Berlin and Sharjah. The exhibition includes video, performance, sound installation, and print-based work spanning over two decades, and draws together her long-standing interest in power, securitization, and everyday life, marked by moments of humor and absurdity. Collectively, Abidi’s practice might be seen to illustrate Henri Lefebvre’s suggestion that “the critique of everyday life involves a critique of political life, in that everyday life already contains and constitutes such a critique: in that it is that critique.”
A trio of split-screen videos that Abidi made as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago form the core of the exhibition, clustered together and displayed on box monitors. In each video—The News (2001), Anthems (2000), and Mangoes (1999)—the artist plays two characters—an Indian and a Pakistani—whose identities emerge from sartorial, discursive, and linguistic differences, revealing the codes that constitute their differentiated national identities. The viewer is forced …
Tarek Atoui’s “The Whisperers”
Rachel Valinsky
Near the entrance of the Contemporary’s street-level gallery, a long chain hanging from the ceiling rigging traces a circular motion around an oxidized cymbal. In the sculptural assemblage The Whisperers: Infinite Ballet Solo (2020–21) these pieces are connected via a long brass rod to a wooden box perched atop a concrete pedestal, and to other nearby elements. The mesmeric, metallic rub and scrape generated by the chain’s slow trajectory is miked, and can be isolated if listened to in headphones nearby, but it’s just as audible at the other end of the gallery, where it coalesces into the overarching din of the soundscape.
Tarek Atoui’s exhibition “The Whisperers” is a meticulously orchestrated playground in which each “tool for listening,” as he calls them, triggers a mechanism that generates a series of chain reactions and feedback effects. These new sculptures, first exhibited at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris last year, emerged out of a collaboration with a class of kindergarten students on an ongoing sound workshop. They conserve their experimental, ludic quality with playful titles given for the form each assemblage evokes, or the associations it whimsically stirs up. Underwater Birds (2020–21), for instance, fosters a set of aquatic plants, while …
Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group’s “Happy Spring”
Jason Waite
A number of art exhibitions have, in recent years, disrupted cultural institutions in Japan. Take the allegations of censorship at the 2016 MOT Annual, which resulted in two curators being let go, or the temporary closure of the 2019 Aichi Triennale after violent threats were made against its organizers. To this list can be added “Happy Spring” at the Mori Art Museum, the work of the six-person, Tokyo-based collective founded in 2005 and known at the time of the show’s opening as Chim↑Pom. In late April, the group changed its name to Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group in response to the institution’s refusal of sponsorship from its long-time collaborator Smappa!Group, an organization which runs a number of “host clubs” in Tokyo. The museum claimed this was a “branding” issue; the artists argued that it could be regarded as “discrimination against nightlife workers”—an already stigmatized section of Japanese society. All that can be said with certainty is that this group’s first retrospective, curated by Kenichi Kondo, was long overdue and worth undertaking, although its longer-term effects remain uncertain.
The pulsing, unruly show at Mori Art Museum centers around a replica street shaped like an ouroboros that runs throughout the institution. That this …
London Roundup
Orit Gat
In the local elections held the week before London Gallery Weekend, the residents of Westminster City Council, which covers much of central London, voted Labour into a majority for the first time since the council’s creation in 1964. The vote was partly informed by the Conservative council’s misguided decision, widely publicized in 2021, to spend six million pounds on the “Marble Arch Mound,” a twenty-five-meter-tall astroturf hill and viewing point designed to lure viewers back to the city’s busiest shopping district. It failed: many stores are still covered with for-rent signs, one of which peddled a “blank canvas for new ideas.” These are the visual and linguistic relics of the before-time: they represent old ideas of urban environments and their inhabitants’ habits, and beg the question, “What if we don’t want to return to how things were?”
At Emalin, Augustas Serapinas is displaying eight large black reliefs made of roof shingles taken from a wooden house from his home country, Lithuania. Many of these traditional architectures are now abandoned or destroyed and used for firewood. Serapinas bought one, broke it apart, charred its roof shingles, and repurposed them into monochromes that are part-painting, part-sculpture. They are heavy, loaded with their …
“Dance Reflections”
Isobel Harbison
“WORKING WITH BOTH TRISHA BROWN AND LAURIE ANDERSON WILL BE ONE OF THE MOST UNIQUE THEATRICAL CHALLENGE [sic] IN MY CARREER [sic],” wrote Robert Rauschenberg prior to the production of Set and Reset (1983), in his signature uppercase. “THE EXPERTISE RELIES ON WHAT KIND OF ROOM WE MAKE FOR EACH OTHER. NO ONE COULD BE MORE CURIOUS ABOUT THIS THAN I AM.”
Set and Reset premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in the institution’s inaugural “Next Wave” festival. The collaboration between Anderson, Brown, and Rauschenberg was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts—part of a new grants program supporting the interdisciplinary artistic collaboration increasingly evident in the city—and it became a commercial and critical success. Forty years on, the work headlines “Dance Reflections,” a new international festival of contemporary dance set across London’s Tate Modern, Sadler’s Wells, and the Royal Opera House. While the first festival iteration of Set and Reset elevated avant-garde performance from the ad hoc spaces used by Brown during the 1960s and ’70s onto the grand theatrical stage, this recent one re-grounded it onto a different space altogether: the museum floor. This marks another phase in the life cycle of avant-garde dance: …
Josephine Pryde’s “Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’ & the Gastric Flu”
Travis Diehl
Josephine Pryde’s campily titled show at Reena Spaulings frames the genius of Taylor Swift—her capacity for reinvention and the influence of her confessional songwriting—as a model of the creative process. The story goes that sometime in 2019, Pryde, an English artist known for detourning the conventions of commercial photography, came down with a stomach bug: she spent her convalescence listening repeatedly to Swift’s album Lover, released that same year. In the months since, she produced a series of twelve bronzes by chewing on a piece of gum while remembering a different track, matching her chews to the rhythm of each song in a kind of masticatory lip-sync. She stuck each resulting wad to one of the pieces of driftwood or small rocks scattered around her flat, cast the assemblages in bronze, and patinated the gum part a scaly green. Hannah Wilke, eat your heart out.
Pryde’s goal seems not to relive or remember her illness so much as transpose it into the key of Taylor’s heartbreak. Each piece is titled after the song in Pryde’s head while she made it: “The Archer”; “Paper Rings”; “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince.” The suggestion is that the tenor of each song affected …
Em Rooney’s “Entrance of Butterfly”
R.H. Lossin
“Entrance of Butterfly,” Em Rooney’s third solo show with Derosia (formerly Bodega), consists of six large sculptures and the looping, 11-minute slide show that gives the exhibition its title. The artist has previously integrated photographs into her sculptures, but here the 80 color stills are disaggregated and projected at a notably small scale in a separate gallery: their relation to the sculptural forms is symbolic or narrative rather than material. If these representational images suggest context or content for their more abstract, three-dimensional counterparts, it is only in the most provisional way. The wall-mounted sculptures, titled with reference to films and natural processes, have a descriptive power of their own.
trouble every day (all works 2022) is the approximate size and shape of a headless dress mannequin. Impaled on the steel strip that secures it to the wall, the candy-wrapper quality bestowed by Mylar and coated rice paper is at odds with the violence of a disarticulated female torso. This shape, at once a replica and an encasement of the female body—shiny, blue, aggressively corseted by sharp, rhinestone-studded petals (synthetic whale boning and all)—invites us to dwell on the often incompatible demands made on women’s bodies (literally, materially on them). …
Paulo Nazareth’s “Vuadora”
Oliver Basciano
I often stare open-mouthed at Brazilian supermarket shelves, horrified by the overt racism of some of the branding. One line of cleaning products features a caricature that’s too grim to go into, and would likely have been considered offensive by many as far back as the 1920s. There is a history to all this of course. While they number under half the population, white Brazilians still hold a disproportionate amount of the country’s wealth and power: a legacy of colonialism, slavery, extractionism, but also of the myth of Brazil’s post-racial utopia to which many in the country still cling (a multiculturalism partly due to the post-abolitionist government’s desire to “whiten” the population by inviting immigration from Europe and Asia in the late nineteenth century). That is a lot to unpack from the weekly shop.
Some of these dubiously branded products caught the eye of Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth too, who uses them as the basis for his critique of the art world’s tendency to transform cultural identity into commercial capital. In his series “Ovo de Colombo” (Egg of Columbus, 2020), one of the first bodies of works encountered in this expansive retrospective of art made over 17 years, they …
Elmgreen & Dragset’s “Useless Bodies?”
Cathryn Drake
The sleek, sardonic work of Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset has found a consummate context in the Fondazione Prada, a private museum founded by luxury fashion entrepreneurs. The question mark in the exhibition title—“Useless Bodies?”—signals an interrogation of the human body as a viable organ in contemporary society, played out within the context of a western-centric ideal of beauty and vitality.
The main space, called the Podium and employed in all the term’s senses of stage, soapbox, and platform, is arrayed with human figures engaged in related but disassociated activities. Classical marble nudes—tautly muscled athletes, a young shepherd with a dog, and a reclining gladiator among them—mingle with bronze sculptures of pubescent boys to suggest a diorama in an archaeological museum. The only woman represented is Pregnant White Maid (2017), regarding a petulant, pouting schoolboy (Invisible, 2017) with her eyes decidedly shut. All of the contemporary bronze figures are lacquered in opaque white or buffed to a brilliant glow, with the exception of a striking black Runner, from the first century BC, idealized with Caucasian features and a startlingly realistic gaze.
Like a terrarium, the main space is transparent yet hermetic, enhancing a sense of highly visible isolation, not …
“One long crime”
Lawrence Abu Hamdan / Skye Arundhati Thomas
On August 4, 2020, a 2,750-ton cache of ammonium nitrate exploded at a warehouse of the main port in Beirut, Lebanon, in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. An enormous toxic red cloud hung for days over the city; according to Human Rights Watch, 300,000 people were displaced by the damage, 7,000 injured, 218 killed. An official investigation is ongoing, and no clear resolutions have yet been found. The city—and country—has since been subject to long power blackouts, a collapse of healthcare infrastructure, and skyrocketed inflation. “My government did this,” reads a graffiti scrawled in black ink by the side of the port. The artist and self-styled “private ear” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who has previously conducted sonic investigations into asylum tribunals in the UK and ballistic reports of instances of military brutality in Palestine, turned his attention to these events; judging the explosion the result of state negligence, he began to map out a longer history of governmental corruption and military occupation in the region.
On 8 March, 2022, a crowd gathered in Sharjah’s “Flying Saucer,” a Brutalist theatre shaped like a star, where Abu Hamdan presented an audiovisual essay. He circled the perimeter slowly as we …
How Soon is Now?
The Editors
On the evening of the first preview day of the Venice Biennale, I had dinner at the house of a friend who lives in the city. The writers around the table were, as always, worrying about how they were going to find the time to see everything in the exhibition, formulate an intelligent response to it, and file their reviews before their deadlines in the coming days. Which prompted the host, having sympathized with their predicament, to direct her next question to me, the only editor present: “What’s the rush?”
The implications of the question were clear (at least to someone who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about these things). When everything is on social media within minutes of the exhibition’s doors opening anyway, and the preview is spent dodging people taking selfies to post alongside snap judgements, why not give critics more time to consider their opinions? However useful they are for people running around Venice, the proliferation of listicles with titles like “Best Five Pavilions at the Biennale” and “Standout Works from the International Exhibition” contribute to a discourse which is more about identifying winners and losers in the snakes-and-ladders of professional art than reflecting on …
Erin L. Thompson’s Smashing Statues
R.H. Lossin
Amid the waves of protests against the murder of unarmed black people by the police, many more US citizens began to question the validity of statues honoring men who massacred the continent’s indigenous inhabitants, owned slaves, and otherwise profited from the suffering, exploitation, and death of mostly non-European people. Some statues were successfully pulled down by crowds, others damaged, removed under the cover of night, and placed in storage. But most of these sculptures, as Erin L. Thompson documents in her much-needed history of public monuments and social change, have been legally protected in perpetuity by state legislatures. Take for example the Confederate Memorial Carving on Stone Mountain, which is the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world and depicts the heroes of the slave South Jefferson Davis, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Robert E. Lee as they ride toward something—possibly a future in which they exercise an inordinate influence. Thompson, a specialist in art crime, has written a thoroughly researched, convincing, and readable argument for the removal of the United States’ monuments to its colonial and slave history: in doing so, her book eradicates any lingering doubts as to the wisdom of suppressing these symbolic markers of the past.
Advocates of …
Elbert Joseph Perez’s “Just Living the Dream”
Hallie Ayres
A pristine, nondescript hammer dangles upside down from the skylight in Rachel Uffner’s upstairs gallery. Situated on a pedestal directly underneath are three porcelain figurines: a swan, a lamb, and a pony. Arranged in a congregation that is as tender as it is eerie, the figurines exude a fragility that is exacerbated tenfold by the hammer’s precarious installation. The notion that moments of suspension—of disbelief or otherwise—can so quickly turn catastrophic runs through the rest of the works on display in “Just Living the Dream,” Elbert Joseph Perez’s first solo gallery show in New York City.
The motif of ceramic figurines of baby animals on the brink of violent extermination recurs throughout Perez’s suite of paintings. The eleven compositions, all oil on canvas, oscillate stylistically between aesthetics of naturalist still life and symbolist metaphysics. Their conventional orientation on the gallery wall belies the foreboding subject matter. Duhkha Aisle (all works 2022) features a ceramic duck in a cowboy hat, an immobile target for the rearing snake in the hellscape behind it, while 16 oz. Migraine positions the glazed upper body of a horse inches away from a glimmering sledgehammer affixed to something beyond the bounds of the canvas by a …
59th Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams”
Quinn Latimer
How to make an exhibition about technologies of gender in the year 2022? About bodies that are symbiotic and prosthetic and in solidarity—an extension of ourselves into other receiving forms, whether animal, vegetal, machinic, spirit, land, human, or otherwise—and about an ecosystem in which the body is seen as a vessel of ancestral and speculative relations and active possibilities? That is, at once mutable, vulnerable, hybrid, Indigenous or diasporic, human or non, but ever transforming and telegrammic? Real queries, I know, but stay with me. We were all once stardust, remember.
Take These Eyes
Djamila Ribeiro has written about understanding “the gender category” from non-Eurocentric sources, taking, for example, the female orixás deities in African-origin religions including Candomblé and Umbanda. This is feminist discourse by other “geographies of reason,” with women of care, women of cult, mythical female ancestors, and African diaspora witches who are, she writes, “the antithesis of any denial of behavioral, political, ethical transcendence that women may represent.” Ribeiro notes, precisely: “From them it is possible to think of a practice that transforms the colonial relations present today.” Her words surfaced in my mind as soon as I entered the opening rotunda of Cecilia Alemani’s exhibition in …
59th Venice Biennale, The National Pavilions
Ben Eastham
Among the many dizzying contradictions that characterize the Venice Biennale is the persistence, amidst the rhetoric of decentering and decolonization, of a national pavilion format that gives prominence to those western powers considered a century ago to constitute the world order. The issues this raises are complicated, in this year’s edition, by apparently conflicting attitudes to the construction of identity (to be affirmed or broken down) and the violability of borders (to be defended or dissolved, sometimes within the same press release). For all of the anachronism and cognitive dissonance, one purpose of the Biennale’s pavilions might be to drag these contradictions—all of which have “real world” analogues or implications—into the light in order to discuss them.
With its façade transformed by hanging thatch into an homage to vernacular African architecture, Simone Leigh’s attention-grabbing US Pavilion is pointedly titled “Sovereignty.” As a counterpoint to Cecilia Alemani’s surrealist-infused international exhibition, which foregrounds fluidity and category slipping, this assertion of the right to self-determination is striking. The sheer physical presence and self-possession of sculptures indebted to African traditions—precisely and sparsely arranged through the pavilion—communicate an identity that is confident, coherent, and secure in its boundaries. Yet the title also draws attention to …
Rabih Mroué’s “Under the Carpet”
Jayne Wilkinson
“One of the main weapons is the image itself.” So proclaims Rabih Mroué in his 2018 lecture-performance Sand in the Eyes. With trademark brevity, his statement articulates the complex recurring strategies—analyzing images as weapons, conflating theatricality with war, reading revolutions through pixels—that underlie Mroué’s multidisciplinary projects as a visual artist, actor, playwright, and director. This mid-career survey, surprisingly also his first solo exhibition in Berlin, brings together two decades of work and, incredibly, eight new commissions produced largely during the pandemic.
In design and execution, its ambitions are staggering. A non-linear constellation of video projections, installations, collages, and archival material are structured around a two-story vertical video that can be seen from all corners of the exhibition’s two floors. With so many video and audio works, the sound bleeds (a plinky xylophone suggestive of a film score’s anxious denouement, punctuations of gunfire and explosions that arrive unexpectedly, the noisy insistence of a film projector) effectively recall the sonic chaos of war while still creating an integrated audio environment.
The imposing central work, Images Mon Amour (2021), loops through imagery culled from Lebanese newspapers, with the benday dots of analog print enlarged and visible. Weaponry, …
Zoe Leonard’s “A View from the Levee”
Jesi Khadivi
Art historian Darby English describes humans’ relationship to the natural world as “an interchange of flow and force,” a phrase that also evokes the way geological forces are harnessed to mark political boundaries. Zoe Leonard’s epic photographic work Al río / To the River, created between 2016 and 2022, comprises approximately 500 black-and-white and 50 color photographs of the river that marks the border between the United States of America and Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Called the Rio Grande by Americans and the Rio Bravo by Mexicans, the numerous violent modifications the river has undergone testify to this entanglement of flow and force: over the last century engineers have forcibly straightened and shortened its meandering natural course by nearly 67 miles, lining its base in concrete so that it may never shift its channel again. The river’s edge is alternately home to cities, towns, border patrols and facilities, grazing animals, and open expanses. In some places it flows wide and mighty, while in others no water runs through, and its cement embankments form what scholar C. J. Alvarez describes as “a massive trapezoidal canvas for graffiti.”
Before Leonard zooms out to capture this interchange, she zooms in. Upon entering “A View …
Patrick Goddard’s “Pedigree”
Tomas Weber
Watching animals in a zoo, Patrick Goddard’s show at Seventeen suggests, disapprovingly, is a bit like looking at art in a gallery: you stroll between marvels, whose only reason for being is to be seen. At the entrance to the gallery are three grisaille ink paintings (all 2022) behind reeded privacy glass. Each stars a bichon frise dog: watching a burning car (Whoopsie at the End of the World), saying “up against the wall!” through a speech bubble (Whoopsie, Up Against the Wall), and next to a naked woman under the word “APOCALYPSE” (Whoopsie’s Dream). Against the quietness of these works on paper, a sculptural installation occupies a whole wall. Plague (Downpour) (2022) consists of 200 falling frogs cast in recycled lead and attached to the wall. Each is unique, its body caught in baroque contortions: some graceful, some agonized, some resigned. These works introduce the show’s prevailing theme of our entanglements with animal life, from pets to pests.
Humans enlist animals into satisfying their needs and desires. Sometimes such animals are threatening or toxic; usually, they are unfathomable. As John Berger points out in “Why Look at Animals?,” a 1977 essay that inspired Goddard, animals have been stripped of …
Dora Budor’s “Continent”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
With my nose to a millimeters-wide gap between wall and floor on the building’s top story, I tune in to a thrumming disruption. Dora Budor has channeled it into the very arteries of the Kunsthaus Bregenz: remote-controlled sex toys have been placed in a ventilation system that should operate invisibly and inaudibly. Instead sound resonates—sometimes faintly, then a crescendo, a solid impression. For an extra frisson, the 2022 work is titled Termites, to spell fear for wooden-building-dwellers the world over. The stimulation might be a gift or a curse.
In his famous 1976 essay, Brian O’Doherty defined what a white cube for art means: a space aspiring to neutrality, even if that is ultimately an illusion. In Bregenz, the architect Peter Zumthor took a controlled environment for display to the next level, creating a blank page onto which art can be written. In an array of sumptuous stone-based material treatments, four high-ceilinged galleries are stacked on top of each other, connected by straight flights of stairs to make a nigh-on spiritual experience. (Spiritual spaces are a Zumthor speciality; among his best-known projects are the Bruder Klaus Feldkapelle, or field chapel, outside Bonn, and the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, which …
Andrea Bowers’s “Can the world mend in this body?”
Brian Karl
Andrea Bowers’s solo show at Jessica Silverman is marked by the artist’s signature combination of directness and nuance. Rooted in eco-feminist engagement and employing a wide range of media—neon signs, drawings on recycled materials, and video documentary—her deftly radical work calls attention to environmental degradation caused by patriarchal systems.
Bowers’s wall-mounted sculpture Rights of Nature I (2022) glows at passersby through the gallery’s street-level storefront window. Green neon tubing, styled in antique Gothic font, evokes legal documents while limning the piece’s title phrase. This in turn seems to emit a yellow speech bubble framing the words “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve” in a contrasting font. This work builds on the use of neon by an earlier generation of artists—Deborah Kass and Bruce Nauman among them—as a communicative medium for political commentary, while continuing to play on and against its conventional employment in commercial signage. Though less dynamic than some of Bowers’s previous witty and sharply political slogans in flashing multicolor lights, it is among her most substantial: a heartfelt and lucid declaration that the Earth and other living creatures should be afforded the same rights, ethical treatments, and legal protections as humans.
Within the gallery, a sister piece is …
“The world is the flask”
Cosmo Sheldrake / Merlin Sheldrake
In this instalment of the “Ecological turns” series, which considers how the production and reception of new art is being informed by developments in the ecological discourse, we talk to two brothers working across these fields: the composer Cosmo Sheldrake and the biologist Merlin Sheldrake. In his best-selling book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Merlin presents the world from the point of view of those fungal networks that stitch it together. In doing so, he contributes to a Copernican shift in our understanding of the relationship between human “culture” and nonhuman “nature” that has consequences for how we think and make art in the age of climate crisis.
Cosmo’s music explores similarly radical shifts in perspective, producing an album composed of recordings from endangered British birds and collaborating with the American sound ecologist Bernie Krause as part of “The Great Animal Orchestra” at the Fondation Cartier in 2016. Taking for a starting point the ideas of “listening” and “decomposition” as artistic strategies, the interview was moderated by art-agenda’s editor-in-chief, Ben Eastham, and the series’ co-commissioner, Filipa Ramos.
Editors: Writing about how fungi make life on earth possible, in Entangled Life Merlin …
80th Whitney Biennial, “Quiet as It’s Kept”
Dina Ramadan
In her 1988 lecture, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Toni Morrison explained that the opening sentence of her 1970 novel The Bluest Eye—“Quiet as it’s kept”—was a familiar idiom from her childhood, usually whispered by Black women exchanging gossip, signaling a confidence shared. “The conspiracy is both held and withheld, exposed and sustained,” Morrison tells us. By borrowing this expression for the 80th edition of the Whitney Biennial, curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards promise the intimacy of knowledge bestowed, an exploration of the tantalizing space between hidden and revealed, a quiet reflection on whispered truths.
Unfortunately, the possibilities of this title are not fully explored; the curators instead pursue a series of “hunches” which are much less satisfying. The two main floors of the biennial are constructed in opposition to each other, the upper story a dark maze, restricted and confined, while the lower level is an airy relief, open and invigorating. This contrast is intended to reflect what the curatorial statement describes as “the acute polarity of our society,” although it is never clear how the works on each floor speak specifically to these fissures.
A recurring concern through the exhibition is a palpable disillusionment …
Root and branch
The Editors
We recently heard the times through which we are living described as the “permacrisis,” a series of disruptions that began three years ago and seems like it will never end. Like any historical period, its boundaries are arbitrary: the pandemic, uprisings against racial injustice, floods and fires in the Global North, and the war in Ukraine are merely the most visible manifestations to western audiences of longstanding emergencies, and it’s easy to concoct arguments for the period having begun in 2016, 2008, or 2001 (or having been inevitable since the collapse of the USSR, the advent of colonialism, or…). Yet the phrase has its uses: it expresses the helplessness that this rolling disaster has engendered—the whack-a-mole sense that even if one crisis can be addressed, another will soon pop up to replace it—and the loss of historical perspective that makes it difficult even to imagine change.
If you work in the cultural field, it has been impossible to avoid the issue of how to respond to each new expression of the “permacrisis.” There has been much discussion of the way that institutions have reacted, running the gamut from cynical cosmetic gestures to long-term investment in structural reform. But recent …
Kuba Szreder’s The ABC of the projectariat
iLiana Fokianaki
The ABC of the projectariat seems, at first glance, to be a humorous glossary of phenomena familiar to members of what Kuba Szreder names the “projectariat”: “a person who does projects in order to make a living.” Once you’ve read it, Szreder’s book—an acute account of the grim reality of working conditions within the contemporary art field—remains fun, but is no longer funny. Through sixty-six alphabetically ordered entries, the academic and independent curator offers an introduction to the work ecologies of the less glamorous subsection of the industry: a stressful life of pitching projects, managing painstakingly attained cultural capital, and the stress of making ends meet, given the fluctation in one’s monthly earnings, while traveling constantly via early-morning flights on budget airlines.
The book contains all the classic terms of the labor movement: C, for example, is for “Capital,” “Circulation,” “Curatorial Mode of Production,” and “Control.” More surprising entries like “Cynicism and Cliques,” “Time Machines,” and “Trawling” offer a fresh perspective on the bleaker aspects of our professional realm. D is for the dark side, or “Dark Matter,” referencing Gregory Sholette’s 2010 book which draws parallels between the invisible physical phenomenon that connects the universe and the unseen exploitation of …
Wilson Díaz’s “Taste and Conflict: Reasons to Connect”
Noah Simblist
Wilson Díaz speaks to a violent history with tenderness and humor. Born and raised in Pitalito Huila, a rural area in southern Colombia, and now based in Cali, the artist has witnessed the effect on daily life of drug trafficking and violent clashes between the government’s military, leftist guerillas, and right-wing paramilitaries. Since it began, in the 1990s, his career has coincided with a number of significant moments in the country’s recent history: the drug cartels’ increasing power and political influence, growing neoliberal economic policies, and the incessant US intervention as a result of, among other things, the so-called War on Drugs.
Díaz’s solo show at Cali’s Museo La Tertulia mostly comprises paintings and drawings, whilst the exhibition’s layout makes use of immersive installation. A line of newspaper clippings, reproduced on one-to-one scale with adhesive vinyl, covers several walls with images including military generals and politicians in staged photo-ops. One story describes a director of police intelligence who is also an amateur painter, depicted with smock and easel in his living room. Above are two small black-and-white easel paintings: one of Pablo Escobar, another of a military jeep surrounded by dead bodies—a reference to a 1989 state-sanctioned massacre at La …
Kathmandu Triennale 2077
Hera Chan
Once upon a time, the Buddhist scripture Swayambhu Purana tells us, the Kathmandu Valley was an enormous lake filled with serpents. One folk legend describes lengthy negotiations with the king who displaced the serpents to other smaller lakes, to bring rain back to the dusty valley. Another describes the draining of the lake as an act of god, in which the Buddhist deity Manjushree took a sword to the lake and cut a gorge deep enough to drain the whole valley. Woodcut block prints on rice paper depicting serpents typically grace the heads of doorways, bidding safe passage to those who cross the threshold. One of these hangs in the Patan Museum next to No History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 5 (2018), a single-channel video by Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic featuring the performance artist boychild performing as the Thai serpent spirit Nāga, interspersed with news bulletins charting the 2018 rescue mission of 13 boys trapped in a flooded cave in Northern Thailand.
Kathmandu Triennale 2077 is dated according to the Nepali Bikram Sambat calendar system, which is set almost 57 years ahead of the Gregorian calendar. But the Triennale takes place neither in the …
Yerbosyn Meldibekov’s “A Dot Becomes a Circle, or Dark Ghosts of a Bright Future”
Valentin Diaconov
Born in 1964, Yerbosyn Meldibekov is part of a generation of groundbreaking Kazakhstan artists who, since the collapse of the USSR, have challenged Russian imperialism. Working in a wide variety of media—photography, painting, sculpture, 3D-modeling, readymade, performance—Meldibekov disassembles the Eurocentric model of Empire, adopted by Russia as well, with its monuments to political and military leaders, neurotic craving for geographical expansion, and degrading stereotypes of conquered peoples. At the start of the nineteenth century, Russian authorities began to restrict Kazakh nomadism and traditional horse-breeding practices. Their aim was to coerce the populace into accepting agricultural and industrial jobs that integrated neatly into Russia’s imperial framework of resource extraction. Backlashes against this system have been constant over the decades since. But only since Kazakhstan declared its independence, in 1991, has the country begun openly to discuss its cultural autonomy. Meldibekov is prominent among the first generation of Kazakhstan artists clearly to denounce ideological frameworks of statehood based on colonial bureaucracy. Their alternative is the vast Kazakh steppe, where ideologies are accidental and infirm.
The centerpiece of Meldibekov’s show at Almaty’s Dom Na Baribayeva 36, The Fall of the Author (2021), is a self-portrait as a destroyed monument. On a white neoclassical …
Jesse Darling’s “No Medals No Ribbons”
Francis Whorrall-Campbell
What does it mean to make forgettable work when the art world trades in memory? Pics or it didn’t happen, the reification of the document: even in the dematerialized, social-media-sodden scene, art still functions as a memorial—even, we might venture, a monument to capital. Forgetting is abolitionist.
The title of Jesse Darling’s survey at Modern Art Oxford, “No Medals No Ribbons,” signals a refusal to this sort of public recognition. Like the vitrines of slowly wilting flowers in the gallery café (and entrance to the exhibition), it calls up the trappings of remembrance while imploring us to forget. Inside the show, objects engage in childlike cosplay, slough off inhibitions to reveal new forms. A litter picker, crutch, and plastic bottle come together to form a gun; a Hitachi vibrator becomes the torch on the Statue of Liberty. Objects seem unbothered by the fact they are in a museum: they trip over each other, try and trip you up, stretching and lurching their wiry limbs in ungainly configurations.
Two unsteady vitrines—part of the series “Epistemologies” (2018–22)—comprise an art-historical joke at the expense of the institution. Containing only concrete blocks or a pile of lifeless birds, these works make a blunt mockery …
Carolyn Drake’s “Knit Club”
Ben Eastham
To walk into Yancey Richardson’s Chelsea gallery is to enter a secret society of women. These photographic portraits of women alone, with their children, and in groups—their faces often hidden behind objects ranging from bunches of flowers to a plaster cast death mask—are freighted with esoteric symbols. A snake twists around a tree as if it were Asclepius’s staff before transforming into dangling feet; a woman holds an eerie nineteenth-century painting of a small girl in front of her like a screen. A slim figure in a pink dress wearing the rubber mask of an eagle’s head completes the impression of having stumbled into a feminine cult, the meaning and membership of which must remain obscure to the uninitiated.
That the title of the exhibition suggests this is a “knit club” does not diminish the mystery: even fleeting acquaintance with the literature of the Southern Renaissance is enough to forewarn the viewer that the weirdest histories are concealed behind the picket fences of polite society. And we are unmistakeably in the American South of the popular imaginary: complementing the air of collapsed grandeur connoted by peeling colonial-era wallpapers and hardwood dressing tables are signifiers as direct as a Victorian Gothic dollhouse …
Leonor Antunes’s “the homemaker and her domain, part iii”
Jayne Wilkinson
Leonor Antunes has described her latest exhibition as a library, or an archive. The vast range of materials—jute, bamboo, brass, nylon, pineapple leather, straw silk, cotton, glass—does offer a hanging collection of sorts, presented in various knots, weaves, textiles, and forms of joinery suspended around two primary structures. But any archival capacity is purely speculative, and the exhibition is more a staging of the conceptual possibilities of design than an accounting of historical documents. Nonetheless, histories saturate the work, and the invocation of many elegant lesser-known figures of twentieth-century art and design forms a network of influences tied together by Antunes’s own signature aesthetic.
As in her past work, Antunes addresses local contexts through visual and material citations that are direct, honorary, and respectful, in this case through the figure of Lena Meyer-Bergner, a designer who trained in the second phase of the Bauhaus and moved to Mexico in 1939. She was primarily a textile artist but was active in the graphic workshop, Taller de Gráfica Popular, which was famous for using printmaking to support anti-fascist and leftist political causes. The jute hanging grid that draws influence from Meyer-Bergner’s work tells us little that would recall her legacy directly, but it …
Samara Golden’s “Guts”
Vanessa Holyoak
Samara Golden’s “Guts,” the inaugural exhibition at Night Gallery’s new venue in downtown Los Angeles, offers a direct, physical encounter with fantastical perceptual experience. In this warehouse space, Golden has installed a huge mirrored box titled Guts (2022). Looking into it from one of two walkways reveals three white “floors,” each of which holds two “scenes” (one above and one below) relating to Golden’s shifting psychological states over the past few years: a messy living room with its toppled furniture, lamps, and crushed beer cans; an iridescent blue water-like surface; and an array of snaky, muted pink and lavender intestinal shapes that evoke the title of the installation, which gives its name to the exhibition. The effect is of one building contained within the atrium of another, extended vertically in a vertiginous series of reflections. It is a demanding task to distinguish between “real” installations and their mirrored reproductions.
Guts builds on Golden’s previous site-specific installations using mirrored structures. The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes (2017), for instance, was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and staged handmade furniture to create miniature “sets” of scenes of everyday life. In the context of a shift towards virtuality and digitization accelerated during …
Every Ocean Hughes’s “One Big Bag”
John Douglas Millar
In the introduction to her friend the photographer Peter Hujar’s monograph Portraits in Life and Death (1976), Susan Sontag wrote that: “We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes at rest contain that knowledge. The body knows and the camera shows inexorably.” Sontag wrote those lines from a hospital bed while awaiting surgery to remove a malignant tumor from her breast. The surgery was successful, but she would die from cancer a quarter century later, terrified, furious, and absolutely unresolved.
On June 5, 1981 the first clinical report on AIDS was published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In the years that followed, the gay and queer communities and other vulnerable minorities were forced to “study the art of dying,” to construct communities of mourning and activism and develop clusters of “lay-expertise” in pharmaceuticals and their trialing, endocrinology, blood science, and the legal and ethical structures of the medical and death industries. As the art historian and ACT UP New York member Douglas Crimp argued, “AIDS intersects with and requires a critical rethinking of all of culture: of language and representation, science and medicine, health and illness, sex and …
Valentina Diaz’s “The Intermittent Movement of Speech Acts”
Gaby Cepeda
A guide, dressed all in black, formally addresses the audience. Argentinian artist Valentina Diaz’s practice, the guide explains, relies on a series of inexact but exacting translations: specific mental states inspired hand-knitted costumes; knitting patterns are transposed into a musical score rendered on an old-school typewriter; this score is interpreted, according to a tempo kept by a metronome, as a choreography for performers dressed in the costumes. Diaz’s performances have long been characterized by such iterative mutations, a methodology emphasized in this exhibition: rather than wander around the space, viewers enter at specific times to follow the guide through a pre-planned sequence of rooms.
After the brief introduction, we are welcomed into a room surrounded by a soft orange curtain. The space is illuminated only by the projection of a new, 11-minute video version of one of Diaz’s performances, /A Å Æ )A(, dating from 2019. Two characters wearing black, triangular, and armless costumes whose hoods conceal the upper halves of their faces pace metronomically around a squash court’s symmetrical grid. One sports a small yellow triangle on their front and a large red one on the back; the other has a large yellow and large blue triangle on front …
Jala Wahid’s “AFTERMATH”
Adeola Gay
Delicate sheets of paper are scattered over the floor of Jala Wahid’s exhibition at Niru Ratnam Gallery. The pieces are reminiscent of leftover protest flyers and posters, giving the sense that a demonstration has taken place. The Kurdish-British artist’s exhibition continues her interest in exploring materiality, investigating the symbolic elements of archival objects. Wahid’s latest series of works is heavily informed by her research at the Kurdish Cultural Centre and the UK National Archive in London. The two archives focus on contrasting aspects of Kurdish history, with the former dedicated to the lived experiences of the Kurdish community, and the latter serving as a public record, listing details of treaties, conflicts, and political policies.
“Aftermath” is a collection of seven compelling objects and texts, with two sculptures hung on the wall, two sculptures placed on a long base, two text pieces displayed on plinths, and the paper cut-outs spread across the gallery floor. The exhibition prompts questions including: Who is allowed to narrate history? How does one document that history? And, most importantly, how are cultural identities formed? As with much of Wahid’s work, these recent pieces embody a sense of memory. The artist captures moments of conflict and …
Zach Blas’s “Unknown Ideals”
Kevin Brazil
Unknown Ideals collects a range of texts written by the artist and educator Zach Blas since 2008: essays, a screenplay, poems, and the hallucinatory monologue of a mannequin getting fucked by a suction gun. These writings, and a selection of installation shots and stills from the exhibited works which prompted them, are interspersed with critical responses by theorists and art historians such as Alexander R. Galloway and Pamela M. Lee, as well as an interview conducted with curator Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu. The book is far from a collected works: writing is central to Blas’s practice, and he has published a long bibliography of academic writings on film, queer theory, and digital media. Yet beyond being a simple miscellany, it serves as an introduction to the distinctive imaginary world which has animated the artist’s work in film, digital media, installation, and sculpture.
The opening text, “Unknown Ideals,” offers a panorama of that world: California, the site of the contemporary “informatic means of production.” Blas’s California—perhaps like every California—is fantasy. A landscape, retro and futuristic at the same time, of Disneyland, meditation retreats, and Silicon Valley; inhabited by The Doors and Jack Dorsey, but dominated by Ayn Rand, whose 1943 novel The Fountainhead …
A letter for Ukraine
The Editors
We stand alongside the people of Ukraine in their resistance to the invasion of their country by Russian forces. We assert the rights of the Ukrainian people to free expression and democratic self-determination. We stand in solidarity with our colleagues working in Ukraine’s cultural sector.
We deplore the lies to which President Putin resorts in attempting to justify an unjustifiable war. We applaud the thousands of people in Russia who continue to protest President Putin’s despotism in defiance of his apparatus of repression. We recognise that this war is not the will of the people of the Russian Federation but the fantasy of their corrupted leader.
This is not a regional conflict. This is the latest development in a global war waged by autocrats and kleptocrats. We thank the people of Ukraine for their valor and we pledge our support to their cause. We call for safe passage to be provided to the students and workers of other nationalities trapped in the country, and insist that Ukraine’s international partners provide refuge for all those displaced by the war.
We urge readers to learn more about the conflict, and to act to support those affected by it, by referring to these resources and contributing …
Shannon Ebner’s “FRET SCAPES”
R.H. Lossin
FRET is an acronym for Forecast Reference Evapotranspiration Report. It is a record of the rate of evaporation and transpiration, or how fast water moves from the various living and non-living surfaces of the earth—dirt, lakes, oceans, plant bodies, forest canopies—back into the atmosphere. The information is useful in deciding how to irrigate crops and manage municipal water supplies; decreased precipitation depths, as a result of climate change, mean water will evaporate more quickly and increase irrigation demands in arid and semi-arid climates. Fret is also, of course, a verb that means “to worry” and a noun that refers to a number of things: a repeating, geometric ornament that forms part of a frieze, the fret saw that might be used to cut such ornamental designs into wood, and the raised portion on the neck of many stringed instruments.
Shannon Ebner’s “FRET SCAPES” consists of thirteen black-and-white photographs arranged around a five-columned floor-to-ceiling poem called FRET, in which Ebner has some fun playing with the acronym in relation to the common verb as well as its technical use. The National Weather Service gives daily, weekly, and other reports that Ebner transcribes: “THE DAILY FRET/THE WEEKLY FRET/AND THE DEPARTURE/FROM NORMAL FRET.” It …
“Sex Ecologies”
Natasha Marie Llorens
At first glance, I thought Jes Fan’s iridescent installation Mother of Pearl 東方之珠 (2021) was simply a set of surrealist silk scarves strung up between aluminum poles. In the mostly abstract, brightly colored close-up images of oyster shells’ undersides I saw the stage set for a (deliciously) campy eco-political sex show. The images printed onto the fabric document a process by which the artist had four Chinese characters implanted into a variant of pearl oysters native to Hong Kong; the oysters responded to the implants the way they respond to sand, coating the intruder in mother-of-pearl. Each of the four characters translates to a word that, taken together, form a colonial nickname for Hong Kong: Pearl of the East. So, yes, a brilliant eco-political sex show starring the oyster slathering layers of nacre and wet dichroic substrate over the legacy of British colonialism. Fan’s work sets the tone for “Sex Ecologies,” a group show curated by Katja Aglert and Stefanie Hessler, with Prerna Bishnoi, Carl Martin Faurby, Kaja Grefslie Waagen, and Katrine Elise Pedersen, that presents nine newly commissioned works spanning both floors of Kunsthall Trondheim. Asking playful but biting questions about contamination and desire, the works on view critique …
On Hybridity
Daisy Hildyard
“Ecological turns” is a series in which writers from different fields of the ecological discourse consider new ways of making and responding to art. In this instalment of the program, which is co-commissioned with Filipa Ramos, the novelist and historian of science Daisy Hildyard reflects on the work of Anicka Yi.
I recently came across a poem that I found unsettling. I was reading Oli Hazzard’s Blotter and the voice appealed to me: it spoke in a direct way but the course of speech kept changing. There were images of sprouting seeds, cherry brandy, people kissing and whispering, Ukrainian coal imports, wandering deer. There was something that felt right about this jumbled reality, and something vulnerably human in the intimate experiences it alluded to: lips burned on hot tea, the fear of the dark wood, drowsiness, the pleasure of reading aloud. This is how the world feels, I thought. And then I read the book’s blurb, which explained that the lines I had found so characterful were generated by a Russian spambot. This was a speaker who could not grow drowsy, or burn its lips on tea.
My response to the poem, no doubt, says something about my own emotional intelligence—but more …
Golnar Adili’s “Found in Translation: A Story of Language, Play, and a Personal Archive”
Dina Ramadan
“Found in Translation” is a quiet exhibition that exudes a palpable sense of yearning for a past that never quite was. Golnar Adili’s childhood was shaped by the fracturing of her family due to political events; born in Virginia, she returned with her parents to their home country of Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution. Her father, a leftist activist, soon returned to the United States, forced into exile by his political convictions. The exhibition is an expansive yet cohesive “lexicon of displacement” (in Adili’s words) articulated through a floor installation, sculptures, digital and silkscreen prints, and photo lithography.
The first piece we encounter is She Feels Your Absence Deeply - Pixels (2017), a digital image of the artist and her mother printed on delicate Japanese paper and reconstructed in a grid of quarter-inch wood cubes reminiscent of children’s building blocks. The two subjects, seated close together, stare directly at the camera with gravitas, intent on capturing the moment, no matter how joyless. Titled after a line in a letter from Adili’s mother to her husband, in which she describes their daughter’s visceral response to the family’s disintegration, the piece evokes many of the exhibition’s essential themes; the (re)construction …
Sahra Motalebi’s “This Phenomenal Overlay”
Rachel Valinsky
“What is semantic security?” asks an acousmatic voice. This is one among many phrases Sahra Motalebi recites in a twenty-minute recorded track that emanates from a speaker concealed in a wall-hung assemblage to the left of the entrance door. Material Conditions for a Stage (Diorama) (2022) teases the premise of its own title with its slapdash construction and unpretentious materials: a linen curtain peeled back over two metal pylons enframes a rectangular, open-faced cardboard container like product packaging, its insides an irregular topography shaped to hold an object during transport. In other words, the kind of thing that is usually thrown away. But for Motalebi, a dispensable object, like a “dead metaphor,” can have alchemical properties. “What can we perceive?” the voice asks. “This Phenomenal Overlay,” the exhibition’s title, suggests one possible way into the question.
Material Conditions is one of two “dioramas” in Motalebi’s exhibition at Brief Histories. As if reprising the question at the core of Plato’s allegory of the cave—whether we acquire knowledge through sensate experience or philosophical reasoning—the diorama enters into dialogue with another voice sculpture, Resonator #1 (404) (2022). The “resonator,” a potential instrument, is made of decommissioned copper tubing from which jut out two …
Nikita Gale’s “END OF SUBJECT”
Adam Kleinman
What are the uses, and abuses, of abstraction? Five years on from the controversy sparked by the inclusion of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the quandaries of representation continue to preoccupy institutional programs. Brilliant figurative portraiture of and by traditionally silenced voices has become dominant—at the price, perhaps, of de-platforming artwork in which personal identity is less then immediately recognizable. Said more crudely: visibility is in, while opacity is out. But at what, or whose, cost? Plausibly as a consequence of, and response to, the kind of over-visibility through which people are surveilled by corporations and states, several artists who deploy strategies of interference are now, perhaps paradoxically, achieving prominence. Nikita Gale—a nom de plume (or is it nom de guerre?) created by redacting Gale’s inherited “legal” surname—is one such artist. In Gale’s work, abstraction is more than a device to generate imagery, and becomes a mode of creative reflection and deflection.
Upon entering the artist’s current exhibition at 52 Walker, the David Zwirner TriBeCa outpost that opened in October 2021, expectations are immediately interrupted. Within the cavernous hall, a series of crushed and deformed aluminum bleachers frame the overall sense of arriving too …
Entering the Labyrinth: on Walid Raad’s “Two Drops per Heartbeat”
Julieta Aranda / Regine Basha
It was in 2007, in the setting of e-flux’s “United Nations Plaza” in Berlin, that we first met Walid Raad and Jalal Toufic, who were working as mentors at the alternative school. We learned then how they conspired (or co-inspired) together, with Toufic’s texts such as “Vampires” (2003) and “The Withdrawal of Tradition against a Surpassing Disaster” (1996) complementing Raad’s construction of cultural histories under the guise of the fictional preservation foundation The Atlas Group.
So when we learned that TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary had commissioned Raad to create a new project around the history of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, we were naturally eager to see it. Having sharpened the methods and approaches pioneered with Toufic, Raad has produced a highly elaborate narrative intervention into the museum’s past. Titled “Cotton Under My Feet,” this investigation was paired with a 92-minute performative tour of the museum in the company of the artist called “Two Drops Per Heartbeat,” which took place a total of 67 times in the course of the show’s run.
The intervention focused, according to the show’s curator Daniela Zyman, on the events and documents around the sale, transfer, display, storage, and conditions of a collection that became one of …
Donna Huddleston’s “In Person”
Chloe Carroll
If you had been wandering the corridors of the National Institute of Dramatic Arts, Sydney, sometime around the year 1997, you might have happened upon a young, overworked Donna Huddleston. The artist documented her experiences studying set and costume in the monumental 2019 work The Exhausted Student, in which a pale waif, having fainted, is held aloft by a group of concerned, impeccably dressed undergrads in a sling of milky green drapery, pieta-like. Informed by Huddleston’s student years, the artist’s first exhibition at London’s Simon Lee Gallery stages a one-woman show over eleven unabashedly theatrical new works on paper. The drawings here mark a departure from The Exhausted Student’s tableau form, instead focusing in on strange intimacies and individual dramas.
Several pieces show the artist herself, roughly life-size, donning various glamorous disguises: slinky, ruched dresses with plunging necklines; ruffled poet’s blouses under tailored camel coats; immaculately coiffed wigs. She slips from frame to frame like a woman on the run. Most are rendered entirely in Caran d’Ache pencil, a painstakingly slow process and unforgiving material which lends itself naturally to the artist’s taste for minute detail against flat, overlapping planes and tightly choreographed mise-en-scene. Blocks of color are lightly flecked with …
Allison Katz’s “Artery”
Oliver Basciano
Why did the chicken cross the road? I don’t know—but Allison Katz has some suggestions. There are chickens aplenty in “Artery,” a show of 30 works, the majority new, by the Canadian painter. The other side (2021) is a painting of a cockerel in motion that recalls Eadweard Muybridge, the work hung across two freestanding walls so the bird seems to be surmounting the gap between them. Grains of rice—a kind of chicken feed, presumably—are scattered across the canvas surface, stuck on and around the golden animal. Despite the bird’s strut, it’s unclear—given the yellow plumage and blue-feathered head—whether what we are looking at is the result of Katz painting a chicken (or a photo of a chicken), or of her painting a chicken-shaped ornament; whether this painting is a representation, in other words, or a representation of a representation.
This quandary seems answered in The Cockfather (2021), a painting titled like a hipster fried chicken joint, but which in fact shows a kitschy egg holder in the shape of a cock in which are placed three eggs, the neck of the apparently misgendered bird (it is hens who normally warm eggs) forming a handle. This plumed porcelain soul …
Forensic Architecture with Laura Poitras’s “Terror Contagion”
Jared Quinton
Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, international research collaborative Forensic Architecture has been investigating the use of Pegasus, a spyware product developed by the private Israeli cyber-arms firm NSO Group. Pegasus has been licensed by governments around the world to covertly surveil journalists, activists, and political opponents by hacking their phones, and has been linked to high-profile human rights cases such as the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico, and the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. In “Terror Contagion,” presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), Forensic Architecture and a few high-profile collaborators—filmmaker Laura Poitras, musician Brian Eno, and whistleblower Edward Snowden—map a preliminary network of Pegasus’ operations, attempting to visualize the frightening scale of its global reach as well as to humanize the experience of its civilian victims.
Mirroring the collaborative nature of Forensic Architecture’s work and the networks that Pegasus is designed to infiltrate, the exhibition fills a subterranean, windowless gallery with a dense web of interconnected films and videos that feature interviews with people targeted by the spyware alongside haunting, disturbingly beautiful data visualizations of these attacks and how they are interconnected. Explanations of how the …
Cracks and joins
The Editors
The photograph accompanying this month’s letter comes from the New York studio of the painter Amy Sillman. In the course of our correspondence, during which we discussed the nature of the brief and considered the relative merits of different views, Amy mentioned that she has always associated elements of New York painting with the “glum and ugly and shabby and tattered” surfaces of the city’s buildings and sidewalks. When the above picture arrived we suggested that—in its off-geometric composition, its scratched plasterwork and exposed layers—it communicates some of the relationship between the world and the work that this series of snapshots from artists’ workspaces hopes to foreground.
Shortly afterwards, Amy forwarded a photograph of a drawing she was working on. It was apparent to her that this image—with its cracked and distressed surfaces and scratched, brick-colored patches—is “so obviously that same wall.” In one sense, the drawing reinforces the basic proposition that the environment in which an artist lives influences, whether consciously or unconsciously, the work that they make. And, by extension, that some knowledge of those conditions might help the viewer of their work to understand it. Yet in another sense, this drawing of entangled figures against a smog-gray ground …
Jordan Stein’s Rip Tales: Jay DeFeo’s Estocada & Other Pieces
Chris Murtha
In November 1965 Jay DeFeo was evicted from her home and studio at 2322 Fillmore Street in San Francisco, the epicenter of a vibrant community of Beat-adjacent artists, writers, and musicians. In a now-famous story, the artist hired a moving company to box up and haul off her massive painting, The Rose, which she had labored over since 1958. Eleven feet tall, nearly a foot thick with sculpted oil paint, wooden armatures, and earlier drafts, and weighing 1,800 pounds, The Rose had to be hoisted out of her second-floor window.
When DeFeo vacated the apartment the following day, she left behind another work in progress—a comparatively slight painting, in oil on paper, stapled directly to the wall. The artist was only able to salvage a few roughly torn fragments from the scarred and stuccoed surface of Estocada, as the piece was titled (after a matador’s final murderous blow). Though The Rose spent decades languishing in storage and was only exhibited twice during the artist’s lifetime, the painting and its legend have come to define DeFeo’s career. Estocada’s story, on the other hand, has remained untold. But how does one write the story of an artwork that never really existed, unfinished …
Web 3.0
Ma’an Abu Taleb
This is Clearly Money Laundering is a work of art by XCOPY which last sold on April 17, 2021 for 180 Eth, or $436,419.69 at time of purchase. Other works by the artist have sold for millions. NFTs, the tokens that situate these artworks on the blockchain where they are stored, were once referred to as deeds. They could one day be used for passports. The exorbitant prices these NFTs command, and their entanglement in controversy regarding the environmental impact of blockchains, mean that the actual images are often overlooked. Let’s assume that crypto is indeed a scam, and that it is bad for the environment. This, in itself, doesn’t invalidate the art.
When I first came across XCOPY’s work, my opinion wasn’t prejudiced by the above concerns. Still, I hated the art. I found it jarring and obnoxious, obscene even. It felt like it was made to annoy me. My dislike intensified the more it kept showing up as I tried to discover this new digital world. To be fair, much of what was happening at the time was unsettling to me. I had been a smug luddite until 2019, when I finally gave up my Nokia and got a …
“Ecological turns”
Filipa Ramos / The Editors
Among the functions of a critical publication is constantly to refresh the language that supports contemporary art. Not to reduce art and its transformations to words, but to make it possible for diverse audiences to conceptualize, experience, and discuss it; not to tie work to terminologies, but to liberate it from obsolete categories.
In conversations at the turn of the year Julieta Aranda suggested a series revolving around the various “ecological turns” in contemporary art of recent years. So, with the above in mind, we approached Filipa Ramos, a previous editor-in-chief and a passionate investigator of what “nature” means, to help us convene a thread of texts by authors working in different fields of the ecological discourse. In each case they will be invited to consider their knowledge in relation to the work being made and displayed today.
This relationship is not new, of course. Artists have always looked for new ways to experience, represent, and engage with “nature.” Yet even the scare quotes we feel obliged to add to the previous sentence speak to how dramatically perspectives have changed in recent decades, and how much this has transformed the way we speak about, more scare quotes, “culture.” As the …
“Stories create more stories”
Marta Dziewańska
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between artists and writers. In the latest addition to the series, Marta Dziewańska considers her work with Jagna Ciuchta in the context of storytelling and exchange.
“Storytelling,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” In her essay on the writer Isak Dinesen, she opposes storytelling to conceptual thought. Storytelling, she argues, “recollects and ponders” rather than putting forth a notion of truth as revelation. In my writing and curating, I try to do the same. I’m not interested in describing, defining, or explaining; in hiding behind the artist, or disguising myself as some omniscient sage. On the contrary, I see my work as storytelling. First, I need to understand the artist’s language, and then think of my reaction to it: propose my own story.
This was the case in my text devoted to the work of Jagna Ciuchta. I was not familiar with her work, knew little about her artistic language, and the pandemic prevented me from meeting her in person. We saw each other a couple of times online and I was sent catalogues, …
Teresa Gierzyńska’s “Women Live for Love”
Ewa Borysiewicz
Viewers are caught in a crossfire at the start of Polish photographer Teresa Gierzyńska’s first major retrospective. On the facing walls of Zachęta National Gallery hang two self-portraits. The black-and-white images Left-handed I and Left-handed II (both 1980) show the artist pointing a crude reflex camera towards the center of the gallery. With this simple gesture, she communicates that she’s in charge here.
Born in 1947, Gierzyńska trained as a sculptor in the studio of Oskar Hansen, who encouraged her “to experiment, to question the existing rules.” Gierzyńska’s experiment is not merely formal or technical, but extends to challenging the patriarchic status quo. It is, first and foremost, an existential decision: a way of living and making art. The “About Her” series (1979–present) introduces a number of the techniques by which Gierzyńska pursues this project, and this first part of the show is prefaced by a revealing quote from the artist: “I talk about intimacy, love, loneliness, femininity, motherhood, puberty, relationships […] in a rather quiet voice, even a whisper.”
Her photographs are colored with aniline, while details are added with pen and pencil; other images are copied and reframed. These intimate pieces cover one wall without an immediately discernible order, resembling …
Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull’s “There is No Paradise Without Snakes”
Gaby Cepeda
The idea of the periphery implies a metropolitan center around which everything revolves. As cities become ever-more expensive and policed, they effectively turn their poorer citizens into an extrinsic workforce, pricing them out of central areas and forcing them to commute. Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull’s textiles capture the sorts of exurban landscapes that workers who live in the peripheries are likely to witness daily. Her delicate embroideries in “No hay paraíso sin serpientes” [There is no paradise without snakes], made with chunky acrylic and natural wool on Aida cloth, depict neglected areas of Puente Alto, the most populous commune in Chile, on the edge of Santiago.
In one of the two 2020 works whose shared title lends the show its name, Gutiérrez Marfull represents an overpass leading nowhere atop a dry stream bed using tight, colorful stitches. The weeds are tall, the concrete bridge mossy. Graffiti dots the area, as do a few trees. A few dark, elongated clouds cross the blue sky. In the second embroidery of the same title, a graffitied concrete wall obscures everything but the red roof of a beige building standing in the background. Beneath the gray sky, a couple of yellow trees sit in …
“Witch Hunt”
Kim Córdova
“Witch Hunt” opens with an unnerving chill courtesy of El agua del Río Bravo (2021), a sculptural installation by Teresa Margolles that envelops visitors ascending the Hammer’s steps in air cooled by water gathered from the Río Bravo, along the US-Mexican border, by residents of the Casa Respetttrans women’s shelter. The work sets the tone for an exhibition responding to today’s generalized culture of misogyny with powerful work by an international roster of midcareer women artists.
It may be tempting to assume that the show’s title is mere allegory: that concerns about cabals of female devil worship no longer occupy the minds of contemporary Americans. But a cursory review of the news, from Pizzagate to the “lock her up” refrain against Hillary Clinton and death threats against AOC, show that women who threaten to disrupt male power will continue to be accused of evil. And where witch hunts once referred to the persecution of the weak by the powerful, the script flipped in 1973 when Richard Nixon used the term to denounce the Watergate hearings, setting in motion a pattern of powerful men—most notably Donald Trump—claiming to be the subjects of exactly such a threat. This show across two institutions …
Sonya Rapoport’s “Fabric Paintings”
Danica Sachs
In 1970, Sonya Rapoport unlocked an antique architect’s desk she had purchased a decade earlier and discovered a trove of geological survey maps from the early 1900s. Using the information on the maps as a starting point, Rapoport began drawing and embroidering directly on the sheets in what she called her “Nu Shu language,” a visual lexicon the artist developed in reference to a tongue used only by women in the Hunan region of China. As the artist tells it in a 2006 essay, this moment marked an aesthetic shift, opening a new line of creative inquiry that would anchor her practice for decades.
The artworks exhibited at Casemore Kirkeby, however, make clear that in fact there were inklings of these developments a few years prior to the artist’s revelatory moment with the maps in the desk. Here, in a selection of sculptural paintings made from 1964 to ’67, Rapoport uses upholstery fabric as her primary substrate, both for tracing the gaudy floral patterns in paint, and for stenciling curvilinear, abstract forms that mark the first instances of the artist’s transcription of her visual language into her artwork. Viewed alongside several drawings made during the same period, the exhibition reveals …
“Crip Time”
Kenny Fries
The sign next to the interior ramp at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) indicates that it is too steep for wheelchair users. Though there is an elevator to access the three floors of exhibition space, the inaccessible ramp and its sign form an apt metaphor for the “Crip Time” exhibit.
Disability/feminist/queer scholar Alison Kafer defines crip time as follows: “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” By this definition “Crip Time”—unlike Shannon Finnegan’s refashioned one-handed clocks, Have you ever fallen in love with a clock? (2021), in which the days of the week replace numbers—has not bent the clock nearly enough.
An entire major museum dedicated to disability-related work from 41 international artists and collaboratives is a big deal; as far as I know, on this scale it’s unprecedented. But the work is shown without the necessary cultural, historical, and political context. Too many times one is forced to ask how the work relates to crip time and, even when the connection is obvious, it is too often in the medical model of disability, in which the body’s impairment is at issue, rather …
April Bey’s “Atlantica, The Gilda Region”
Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi
What is the blueprint for Black liberation? And where does Afrofuturism fit into it? As if in response to political philosopher Joy James’s charge that Black liberation lacks a workable model, April Bey’s immersive two-room installation offers ways to reimagine Black futurity and governance against the civilizing agenda of European humanism and the afterlife of colonial dependence. At the magenta-lit entrance, dubbed The Portal Room, I’m greeted by an effervescent ecology of live plants. On opposing walls, framing the room like clasped hands, are two time-lapse videos—Julia and Namibia (all works 2021)—showing calatheas (also known as prayer-plants) bowing and bending to the revolutionary sounds of Super Mama Djombo. The Guinea-Bissau funk band’s name venerates Mama Djombo, an initiation spirit who presides over an uncleared sacred forest in Cobiana. That Mama Djombo grew in popularity during the anti-colonial struggle in Guinea-Bissau underscores an idea that varied acts of spirituality—from song to ecological conservation—are central to emancipated Black futures.
Continuing with a sense of sonic spirituality, the next room, titled “The Gilda Region” after Jewelle Gomez’s 1991 speculative novel The Gilda Stories, displays three wall vinyl pieces; two murals composed of high-gloss photographs and faux fur; and eight large paintings and hanging tapestries …
Reasons to be cheerful
The Editors
In the year 2022, according to the SF procedural Soylent Green (1973), food shortages resulting from climate change will mean that half of the world’s population are reduced to eating mass-produced wafers that are made, it transpires, out of people. Which is to say, without wanting to tempt fate, that things could be worse.
Our own predictions for the coming year are less dire. A whip round at this morning’s editorial meeting raised hopes and expectations: the revival of performance; the imminent triumph of a new generation of Latinx artists; online art communities as havens against increasingly repressive regimes; the imminent triumph of a new generation of South East Asian artists; and so on. More broadly, there was hope that the crises of recent years might have conspired to force institutional reforms, tempered by the insistence that this will only happen if museums continue to be held to account by their audiences.
The emergence, or in some cases re-emergence, of alternative models for the exhibition of art was another popular theme. The future of NFTs and the establishment by major galleries of new platforms to showcase and sell them has been the subject of much speculation, countered by …
Looking back and leaping forth
The Editors
This time last year, we asked our contributors for a few festive sentences not on the shows they’d most enjoyed over the past twelve months, but the ones they would most have liked to have seen but couldn’t, for reasons ranging from gallery closures to travel bans to citywide lockdowns to periods of self-isolation. To reflect on 2021, we’ve returned—with tentative optimism—to the more conventional format. Our writers from around the world pick the best shows they did manage to see over the past year, whether these were retrospectives in established institutions or group shows in nimble pop-up venues, immersive installations in back gardens or video works shown on LED screens in the middle of fields, curated in well-ventilated gallery spaces or broadcast via Zoom. The best exhibitions, Jonathan Griffin suggests, are “the ones that surprise you, change your mind.” We hope this can also describe our program of criticism, which will recommence on January 3. The Editors
Julieta Aranda
The pressures of motherhood during a pandemic meant that I was unable to take up the invitation to participate in “Maternar.” But I have been thinking ever since about the necessity of exhibitions that present and represent the complexity and autonomy …
Colette Lumiere’s “Notes on Baroque Living: Colette and Her Living Environment, 1972–83”
Wendy Vogel
Colette Lumiere’s art is unmistakably original, though its reverberations throughout pop culture may inspire feelings of déjà vu. Spanning painting, sculpture, and performance tableaux, as well as interior design, music, fashion, and the branding of various personae, Colette’s “Deadly Feminine” aesthetic crystallized in the New York of the late 1970s and early ’80s. Her work is born of the unique cultural collisions of that time—disco, punk, and new wave; the countercultural underground and the emerging art market; feminist ideology and postmodernism; and a thirst for glamor in a city plagued by crime and bankruptcy. Much like punk’s jarring aesthetics, Colette’s winking appropriation of theatrical femininity (with nods to the bohemian demimonde) has moved from the artistic fringe to a canny marketing posture in pop and art. Her restless and shapeshifting influence has become part of the cultural ether.
This exhibition focuses on the fruitful period of 1972 to ’83. At the show’s core are garments and artifacts from her Living Environment, staged in her Wall Street–adjacent loft during these years. There, Colette suspended satiny ruched fabric in unabashedly feminine shades of blush and cream from every available surface. The look was described by one writer as “suffocating voluptuousness”—a …
“The Machine of the World: Art and Industry in Brazil”
Oliver Basciano
A few days before I visited the Pinacoteca, I witnessed a traffic accident. At a busy intersection in downtown São Paulo—medics and military police already in attendance—a motorcyclist lay on the oily tarmac, his crumpled bike to one side. He was going to survive, it seemed, but his recuperation might take a while. Particularly telling was the fluorescent orange food delivery box abandoned on the ground next to him. The workers’ rights activist group Treta no Trampo has recently been fighting for those working in Brazil’s gig economy, targeting low pay, dangerous working conditions, and contracts that leave those injured at work on the breadline. The tech might now be more advanced, but the fact that worker exploitation is as old as industry was brought home to me by Eugênio Sigaud’s 1944 painting Acidente de trabalho [Work Accident]. Included in the group show “A máquina do mundo” [The machine of the world], this social-realist canvas depicts a man sprawled on the ground of a building site, his fate equally unknown, as colleagues look down from the precarious scaffolding and ropes far above.
Sigaud’s painting is among the oldest squeezed into this 120-year survey of art dealing with Brazilian industrial …
Johannes Phokela’s “Only Sun in The Sky Knows How I Feel (A Lucid Dream)”
Sean O’Toole
In February 1959, Walter Menzl walked into Munich’s Alte Pinakothek and splashed acid over Peter Paul Rubens’s The Fall of the Damned (ca. 1620), a baroque vision of biblical end times replete with corpulent humans being consumed by horned demons and fanged animals. Contemporary news photographs show museum staff conveying the three-meter-tall painting, its center visibly stained, like a stricken soldier. That stain, the residue of an action intended by Menzl to jolt the television-gawping masses and draw attention to his own unpublished writings, is central to understanding Johannes Phokela’s work, pictorially as much as conceptually.
In 1993, six years after relocating from Johannesburg to London, Phokela presented his master’s degree show at the Royal College of Art. His budding interest in iconoclasm was summarized in Original Sin - Fall of the Damned as Damaged, 1959 (1993), a compact, murky reproduction of the vandalized Rubens painting. The work features two embellishments: a red dot and pink oval at the topmost point of the stain. Such geometric appendices would become a hallmark of his classically influenced and technically accomplished figure paintings. Also part of Phokela’s degree work was a larger canvas, Fall of the Damned (Yellow) (1993), which resembles Guy Head’s …
Vienna Art Week, “Losing Control”
Novuyo Moyo
The group exhibition “House of Losing Control” gave this year’s Vienna Art Week a theme that proved fateful: just ten days after its conclusion, the Austrian capital went into lockdown after having failed to control the latest wave of Covid-19 cases. The opening night of the show featured installations, performances, and artworks dotted throughout a sprawling building complex in the north of the city that once housed an auto workshop, a club and, we were told, a brothel. All these institutions were functional until very recently; their abandonment is emblematic of the precarity that the latest lockdown (made necessary by the low vaccination uptake in the country) will amplify.
That context of economic decline and ecological disaster made the former auto shop a fitting location for Ernst Logar’s intensely researched works on the damaging effects of the petrochemicals industry. ÖLPEST (2021) unfolded in two parts: a large banner mounted onto the wall on which different translations for “oil spill” were written in crude oil, then on the floor a transparent hose contorted into various formations by the oil being pumped through it. The multilingual work—designed for an international audience—invites us to understand our collective responsibility for this type of disaster …
Glomming, Cottoning
Nick Currie
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between artists and writers. Here, Nick Currie discusses annotation, marginality, and piles of unread books in relation to his essay on Anne Bourse.
1. “I like to annotate,” Isaac Asimov told David Letterman in 1980. “The Bible, Shakespeare, various things. You simply copy down all the verses in The Bible and you make little footnotes and say whatever you please about each one. If you do it right the annotations are longer than the thing you’re annotating.” Nine years later Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, and soon annotation became something we all do pretty much all the time.
2. The annotation Asimov described resembles what generations of rabbis did with the Torah, calling the result the Talmud. Whereas the Torah is a fixed document of around 80,000 words, the Talmud is a massive accretion of debates, decisions, and commentaries—a huge nacreous encrustation built up around the original text over the course of many centuries. In his book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism (2003), Douglas Rushkoff suggests that early Judaism was comparable to open source software, but that the …
Lost futures: on the work of Nam June Paik
Anna Mirzayan
Earlier this year, I returned to my home state for the first time since the pandemic began. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) was hosting Nam June Paik’s first retrospective on the West Coast and, under the California sun, the Korean-American artist’s works seemed to couple the beauty of modern technology with just enough irony to stave off techno-determinism. It also prompted me to reflect on Paik’s status as a prophet of the idealism I had grown up with, and to consider how his work reads today, now that the hegemony of Silicon Valley’s IT corporations has come to pass.
In Paik’s TV Buddha (1974), which opens the show, a black Buddha statue sits across from a white television set, behind which looms a video camera. The closed-circuit camera, of the kind that Paik often used in his work, captures both statue and passing viewers and projects them onto the TV screen. Iconic and serene, the statue’s pose is reflected in a two-dimensional circuitous feed that seems to mimic Silicon Valley’s romanticized Zen Buddhism-lite. This “Buddhism” has replaced Protestantism as a catch-all for many Bay Area-dwellers looking for a spiritual supplement to the region’s hyper-corporate culture, as …
Minor literatures
The Editors
The Polish author Olga Tokarczuk pities those whose first language is English. Imagine how “lost” they must feel in a world, she writes in Jennifer Croft’s translation of Flights (2017), “where all the lyrics of the stupidest possible songs, all the menus […] are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths.” She speculates that English-speakers must communicate through special codes, reports a rumor that there are plans to supply them with a “little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something to themselves.”
The existence of a lingua franca is not a wholly bad thing, yet Tokarczuk’s compassion for those who cannot escape it speaks to our generation’s dawning realization that to be free we need a space in which to talk privately as much as a forum in which to speak publicly. In our panopticon culture, her point begs a question: what if art might serve to draw a screen around its makers rather than make them comprehensible to “anyone at any moment”? If rather than aspiring to the transparency of a universal …
Brad Haylock and Megan Patty (Eds.), Art Writing in Crisis
Orit Gat
It is easier to discount the importance of things than it is to advocate for them. One would expect a book titled Art Writing in Crisis to make an argument for criticism in “times like these”—an exhausting task in which writers are cornered into justifying their practice, which may end up equating art, culture, and discourse with what is now termed “essential work.” The crisis in the title isn’t the one I initially thought it was: it’s not art criticism that is in crisis, but the world. Instead of proposing criticism as a solution to upheaval, the writers in this book are reflecting on how we work in the midst of global chaos. The theme of their essays is not the place of art criticism now; there are no solutionist ideals about the role of art in society, or claims of how crucial art and criticism are, “now more than ever.” Instead, the 22 texts are largely personal in approach but community-oriented in scope, and appended by historical surveys on art publishing and writing, making a true argument for the value of art and criticism—not to save a society in crisis, but to grow the sense of collectivity that builds …
Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, “A Goodbye Letter, A Love Call, A Wake-Up Song”
Filipa Ramos
Green is toxic, alienating, envious. Green is hopeful, lush, prosperous. Chromakey backgrounds and laser diodes are green: they can place something somewhere else by using a color that is as natural as it is artificial. The organic and the synthetic meet in green. And it is via an ever-changing strip of electric green, presented on a 17-meter long LED video display, that I first encounter the 2021 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, curated by the Centre d’Art Contemporain’s director Andrea Bellini and the New York-based collective DIS (Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro, whose 2016 Berlin Biennale polarized opinions and traced generational gaps like few other artistic proposals).
Riccardo Benassi’s Daily Dense Dance Desiderio (DDDD) (2021), a three-minute video loop presented at the Champel Léman station in Geneva, allures biennale visitors and random train commuters alike with its inebriating sound, hypnotic imagery, and poetic reveries. With this installation, the artist turns the station’s calm hallway into a soft rave where semi-abstract images pulsate to the rhythm of a gentle, danceable melody, over which sentences about bodies, technology, and affects float intermittently. DDDD brings together organic, synthetic, and linguistic matter: out-of-focus hands may well be tentacles, iridescent lines …
“Spacemaking and Soul Delay”
Sophia Al-Maria / Lydia Ourahmane
It’s been over a month since I went to Amsterdam to see Lydia Ourahmane’s “Survival in the afterlife” at de Appel, and I am still feeling the effects. On arrival, I felt a sense of having come to a place of safety after having been far from home for a long time. It was very, well, healing. The show’s starting point is the spiritual commune Ourahmane’s parents founded during the civil war in Algeria (1991–2002), so perhaps the feeling of peace that washed over me is no coincidence.
Ourahmane’s research-driven practice, which often involves sound and installation, explores questions of borders, migration, colonialism, and spirituality. The curved Aula at de Appel felt full-sail with the breath of more people than I’d been around in over a year. Shadows shifted over a vast raft of pattern-clashing mattresses that sprawled across the floor. The ambient incantation Notice the direction of fires (2021), composed by Ourahmane and collaborators Yawning Portal, was calming. Hie Tee, Lydia’s mother, sang soothingly over the speakers: “my peace, my peace, I give unto you.” I went to smoke, where Hie Tee talked to me about the importance of never turning away anyone who is in need and …
Sophie Calle’s “The Hotel”
Cal Revely-Calder
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in recent art history by returning to an influential exhibition, artwork, or text from the past and reflecting on its relevance to the present. In this edition, Cal Revely-Calder considers a newly published edition of Sophie Calle’s The Hotel (1981) in the context of contemporary attitudes to privacy and surveillance.
How do you defend someone like this? She circulates people’s secrets, complete with photographs and notes. One time, she found an address book in the street: she rang up the names inside, asked them questions about its owner, and printed what they told her in a newspaper column, every day for a month. Another time, she got a job as a hotel maid: she removed objects from people’s luggage—underwear, medication, diaries—took pictures and wrote long captions, and published them in a book. She would follow people around without their knowledge, never mind their consent; she shadowed one couple from Paris to Venice, where she snapped them all day as they wandered around believing they were alone.
The Address Book (serialized in Libération in August 1983) was the project that got Sophie Calle denounced. The book’s owner, “Pierre D” (Pierre Baudry), returned to France that autumn; …
New Museum Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone”
Dina Ramadan
The reopening of New York’s art institutions a little over a year ago was accompanied by vocal expressions of support for movements for racial and social justice, and an avowed intention to confront their own discriminatory practices. What has transpired since has mostly taken the form of a curatorial recalibration—of which “Soft Water Hard Stone” is symptomatic—in which exhibition-making has been used as a primary tool of critique and correction. However, despite their content, such exhibitions tend to leave the institutional infrastructure largely intact, all too often underplaying both the historic and continued complicity of the art establishment in perpetuating the conditions for colonialism, climate change, poverty, income inequality, displacement, and gentrification. Curated by the New Museum’s Margot Norton and Jamillah James of the Institution of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the fifth edition of the New Museum Triennial includes 40 artists from 23 countries. Borrowing its title from a Brazilian proverb—a commentary on the power of perseverance and persistence—“Soft Water Hard Stone” contemplates material and materiality, focusing primarily on Indigenous artists from the Americas working in various forms of sculpture, with a handful of video installations and a noticeable absence of photography. The assumption of a slow and steady path …
“quelque part entre le silence et les parlers”
Natasha Marie Llorens
At the entrance to the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Malakoff on the outskirts of Paris, I am met with a mass-produced, generic “Oriental-style” rug into which an Arabic word has been burned, a word which transliterates to inteqaal. It can mean the movement of persons from one country or place to another, or the transition from life to death. It also describes the time when something ends, such as the end of a regime or the end of belonging resulting from immigration and exile. Oran-based artist Sadek Rahim burned the word into the rug—in some places straight through it—by dripping refined petroleum made from Algerian crude oil into its synthetic ground and then setting it on fire. The rug is part of Rahim’s installation Mouvement (2020), which encompasses a slim plinth standing in front of the rug with a GPS Garmin 73 device sitting atop it. This model is the one most used by harragas [burners], the North Africans who destroy their papers and cross the Mediterranean in search of economic stability.
Rahim’s work is thus centered on a word that marks a slippage between physical and metaphysical transitions. It introduces a group exhibition entitled “quelque part entre le …
59th New York Film Festival, “Currents”
Herb Shellenberger
After the virtual screenings and drive-ins of its 2020 edition, this year’s New York Film Festival (NYFF) once again rolled through Lincoln Center: a program of screenings, talks, parties, and red carpets that—with the exception of vaccine checks and masks—would not have felt out of place pre-pandemic. Situated as a festival-within-a-festival, NYFF’s “Currents” strand was billed as an eclectic showcase of innovative cinema, comprising 15 features and 36 short films that ranged from experimental and essay film to low-budget arthouse. In the context of a reduction in support for experimental film across festival lineups internationally, “Currents” was this year marked by a sense of plentitude that felt both generative and somewhat overwhelming. The general level of quality was high, but several works stood out.
A Night of Knowing Nothing (all films mentioned 2021), Payal Kapadia’s feature debut, is a bold work of documentary that balances the poetic and political in depicting protest movements at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). (Kapadia joined the institute as a student in 2012, producing several phenomenal short films through to the end of the decade.) It opens with an off-kilter shot, camera low to the ground like Ozu’s, showing a group …
Lorna Simpson’s Everrrything
Fanny Singer
A horizon line of celestial bodies runs around the first room of Lorna Simpson’s solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles. In each of these collages, the figure of a woman has been cut away from a printed photographic image and placed over another of a night sky, revealing, through the negative space of her form, a window onto the cosmos. The show’s title is borrowed from the first piece you encounter, a ten-part work stretching out like a necklace, or a string of stars perhaps, across the north wall. This opening gallery contains four multi-part works, and three discrete ones (all from 2021), of nearly identical scale and media: all are intimate collages affixed to rough, indigo-hued handmade paper. Of the twenty-four pieces in the first room, the majority have the same source material: nineteenth- or early twentieth-century astronomical charts, illustration plates depicting constellations of stars and planets and celestial events.
Simpson’s muses are sourced—as her female subjects so often are—from vintage magazines like Jet or Ebony, or pin-up calendars. These dazzling pieces are both tidy and careful, yet strangely unpredictable, as if Simpson had allowed the process of excising the female silhouettes to approach automatic drawing rather …
Andrew Norman Wilson
Jared Quinton
Last month, a strike by over 60,000 members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) was narrowly averted by last-minute negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers; the union will vote to ratify its new contract on Friday. This felt like a fitting backdrop for the opening of an exhibition which uses the tricks and trappings of the art world to make insidious labor politics slightly less ignorable. Andrew Norman Wilson’s solo presentation at the MIT List Visual Arts Center pairs two short features about workers navigating increasingly obsolete roles in corporate systems that produce mass media: the video Kodak (2019), a fictionalized account of a blinded former employee of the Kodak corporation, and Wilson’s new film Impersonator (2021), which follows a houseless, out-of-work character impersonator as he wanders the fringes of the Los Angeles film industry.
Wilson’s work treads the (often uneasy) territory between cinema and contemporary art. The two films, around 30 and 20 minutes respectively, play alternately on projection screens at either end of the List Center’s project space, which has been painted entirely black. Drawing techniques from documentary, montage, animation, and big-budget Hollywood, the works operate in a cinematic idiom that …
“Fellow Travelers”: Nazi Art and Historical Amnesia
Jörg Heiser
On the August day in 1944 that Charles de Gaulle headed a liberation parade through Paris, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: “We are drawing up a so-called ‘list of the Divinely Gifted,’ of about 300 to 400 truly outstanding artists, who will have an impact beyond their time, and who are to be exempted from frontline and labor service. These artists will be recruited from all branches of our cultural life.” The list was put together the following month, and included 114 (exclusively male) sculptors and painters. Typewritten on standard paper, the list is held in the Federal Archive of Germany in Berlin. Yet no-one had made a concerted effort to look up these names and see who among them made a career in postwar Germany, let alone make an exhibition of it, until now. The fruit of that research is “‘Divinely Gifted’: National Socialism’s Favored Artists in the Federal Republic” at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) in Berlin.
It is widely known that some Nazi artists continued their careers after the war, most famously Hitler’s favorite sculptor, Arno Breker. Declared a “fellow traveler” of the National Socialists in 1948 by an Allied de-Nazification tribunal, he continued to receive significant …
Hurvin Anderson’s “Reverb”
Kevin Brazil
The first painting you see on entering Thomas Dane’s white-cube gallery—one of the two Duke Street spaces devoted to Hurvin Anderson’s “Reverb”—is called Skylarking (all works 2021). In a two-meter tall canvas, three small figures stand in the lower foreground. A woman, to the left, looks away from the viewer. Another, in the middle, looks to the right, partially obscuring the face of a man standing behind her. Are they looking at one another? Conversing? Above loom palm trees in bursts of dark green, aquamarine, and lime—above, albeit only on the surface of a canvas. The size of the trees in relation to the diminutive figures makes it hard to situate both in a coherent three-dimensional space, one which further dissolves in the lower half of the canvas as the paint thins into long thin drips. In their frozen interactions, and in their relationship to the trees, these figures are at once proximate and distant; almost touching, yet floating in unarticulated space.
This sensation of proximity and distance is produced by all the paintings in this show, even when, as is more common, no human figures appear. Each work, rendered in oil, depicts a hotel complex in northern Jamaica, where Anderson’s …
Showing your workings
The Editors
In a recent writing workshop, this editor was asked whether critics should be “objective” or “subjective” in their approach. For all that it was baldly stated, the problem is both delicate and perennial. How is it possible to say of a particular work of art that it is good or bad—which remains the basic function of a critic—without imposing ideas of what constitutes the good? The notion of the critic as a purely independent arbiter, judging exhibitions against a set of universal standards, cannot survive the ongoing and overdue reappraisal of how and by whom those standards were set. Yet the alternative is that expertise married to careful attention carries no weight. This leads us to reviews which offer up a potted biography of the artist in lieu of judgement on whether and how their work is, if we put aside the pieties, any good.
The reader will not be surprised to learn that this editor dodged the question by suggesting that it constituted a false dichotomy. Nit-picking a question as a means of evading it is a skill learned through hard knocks on the streets (meaning, minor-league panel discussions). Yet the point holds: that the critic holds …
Simone Forti’s News Animations
Ben Eastham
Simone Forti has been dancing the news for four decades. Prior to the death of her father in the early 1980s, the Fluxus artist was more likely to be found reinventing the possibilities of dance in New York or exploring the limits of consciousness in Woodstock than engaging in the quintessentially bourgeois leisure activity of reading the newspaper. Yet Forti took up the practice in homage to her father, whose careful attention to the newspapers prompted him to flee Mussolini’s Italy in 1938 with his wife and the three-year-old Simone (her uncle, a partisan, later died on the way to Auschwitz). From her reading Forti developed a series of improvisational performances that she calls “News Animations,” in which she brings a pile of newspapers onstage and, having arranged their pages into “maps” on the floor, responds with spoken word and bodily movement to what she can see. A headline might, for example, compel the artist to strike a pose which embodies contradiction or despair; she might see two unrelated stories and riff on what connects them.
This book, published to accompany an exhibition at the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Tuscany, gathers together preparatory drawings, transcripts, and photographs …
The dance: exhibition architecture in contemporary Russia
Alex Thyr
No other context I know places as much importance on exhibition architecture as today’s Russia. The level of ambition is very high: walls and other complex structures are built and painted, carpets are laid, walkways are constructed, and the rooms are illuminated as in a theater performance. As a visitor, or (better) experiencer, you are enveloped. It reminds me of the nineteenth-century Gesamtkunstwerk, and of Boris Groys’s famous description of Ilya Kabakov’s characteristically dense and atmospheric environments as “total installations.” But with a major difference: while the Gesamtkunstwerk and the total installation rely on affinities and correspondences between the display structure and the displayed, creating synergistic effects, the style that predominates in Russia tends to run its own race.
Exhibition architecture can certainly highlight art on its own terms and give energy to what is exhibited, but it can also make it difficult to reach art. One example of elaborate and costly design that made that connection strenuous was the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of Coronacene” (March 26 – August 1) where visitors were led around an illuminated “catwalk.” This created an unfortunate contradiction between a laudable initiative—to support artists in …
Diane Severin Nguyen’s “IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS”
Peter Brock
The central character in Diane Severin Nguyen’s video IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS (2021), which comprises her institutional debut at Sculpture Center alongside four color photographs, is a Vietnamese girl named Weroníka who literally washes up on the shores of Poland. In the opening sequence, a male voice addresses her in Polish over shots of soggy grey landscapes. His obscure phrases are charged with radical sentiment as low piano music escalates the tension: “This is the condition for understanding the collective as a process. Isolation will destroy you.” When Weroníka appears onscreen in a yellow shirt with red sleeves, she is accompanied by sound effects: a mechanical breathing noise ends in a metallic click as she opens her eyes; percussive noises punctuate her repeated, dance-like gestures. Later, she nods her head to the thumping bass of a pop song playing on her headphones while the man’s voice declares that knowing the “truth” of a spectacle comes at the price of not participating in it.
Nguyen’s sound effects complicate the viewer’s relationship to Weroníka, as does the staging of the video. Flanked by two PA speakers and pleated yellow fabric, the screen on which the video is shown is mounted …
17th MOMENTA Biennale, “Sensing Nature”
Xenia Benivolski
The seventeenth edition of MOMENTA seeks to map out alternate ways of sensing the natural world and, in return, to allow nature to respond in ways imagined, projected, and real. Curated by Stefanie Hessler with Camille Georgeson-Usher, Maude Johnson, and Himali Singh Soin, the biennale comprises fifteen exhibitions scattered throughout the city’s institutions and galleries, which offer divergent perspectives from the points of view of air, water, land, animal, and plant life. These projects tether the exhibition to the site of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, and expand the local context by letting global contemporary issues resonate throughout.
On opening day, a group gathered to see TEIONHENKWEN Supporters of Life, a new installation in a city park by Montréal’s Grande Bibliothèque, where artist and ethnobotanist T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss, in collaboration with Silverbear and Joce TwoCrows Mashkikii Bimosewin Tremblay, planted an elaborate garden of indigenous plants, carefully researched for their medicinal and ceremonial properties. The garden is a new start: walking between the wooden crates, viewers take part in a social gathering between groups of plants and of humans. This encounter proposes a novel way of moving through the biennial, through touch, smell, and the presence of the entities that prompt one to ponder the priorities and …
“Greater New York”
R.H. Lossin
A large installation of T-shirts stretched across metal wall studs anchors MoMA PS1’s 2021 iteration of “Greater New York.” The T-shirts—by the collective Shanzhai Lyric—are the bearers of mistranslations (“Revoltig/No!/Save the Queen”), misspellings (“La Vieen Rose”), juxtapositions that make little to no sense (“LV/Louis Vuitton/Challenger Races for the Americas Cop/For the Americas Cop”), or free-floating phrases that violate the semiotics of communicative clothing (“I’ll be back!/I’ll be back!”). Shanzhai is the transliteration of a Chinese word for both “mountain hamlet” and “counterfeit.” The shanzai T-shirts, collected since 2015 from Hong Kong to New York City, are part of an ongoing project—or poem—that urges us to think about translation, trade networks, the exchange value that is increased by the designation “real,” and, as the artists note in the wall-text, “how deeply we can be moved by apparent non-sense, how it actually seems to describe with poetic precision, the experience of living in an utterly nonsensical world.”
Incomplete Poem (2015–ongoing) might serve as a useful cipher for a large and, one could argue, unavoidably chaotic exhibition. “Greater New York” is staged every five years. It is what it sounds like: an exhibition meant to give viewers a sense of what artists are …
Toronto Roundup
Tess Edmonson
My tour of Toronto’s first Gallery Weekend started on a Saturday morning at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, where artist Andy Patton joined Petro in discussing a suite of new Carol Wainio paintings. In view of Wainio’s fluffy, Rococo landscapes, Patton reminded a small audience that paint is essentially “just colored glue.” A few days later, during the opening days of Greater Toronto Art 2021 (GTA), the inaugural edition of a triennial survey of Toronto artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I stopped in front of a Tony Romano sculpture (one element of a larger installation titled Between the Lilies and the Birds, 2021): a small, rough face rendered in ceramic. Big blue tears ornamented its right cheek, and the word “SAD” was carved into its chin. I left the museum listening to Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Banisters” (Republican music, sorry) and walked home through the very strong smell of chocolate (the museum is next to a chocolate factory). Something humbling was happening. The city was coming out of what’s been, by some measures, the longest consecutive lockdown of any major international metropolis. The exhausted, perennial questions that attend art’s relationship to event—why do this, who is it for, do …
Lyndon Barrois Jr. and Kahlil Robert Irving’s “Dreamsickle”
Shiv Kotecha
The word “dreamsickle,” like the word “chaos,” conjures numerous associations. Referring to the defunct brand of ice pop, it might invoke an orange gleam, a vanilla coat, the state of being frozen; more broadly, a “dreamsickle” suggests a tool used to harvest imaginative content, such as montage or color. In their show at New York’s 47 Canal, Lyndon Barrois Jr. and Kahlil Robert Irving probe at the chromatic (and chronomatic) channels by which cultural memory is sutured to political violence. Using collage, repurposed film stills, and frequent allusion to the coded lexicons with which we read color—for example, the artists specify that the exhibition title is formatted using the “pure Orange” code HEX #ff7c00—Barrois Jr. and Irving’s latest collaborative exhibition teases out the elastic, yet always discontinuous, circuits by which a person may inhabit the limits within which they are materially defined.
Installed at eye-level along the gallery’s main wall is Irving’s Sky_High (Low & fractured SMAERD) (all works 2021), a thin wooden shelf on which rest several square and rectangular panels that depict blue skies and fluffy clouds, cross-sections made from a digital composite image. The panels fill out the shelf’s sill, overlapping with one another from one …
“The Cool and the Cold”
Ryan Ruby
I am standing in front of two full-length portraits, each just over 200 centimeters tall. The one on the left is a gray-scale screen print; in it, a man in a billowy shirt with a popped collar, jeans, and cowboy boots has emerged from the void to draw a revolver from the holster at his hip, which he points at the viewer. The one on the right is painted in thick, dark oils; it shows a man in a black three-piece suit and polka dot tie, his hands in his trouser pockets, standing in his study, before wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a desk covered in a red, tasseled table cloth, on which the viewer can make out two candlesticks and a set of miscellaneous papers. The subject of the first painting is Elvis Presley. The subject of the second: Vladimir Lenin.
These two portraits—Andy Warhol’s Elvis Presley (Single Elvis) (1964) and Dmitriy Nalbandyan’s Lenin (1980–82) respectively—flank the entrance of “The Cool and the Cold: Painting in the USA and the USSR 1960-1990,” a selection of over 125 pieces from the collection of the late chocolate manufacturer and art historian Peter Ludwig and his wife Irene, now on view at the Gropius …
Arseny Zhilyaev’s “The Monotony of the Pattern Recognizer”
Valentin Diaconov
Arseny Zhilyaev’s “The Monotony of the Pattern Recognizer”—an installation of more than a hundred untitled paintings, wall-texts, neon sculptures, collages, and other works arranged according to a series of speculative concepts that comprises his exhibition at Moscow Museum of Modern Art—seems to have been thought out while stoned. “Imagine TENET,” the show seems to propose, “not the Christopher Nolan flick but a freight spaceship lost in some faraway quadrant of the universe, and its AI stumbles upon the Sator Square palindrome from Pompeii, you know, the one reading SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, and starts to unpack it and reconstructs the whole history of European art, from the Romans to the Moderns, in coded images! And… maybe we all are living in a simulation that is created by that AI to get in contact with sentient life and bring us whatever cargo it has on board!”
This sci-fi premise is beguiling by itself, but Zhilyaev, nothing if not studious, brings the idea into relation with the wealth of contexts he has explored in the past. Prominent among these is avant-garde museology: an umbrella term for a number of early Soviet practices that seek to recontextualize histories from class …
Back and forth
The Editors
There has been much talk over the past year of the advent of a “new normal,” and with it a pressure to identify its characteristics. How should we define the changing conditions under which we are now living? How should they be reflected in our cultural production, and to what new standards should we be holding it?
One theme to have emerged in recent work (and the criticism written of it) is a reluctance to impose grand narratives—a counterintuitive insistence that the “new normal” might be distinguished by the absence of broadly applicable traits. This prioritising of felt specifics over abstract generalities might be attributed, in part, to lockdown. As several of our writers have recently observed, it’s not surprising that artists should have retrained their focus on what is close to hand and particular to their circumstances. (It’s one reason why we last month introduced a new series of images to accompany this column, inviting artists to share a photograph from their workplace.)
It might also acknowledge that the inflection point has not passed, and that we need to attend to a changing world before we start imposing rules upon it. The crises which manifested so spectacularly last …
Cady Noland’s THE CLIP-ON METHOD
Alan Gilbert
In the late 1980s, when borders were collapsing and capital was carving new channels in which to flow, Cady Noland was producing an art of blockages and impediments. She famously made walls of Budweiser beer cans and created barriers with bars, metal pipes, and sculptures resembling stockades. Where movement was signified, it took the form of heavy, clumsy metal walkers and shopping carts that vaguely resembled torture devices. A number of these pieces ominously featured the American flag during a period of US triumphalism and leaching neoliberalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time, US prison populations, primarily nonwhite, were skyrocketing—part of what Saidiya Hartman has called the ongoing “afterlife of slavery.”
Noland’s decision to stop making art circa 2000—and her subsequent legal battles over the selling and display of her work when it has been altered or improperly conserved—might be seen as extending her engagement with obstruction and nullification. When there are more things in the world to say no to than yes, it is a sign that the reactionaries are winning. In this sense, Noland’s politics of refusal, in both art and life, feel prescient and valuable. Similarly, while there’s no doubt …
“Writing on foot”
Fernanda Brenner
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between artists and writers. Here, Fernanda Brenner considers how questions of intimacy, digital mediation, and “unlearning habits” influenced her response to the work of Sarah Tritz.
My old drama teacher used to tell a story about Antonin Artaud. Trapped in a taxi in a massive Paris bouchon and unable to hold himself together, Artaud stepped out of the car, jumped on top of it, and started walking over the sea of immobile vehicles shouting: “You are all mad!” The anecdote came to mind when I was asked to write about Sarah Tritz’s work. The artist and I had planned a studio visit right after I saw her outstanding exhibition at Centre D’Art Contemporain D’Ivry – Le Crédac, in Ivry Sur Seine. Cut to lockdown. Whoever didn’t reappraise the pillars of their life during that time—love, work, whereabouts, and so on—must be truly mad.
Since I was unable to meet Sarah in person, writing about her work became an exercise in pairing information gathered piecemeal over Zoom calls to the artist with my still-fresh impressions of the works I’d seen …
Berlin Roundup
Emily McDermott
Since the beginning of last year many artists have turned inward—or at least towards their immediate surroundings. Last week, during Berlin Art Week and Gallery Weekend Berlin’s Discoveries edition, over 70 exhibitions (some long-delayed) opened in the city’s galleries, institutions, project spaces, and private collections, featuring both established and emerging artists. The themes addressed are wide-ranging, but one recurring motif is an introspection expressed in portraiture: not necessarily in the figurative sense, but in using the framework of an exhibition to present a close study of one’s own identity, of a place, of an environment.
Reflecting this idea most overtly is Alicja Kwade’s exhibition “In Abwesenheit (In Absence)” at Berlinische Galerie. Here, the artist moves away from her usual cosmic explorations of time in favor of a show that is most clearly read as a self-portrait. 314,000 sheets of pale purple paper are printed with her fully sequenced DNA, with the 0.1% of letters that differentiate her from others bolded. Many sheets line the room’s towering walls, while thousands more are encased in bronze archival boxes. Twenty-four speakers are arranged on a giant black steel ring suspended from the ceiling, projecting Kwade’s heartbeat as it rises and falls. Bronze molds …
Brussels Gallery Weekend
Vivian Sky Rehberg
Having moved to “the capital of Europe” just last August, I approached the 14th edition of Brussels Gallery Weekend (BGW) aiming not to reckon with changes in the city’s cultural landscape, or discern the features of a much-touted “new normal,” but to focus on the present. I started with “Generation Brussels,” an exhibition of young Brussels-based artists without gallery representation, sponsored by BGW since 2018. Spread across two venues, the thematic focal points this year were gender, identity, space, and environment. In their curatorial statement, Dagmar Dirkx and Zeynep Kubat declared individualism dead, lauded collaboration, and opposed binary divisions (nature/culture, artist/curator, etc.). This overly familiar discourse and thematic framework belied the curators’ sensitivity in arranging a true medley of mixed-media installations, videos, photographs, and textile works, many of which seem to have been produced with the strictest economy of means.
Amongst these, at the Tour à Plomb sports and culture center, Günbike Erdemir’s ramshackle burlap tent At the horizon of the evening of no return (2020) arose from the ground floor like some arcane pagan shelter, eerily lit and replete with small paintings of fantastical creatures and ritualistic scenes, pillows, and wooden bookstands built for reading on the floor. Upstairs, …
Shuruq Harb’s “Ghost at the Feast”
Marwa Arsanios
How can one write about Shuruq Harb’s work when the work itself is already a wonderful text about the potential of writing? At first glance, one could be fooled into thinking that the artist’s questioning of a dominant visual culture tackles its subject straightforwardly, through images, only to be surprised at how essential writing, text, and language are to the work. Not that they were ever separate to begin with.
The more one delves into “Ghost at the Feast”—Harb’s solo exhibition at Beirut Art Centre, comprising five video installations and sculptures made over the past decade—the more one understands that the images’ “duty” is to make the text appear, while the text pushes the image to the margins and slowly breaks its supremacy. What we hear or read in this exhibition is at the same time a caption, a poem, a press release, and a beautiful literary form.
This tense, unresolved, and dialectical relation between what is pictured and what is written opens up the question of how text is used to structure and support the image. Harb’s exhibition takes this question to the level of the unconscious. Language here becomes a manifestation of an accessible—but not necessarily understandable—part of the unconscious, …
Sara Cwynar’s “Glass Life”
R.H. Lossin
Early in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1941), we are told to get out: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” Part of Eliot’s poem makes up a small fraction of the voiceover narration to Sara Cwynar’s six-channel video installation Glass Life (2021), a maximalist meditation on living amongst ever-accumulating and constantly moving images.
Glass Life is as dense audially as it is visually. The images are accompanied by two voices reading a sequence of largely unattributed quotes culled from texts and speeches by Anne Boyer, Margaret Thatcher, and William Shakespeare, among many others. But this line seems to offer a particularly apt cipher for a work that is about a life lived in and through an excess of images and text—a life whose reality is always in question, where the distinction between activity and documentation collapses, and representation precedes its object. What is the internet but a massive archive? And what is an archive but an institution, as Jacques Derrida noted in the mid-1990s, obsessed with cheating death? “The archiving,” Cwynar’s two narrators say, “makes the self seem richer and more substantial even as it becomes more tenuous.”
The internet is a space …
“The Skeptic’s Allegory”
Jacolby Satterwhite / Travis Diehl
The first thing Jacolby Satterwhite showed me when I visited his apartment in Brooklyn was his painting studio. Leaning on walls and furniture and easels were a dozen canvases in various states, some based on family snapshots, others scenes from the mind-bent digital worlds for which he’s known. On the surface, it’s a wild departure from the works that made his reputation as a multidisciplinary artist: video installations, virtual environments, performances, and digital-media works, informed by queer theory, video games, and much else besides.
“Spirits Roaming on the Earth,” a decade-deep survey of Satterwhite’s work now on view at Pittsburgh’s Miller ICA, showcases videos, sculptures, and c-prints drawn from these idiosyncratic, alternative realities. They are populated by dancing sprites—many of them avatars embodied by the artist, others figures cast from clubs or pop culture—adorned with 3D tracings of his mother Patricia’s many schematics for fantastic household objects. Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire 1–6 (2014), his earliest series of video installations, weaves together light S&M, Patricia’s inventions (including a remote-controlled penis), and five gyrating figures modelled on Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Ropes of light flow from the characters’ hands.
Spend a moment with these videos with painting in mind, however, and …
Conceição dos Bugres’s “The Nature of the World”
Oliver Basciano
Over a hundred pairs of inky-black eyes stare out of their glass vitrines. These are Conceição Freitas da Silva’s “bugres”: the diminutive figures that for over two decades until her death in 1984 the Brazilian artist carved from tree trunks and branches. The short smiles of some disarm, the longer grimaces of others give a more forlorn, or on occasion menacing, disposition. Their arms and legs are mostly demarcated by the slightest carved line, their heads flat-pated and running with the merest hint of neck into the stocky bodies. Their gender is indeterminate. Such was Conceição’s connection with the creatures that preoccupied her whole life—she made nothing else—she adopted the moniker Conceição dos [of] Bugres.
In the majority the bugres—a colonial-era racist slur for indigenous workers offensively perceived as “lazy buggers”—have a pale, yellowish, complexion that stems from the paraffin wax the artist used to decorate her carved figures. Most have a bob of straight painted black hair. Conceição had Kaingang heritage, an ethnicity native to southern Brazil: “I think that Indians have heads like that,” she said. “That’s the only way for it to come out.” Each of them possesses uniformity, to a point. Yet the longer you spend …
“When is a Painting?”
Kevin Brazil
In June 2021 Urs Fischer exhibited “The Intelligence of Nature,” a group of paintings made during a year when Fischer, like many, was forced to spend more time at home than normal. After artists’ and curators’ immediate—and sometimes kneejerk—responses to the Covid-19 outbreak have passed, and as we discover the pandemic will be a permanent reality of global life for years to come, as well as a symptom of deepening ecological and economic crises, more considered art can offer us a guide to this new situation. And one thing recent painting might be able to do, as a practice for reflecting on the pressures of our new present, is give us a sense of how these interlocking crises—as Fischer’s series suggests—are shaping our experience of time. A “crisis,” after all, is a temporal phenomenon: a decisive turning point that changes our understanding of what went before, and our experience of what will come next.
In Fischer’s paintings, the background images are primarily photorealistic depictions of scenes from his house in Los Angeles, which appear to be covered in smears of paint, at times so dense they cover the whole canvas. On close inspection, however, the relationship between these …
34th Bienal de São Paulo, “Though it’s dark, still I sing”
Felipe Molitor
In recent years, the common description of Brazil as a “polarized” country has shaped a national identity forged in resentment, which only fuels the fantasy that two equally radical factions are in dispute and that one must be annihilated. The 34th Bienal de São Paulo marks an attempt to avert this dystopia, guided by echoes from a distant or recent past. The result is an exhibition that is more reflective than activist, that sets out to listen rather than make claims. It seeks to bring about a meeting between ancestral and contemporary voices, creating a space for dialogue where each can be heard.
The show—curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, alongside Paulo Miyada, Ruth Estévez, Francesco Stocchi, and Carla Zaccagnini—opens with the Santa Luiza meteorite, discovered in Goiás in 1921. This survivor of the 2018 fire that gutted the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro (and other cosmic misfortunes) makes a strong opening statement about the ruinous state of the underfunded cultural sector in Brazil (echoed, through the exhibition architecture, by dominant shades of black that conjure an atmosphere of mourning). Contemplation of the object is interrupted by the tinkle and flash of metal pieces being transformed by a hired …
“The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse”
Noah Simblist
“The South got something to say!” declared André 3000 at the 1995 Source Awards, after Outkast were awarded Best New Artist to boos from the audience. Goodie Mob, another Atlanta-based hip-hop group, released a track called “Dirty South” that same year. Both these events are cited by curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, who also notes in her catalogue essay for “The Dirty South” that the term had been in use since at least the 1980s. So what does it mean? We know that the American South is below the Mason–Dixon line, but what’s dirty about the prevalent image of it? Is it the paradox of living with violence and corruption while also celebrating its finer qualities, as Goodie Mob suggests? The Northern fantasy of rural life and unpaved roads that resist Cartesian order? An intermingling of African, European, and Indigenous traditions?
This is not the first exhibition to focus on the American South in recent years. In 2016, “Southern Accent” opened at the Nasher Museum: a thirty-year survey show that treated the region as an “emotional idea,” a term borrowed from William Faulkner. What’s new about the VMFA exhibition is its focus on the particularities of Black culture in the …
3rd Autostrada Biennale, “What if a Journey…”
Adam Kleinman
Whether measured by visitors, tourist revenue, and column inches, or in the more nebulous terms of intellectual, spiritual, and social understanding, it’s worth asking: is growth an inherently good thing for a biennial? Each of these developmental metrics can be applied to the Autostrada Biennale, now in its third iteration, as it partners with a larger institution: the peregrinating European biennial Manifesta, which lands in Pristina in 2022.
Curated by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, “What if a Journey…” plays on the series of postwar highway projects, collectively known as the Autostrada, that link the nation’s three main cities and hosts for this exhibition—Pristina, Prizren, and Peja—to each other and to neighboring countries. Featuring 30 artists and collectives in venues ranging from a library in Pristina to a bar in Peja, it grows a project founded in 2014 by Vatra Abrashi, Leutrim Fishekqiu, and Barış Karamuço as the first contemporary art institution in Prizren.
In the nation’s capital, two large-scale installations pivot from infrastructure to flora, and back again. Agnes Denes’s Sunflower Fields (2021) finds the artist planting a radiant sea of sunflowers within a drab city plaza awash with crumbling concrete. As charming as it is seemingly …
Eyes forward
The Editors
Regular readers of this column will have noticed a change in the image accompanying it. Where these letters were previously introduced by a few lines snatched from books the editors happened to have on their shelves, this one is paired with a view of London from the desk of artist and writer Laura Grace Ford. It is the first in a series of photographs taken from artists’ workspaces, and reflects a desire not only to freshen things up but also to respond to changed circumstances.
We started writing these letters eighteen months ago, when the pandemic was beginning its spread across western Europe and into the Americas. We twinned them with fragments of poetry in the hope that encountering the same lines at the same time as other readers might generate a fleeting sense of community across the lockdowns. In the months that followed, we often found escape from isolation in simple gestures towards shared experience: a friend sending a book through the post and then ringing to talk about it; watching a gallery’s online screening program and discussing it in real time with colleagues on WhatsApp.
That turbulent period is not ended, but some of the old …
What we’re doing this summer
We take a short break over August. A time to catch our breath and, praise be, to see some shows. To help us and you to make the most of the summer we asked a few of our recent contributors to nominate the exhibitions that they are looking forward to seeing. Our writers are creative individuals, liable to respond creatively to any brief, and so their responses encompass shows they have recently seen and will be thinking about for weeks to come, the books they are excited to read, and everything else under the summer sun. We’ll spend the next month plotting the year ahead and publishing archive material on social media: be sure to follow us there.
Hallie Ayres
Having been away from New York for a little while, I’m excited to see “Beyond Metaphor: Women and War.” Curated by Katarzyna Falęcka, the show aims to expand the reductionist trope of women’s lives under colonialism—heroic freedom fighter or defenseless victim—by highlighting five artists who trouble the facts and fictions of the Algerian War of Independence. I’m intrigued by this understanding of the struggle, which acknowledges that a slippage between categories is critical to the messy negotiation of liberation. …
Pejvak’s “If Need Be”
Xenia Benivolski
The slippery narratives in “If Need Be” by Pejvak, an artist collective formed of Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari, blend fact and fiction. Working as intermediaries, Pejvak channel a larger collective—of artists, writers, authors, playwrights, composers, miniaturists, calligraphers, and translators both imaginary and real, dead and alive—with whom they appear to collaborate across the centuries. Their work fills historical gaps with selective, hyper-surreal auto-fictions, forging new myths from overlapping narrative elements that hint at the bio-political agency of water, residue, plant life, and people.
In the entrance to the first exhibition hall is Cold-Chain Logistics (2021), a cold, sweating pipe that runs around the perimeter of a small bridge leading to a half-closed roll-up door reminiscent of those on water-delivery trucks. Step into the rectangular metal loop, and you are enveloped by the smell of copper and iron. The scent, diffused by the evaporating water on the surface of the pipe, conjures associations with blood, the earth, and the cosmos. Metal alloys have also been the subject of much local conflict in areas of Soviet industrialization and resource extraction. Cold-Chain Logistics thus establishes the tone of an exhibition that connects multiple landscapes, photographs, and sites of interest throughout eastern Eurasia …
Teju Cole’s Golden Apple of the Sun
Megan N. Liberty
During the lockdowns, Teju Cole turned to cooking. From September 28 to November 3, 2020 (the date of the US presidential election), Cole’s kitchen became his photographic subject. But instead of documenting elaborate freshly plated meals, Cole’s images show the juxtaposing edges of pots and pans, cutting boards, and dirty spoons resting on the stove. The sequence of oddly cropped images illustrates the social and global politics held in our food, cooking habits, and household items.
Best known as a novelist and essayist, Cole is also the author of photobooks including Blind Spot (2017), which drew on his Instagram practice of pairing photographs from his travels with long prose captions. But Golden Apple of the Sun departs from this format, instead presenting photographs of his countertop without adjacent texts (save the date and time stamp on the top margin of each page), sequenced with brown pages showing faded handwritten recipes reproduced from an eighteenth-century cookbook. The images and recipe pages are followed by a lengthy text without paragraph breaks, a meandering musing on Cole’s thinking behind this project, which encompasses the history and politics of the still-life genre—particularly the Dutch vanitas—and his own relationship to food and hunger.
While the essay is …
Every Woman Biennial, “My Love is Your Love”
Wendy Vogel
There’s always been a pioneering, even contrarian spirit to the Every Woman Biennial (EWB). Formerly known as the Whitney Houston Biennial, the inaugural exhibition opened in March 2014—in the same week as that year’s Whitney Biennial—as a scrappy one-day exhibition in a Brooklyn artist’s studio. With works by women artists hung floor to ceiling and ranging from figuration to agitprop, the Whitney Houston Biennial thumbed its nose at the tepid representational politics of the uptown affair from which it derived its (first) name. Over the next two New York editions C. Finley, the biennial’s founder, grew the exhibition to include hundreds of women and non-binary artists of diverse ages, races, and life paths.
The 2021 iteration of the EWB operated as a testing ground for the (post-?)pandemic new normal. The EWB expanded to London for the first time, presenting work by more than 300 artists in IRL locations for a week in early July. This year’s New York show, “NYC/NFT,” moved to the Wild West of the blockchain. Curated by Finley and EWB managing director Molly Caldwell, the show featured NFTs of works by 272 female and non-binary artists selected through an open-call proposal process. Superchief Gallery hosted the …
sonsbeek20→24, “force times distance: on labour and its sonic ecologies”
Rachael Rakes
Early on in the preview for sonsbeek20→24, I started thinking about art historian James Elkins’s Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (2001). Among the book’s touching elements is a seriously brooding table of contents: “Crying at the Empty Sea of Faith,” “Crying at nothing but colors,” and so on. At the risk of over-performing my own sentimentality, the press conference, of all things, set the exhibition up for me in a similar way. Instead of procedural speeches, there were testimonies on overwork and the uneven distribution of rest from co-curators Amal Alhaag and Aude Christel Mgba (Antonia Alampi and Zippora Elders complete the team with support from Krista Jantowski), artistic director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s remarks about assembling through and despite resonant bitter histories, and several other expressions of weariness, resilience, anger, and pride. These statements were interspersed with live choral music performed by Black Dutch gospel group G-Roots, whose songs felt programmed to raise energy and spike emotion. The form and feeling of this event set an affective index for the exhibition’s opening days.
The press conference took place in St. Eusebius Church, a sixteenth-century landmark in Arnhem that doubles …
Naeem Mohaiemen’s “Jole Dobe Na”
Natasha Marie Llorens
Naeem Mohaiemen’s new film, which lends its title to this solo exhibition of his work at the Bildmuseet in Umeå, opens with an image of a beautiful young woman. Sufiya, played by Kheya Chattopadhyay, is standing with her eyes closed, her head caught between two old-fashioned surgery lights covered in dust. In Listening to Images (2017), Tina Campt follows Fred Moten in asking “what is the sound that precedes the image?”; the question comes unbidden into my mind as a landline telephone begins to ring softly but insistently off screen, forcing the woman to open her eyes and return to the surface of the world. As the film cuts to a slow panning shot of the crumbling façade of the abandoned Lohia Hospital in Kolkota—formerly a maternity hospital—I wonder what this woman heard in the privacy of her own mind before she faced the ruinous present.
According to the exhibition guide, Mohaiemen’s work is “a counter-history of minor events” that destabilize grand historical narratives using imaginative annotation, slow panning shots, and speculative documentary strategies. I think that both the exhibition and the film are more profoundly about the frequency at which loss becomes audible, sensible. For example, the installation of …
“Ora et lege”
Emily McDermott
Sister Francesca Stanislava Šimuniová gave a speech at the opening of “Ora et lege” (“pray and read”). I can only speculate about what the nun said—she was speaking in Czech—but her presence, along with that of Sister Lucia Wagner, reflected this exhibition’s point of departure: It is not critical of or in opposition to religious belief; rather, curator Monika Čejková proposes contemporary art as a way to bring values of the Benedictine Order into a secular positioning, namely that of the “holy reading” ritual. The six participating artists—Ed Atkins, Kamilla Bischof, Jesse Darling, Liam Gillick, Martin Kohout, Florian Meisenberg, and the collective Slavs and Tatars—have responded to the site through artworks and texts, reflecting the Benedictine daily practice of lectio, meditatio, and oratio (reading, meditation, and prayer).
Entering St. Adalbert’s Church, Baroque frescos and architectural elements juxtapose Gothic wooden pews covered with graffitied inscriptions of Czech and German names, along with the occasional phrase. These markings were likely made by students at the grammar school that operated within the monastery from 1624 through to 1939—all but one, that is. On the second pew in the row, an uncannily new engraving reads “silence of the perpetual choire in heaven, 23 June …
“Chicago Works: Omar Velázquez”
Harry Burke
At the center of artist and musician Omar Velázquez’s first solo museum presentation is a sequence of four landscape paintings. Evocative of eerie, enlarged postcards, they depict disquieting Puerto Rican pastoral scenes. In Baracutey (2020), the slender neck of a white heron is throttled by a loop of metal wire. The gasping bird stands upon a squat wooden pig; nearby, a green lizard scuttles up a slanting tree. Between is an emptied bottle of Lysol surface cleaner, propped like a pennant on a wooden stick driven into a hump of pointillist grass.
In An Eye for the Tropics (2006), her study of the role of photography in early twentieth-century marketing of Jamaica and the Bahamas to tourists, Krista A. Thompson discusses the complex processes of “tropicalization” by which the Caribbean was fashioned as a “paradise.” She describes how images, consumed in the context of a sightseeing culture that burgeoned with the decline of agricultural industries, became the “new sugar.” The art-historical tradition of the picturesque—reformatted to accent the exoticism of the tropics, as perceived from an imperial viewpoint—informed this development. This imported European aesthetic shaped landscaping conventions and racialized island terrains.
By probing this lineage, Velázquez’s paintings connect contemporary patterns …
Tursic & Mille’s “Strange Days”
Kevin Brazil
Tursic & Mille’s Blue Monday (January) (all works 2021), an oil painting on a wood panel, depicts a young woman in a gingham dress sitting at a table. She is staring with confused disgust at her fingers, covered in the blue paint that lies, in a viscous blob, on the surface in front of her. Or rather, on the surface of the wood panel. Or rather: both on the table and on the panel at the same time, for the blue is so thickly applied that, disrupting the illusion, it reminds us that a painting is always matter and representation at once. Like this girl, Tursic & Mille are transfixed by this fundamental fact about painting: a fact and a fixation, which seems to unsettle as much as it captivates.
Each painting in “Strange Days,” Tursic & Mille’s first UK solo show, has a month of the year as a subtitle. These works, along with two sculptures of painted dogs, were all painted in 2021, yet the calendar they constitute serves as a summary of the concerns that the Serbian artist Ida Tursic and the French Wilfried Mille have explored since beginning to work together in the early 2000s. They start …
“Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys”
Aaina Bhargava
Hong Kong’s art history has traditionally been overshadowed by its status as a trading post for galleries and institutions showcasing internationally established artists. “Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys,” an exhibition organized by Asia Art Archive (AAA), brings different stories to light by exploring what archives are and can be.
Claire Hsu and Johnson Chang founded AAA in Hong Kong in 2000, with the objective of documenting existing and developing Asian art histories from Asian perspectives. Their action anticipated wider movements advocating the reclaiming of historical narratives, which have in recent years dominated discourses engulfing the art world and cultural sphere. Now home to one of the most valuable and comprehensive collections of materials pertaining to recent and contemporary Asian art, AAA demonstrates how crucial archives are to local art ecosystems, as well as to artists’ practices. By making the process of documentation accessible, they make the unseen seen.
Curated by Michelle Wong, a former researcher at AAA, this exhibition stems from a project initiated by the institution in 2014, delving into the vast personal archives of the late self-taught Hong Kong artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009). Ha’s collection of printed materials including exhibition catalogues, art books, and photographs—known as his “thinking …
The more things change
The Editors
There is a saying in French, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” It translates, roughly, as “don’t open your editorials with a quotation in French, if you want anyone to read them.” As such, it is among those critical principles that endure through even the most dramatic changes in the discourse surrounding works of art and the societies that produce them. Whether before or after the lockdowns, under Trump or Biden or Bolsonaro, in the midst of the climate crisis or a global reckoning against racial injustice, in the twilight of an old era or the dawn of a new, no one cares to read Anglophone writers showcase their imperfect French. The more things change, in this respect, the more they stay the same.
The most striking aspect of the gradual global emergence from lockdown has been, once the euphoria of seeing people and things subsides, how much of the old world has survived a series of events that were interpreted as paradigm shifts. This is particularly the case in the context of contemporary art, where the consensus was that a year of pandemic and protest would usher in a suite of dramatic infrastructural changes from which there …
Space Caviar (Eds.), Non-Extractive Architecture, Volume 1
George Kafka
Greenwashing, as defined by architect and writer Luke Jones in his contribution to Non-Extractive Architecture, Volume 1, is the “shallow or cynical deployment of faux-ecological imagery” considered in contrast to “green authenticity.” Edited by Italian architecture and research studio Space Caviar, this sleek collection of astute texts accompanies an exhibition, residency, and conference series organized by the Venetian arm of V–A–C Foundation, an organization co-founded in 2009 by Leonid Mikhelson and Teresa Iarocci Mavica to promote Russian contemporary art. Mikhelson is also the founder and chairman of Novatek, Russia’s largest independent producer of natural gas. In late 2018, Novatek finished building a $27-billion plant in the Arctic Circle that, combined with two more planned facilities, is expected to produce 60 million tons of liquid natural gas per year by 2030.
These facts are not mentioned in Non-Extractive Architecture, Volume 1. The book brings together 18 eloquent contributions, largely essays, from important voices in architectural academia to advocate for new forms of ecologically sound architecture practice. Its opening sections explain how extraction might be a useful lens through which to read architectural history and to reformulate its future. Intentionally or otherwise, they also provide the reader with an intellectual framework for …
London Roundup
Orit Gat
It would be impossible to think about London’s first Gallery Weekend in early June outside the context of the slow re-emergence from lockdowns. I know this strange sensation is not unique, but the experience of a public disaster dealt with largely by isolating from society has also marked the way I look at art. Taking stock of my tour of the city, it strikes me that the artworks which affected me most were ones that displayed intimacy, proximity, and all those daily exchanges from which I have felt distant these past sixteen months.
That is not to say that the daily and intimate are not political. At Lisson, “An Infinity of Traces,” a group show curated by Ekow Eshun, focused on the work of UK-based Black artists. It included Alberta Whittle’s video Between a Whisper and a Cry (2019), which explores Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite’s idea of an oceanic worldview in the aftermath of the Middle Passage, and a series of watercolor text drawings by Jade Montserrat (who also has a solo show at Bosse & Baum in South London) that bear heavy, physical messages, like The smell of her still burning hair (2017). When I was trying to …
Caline Aoun’s “Sedimentary Matters”
Rahel Aima
Summer, muggy and punishing. In another city we might rely on our bodies to index its various accumulations: sunlight, sweat, melanin. Here, we use our cars. Steering wheels and leather seats that scald palms and thighs and—I had forgotten until I found myself hurtling down the highway unable to see—windows that fog up with the contrast between the hot, soupy air outside and our blessedly air-conditioned interiors. Since moving back to Dubai from Brooklyn earlier this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about terroir. What would work that reflects these atmospheric conditions, the filmy dust and sticky heat, look and feel like?
In Caline Aoun’s “Sedimentary Matters,” the uber-minimalist gallery is recast as an alluvial plain. There’s a rare sense of overflow and sensuous excess that overwhelms the space’s usual affective straitjacket. Things accrete into a material typology: ink, shadows, humidity, and the ghosts of all the other shows that have happened there. Upon entering the space, viewers encounter Condensations of the Invisible Space (all works 2021), a machine placed upon a high, spindly table with attached piping that goes through the wall. Those more mechanically literate might identify a fridge and compressor parts. On the other side is an …
Maxwell Alexandre’s “Pardo é Papel”
Oliver Basciano
In early 2020 I attended a protest outside the police headquarters in downtown São Paulo. The small crowd had come to hear from the relatives of nine young people, all Black, who had been killed in a stampede when police fired rubber bullets indiscriminately across a packed baile, a dance party, in the south of the city. The authorities claim that these nights are a hotbed of gang activity and are rife with drugs. One young woman who spoke to the crowd, her voice flat, described how her 16-year-old brother, Dennys, worked six days a week to support the family and went to the party on his one day off. He never came home. This May, 27 residents of Jacarezinho, in Rio de Janeiro, died during a drug raid. Earlier this month, a young woman called Kathlen Romeu, who was pregnant, was fatally caught in the crossfire of a police shootout in the north of the city.
Both police violence and parties are subjects of the thirteen paintings by Maxwell Alexandre at Instituto Tomie Ohtake. In one work from “Pardo é Papel”—the series that dominates the exhibition and in which the artist depicts his scenes of favela life using acrylic, …
Glasgow International
Rosanna Mclaughlin
On my way to Tramway in Glasgow’s Southside I spot the artist Jenkin van Zyl walking past the McDonald’s on Pollokshaws Road. I know it’s van Zyl because I watched an online video about his make-up routine. He’s wearing prosthetic horns, hooks for hands, and nothing much on the bottom half, except for some strapping that reveals pretty much the whole of his arse. Van Zyl’s film Machines of Love (2020–21), showing at Tramway as part of Glasgow’s biennial arts festival, unfolds like a World of Warhammer cosplay fantasy with heavy shades of Paul McCarthy, in which a group of orc-like people with rat teeth and squashed noses conduct squalid sex games in an underground lair. The prosthetics are impressive, yet while van Zyl has understood the look, after 40 minutes of writhing around it’s less clear what he wants to say with it: a problem endemic in a culture that specializes in polishing and grafting pre-existing aesthetics.
The theme for this year’s festival is “attention.” During an era in which convoluted curatorial agendas have become de rigueur, director Richard Parry has opted for the opposite approach, picking one so open that you’d be hard pressed to find an artwork to …
Surrogacy, Money Shots, and Bit Rot
Sylvie Fortin
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between writers and artists. Here, Sylvie Fortin explores ideas of hospitality, surrogacy, and profit, and considers how the pandemic has shaped her response to the work of Jean-Charles de Quillacq.
It took me a long time to write “Visqueen Lumisol Clear.” Looking back, I can understand why. It was the first project I managed to complete under Covid-19; in New York, where I had landed in confinement, confusion held the city in a chokehold, exacerbated by the profound inequalities laid bare by the virus’s spread of death and hardship. To get a hold of things—anything—I cast a wide web. My text, with its online-real-life shuffle, its windows and screens, its memory jumps and mind wanderings, and its leaps across scales, reflected a specific moment in the “life cycle” of our ongoing relationship with the virus. So did the human body’s insistent irruptions into the text.
In 2019, when I first encountered the work of Jean-Charles de Quillacq in Paris, I was beginning research for an exhibition that would explore the storied intersections of the body and hospitality in contemporary art. Jean-Charles’s …
13th Shanghai Biennale, “Bodies of Water”
When “Bodies of Water,” the 13th edition of the Shanghai Biennale, opened in November last year, it adopted a fluid approach to programming in response to the pandemic. In place of the traditional biennale format was a multi-platform “in crescendo” project comprising three “phases” and lasting a total of eight months. The first two of these, “A Wet-Run Rehearsal” and “An Ecosystem of Alliance,” featured live events, screenings, and discussions—held within the Power Station of Art (PSA), in art spaces along the Yangtze river, and online—that explored the exhibition’s central concerns: ecology, hydrology, posthumanism, and the interconnectedness of all lifeforms on earth. In the midst of a pandemic precipitated by zoonosis, these are timely concerns.
In April this year “The Exhibition,” the biennale’s third and final phase, opened in the PSA. This massive decommissioned power station, modelled on London’s Tate Modern, was in 2012 repurposed as the first state-run museum of contemporary art on mainland China. Situated on the banks of the Huangpu River, which the electric plant helped to industrialize, it is an apt location for an exhibition that emphasizes the inseparability of humans from the natural world they exploit. Curated by architect, researcher, and writer Andrés Jaque …
“Portals”
Ben Eastham
The editors of this publication keep a list of words and phrases that writers are to be strongly discouraged from using. On it are examples of curatorial bluster and authorial overreach (“In these times”), individually blameless words against which one editor maintains a personal vendetta (“oeuvre”), and a selection of quotes from canonical literature that have, by adoption into the catchphrase kitty of contemporary art, been entirely separated from their original meaning. So imagine my feeling when I discovered one of those blacklisted lines—Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again […] fail better”—mounted in giant steel letters outlined by LED lights on the façade of Athens’ new cultural center.
In fairness to Nikos Navridis, the artist responsible for transforming Beckett’s meditation on the void into a city-scale motivational mantra, his piece illustrates how a work of art can be interpreted in ways contradictory to its maker’s intentions. The artist is entitled to construe the line as he chooses, or it might even be that he wants local residents to reflect on the purposelessness of existence when buying oranges at the neighborhood market over which his sign looms. Either way, this reminder of art’s tendency to slip the leash of simple meaning offers a …
Nan Goldin’s “Memory Lost”
Talia Curtis
Since the advent of the US’s “War on Drugs,” popular media representations from Breaking Bad to Intervention to Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew have mirrored the political consensus on drug addiction, reducing it from a deeply political phenomenon driven by markets—both the pharmaceutical industry and underground economies—to a dialectic of stylized euphoria on the one hand and abject depravity on the other. Both the media landscape and the rehab industrial complex drip with a Protestant ethic that pits puritanism against hedonism: addiction is rendered as a moral failing, not what a growing scientific and sociological consensus understands as one symptom of a profit-driven healthcare system, systemic racism, and gross income inequality.
Nan Goldin’s work is antithetical to ideas of addiction that, by painting it as a personal failing, obstruct any substantive response to a devastating health crisis in favor of subjecting vulnerable populations to punitive violence. Against this backdrop, Marian Goodman Gallery’s first New York exhibition of Goldin’s work highlights several major pieces, including Memory Lost (2019–21), an impressionistic slideshow of life seen through the experience of addiction; its thematic sister Sirens (2019–20), a video work approximating the hypnotic ecstasy of being high; and The Other Side (1992–2021), an update of …
Maysha Mohamedi’s “Sacred Witness Sacred Menace”
Fanny Singer
I cannot stop thinking about the quality of Maysha Mohamedi’s facture. There are a number of different styles of brushstroke—or, perhaps more accurately, applications of paint—deployed in Mohamedi’s first solo show at Parrasch Heijnen, but, in particular, there is one type of line, thin and febrile, that struck me as completely original. It’s unusual to discover something like this in contemporary abstract painting; young artists are inevitably rearranging, for the most part—sometimes brilliantly—familiar, anthologized marks. There is a sense that only a finite quantity of maneuvers are possible when it comes to the meeting of pigment and surface. Here is a line, however, rendered in oil with a minute brush, that denies the sumptuousness of the medium. A line that, in effect, does what oil paint does not want to do: it creeps anxiously across a spare ground, it does not fatten, grow tumid with thinner, or spill blearily beyond itself. As if responding to my scrutiny, this line appears—on each canvas applied at different frequencies—to jump like the reading of a seismometer’s jittery needle during a series of minor earthquakes, or, in other places, to accumulate like a loose mass of Silly String. I think of Joan Mitchell, her …
Camp, drag, and activism in South African art
Sean O’Toole
During a recent project researching the history of nightclubs in Johannesburg, frustrated by the limitations of orthodox archives—newspapers, magazines, music books, biographies, Facebook groups—and the mythologizing of DJs and musicians, I turned to artists for additional insight. Where did they dance, I asked, and how, if at all, did these ephemeral spaces influence their practice? The two-part question reflected my focus: I was interested in mapping the safe spaces and contact zones where Johannesburg residents—Black and white, straight and queer, normative and other—retreated at night, sometimes in flagrant costumes, to socialize, dance, and possibly enact dissident desires against the backdrop of apartheid and its messy aftermath. The direct line artists drew from their club experiences to their professional practice was surprising.
Zanele Muholi, the binary-refusing artist whose photographs register the complications and assertions of South Africa’s Black LGBTQ+ communities, recalled partying at Club Chameleon in Johannesburg in the late 1990s. The club night was organized by Sistahs Kopanang, a short-lived Black lesbian group active between 1997 and ’99, and occupied a venue close to the home of Muholi’s future mentor, the photographer David Goldblatt. The club’s anthem was Michael Bolton’s schmaltzy 1995 paean “Can I Touch You… There?” Muholi was …
Cutting both ways
The Editors
In Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Karen Barad describes a 1922 experiment that changed the course of quantum physics. Stay with us here. Rather than get into the details of what Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach were investigating—our grasp on space quantization is loose—we’ll merely highlight that their attempts to record what happens when silver atoms are beamed through a magnetic field were initially frustrated. It was only when Stern, a cigar smoker, leaned in to observe the screen on which the atoms had landed that their traces appeared. The sulfur in the cigar smoke had turned the silver into the more easily visible, dark black silver sulfide, “like developing a photographic film.”
Barad’s point is that the cigar is not featured in textbook representations of the experiment’s equipment—alongside atom beam, magnets, and screen—yet was essential to its findings. The physicist from whom she takes her lead, Niels Bohr, was scrupulous about including in his sketches even such seemingly superfluous details as the bolts holding the apparatus together, because he recognized that the material infrastructures of an experiment dictate the readings it produces. Barad goes further by including the cigar in her diagram. But if we are including the cigar, …
Laura Raicovich’s Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest
Travis Diehl
Who really thinks museums are politically neutral? Find these people, and you will have found the audience for Laura Raicovich’s new book on the tensions between social movements and museum politics. In 2018, Raicovich resigned as director of the Queens Museum over pushback against her expressions of solidarity with immigrant communities and striking workers, and the board’s decision to rent out the museum for an Israeli government event keynoted by Vice President Mike Pence. In the former case, she writes, the board argued that “a public institution […] should not, and indeed could not, ‘take sides’” in political debates; in the latter, however, it was Raicovich who argued for maintaining the practice of “not renting space for such political events.” Neutrality is rhetorical; the public understands this as well as art world insiders.
So it’s odd how often Raicovich returns to “the myth of neutrality” in Culture Strike. The first three chapters survey the legacy of colonialism, the “universal museum,” and arguments for returning looted objects; the problems of philanthropy in a world of unethical riches; and well-meaning blunders into cultural appropriation. The fourth and sixth ponder ways to move forward by revising the narratives museums tell and committing to an …
Piotr Łakomy’s “Combined Vessels”
Ewa Borysiewicz
Piotr Łakomy’s work reconsiders the classical idea of the human figure as model of good proportion. Recent events have proved beyond any lingering doubt that man is in fact not the measure of all things, and the Polish artist’s latest exhibition focuses on feedback loops between human and nonhuman agents as one alternative source of aesthetic form. Łakomy’s presentation of painting-like sculptures and sculpture-like paintings, composed of both organic and inorganic matter, hints at a possible way out of the nature-culture dichotomy.
Łakomy’s points of departure are Le Corbusier and Frederick Kiesler, whose contrasting architectural theories outline the field of his investigations. Le Corbusier’s insistence on rational principles provides Łakomy’s works with their basic structure; Kiesler’s emphasis on fluidity is reflected in the versatile and unpredictable character of the fabrics with which he fills his frames. Best known for his careful, minimalist sculptures, Łakomy has recently gravitated towards an even more ascetic style, reflected in his new sculptures’ nearly two-dimensional design and unified formats. The majority hang with their upper edge 140cm above the ground (the height is conceived to meet the eyeline of the body according to which Le Corbusier’s scale, the Modulor, was …
Cameron Rowland’s “Deputies”
Alan Gilbert
Cameron Rowland’s artworks sometimes feel as if they are meant to serve as illustrations for a text or historical thesis. I don’t say this as a criticism. His breakout 2016 exhibition “91020000” at Artists Space in New York City contained previously manufactured items—to use the term “readymade” would already begin to aestheticize them—that partly functioned as visual counterparts to their captions and to an accompanying essay made available as a pamphlet. Displaying desks and benches made by inmates, “91020000” addressed the prison-industrial complex, which disproportionately incarcerates Black men and is a crucial node in slavery’s ongoing legacy in the United States.
Rowland’s current exhibition, “Deputies,” contains four object-installations (all undated) and a longer essay also available in takeaway pamphlet form. The theme here is the origins of policing in the United States with the establishment of slave patrols that monitored and disciplined the subjugated and hunted down fugitives. With a nod to site-specificity, the exhibition focuses on New York City (where the first official U.S. police force was created following the passage of the 1844 Metropolitan Police Act), and extends outside the gallery space to five benches installed in a nearby park, each one paying homage to a different unmarked …
Liverpool Biennial, “The Stomach & The Port”
Francis Whorrall-Campbell
The title for the latest Liverpool Biennial, “The Stomach & The Port,” makes direct reference to the tangled threads of global trade and disease transmission, plumbing the history of a city that has, over the last three centuries, found itself at the center of both. The curatorial “entry-points” for the Biennial are “porosity,” “kinship,” and “stomach,” all themes which have taken on new resonance during the Covid-19 pandemic: the show, which spreads from the waterfront up into the city, taking in nine venues and various public commissions, displays a timely fascination with what it means to be a body alongside others in the world.
The city’s port, a place of commerce in both people and goods, here serves both as metaphor and as real site of human connection and consumption. Curator Manuela Moscoso’s commitment to interrogating the past is particularly striking—and necessary—in light of recent policy moves by the British government to hamstring museums and other cultural organizations in reckoning with the colonial violence embedded in their collections. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, currently making its way through the UK legislature, proposes harsh penalties for those enacting “criminal damage” on a memorial, ignoring the real criminal damage done …
Peter Hujar’s “Backstage”
John Douglas Millar
“Backstage” is the third solo exhibition of Peter Hujar’s work to be presented at Maureen Paley’s London space since 2008, when the gallery took responsibility for the artist’s estate in the UK. The work is presented across two rooms; a larger space that almost exclusively shows portraits of artists from New York’s thriving drag performance scene of the 1970s, either preparing their costumes and make-up or gloriously composed backstage. These silver-gelatin prints were made by Hujar himself, with three exceptions: a portrait of the filmmaker John Waters, another of his muse Divine, and a group self-portrait showing Hujar jumping in the air with friends. These are all estate ink prints made by Gary Schneider, the artist and master printer trained by Hujar and now widely regarded as one of the finest printmakers alive. He is also the only printer authorized to make editions of Hujar’s work.
The second, smaller room displays four further estate prints: an extraordinary nude self-portrait entitled Seated Self-Portrait Depressed (1980); a portrait of Hujar’s friend the writer and raconteur Fran Lebowitz reclining in bed at her parents’ home in Morristown; one of Hujar’s sometime lover, protégé, and friend, the artist David Wojnarowicz, sparking up a cigarette on …
Monika Baer’s “loose change”
Peter Brock
The six watercolors that greet the viewer when they enter “loose change,” Monika Baer’s second exhibition at Greene Naftali, offer a pared-down introduction to the artist’s habit of combining heterogeneous elements within the space of a single picture. In one sense, these modestly sized paintings are straightforward: splotchy pools of pigment on chunky paper with a few coins glued to their surfaces, sometimes in little clusters. The painted bits look casual, loosely composed, and unselfconscious. Faint lines meander through The Grove (2021) with such ease that they almost resemble accidental scratches from a bracelet or the dull end of a tool. Two of these works have fragments of small sawblades screwed into their surfaces. The watery dabs of paint in Loose Change (2021) seem not to notice the menacing metal teeth less than an inch away, whose rusted tips look weary but fierce. The literal and symbolic density of these metallic intruders contrasts strongly with the soft haze of the watercolor passages. At first it seems like the only relationship these chunks of metal have with the paint is that a few of the coins overlap with the colors.
Face Up (2021) contains a loose wash of pale blue …
Kamrooz Aram and Iman Issa’s “Lives of Forms”
Vivian Sky Rehberg
The title of Kamrooz Aram and Iman Issa’s “Lives of Forms,” and the work included in it, is not inspired by French art historian Henri Focillon’s 1934 study Vie des formes, as far as I know. Yet after exploring this kempt trove of paintings, sculptures, and displays, installed in separate galleries devoted to each artist, the art-history geek in me found hope in Focillon’s claim that formal relationships within and among artworks order and serve as a metaphor for the universe. In this universally chaotic period, with this astute artist pairing, curators Silvia Franceschini and Tim Roerig kindle still-combustible frictions between aesthetics and politics by exquisitely accentuating form in relation to the content it conveys.
“Lives of Forms” asserts that aesthetic form is always imbricated in the socio-political realities of historical moments. The space in which the artists’ works overlap is at a threshold atop the central staircase, just outside the gallery entrance. There sits a white, ring-shaped bench where you can listen to a disembodied text-to-speech software-generated voice deliver Issa’s looping sound piece The Revolutionary (2010). While doing so, you can gaze toward or away from an interior portico in which Aram’s trim collage of a ceramic vessel …
Smriti Keshari and Eric Schlosser’s “the bomb”
Hallie Ayres
When an atomic mushroom cloud is reduced to an image, it is more likely to inspire awe than terror. This is the paradox that haunts Smriti Keshari and Eric Schlosser’s the bomb (2021), an immersive adaptation of a 2016 film that transmutes violence into spectacle in an attempt to teach its audience a lesson. These sensational images, though ostensibly employed in the service of nuclear disarmament, instead exaggerate the perverse glamor of mass destruction.
At Pioneer Works, the black-box installation resembles a military command center, curved to simulate the enclosure of a cockpit. The effect calls to mind Charles Eames’s Glimpses of the U.S.A., which collaged thousands of images of “typical” American life into 13 minutes and projected them onto seven massive screens suspended within a geodesic dome. The reference to Eames’s consumerist propaganda, famously displayed at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, sets a prescient tone for a film that spends nearly half of its 59-minute runtime rehashing Cold War talking points. Playing through five rows of nine LED screens, the thematically grouped footage follows a loose chronological cycle: contemporary displays of military might; US propaganda footage of nuclear testing and safety drill education; the destruction of Hiroshima …
Hanni Kamaly’s “THE MIGHT THEY HAVE”
Natasha Marie Llorens
Hanni Kamaly’s lanky sculptures remind me of something an earth scientist in N. K. Jemisin’s 2015 SF novel The Fifth Season said about a mountainous life form: “They are an arcane thing, you understand, an alchemical thing […] Obviously they possess some sort of kinship with humanity, which they choose to acknowledge in the statue-like shape we most often see, but it follows that they can take other shapes. We would never know.” The strangeness of Kamaly’s creatures is similar—impenetrable and infinite, simultaneously.
The sculptures are crowded into Index’s exhibition space. Some, such as LAMINE DIENG (2018–21), stoop to fit under its low ceiling. Made of paired solid metal rods and standing on five legs stabilized by at least four joints each, LAMINE DIENG’s formal composition should imply both strength and flexibility, yet it gives the impression of a thing that has been abruptly switched off in the middle of a gesture. The same sense of interruption affects all of Kamaly’s sculptures, and it feels like an act of power intended to limit the development of these careful, dexterous creatures.
Jemisin’s novel comes to mind because of the attention the author pays to the violence inflicted upon …
John Akomfrah’s “The Unintended Beauty of Disaster”
Cora Gilroy-Ware
Viral videos, especially those featuring animals, rarely make a lasting impression. Part of their charm is their innate forgettability. But every now and then there is an exception. In April I came across a video online that has haunted me ever since. Shot by drone from directly above, this 49-second clip centers on a strange spiral made up of hundreds of tiny gray-brown forms moving clockwise over a pale surface. As the camera moves down, we see that these forms are four-legged creatures whose fur ranges from dark taupe to a white brighter than what gradually reveals itself to be snow under their hooves. When the camera retreats back up into the sky, we glimpse another, more dense and fast-paced spiral to the left. A caption states that these are “reindeer cyclones” captured on the Kola Peninsula, the north-eastern part of the area known as the Baltic Shield. Responding to an outside threat, reindeer gather and move in a whorl, keeping their fawns tucked safely in the middle. In the comments under the post, viewers asked what, in this instance, caused the reindeer to behave in this way. “Probably the drone” was the consensus.
Not only were these mesmerizing rosettes …
Frieze New York
Osman Can Yerebakan
Nostalgia was the prevailing feeling as I approached Frieze New York’s new home at The Shed in Hudson Yards. I wasn’t around when the piers were a queer hub of sex and solidarity, but I remember the East River breeze on the ferry to Randall’s Island on previous visits to the fair, and a time before Thomas Heatherwick’s (indefinitely closed) eyesore The Vessel. Frieze’s pandemic-enforced change in venue brings into sharp relief the disparity between the neighborhood’s new occupiers—business-casual millennials; more recently those getting their vaccines at the nearby Javits Center; and, now, fair-goers—and the legendary stories that haunt the crumbling docks. It was nonetheless hard not to miss the old spectacle of the fair, which has been replaced by a new and more muted tone.
In place of the gigantic sculptures that guarded the vast fair tent in its previous location, visitors to The Shed find a series of more modest flower boxes. The Acute Art “augmented reality” app transforms them, via your phone screen, into Cao Fei’s RMB City AR (2020), a virtual rendering of an exploding, dystopian city. Stationed outside the entrance, the phone-activated work starts the chain of “camera moments” that stretches into the booths …
Standard bearers
The Editors
Last Friday, security guards prevented a group of protestors from entering New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The action was organized as part of the artist-led “Strike MoMA” campaign, which calls for a radical reappraisal of the institution’s funding model so that “something else can emerge, something under the control of workers, communities, and artists rather than billionaires.” Two days later, on the other side of the Atlantic, supporters of Manchester United took their protest past security and into the soccer club’s stadium, forcing that afternoon’s match to be postponed. Banners demanded the creation of an ownership model that would give fans a majority stake, returning an organization founded by railway workers to the community that supported its growth into a multibillion dollar company.
There are issues here that shouldn’t be elided—there is always risk in transferring across contexts, even those as closely aligned as the US and UK—but the similarities were striking, especially if you subscribe to the idea that art is part of a wider cultural continuum. Both protests were organized by members of the audiences that these institutions exist, at least nominally, to serve; both drew attention to the disparities between those in power and their constituencies. …
Contemporary Art Writing Daily’s Anti-Ligature Rooms
Kevin Brazil
An anti-ligature room is a room that contains nothing around which a rope or cord can be tied. Designed to house people considered at risk from suicide, it provides the title, and a guiding metaphor for the state of contemporary culture, for a collection of texts by “Contemporary Art Writing Daily.” CAWD, as it styles itself, is an author project and website which, since 2014, has published short anonymous reviews of, mostly, the kind of contemporary art displayed in élite galleries in the Global North. Scrolling through the reviews, like reading this book, is like tuning into the interior monologues of a crowd of MFA graduates as they mill awkwardly in a private viewing. They offer repressed and volatile compounds of high theory and raw emotion—“the cast-off internalizes its social panopticon as an ever-carried guilt”—that suggest something is unstable and off-kilter, at least among the insiders of this particular sphere of the art world.
The book consists of seven sections, six of which are numbered rooms, riffing on the title, focusing on themes like “cold” or “content.” As art criticism, the texts work indirectly, circling around common preoccupations of the past decade’s art: animation, CGI, object-oriented-ontology, the digitization of everyday life. …
Shahryar Nashat’s “THEY COME TO TOUCH”
Jonathan Griffin
I still do not really know what color the fitted carpet is that runs through the three floors of 8762 Holloway Drive in West Hollywood. Some shade of sage green, I’d guess, but it could be more lime, maybe more grass, maybe more gold. I do not know because Shahryar Nashat has covered every window in the building with a pink film (again, hard for my dazzled eyes to calibrate) that suffuses the space in a discombobulating, low-contrast pall—akin to the pulsing non-color that appears when you face into the sun with your eyes closed.
I also was not certain, on my visit to Nashat’s exhibition “THEY COME TO TOUCH,” what was in the bags of yellow liquid that slump unpleasantly in the corners of most rooms, although I suspected, and further research has confirmed, that they are filled with piss.
A former architect’s office in a 1930s commercial building designed by Rudolph Schindler, 8762 Holloway Drive has seen better days. Tidemarks of caulk on the walls reveal where desks have been ripped out. The greenish carpet is wrinkled and unevenly patched. The building is a stone’s throw from the Sunset Strip, where tourists trundle in open-top minivans past …
“A Fire in My Belly”
Alan Murrin
This show of 47 works by 36 artists—41 drawn from Julia Stoschek’s collection, augmented by six loans—explores the effects of violence, physical and psychological, on the body and the body politic. The earliest work on display is Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach’s Capri (1911), an oil painting showing a sunset burning out over a darkening coastline; the most recent is Anne Imhof’s Untitled (Wave) (2021), a thirty-minute video wherein a lone figure stands on a shoreline, beating back the oncoming tide with a whip. The show is filled with careful pairings, its emotional register ranging from despair to hope, from the abject to the sublime. It takes its title from David Wojnarowicz’s 1986–87 montage of spinning eyeballs and sewn flesh, mummified corpses and ants crawling over a figurine of the crucified Jesus; on the opposite wall hangs Zoe Leonard’s Untitled Aerial (1998/2008), a photograph of a vast landscape with a river wending through it like a strip of silver ribbon. The two sit in silent communion, the naked landscape a counterbalance to the corporeal concerns of Wojnarowicz’s work. As is so often the case with this show, the wound inflicted by one piece is salved by the next.
On entering the space, …
“Back and Forth, Maybe With Some Chatting”
Sophia Al-Maria / Tosh Basco
Like a lot of Tosh Basco’s work, the images I’m looking at on my phone seem to evade capture and demand physical presence. The other day Tosh sent me this fleet of photos documenting the series of new drawings that make up the current exhibition “Angels, Hand Dances and Prayers” at Company Gallery in New York. The exhibition gives a glimpse into a body of work that accompanies Tosh’s remarkable output of performance over the past decade but which has been less commonly seen. And the question of the seen and the unseen is a preoccupation here.
It is particularly poignant given the notoriety Tosh gathered over the past decade under the former moniker boychild, a magnetic persona widely referenced in pop culture and scholarly articles. Her movement-based performance practice is slippery, moving, and alive. Although it begins with a body, the work does not end there. Sometimes it may point to Tosh’s origin story as a kid in San Francisco who accessed performance via drag, but more often it is reaching outward towards the future—questioning the possibilities of communication and expanding space for those who engage with the work to do the same.
Tosh tells me the haunting …
Ishi Glinsky’s “Monuments to Survival”
Christina Catherine Martinez
It was an emergency. A young brown girl had Tik Tok’d misinformation about the origins of punk. A podcast was assembled. A white expert was brought in. He used to skateboard. He said the girl was “probably a good person” but she didn’t know what she was talking about. A Reddit post began with a list of black and brown punk artists (Pleasure Venom, Big Joanie, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex) and the thread spiraled into a tangled argument over whether or not they constituted the “real” origins of punk. I can’t believe these arguments are still happening. But then again, I’m still not certain I know what modernism is, only that it has failed us in some way, and I know that similar arguments occur about whether what we call “America” today started with brown people or white people, and what value judgements must attach to each tangled story.
Sitting on the ground in the back room of Chris Sharp’s white cube gallery, Ishi Glinsky’s Tohono O’odham Basket (2013) looks like a tangle of wires shaped into a gourd-like vessel, a purposeful twist on the traditional baling wire baskets of his tribe. Each of the five works in this …
London Roundup
Patrick Langley
London’s galleries are open again. Exhibitions that were paused or postponed last fall have emerged from enforced hibernation into a cultural environment altered by six months of—well, not very much. To a quarantine-addled critic, this presents a quandary. One of the pleasures—and pitfalls—of writing about art is using it as a measure of lived experience: of holding work up to the light and saying, ah yes, this reminds me of something. The problem is, I haven’t much new experience against which to gauge the work. But maybe I’m not alone. In the capital’s galleries I kept noticing pieces, many made over this past year, that described a version of the same space—an unstable interior, variously possessed and infiltrated by outside forces. Which is to say, a state of mind. Or was I just projecting?
Leidy Churchman’s “The Between is Ringing,” at Rodeo’s Bourdon Street space, is a small, rewarding show of a dozen new paintings that range from smudgy abstraction to cartoonish exuberance. The work subtitled Diptych (all works share a main title with the exhibition and are dated 2020) comprises two oil-on-linen paintings, stacked one atop the other, depicting an abstracted living room that is also an existential void. The …
Monika Grabuschnigg’s “Razed in Isolation”
Rahel Aima
We knew that the onslaught of pandemic art was coming. In Monika Grabuschnigg’s “Razed in Isolation,” it arrives by way of parable. Here, the cataclysmic disaster is the most powerful volcanic eruption ever recorded: Mount Tambora, Indonesia, 1815. Volcanic ash blocks the sun, changing the weather and affecting crops on the other side of the world. Things, as the Spice Girls once sang, would never be the same again.
At least, according to the exhibition text. This narrative plays out obliquely across a series of flat ceramic works, which are installed on the walls alongside aluminum panels and gnarly, gloopy tire rims. Loosely articulated nude figures cavort across glazed lavalike rocks, all overlapping limbs and orifices and doggy style. It later occurs to me that this kind of thing is probably a bit risqué here in Dubai. The skin tones on view resemble the shade range of a makeup counter up until a few years ago: alabaster, peaches-and-cream, golden, and—other. This is definitely the kind of cinematic event in which all the people of color die first.
The largest works suggest volcanic activity of a different kind, namely the plate tectonics of early geologic time. In works like Rite of passage …
Kasper Bosmans’s “A Perfect Shop-Front”
Francesco Tenaglia
Kasper Bosmans has turned the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro outside in. On entering his solo exhibition, the visitor is presented with a reproduction of a stylized city: painted onto the walls in shades of red are two ajar doors; assorted memorabilia can be glimpsed through a window display; a mural resembles a fake stone wall; and a thin pink highway painted on the floor, beside which rests an object resembling a discarded necklace, directs the viewer to a red wall on which hang three paintings the size of standard letter paper. Curator Eva Fabbris approached Bosmans about a show before the pandemic. The project morphed over the following months to suit the radically changing conditions, and to reflect art institutions’ ongoing anxiety over how they relate to their audiences. “A Perfect Shop-Front” could be thought of as a kind of trompe l’oeil: the minimal rendering of an urban project within an institution. A tiny strip of the city has percolated into an exhibition space, creating a zone of thresholds in which the boundaries between inside and outside are thin.
A serendipitous detail: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro is located just a few steps from Milan’s Navigli, two artificial water channels built in the …
Joachim Bandau’s “Die Nichtschönen. Werke 1967–1974”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
At the entrance to Joachim Bandau’s Basel exhibition stands Großes weißes Tor [Large White Gate] (1969/1970), a trio of tall, shiny white columns, each sprouting buffed shoulders and arms that conjoin with its neighbors. Born in Cologne in 1936, Bandau’s childhood was marked by World War Two. He determined to be an artist at 13, after a visit to a Paul Klee exhibition, and went on to study at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, just ahead of Gerhard Richter and Imi Knoebel. Nonetheless, he grew up in the shadow of the figurative sculpture with which the National Socialists underpinned their credo of racial superiority—like Karl Albiker’s strapping athletes that still welcome visitors to Berlin’s Olympic Park—and began to counter this mechanical perfection in his own work. The anthropomorphic columns of Großes weißes Tor make unconvincing titans: the arms might just be thighs; the bulges don’t swell where they ought to. And the structure is modular, easily assembled and just as easily tidied away. It’s a collaged acropolis for a time of jerky social reconfiguration.
The initial mood of this selective retrospective, a survey of Bandau’s Nichtschönen [Non-beauties] from 1967 to 1974, is black humor. The Nichtschönen are generously proportioned, fiberglass-reinforced polyester forms, sometimes with …
The Furthest Edge
Jesi Khadivi
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between writers and artists. Here, Jesi Khadivi considers how external circumstances—from our ongoing “state of exception” to the unpredictable sleeping patterns of infant children—changed the way she related to, and wrote about, the work of Tatiana Trouvé.
Hermetic, inwardly focused, private. These are all terms that have been used to describe Tatiana Trouvé’s practice. I’ve used them myself. In fact, I picked them out of a quick skim that I just did of the essay about her work I was commissioned to write for TextWork in the Spring of 2020.
Looking back, I realize that they are also words that I would have used to describe my writing practice until the Covid-19 pandemic. For me, writing has always been about claiming space. Or perhaps more accurately, opening a space: finding a point zero where there is nothing but myself and my subject. This isn’t easy, even in the best conditions. There are fluctuations. The space expands and contracts, other things seep in: external stimuli, a phone call, unrelated thoughts, hunger, boredom, fatigue. I saw this mingling with the …
“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America”
Ladi’Sasha Jones
Ella Sheppard Moore’s father bought her freedom from enslavement as a child; as the lead arranger and composer of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, she grew up to establish Negro spirituals (or plantation songs) in the landscape of American popular culture. Listening to a 1909 recording of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which happens to be my favorite spiritual, I hear a haunting ringing out as the four members sing the phrase “coming for to carry me home”—taking a hold of the word “home,” stretching it, and drawing it out over a run of four notes wherein the register lowers twice as the chorus loops back around. What is utterly magnificent about this rendition of the song, which differs greatly from the version I grew up listening to and singing, is that it conveys a deeper, reifying story of radical refusal, stirring the condition that emerges from living in pursuit of freedom from the imagination of white terror. This kind of living is marked in the formations of early Black American music, wherein songs are in part prayers and prophetic visioning. They are spiritual speech acts that map pathways for new possibilities, self-possessed futurities.
Okwui Enwezor wrote that the social space …
Spring and all
The Editors
Prior to writing this I conducted a straw poll among the editorial team: was it really necessary to talk about NFTs in this month’s letter? The answer, sadly for me—and for you, if you are as bored as I am by both the pearl-clutching and the burn-it-all-down triumphalism—was a unanimous yes. In the conversation that followed, the desire to look away from the furor surrounding one exercise in financial speculation was defeated by the duty of criticism to look at whatever the culture produces. Which, in the end, was hard to argue with.
There has been some confusion about how to address the new market, with digital hardware experts drafted in to explain blockchains in simple terms to the baffled readers of art magazines. Reading these articles has confirmed that I am no more interested in the technicalities of an image’s digital authentication than in the texture of the paper on which an inventory is recorded. But as an art critic I am interested, given the column inches devoted to NFTs, by how little time has been spent actually looking at the art to which their most famous examples are pegged. Take a few minutes to scroll through the …
Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette
Francesca Wade
“A self-portrait,” writes Jennifer Higgie in her delightful history of women artists’ work within the genre, “isn’t simply a rendering of an artist’s external appearance: it’s also an evocation of who she is and the times she lives in, how she sees herself and what she understands about the world.” Yet throughout history, as Higgie details with palpable outrage, women have been summarily deprived of the education and opportunity necessary to make careers as artists: even when they have succeeded in their lifetimes, their work has subsequently been lost, reattributed to male artists, undervalued, excluded from museum collections and gallery rosters, and omitted from the history books. Art historians, from Giorgio Vasari to E. H. Gombrich, have found pitifully little space for women in their canons. By knitting together short biographies of individual artists along loose themes—use of allegory, the nude, solitude, cross-cultural movement—Higgie tells an alternative history of art that is really a story about seeing: about the ways in which women artists have seen themselves, and the ways their lives and work have been seen, or unseen, by others.
In building a picture of women’s structural exclusion from the art world, from the sixteenth century to …
Practical Magic: on art, money, and metaphor
Travis Diehl
I’m not advocating tax fraud, and I’m not a lawyer. I’m just saying—whether you’ve put your stimmy checks in Bitcoin and become a millionaire, or are simply feeling the gravity of 1099 forms at tax time, or find NFTs baffling or exhausting—plain old-fashioned money-laundering is still a thing. That artworks have long been vehicles for hiding wealth is one reason that so many artists, in turn, have taken an interest in the high-stakes schemes attached to art. But there are metaphysical appeals, too. Arcane financial maneuvers, only nominally attached to physical objects, regularly achieve a level of dematerialized abstraction to which most conceptual art only aspires: the transubstantiation of nothing into something.
There are countless variations on the theme, but rinsing dirty funds always requires cycling gains back to their owner through an untraceable chain of transactions. This is the premise of Maura Brewer’s recent show “Integration” at Canary, a project space in LA’s fashion district (an area of cash-heavy and wholesale businesses, more than a few of which have been accused of laundering dollars for drug cartels). From late January to early March, Brewer methodically covered her financial tracks—setting up a dummy Limited Liability Company or LLC, routing money …
Seung-Min Lee’s “Light White”
Peter Brock
Seung-Min Lee’s satirical video installation challenges all claims to virtue, especially those that depend on reductive notions of identity. With four looping videos and their intermingling soundtracks, Lee transforms this subterranean gallery into a bunker where the air is thick with bad vibes. In these works, the artist—who was born in Seoul and grew up in Queens—performs as a suite of characters in a way that simultaneously debases and dignifies them. At the center of this effort is Lee’s impersonation of Kim Jong-un, who plays a role in all but one of the videos. Instead of the righteous condemnation and mockery common in western media, we find oddly intimate glimpses of the Supreme Leader and even the occasional moment of glee.
Frantic slurping sounds interspersed with a metallic clanking quickly drew my attention to a flatscreen television lying askew on the floor. Supreme Leader Feed 2 (Kim Jong Un Mukbang) (all works 2021) consists of looping footage of the artist scarfing ramen while dressed as Kim Jong-un. Filmed from the perspective of the bowl, this work is mostly chin, nostrils, chopsticks, and yellow noodles. The ramen occasionally covers the lens completely, resulting in lovely moments of glowing beige abstraction. Aside …
“OTRXS MUNDXS”
Gaby Cepeda
The group show “OTRXS MUNDXS,” at Museo Tamayo, is a watershed moment: it’s the first standalone exhibition in the museum’s recent history to focus on young, local artists, all of whom work in Mexico City. Since the museum was founded in 1981, it has largely dedicated its spaces to promoting international artists and spearheading state-private alliances in the museum sector. That this inclusive, self-aware moment arrives in the throes of a pandemic, and likely out of institutional necessity rather than want, is unimportant. Is curating local—if only because of travel restrictions and vanishing state budgets—better than the usual fare of pre-packaged US exhibitions? It is to me.
It’s exciting to walk into a show full of familiar names and objects now comfortably nestling in the institutional bosom, which is why it is also disappointing that the conceptual bag into which these practices were thrown is so, well, generic. “OTRXS MUNDXS”—a non-binary spelling of the Spanish for “other worlds”—essentially attempts to other the work of 39 very different artists and artist groups and in doing so make the museum appear sympathetic to the zeitgeist. But there’s a contradiction in claiming these new practices as radical breaks with the past while …
Lucy McKenzie’s “No Motive”
Laura McLean-Ferris
Aesthetic objects of art and design have unruly lives beyond their official business—they exist in homes, imaginations, shopping malls, state politics, and world histories in ways that are promiscuous and difficult to control. Over the last decade, Lucy McKenzie has depicted this pollination between forms in a captivating practice which unifies troubling, exciting, and mundane associative materials through the smoothing effects of style, most prominently trompe l’oeil painting.
Her exhibition at Galerie Buchholz’s New York space, “No Motive,” opens with Ethnic Composition (Moldova, Russian Ethnographic Museum) (2021), a kind of user guide to thinking through forms as composites of visual influence. Adopting the design of an informational display from the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St Petersburg, the artist painted a map of Moldova, divided into patches of cream, green, blue, and lilac, according to the styles of traditional dress in the country. On an “explainer panel” below, angled towards the viewer, we find, in place of any “key” to the data, six photographic prints: a mannequin in a museum display; a fashion illustration; a Mexican store mannequin dressed as “The Lady of Death”; a 1950s Russian department store mannequin; a young woman visiting a Moscow gallery; and, finally, an …
“Speculations on the Infrared”
Harry Burke
“Have you ever wanted to be… savage… wild… free?” asks a nylon banner in New Red Order’s Recruitment Station (2020–21). Mimicking the pat visual grammar of military recruiting tables, the multimedia booth—modelled on a portable trade show exhibit—solicits volunteer “informants” to join the self-styled “public secret society.” With plentiful wit, Recruitment Station frames a contradiction that haunts this exhibition of Indigenous futurisms: modernity has consistently subjugated Indigenous peoples, yet is driven by a sublimated desire for Indigeneity.
Addressing this bind, “Speculations on the Infrared” explores the ways in which Indigenous artists are dismantling settler colonial fantasies by asserting decolonized futures. Alan Michelson, a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, here displays Pehin Hanska ktepi (They killed Long Hair) (2021). The installation projects archival film of Indigenous veterans of the Battle of the Greasy Grass onto an antique wool trade blanket. Known in the settler mythos as Custer’s Last Stand, this saw several Plains tribes unite to defeat forces from the US Army during the Great Sioux War of 1876. The gridded, looping footage, recorded during a parade celebrating the battle’s fiftieth anniversary in 1926, recalls a winter count: a pictorial record used by Plains tribes to …
Heman Chong’s “Peace Prosperity And Friendship With All Nations”
Christine Han
“PEACE PROSPERITY AND FRIENDSHIP WITH ALL NATIONS,” declares a wall piece mounted beside the entrance to Heman Chong’s solo show at Singapore’s STPI. Written in an all-caps, dripping black font reminiscent of leaking bodily fluids and suggesting violence, the arresting phrase—which lends the exhibition its title—is lifted from a British coin minted to commemorate the UK’s formal withdrawal from the European Union on January 31, 2020. Direct and ambiguous, official and hilarious, the piece combines the playful language of conceptual art with the immediacy and seriousness of contemporary history. In doing so, it sets the tone for an exhibition that brings into focus the artist’s powerful use of appropriation, abstraction, and repetition in addressing the restrictiveness and complexity of the present.
In Call for the Dead (2020)—83 black-and-white scans of pages from the eponymous 1961 novel by John Le Carré, screen-printed on linen and hung in a grid-like formation in a long, white-walled gallery—Chong takes his experiments with text into new territory. The Cold War fantasies of the mid-century spy genre might here be read as a comment on decoloniality: the novel was written while Le Carré was working as a spy for MI6—which had a regional outpost in Singapore. …
The Botanic Garden
Tom Jeffreys
From the colonial origins of modern science up to today’s decolonial reckoning, art’s relationship with botany has been complex and contested. Since the seventeenth century, botany has played a vital role in how we understand, attend to, and live within the world of plants. But as an instrumental science it is obsessed with order, naming, and hierarchy on the basis of contested criteria. In the colonial era, botanists undertook military missions, served on slave ships, and displaced indigenous practices for monocrop agriculture worked by generations of enslaved people transplanted from one violently colonized land to another. London’s Kew Gardens oversaw networks of extraction (quinine, rubber, breadfruit) and supported experimental gardens across the colonies to keep the plantations profitable. However, as Jamaica Kincaid has noted, a botanic garden can be a tool and symbol of colonial oppression and, at the same time, “Edenic.” The botanic garden has recently been the site and subject of contemporary art exhibitions from Palermo to Berlin, addressing the entanglement of science with colonialism. So how can the practice of contemporary art assist in the process of decolonizing these “treasure houses”?
With its origins in an era that saw violent enclosure of common land, witch trials, …
Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir’s “WERK – Labor Move”
Kimberly Bradley
Much of the material labor that drives the western world—rubbish collection, farming land, fulfilling Amazon Prime orders—is invisible. Or, in its most exploitative forms, has been made invisible, disappeared for consumers’ benefit in fortress-like fulfillment centers or unsafe garment factories in the Global South. Yet in Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir’s exhibition, manual labor is highlighted, abstracted, and aestheticized.
In an elongated, darkened exhibition hall in the Reykjavik Art Museum’s harborside Hafnarhus location, more than 5,000 white cardboard boxes emblazoned in blue with the words “KEEP FROZEN AT -20 OR BELOW; FRESH FROZEN AT SEA” are stacked floor to ceiling; some jut out at regular intervals like decorative building bricks. Lining the walls almost entirely, they envelop the space. These particular boxes are empty, but normally each would contain 25 kilos of frozen fish, to be transported by freezer trawler to Rekyjavik’s harbor, where they are speedily unloaded by teams of dockworkers, entering the economy as one of Iceland’s primary natural resources (tourism only recently surpassed fish as its primary export).
We see several of these workers in the three-channel video Labor Move (2016), installed on large, vertically oriented screens suspended at even intervals along the hall’s long interior wall. The on-screen protagonists are …
Haig Aivazian’s “All of the Lights”
Jared Quinton
One Sergei Eisenstein quote I’ve always remembered: “montage is conflict.” It’s the ultimate expression of how art can be politically relevant—not by representing or calling for struggle, but by manifesting it formally. Eisenstein argued that while conventional film merely directs emotions, montage directs the entire thought process. A century later, Beirut-based artist Haig Aivazian’s examinations of conflict in the Middle East insist that montage is every bit as expedient today as it was upon its invention.
Aivazian’s solo exhibition at The Renaissance Society features two densely edited videos: All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes (2021) and Prometheus (2019). Roughly twenty minutes apiece, these play alternately on opposing large screens within a third work: the moody, site-specific installation 1440 Couchers de Soleil par 24 Heures [1440 Sunsets every 24 Hours] (2017/2021), which covers the gallery’s raking walls in a chalk grid reminiscent of surveillance technologies such as radar and heat maps. In both of the videos, Aivazian layers and splices found footage to brutal effect, mobilizing elemental motifs—fire and light—to trace themes of surveillance, protest, cultural hegemony, and military invasion that have characterized the relationship between the West and the Middle East over the past several decades, …
Hiwa K’s “Do you remember what you are burning?”
Nadine Khalil
The second time I visit Hiwa K’s retrospective at Dubai’s Jameel Arts Centre it’s still daylight. In the outside sculpture park is the wood, cement, and metal sculpture One Room Apartment (2008-17), shown at Documenta 14 in Athens. A single staircase leads to a worn mattress on a morbid metal bed without walls. I climb it to take in the scene from above, and watch a bird land on the bedframe. Several kids are sprawled on a grassy patch, and in the distance is Palazzo Versace’s promise of decadence. In a city of labor camps and high-rises, Hiwa K’s comment on the rise of single-person living near minefields in Iraqi Kurdistan, the home he fled from and has recently returned to, takes on a different meaning. Where economic deprivation is fueled more by free-market economics than war, his work on atomized dwelling points to the divergent ways in which art manifests in different contexts: from the refugee crisis in Athens to the ongoing controversy over migrant workers’ conditions in Dubai.
Around the unsheltered bed, Hassan Khan’s multi-channel sound installation Composition for a Public Park (2013) expounds, fittingly, in three languages on the nature of bondage. Inside the exhibition, Hiwa K’s video …
Transmediale, “for refusal”
Orit Gat
Sitting at my desk in London in front of my MacBook, I join a Zoom meeting where I look at four chunky, gray mid-2000s computers arranged on a table in an exhibition space in Berlin. The old computers, grouped in a way that brings to mind an internet café, are there for visitors to play a video game by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, I Can’t Remember a Time I Didn’t Need You (2020). But there is no one there to play: the two exhibitions in this year’s edition of art and digital culture festival Transmediale opened in a locked-down Berlin. I am taking part in a virtual proxy tour of Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien. The guide, Annina Guntli, sets her phone to selfie mode and we can see each other and talk for a quick minute. She then turns it around and walks me through the show.
Using the chat function, she sends me links to excerpts of the videos on view and Brathwaite-Shirley’s game, which I play a day later. It begins with a message and a trigger warning: “This archive centers Black trans people. Those that are not Black and trans may feel uncomfortable. TW: there are themes of loss within the …
Archive Fever
The Editors
In a first for art-agenda, this month we publish a review of an exhibition in Berlin through which a writer at home in London was walked by camera-wielding curators. During lockdown, needs must. In the past year, the editors have projected live streams of socially distanced performances from empty theaters onto the walls of their apartments, interacted with art “objects” beamed by augmented reality apps onto their desks, watched entire gallery screening programs on their phones, and waited in the cold outside galleries until their appointed time in order to tour an exhibition of social practice in solitude.
That the experience of a work of art is inflected by the material and emotional circumstances of its encounter is, unless you’re a really hardcore formalist, hardly a controversial idea. Editors who spent four years excising the phrase “In the age of Trump” from reviews won’t need to be reminded of how external events can intrude on critical interpretation, but the recent completion of an overhaul of the art-agenda archive means that readers can now also track these changes. By tagging the 1,276 (and counting) features we’ve published with intersecting themes and subjects, it becomes possible to search for rudimentary patterns …
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze
R.H. Lossin
General Motors opened its Lordstown plant in 1966. Built on Ohio farmland purchased a decade earlier, the facility assembled Chevy’s full-sized vehicles, democratized luxury items with names to match: Impala, Bel Air, Caprice. In 1971 production at Lordstown—one of GM’s most technically advanced facilities—was shifted to the compact Chevy Vega. Redundancies, layoffs, and technologically enabled speed-ups followed: when employees were requested to turn out 100 vehicles per shift rather than the average of 55, workers sabotaged cars coming off the line and went on strike.
In 2019 the last Chevy Cruze rolled off the line and the plant was permanently closed. Or, more precisely, it was “unallocated.” “People keep saying, ‘I feel sorry for you. Your plant closed,’” recounted David Green, president of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 1112. “It ain’t closed, it’s ‘unallocated.’ What the hell does that even mean?” Green, of course, was speaking for effect. He knew what “allocated” meant in substance: any language in the national agreement protecting GM employees in the case of “closed” or “idled” plants doesn’t apply to a plant that is “unallocated.”
Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier documented the last nine months of Lordstown’s operations. An exhibition of her works, “The Last Cruze,” …
Rosie Lee Tompkins
Amelia Lang
I learned about the life and quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins (the pseudonym of Effie Mae Howard) from my mother. She was an art teacher—my art teacher—and would routinely give short presentations about local artists, usually women, to teach her students about art made in Northern California. I knew that Tompkins was born in Arkansas in the 1930s, had settled in Richmond, California, and that her work was considered part of an African American quilting tradition, but I had never seen the quilts in person until early March 2020, when I visited the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) to view “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective.” The previous day, the Grand Princess cruise ship had pulled into the Port of Oakland carrying thousands of passengers exposed to the novel coronavirus; I walked through the museum in suspense, my thinking fragmented by constant notifications about the future. Yet Tompkins’s quilts pulled me into the present: I was mesmerized by the nearly seventy works on display, which revealed her fascination with color, the consistency of her inconsistency, and her use of fabrics that carried with them generational shorthands depending on pattern, texture, and material.
Nearly a year later, a small …
São Paulo Roundup
Oliver Basciano
By rights I shouldn’t be writing this. I should be on the streets of São Paulo, beer in hand, as carnival rages around me. The bloco—street party—that passes under my window is a queer one. There would be a lot of kissing and not a lot of clothes. Instead, the Lenten celebration cancelled, my neighborhood is as quiet as the downtown of Brazil’s largest city can be. There is no samba band playing in the square, there are no sound systems blasting favela funk morning to night, no messages from friends recommending parties in other neighborhoods, no chance to go to the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Anhembi Sambadrome just north of here. I could be watching the carnival schools—there are over a dozen based in the city—parade through that 103,200-capacity stadium, the storyline and costumes of each a year in the making.
There’s a popular meme here that describes images and situations as “Sad and Brazilian.” For all the contemporariness of its dissemination—it’s shared on social media and in sprawling WhatsApp groups—the phrase taps into the deeper cultural concept of saudade, which describes a longing for something lost, perhaps never to return again, apt for a country founded by slaves, colonialists, and immigrants. …
Tacita Dean’s Fernsehturm
Erik Morse
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in contemporary art history by returning to an influential exhibition, artwork, or text from the recent past and reflecting on its relevance to the present. To coincide with Erik Morse’s essay on Tacita Dean’s Fernsehturm, Marian Goodman Gallery is hosting a special online screening of the 2001 film. Click here to watch (the screening ends on February 25).
One benefit of a yearlong quarantine has been the rediscovery of interiors as a source of creative reverie. Restrictions to air travel and public spaces have upended an artistic truism—popular among the globetrotting avant-garde of the last century—that, as Christopher Reed wrote, “being undomestic came to serve as a guarantee of being art.” Instead, like the eccentric, household narrators of Xavier’s de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794), J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), and Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914), visual artists have been forced to dwell in interior space, with its glacial boredom, everyday rituals, and isolation. In this protracted period of sequestration, a film made by Tacita Dean at the turn of the millennium offers one guide for artistic travels through the interior.
Fernsehturm (2001) is the first of several projects in which …
Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner’s “Alchemical”
Forrest Muelrath
What would it take to simulate the sensorium of a single person on any given day and channel it into my own nervous system? Something like the SimStim technology in William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, or the apparatuses that simulate the sensory experience of other people inhabiting other worlds in the Wachowskis’ 1999 film The Matrix. What if a machine were trained to create new 3D spaces based on photographs and videos: could it then simulate a world indistinguishable from our own?
Science-fiction fantasies and ethical questions such as these come easily when considering Casey Reas’s work. This has less to do with the images he creates than how he creates them. Reas is best known for co-developing Processing, an open-source software and coding language intended to make computer programming easier for non-programmer artists and designers. By turns poignant and unnerving, his exhibition “Alchemical” at New York’s bitforms showcases still images and videos made using generative adversarial networks (GANs), a machine-learning program that creates new images from processing thousands of existing ones. The images are accompanied by glitchy, hypnotic music composed by Jan St. Werner, one half of the electronic music duo Mouse on Mars.
In the first room …
“‘Lacrimae Rerum,’ homage to Gustav Metzger – Part II”
Tal Sterngast
Memory, noted Marguerite Duras, is an attempt to escape the “horror of forgetting.” It is also, she argued, a failure: “You know you’ve forgotten, that’s what memory is.” The memory of the things we forget we call the unconscious. A group show at Tel Aviv’s Dvir Gallery, conceived in homage to Gustav Metzger and featuring works by Armando Andrade Tudela and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané alongside the late artist, traces the ways in which amnesia and memory constitute each other in the writing down of history.
At the center of “Lacrimae Rerum,” a lavish yellow fabric covers a large black-and-white photograph fixed to the industrial floor. This photograph from March 1938, part of Gustav Metzger’s “Historic Photographs” cycle and titled To Crawl Into - Anschluss, Vienna, March 1938 (1996–2020), has been enlarged to about thirteen square meters. It shows Jewish citizens in Vienna who were forced to clean the streets of the Austrian capital while Nazis and fellow citizens watched on, shortly after the Anschluss. In order to see this larger-than-life photograph, the viewer is required to crawl on all fours under the cloth, moving along the image’s surface, too close to comprehend it as a whole. The yellow fabric (as …
Liu Shiyuan’s “For Jord”
Fanny Singer
As I left Liu Shiyuan’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, I kept tripping over lines from a Robert Hass poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “because there is in this world no one thing/ to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,/ a word is elegy to what it signifies./ […] After a while I understood that,/ talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,/ pine, hair, woman, you and I.” This poem was published in 1979, when the internet as it exists today wasn’t so much as a dream, but the dissolution that Hass describes is in many respects the subject of Liu’s forensic examinations of post-internet culture. Since 2007, the Beijing-born Liu (who splits her time between China and Denmark) has devoted herself to unpacking, interrogating, even satirizing, internet semiotics. At a moment in history in which an ever-increasing percentage of the global population has been compelled online, there is a poetry to Liu’s search for meaning in a digitally atomized world.
Liu’s exhibition is centered on a fictional—and purely conceptual—character named “Jord” (after whom, or what, the show is titled). Jord is both a noun and a name in Danish, translating, respectively, to “land” or “soil,” and “divine being” or “peace.” …
“WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution”
Wendy Vogel
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in contemporary art history by returning to an influential exhibition, work, or text from the past and reflecting on its relevance to the present. In this edition, Wendy Vogel considers how the 2007 touring exhibition “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” marked a generational shift in art criticism.
Feminist art history may come to be defined as the era before and after WACK!. The onomatopoeic word—more a metaphorical whip-crack than a line in the sand—is shorthand for “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” an exhibition curated by Cornelia Butler that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) in March 2007. This pioneering institutional survey of feminist art brought together work made by more than 120 female artists and collectives between 1965 and 1980. In the introduction to the 500-plus-page exhibition catalogue, Butler stated her curatorial goals: “My ambition for ‘WACK!’ is to make the case that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international ‘movement’ of any during the postwar period—in spite or perhaps because of the fact that it never cohered, formally or critically, into a movement.” It remains a bold statement today; it was …
Thomas Ruff’s “tableaux chinois”
Tomas Weber
The propaganda photographs of Chairman Mao, miners, dancers, rallies, and flowers reproduced in Thomas Ruff’s “tableaux chinois” look magnificent. Their colors are warm and bright: the grass is the greenest of green, skies blue beyond belief, the Chairman radiates kind-heartedness. Propaganda might at first seem an odd motif for an artist interested in the camera as a machine for recording and rendering objects into reliable flatness. But in addition to testing the limits of the camera’s detachment, Ruff has—going back to his series “Plakate” (1996–99)—also interrogated its capacity to glorify.
Think of the passport-style photographs in his “Portraits” from the 1980s: blown up to overwhelming sizes, the anonymous subjects are transformed into bureaucratic demi-gods. Or take his colossal C-prints of the heavens (“Stars,” 1990): in images taken from an observatory, the light from innumerable stars and galaxies scatters over a black abyss. The apparent neutrality of Ruff’s images—too much to take in all at once—can be grandiose, eulogistic.
Here, Ruff has scanned propaganda images taken from the Chinese-produced European magazine La Chine, published between the 1950s and ’70s, and converted the analog halftone pattern of the scans into a pixel structure. He has then placed the digitally built images over the …
Jeffrey Gibson’s “It Can Be Said of Them”
Patrick J. Reed
Here’s a platitude: all’s fair in love and war. This, one could argue, is what Jeffrey Gibson’s solo exhibition “It Can Be Said of Them” is all about: the love being queer love, the war being that waged against queer bodies of color who cannot voice their desires without anticipating, so as to deflect, hatred. Here’s a second platitude to consider in relation to the first, one sometimes assigned to Gibson’s artistry: it is infused with joy and resistance.
It’s true that both characterize, for example, YES! WE CAN (all works 2020), one of two punching-bag sculptures at the gallery’s center. White and yellow words reading “CAN THEY SHE HE DO IT? YES WE CAN!” wind around the bag in a red-and-blue square diamond lattice. As one circles the hanging piece, it reveals its pronouns deftly, like jabs to the psyche that parry normative presumptions. This sensation carries through to the mixed-media pieces mounted on the nearby walls—combinations of acrylic paint, glass beads, and fiber materials embellished with lyrics and protest slogans. The show is a flurry of defensive moves and is more complex than the upbeat language that is often used to label it.
Another of Gibson’s …
Sounding out
The Editors
Can you hear me? Literally, I mean. Is there a voice in your head, sounding out these words? Stop, if you can spare a moment, and reread this sentence. I did, and now I find myself whispering these words as I type them, a murmuring libretto over the tap of my fingers on the keyboard. I can’t remember ever having noticed this before.
Since the lockdowns began, I’ve filled my head with voices. Frequently they talk about art. They are delivered into my head via podcasts as I walk in the park; through the online symposia I stream on my laptop while cooking; in the pre-recorded commentaries that walk me through empty exhibition spaces; by the audiobooks that ease me into sleep. Now, as Novuyo Moyo reported here last week, it seems that even discussions about art on social media are taking an aural turn. That the future of criticism might be spoken is alarming for those who best express themselves in writing. Which is to say, from my own experience on podcasts and panels, pretty much every art critic in the world.
In another of the pieces we published last month, an interview with the artist Julie Béna, the …
Johanna Drucker’s Iliazd
Ryan Ruby
In 1985, the book artist and future scholar of print and digital aesthetics Johanna Drucker was working on a chapter of her dissertation on Futurist and Dadaist typography in the Bibilothèque Jacques Doucet in Paris. Sitting across from her was a fellow American researcher, flipping through a “marvelous” deluxe edition of a livre d’artiste by someone who clearly belonged to one of these movements, but whose work Drucker did not recognize. The researcher explained that the work was by Ilia Zdanevich, better known by his alias Iliazd: a book artist, poet, playwright, novelist, and publisher who had left his native Georgia for Paris in the 1920s. If she was interested, Zdanevich’s widow Hélène lived nearby, and was always glad to speak to scholars about his work. Drucker was intrigued enough to pay a call on “Madame,” but could not have known that soon she would find herself visiting her daily, working with her on Iliazd’s biography, and becoming her confidante. Nor could Drucker have known that the project would only come to fruition thirty-five years later, with the publication of Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist, or that it would look so different from what Hélène had in mind when …
Social work: the art world online
Novuyo Moyo
The art world has been grappling with social media ever since its potential beyond the purposes of keeping in touch with loved ones first became apparent. Its platforms allow individuals to communicate with audiences without the mediating power of institutions, or to mobilize groups behind a cause with the aim of bringing about change in those institutions. The possibilities and pitfalls for cultural gatekeepers have been pronounced over the course of a year in which they have been forced to relocate online and engage with the audiences they find there. But has their new engagement with social media really widened the scope of who gets to speak about art and what is discussed, or done little more than reproduce the structures that limit offline access? And as discussions around access and diversity in the art world continue, how can social media activism be more than a retweet, a like, a share; how can it effect and sustain change in the long term?
In the summer of 2020, many institutions faltered as they attempted to respond to demands from online audiences to address the lack of diversity in their collections and appointments: a coordinated set of actions arising from the Black Lives …
“Zones of discomfort”
Julie Béna
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between writers and artists. In this edition, art-agenda’s editor-in-chief talks to Julie Béna, whose work in installation, film, and performance makes use of such literary devices as absurdist humor, destablizing allusions to high and low culture, and metafictional characters plucked from sources ranging from William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) to the brand mascot Mr. Peanut.
art-agenda: In your new film, Letters from Prague, you play the role of an art critic. How did that feel?
Julie Béna: The Jindřich Chalupecký Society commissioned me to conceive a new performance about the Czech essayist, philosopher, and critic after whom the society is named. Because of the current situation and my doubt about an online performance, I decided to do a movie instead. In any case, it was difficult to embody a man, an art critic, and an historical figure. In the first part, I embody Chalupecký himself, based on a critical text I wrote, oscillating between fury, hysteria, and seriousness. The second part is an animated tale called “DICKS WINGS AND GRILL.” In the final …
Sable Elyse Smith’s “FEAR TOUCH POLICE”
Natasha Marie Llorens
A short clip functions as the backdrop for Sable Elyse Smith’s multimedia project in three issues—“FEAR TOUCH POLICE”—commissioned by the Swiss Institute and exhibited on a dedicated website. It is roughly 18 seconds of footage showing a solitary car parked by the side of a road at night engulfed in flame. After 14 seconds the car explodes, the camera jolts and then restabilizes. Then the clip resets.
The fire is omnipresent as I scroll down through the five entries that make up “Issue one: FEAR.” I zoom into Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s poem, which is printed in infinitesimal letters to the right of the screen, and the fire is there. It explodes around the edges of the embedded screen on which plays Johan Grimonprez’s classic montage film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997). “If you are reading this, then you have found yourself in a time consumed by crisis,” writes Jessica Lynne in her contribution entitled “A letter written on a day without the sun,” and the car explodes in the background. Several paragraphs later she writes about her wish for a “place that is not riddled with food insecurity or housing instability or extrajudicial murder or…” and the car explodes again.
Neither …
Nathalie Du Pasquier and Alessandra Spranzi’s “Les jeux de mains”
Ewa Borysiewicz
In another interminable lockdown, the gentle winter colors are the clearest indications of time passing in Switzerland’s Engadin valley. But a show at Monica de Cardenas in Zuoz, a nearly monochrome town surrounded by the silent Alps, offers a very different atmosphere to the world outside: a vivid and humorous joint presentation of recent works by Nathalie du Pasquier and Alessandra Spranzi. The two artists’ aesthetics at first sight have little in common: Spranzi’s practice involves found images, often gleaned from unglamorous contexts such as manuals or the classified ads sections in daily newspapers, which she cuts out, rephotographs, crops, resizes, and upcycles into black-and-white silver gelatin prints, allowing herself to be “carried away by the gaze of others.” By uprooting her chosen photographs and washing out their primary meaning, Spranzi reveals the nonchalance with which one can alter and aestheticize the message carried by an image.
In Mano con bicchiere rovesciato (L’insieme è nero) [Hand with Upturned Glass (The Whole is Black)] (all works 2020), a palm holds up an upside-down utensil against a dark background. The decontextualized action demonstrates how easily gestures can lose their value and be rendered absurd. A group of Spranzi’s black-and-white photographs shows …
On Space Art
Xin Liu / Xin Wang
During the prolonged lockdown that defined much of 2020, the Xinjiang-born, New York-based artist and engineer Xin Liu juggled multiple roles. These included participating in a volunteering network that supplied PPE to medical workers in dire need of protection against Covid-19; designing an indie game, Sleepwalk (2020), which reflected on the conditions of confinement and hyper-connectivity; engineering a series of hypnotic sound experiences with her partner Gershon Dublon titled The Wandering Mind (2020), which guides the dreams of a sleeping audience with source materials organized by an AI system; and live-streaming an ambient soundscape recorded on Whitehead Island, off the coast of Maine, for the Camden International Film Festival.
As the Arts Curator at MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative and an artist who makes work for exhibition spaces, film festivals, and astronautical conferences, Liu’s ongoing fascination with space as a medium and destination for new art has seen her send a wisdom tooth into outer space, cultivate potato seeds that had travelled to the International Space Station, and imagine weightlessness as an intimate, “body-opening” condition. In this interview, we spoke about the past lives and expansive futures of Space Art, her unique mixture of academic and identitarian backgrounds, and …
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s “Fly in League with the Night”
Caleb Azumah Nelson
In the foyer outside Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition, a question is written on the wall. “What sounds can you hear when you look at the paintings?” Music spills from a hidden speaker; Miles plays. I can hear the way he held his horn, so closely attuned to the spaces he could inhabit within a melody, perhaps looking for a nod from his band, or, more likely, improvising, always improvising. Feeling rather than knowing.
When I enter the space, it is quiet. The music has stopped, but looking at the paintings around me I still hear Miles and Bill and Gil, Fela and Ebo, Solange and D’Angelo: the music Yiadom-Boakye had playing in the studio when painting. A tradition of rhythm rendered on canvas in blues and greens, yellows and reds. In this way, it is possible to see something and to hear it too, and I wonder if this is what feeling is.
What I do see: Black figures, in all manner of poses and activities, caught in private moments. They tease and taunt, they are in repose, they squat, they crouch, they hurt, they ache, they joy. They are quiet but never silent. In Later or Louder or Softer or Sooner …
“Holdfast”
Sean O’Toole
In 2019, two years after completing her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art and shortly after returning to her native Johannesburg, artist and curator Chloë Reid initiated gallery, gallery as a platform to encourage collaboration among arts practitioners. To date Reid has produced six exhibitions in cooperation with a host of artists and under-the-radar curators, all of them held under the auspices of “the gallery,” an exhibition space carved out of an annex of printmaker Fiona Pole and framer Didier Presse’s working studio and frame shop, The Atelier. Reid’s exhibition initiative, which foregrounds exchange and embodiment, fills an important gap in South Africa’s structurally imbalanced art system.
Project spaces—and for that matter experiments by freelance curators—are few and far between in South Africa, more so in the period since the emergence of the art-fair model in 2008. In the absence of viable non-commercial formats like a biennale, art fairs have come to define the agenda. The opening of Reid’s debut exhibition “Rocks” in 2019, for example, coincided with the launch of two new fairs in Johannesburg. The coronavirus pandemic has temporarily changed the rules, allowing Reid’s plucky co-operative model of low-key, physical exhibition-making to flourish.
“Holdfast” reprises Reid’s collaborations with Zimbabwean …
Digital Art and Trans Archiving
Francis Whorrall-Campbell
Achille Mbembe describes the archive as a “cemetery”: a burial ground in which “fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred.” Opening up Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Resurrection Lands (2020)—an online game and speculative digital archive of Black trans experience—I am reminded of this description. Aside from the obvious conceptual resonance between the paper graveyard and the digital afterlife conjured on screen, in telling the game’s fabulated backstory my disembodied guide seems to echo the central paradox Mbembe identifies. That is: we need the archive to remember, but it is also a tool for forgetting. Or, as Brathwaite-Shirley’s introductory voiceover asks me: “how [is] it possible to store [someone] in a world that had once erased [them]?”
A tentative answer to the difficulty of archiving trans lives might lie in the digital realm. The internet’s potential as a place for self-narration was recognized early by trans creators. In the 1990s the nascent World Wide Web was a playground, a site of both creation and distribution that encouraged new modes of participation and facilitated formal experiment. It was not just that this “newness” opened up space to document trans experiences—apparently (although not actually) in a world as yet untainted by the social …
SoiL Thornton’s “Does productivity know what it’s named, maybe it calls itself identity?”
Rahel Aima
In SoiL (formerly Torey) Thornton’s 2019 solo show at London’s Modern Art, a Macon, Georgia-area number was spray-painted across one corner of the gallery. In their current show at Essex Street, New York, the same number repeats on a crenellated Formica tear-off flyer, titled Dematerialize now but as self portrait to whom (1990-2020 Labor Cont(r)act) (all works 2020 unless otherwise stated), an oversize version of the kind you might see advertising piano lessons or rooms for rent. Used paint sticks along its top edge create an overall effect of a printer test page. But here, it’s the artist that’s for sale in one of the most frankly exciting shows I’ve seen this past year. Call them, maybe.
In 2020, art institutions sought to offer a corrective to the historical marginalization of BIPOC artists. Or perhaps dealers are more interested in meeting the predictable uptick in market demand. In the aptly titled “Does productivity know what it’s named, maybe it calls itself identity?” Thornton unpicks this fetishization of identity and, as their diaristic exhibition text puts it, “biography as trap.” They wonder whether the cultivation of individual celebrity—especially one whose work is predicated upon their racial or gender identity—is a …
Look both ways
The Editors
Happy new year. It can’t be as bad as the last one, as everyone keeps telling us, apparently unaware that fate shouldn’t be tempted. We’re equally suspicious of statements to the effect that the coming year represents a fresh start, a blank slate, or a new frontier to be conquered. The past figured as an effaced text or exhausted patch of land, to be abandoned as the world moves west into unspoiled territory.
We’ve been working a lot on our online archive, as you might be able to tell. Reading old texts while plotting a path through the coming year has reinforced the impression that past and future are entangled in stranger ways than the above metaphors allow. The relevance of pieces written a decade ago, in the early days of art-agenda, to the present moment can be uncanny. Those curious correspondences have left us with the feeling that a new year is a moment in which to reappraise the landscape rather than stride into a brave new world.
Moving through an archive is to be reminded that the past does not slide smoothly “away,” like garbage down a chute, but accumulates around us and crops up in the most unexpected …
The year that wasn’t
The Editors
It’s tempting, when signing off on the past year, simply to bid good riddance to bad rubbish. But we wanted first to acknowledge those who have been cheated by 2020. To that end, we’ve asked some contributors whose work with us was disrupted—because the show they were commissioned to write up was shuttered, or thanks to one of the many incidental consequences of the pandemic, from new childcare demands to the need to assist vulnerable friends and relatives—to nominate a show they weren’t able to experience in person. The idea is to shed a little light on the work that got left behind and offer some small compensation to all the artists, curators, and gallerists whose shows were never seen, or seen only by a fraction of the audience they might reasonably have expected, or were denied the coverage that publications such as this exist to provide. As such, this very partial roundup also hopes to stand in for a larger expression of solidarity with all those in our field whose work was interrupted by the chaos of the past twelve months. Don’t dismay, keep going, and we’ll see you next year. The Editors
Rahel Aima
I …
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Eds.), Critical Zones
Sam Solnick
One of the many ways that I ameliorated my lockdown boredom was to watch David Attenborough’s new Netflix show Our Planet. Each episode begins with a shot of an “Earthrise”—our planet emerging into view as if we were standing on the moon—while the nation’s favorite grandfather intones a warning about the declining “wonders” of the natural world, and insists that we must act so that “people and nature thrive.” These are laudable sentiments but, as suggested by Critical Zones, a gargantuan new collection of multi-disciplinary writings edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel and published alongside the eponymous exhibition at Karlsruhe’s ZKM Center for Art and Media, such planetary long-views from space can be part of the problem.
Attenborough’s narrative of biodiversity loss focuses on one species’ (humans’) capacity to wreak massive environmental change in the fifty-odd years since Earth was first photographed from the moon. However, as Timothy M. Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil’s entries in Critical Zones explain, life (as in the totality of everything that lives) has always adapted the planet, albeit on a different time scale. Life is not a passive actor adapting to an inert environment; it transforms that environment, making it habitable. Earth is, …
Jonathas de Andrade’s “Achados e perdidos”
Oliver Basciano
I’ve been on the search for a new swimming pool in São Paulo since my regular haunt, Estádio do Pacaembu, was first closed to house a Covid-19 field hospital on the adjoining football pitch. And while cases have eased, the pool remains drained and shuttered as it undergoes refurbishment. The plans for Pacaembu, which includes an E-Sports center, hospitality areas, and the new Brazilian outpost for the Italian gallery Continua, are a far cry from the musty changing rooms and faded concrete terraces of its previous incarnation. But the old Pacaembu was free and attracted a wide range of Paulistanos, an oasis in a city of concrete, traffic, and noise. The alternative public pools I searched out are in near-dereliction or closed; the private club a well-meaning friend (clearly unfamiliar with the economics of art writing) recommended was off-putting not just in price but in its website’s reminder that members’ nannies were not eligible to swim. The swimming pool is a microcosm for Brazilian society, its class and racial fractures reflected in the chlorinated water.
For the past ten years the Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade has been collecting swimming trunks he finds discarded or forgotten in the changing rooms …
“Artificial night”: on Dawoud Bey’s America
Anna Mirzayan
Earlier this month, the touring exhibition “Dawoud Bey: An American Project” arrived at the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. This retrospective of the photographer’s 45-year career—which opened in February at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will move next spring to New York’s Whitney—features portraits and photographs from the 1970s to the mid-2000s. These black-and-white images are often shot outdoors and depict majority Black communities in the US—such as those in Brooklyn, Harlem, Orlando, and Birmingham—engaging in everyday activities and moments of communal joy. “An American Project” also features works from Bey’s 2017 series “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” which comprises large, dark rural landscape photographs taken at sites rumored to have been stops on the Underground Railroad, along which Black people travelled in secret to escape slavery. By presenting these two seemingly disparate projects simultaneously, this retrospective insists that viewers attend to both types of works together; in doing so, the exhibition aims to overcome a common thematic split between images that depict people and those, like landscapes, that do not. Considering these works as continuous, however, reveals fruitful new ways of thinking.
The gelatin silver prints in “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” are moody and dim, overlaid …
Aykan Safoğlu’s “Revolving Dreams”
Ulya Soley
How do personal memories become fragments of a political narrative? How can images guide us back through the past? A double-exposed print-out of private and political histories, Aykan Safoğlu’s installation Revolving Dreams (Athens/Istanbul, May 4-7, 2006) (all works 2020) features a series of images suspended from invisible threads. Pages from the artist’s old passport, superimposed with photographs from his personal archive, are enlarged and printed on two long scrolls which hang from the ceiling like waves. The work takes its cue from the bus journey Safoğlu (who was born in Turkey and now lives in Berlin) made from Istanbul to Athens in 2006, along with two friends and a group of alter-globalization activists, to participate in the fourth European Social Forum. The event—which marked the artist’s first encounter with discussions around immigration and climate crisis—brought together activists, NGOs, refugees, and environmental and anti-racist movements. Safoğlu revisits photographs taken over those few days in order to contemplate what the participants would transmit to a contemporary audience, for whom these issues have only gained in urgency.
The work invites us to consider the political shifts in both Turkey and Greece since 2006: the Justice and Development Party (AKP) had only recently come …
Ambera Wellmann’s “Nosegay Tornado”
Jessica Caroline
Ambera Wellmann’s roses are not sick. They are not exactly well, either. The paintings in “Nosegay Tornado” stage fantasy landscapes in which bodies topple out of other bodies, depersonalized and pliable, genitalia effaced, often surrounded by enormous flowers. Her arrangements call to mind the doomed visions of Georges Bataille or William Blake, in which beauty is always poised between grace and destruction. Wellmann’s work also exists at the juncture of excess and profanity, where the material and spiritual realms dissolve into each other. Her triumph is to make these weary old Romantic and Surrealist tropes seem fresh.
In The Unicorn Captivity (all works 2020), roses are anxious placeholders for human heads. Their bodies ride a two-headed unicorn beneath echoes of the eye in Odilon Redon’s Le cyclope (c. 1914); the scene is bordered by flames. The edges of Wellmann’s brushstrokes are soft, her contours indistinct. Like many of the bodies in her paintings, the unicorn appears to be splitting and doubling, recalling earlier works that play on the idea of autoscopy—the ability to hallucinate externalized versions of oneself. Blue Bouquet presents a different kind of framing device, giving the impression that the viewer is peeping through a service window or, perhaps, …
“Tremors”
Brook Andrew / Pablo José Ramírez
Across his practice as an artist and a curator, Brook Andrew develops kinship with non-western cultures rooted in an intersectional understanding of indigeneity. Andrew is of Wiradjuri and Celtic ancestry and was, this year, the first Indigenous artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney since the exhibition’s inception in 1973. In that role, he dealt with a wide range of artistic, community, and activist practices from Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds. Featuring 98 artists and collectives, the exhibition—titled “NIRIN,” meaning “edge” in Wiradjuri—was rooted in a fierce critique of coloniality.
The following conversation explores the possibility of indigenous art as a non-colonial force, one that fractures the idea of history as progress and questions the art-historical canon and the institutions that enshrine it. These themes are evident across Andrew’s research-based artistic practice, in which he engages with themes of colonialism, indigeneity, and historical amnesia in collage, painting, and installation. Something that has always impressed me about his practice is the joy with which he approaches such issues—with care and rigor, and with the soul of someone waiting to be amazed.
Pablo José Ramírez: I’d like to think with and beyond the global crisis by looking back to our past. As you …
Salman Toor’s “How Will I Know”
Murtaza Vali
Nine months since the pandemic first hit New York, it is hard not to be moved by Salman Toor’s tender and luminous paintings, fifteen of which make up “How Will I Know,” his first solo show in a museum. In them young queer men gather inside and outside bars, dance joyously in apartments, embrace tenderly, and chat quietly on stoops and sofas, banal scenes of everyday intimacy and sociality that our seemingly interminable forced isolation has rendered both unfamiliar and precious. Skillfully composed of accumulations of short sketchy brush strokes, they picture the innocent ease of pre-pandemic revelry when the simple act of coming together was still untainted by the invisible threat of contagion.
Though inspired by moments from his life, Toor’s scenes are composed entirely from memory and imagination, and form visual analogues to the literary genre of autofiction, as co-curator Ambika Trasi persuasively argues in an accompanying essay published online. Some are given a dazzling emerald tint, energizing their quotidian settings with the buzz of dreamy fabulation. Toor conceives of his slender young male figures as marionettes, a quality emphasized through their slightly elongated noses á la Pinocchio. However, their sleepy downcast eyes, drooped shoulders, and limp, …
Out of time
The Editors
This is the season in which editors round up the year’s highlights, string them together, and tell you what they mean. The last of the institutional shows have opened, Miami Beach marks the final stop on the art fair caravan, and so the time arrives to make sense of what happened.
It’s difficult, right now, to find the necessary critical distance. Not only are we right in the middle of crises including (but hardly limited to) a global pandemic, but the rhythms which normally conclude in December’s period of rest have collapsed. Much of what was planned has been suspended or deferred. Days dragged on as weeks flew by. Nothing happened while a great deal happened. The breakdown occasioned by the pandemic did not manifest as spectacle—there was no explosion, there was no running—but as a disorienting shift in the ground underfoot. Which is to say that 2020’s many upheavals also registered as aesthetic crises, with implications for how we conceive the world.
This is also to say that we’re not now going to give you our ten best exhibitions of the year. Instead we might point out how some of our recent coverage has unsettled those kind of categories. …
Nida Ghouse with Jenifer Evans (Eds.), An Archaeology of Listening: A Slightly Curving Place
Jens Maier-Rothe
Earlier this summer Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt launched a multi-part tribute to Umashankar Manthravadi, a Madras-born journalist, poet, and pioneer of acoustic archaeology. “A Slightly Curving Place,” an exhibition curated by Nida Ghouse, ran from July to September and featured audio and video installations inspired by Manthravadi’s work; it was complemented by “Coming To Know,” a discursive program co-curated by Ghouse and Brooke Holmes that unfolded over the course of the exhibition. These two projects are joined this fall by the publication A Slightly Curving Place. Edited by Ghouse in association with Jenifer Evans, and the first in a planned series titled “An Archaeology of Listening,” the book features scripts, scores, sketches, and essays that elaborate on questions posed by the exhibition. (The second volume, co-edited with Holmes, will follow in spring 2021.) What does it mean to listen to the past? Why does a Maya pyramid or an Udayagiri cave sound the way it does? And how can listening to historical sites help us unlearn archaeology as a discipline that colonizes the past by collecting it for display?
Manthravadi began working in archaeoacoustics—in which archaeological sites are mapped and measured according to their acoustic properties—in the …
Art in the Aerocene
Tomás Saraceno / Erik Morse
The Argentine artist-theoretician Tomás Saraceno works at the nexus of nineteenth-century aeronautics, utopian urbanism, and synergetic cosmography. Although inspired in part by writers like Jules Verne, Paul Scheerbart, and Jorge Luis Borges, Saraceno’s hybrid oeuvre is perhaps most indebted to Archigram co-founder and “blobitect” Peter Cook, under whom he studied, and architectural polymath Buckminster Fuller. Beginning with installations Cloud Cities (2010–ongoing) and community projects like Museo Aero Solar (2007–ongoing), Saraceno has pursued a reconceptualization of posthumanism through aeromantic fantasies of foam habitats, floating cities, and flying sculptures.
Because of his work between the traditional sciences—including collaborations with researchers at MIT, NASA, CNES and the Max Planck Institute—and speculative futurism, Saraceno has cultivated a uniquely transdisciplinary audience of art critics, diplomats, environmental activists, and philosophers, including Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour, who wrote in a 2011 essay that “Saraceno performed precisely the task of philosophy […] namely of explicating the material and artificial conditions for existence.”
Saraceno’s most ambitious endeavor, the ongoing “Aerocene” project, is a two-decade-long study into the possibilities of “aerosolar” travel, a “practice of developing flying sculptures as a model for a new form of sustainable, carbon-free movement attuned to the rhythms of the planet.” In January 2020 these …
Yara El-Sherbini’s “Forms of Regulation and Control”
Dina Ramadan
It is impossible to separate my experience of Yara El-Sherbini’s “Forms of Regulation and Control” from the circumstances surrounding the viewing: the end of a balmy November day, awash with the jubilation of Donald Trump’s electoral defeat. The first US solo exhibition for British-born, Santa Barbara–based El-Sherbini, curated by Naeem Mohaiemen, is an elegant rejoinder to the din of recent months. Deftly weaponizing humor through a series of discreet interventions, it challenges the so-called “unconscious” bias that permeates even the most seemingly benign forms of knowledge and their production.
“Forms of Regulation and Control” is an exhibition conceived and reconceptualized in the wake of the pandemic; El-Sherbini’s work, usually tactile and interactive, is incompatible with our current socially distanced reality. The game “Border Control” (2017), the only pre-pandemic piece in the show, is an example of the kind of audience participation El-Sherbini usually employs. In something reminiscent of the children’s game, players must trace a charged metal wire shaped like the US-Mexican border with a circular metal tool, all the while avoiding making contact with it: if they do, they will sound off alarms and lights. And yet the way in which the exhibition has been reimagined serves to highlight …
Lagos Roundup
Jareh Das
In more ordinary times, the high season for Lagos’s art scene runs through October and November. This year, as in other cities across the world, major events have been scaled back and directed towards a local audience, with an emphasis on smaller physical events and online presentations. But disruption in Lagos has not been solely due to the pandemic. In the first weeks of October, the city was brought to a standstill by the decentralized social movement #EndSARS, which saw Nigerian youths take to the streets across the country to demand an end to police brutality and bad governance. Members of the art community mobilized, joining protests on the ground and drawing outside attention through their social media channels. Following the fatal shooting of at least twelve protesters on October 20 by the Nigerian military, the art community has shown solidarity: postponements and program modifications as direct response.
The major events in the city’s calendar include the LagosPhoto Festival, ART X Lagos art fair, and (every odd year) the Lagos Biennial, all spearheaded by artists, cultural producers, and entrepreneurs who have, over the past decade, developed innovative, context-responsive platforms for the city’s contemporary art scene. The first week of November traditionally …
Seeing is Remembering: the Expanded Field of Art Writing
Saul Anton
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Saul Anton draws on Charles Baudelaire and Rosalind E. Krauss in reconsidering “Giving Space, Sculpting Time,” his essay on the work of Guillaume Leblon.
I’d like to begin with a confession. My essay on the work of French artist Guillaume Leblon turns on his 2019 exhibition at LABOR, a gallery in Mexico City. But I never saw the show—not in person. Nor did I see any of the other exhibitions the artist has held over the past two decades. I wrote my essay on the basis of dozens and dozens of images of his works and of these exhibitions, which I reviewed in detail over several lunches in New York with Guillaume, and on my own. Once I’d drafted my essay, I fact-checked it with him work by work.
Perhaps that’s a scandal to some. I don’t really know. All I can say is that I’ve never felt that way. But I know that a lot of people—artists, critics, and curators—feel very strongly that you must see the work in person. Embodied …
“Made in L.A. 2020: a version”
Travis Diehl
The posters advertising “Made in L.A. 2020: a version” show a painting of a tear-filled eye. It belongs to President Obama, a detail from Political Tears Obama by Fulton Leroy Washington, aka Mr. Wash. The work dates from 2008, suggesting that while the rises of Trump and the virus have come to shape how we receive everything, including this abbreviated biennial, causes for anguish predate both. In a series of works on view at the Hammer, Washington’s bright-burning surrealism portrays not only the “political tears” of politicians and celebrities from John McCain to Michael Jackson, but also those of his fellow inmates (the artist spent two decades behind bars after being wrongfully convicted on three drug-related charges), drawing the viewer to reflect on the continuing toll of decades of carceral capitalism in the US.
This biennial, announced in January, installed in June, and previewed by the press in November, still has no public opening date. Several live, performance-based projects, notably those by Harmony Holiday and Ligia Lewis, have taken provisional shapes. As conceived by the curators, Lauren Mackler and Myriam Ben Salah, along with the Hammer’s Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, the show runs recto-verso at two museums—the Hammer and the Huntington. …
Bojan Šarčević’s “L’Extime”
Tomas Weber
Bojan Šarčević’s aloof, unyielding mixed-media sculptures skirt the boundary between glacial reserve and slushy poignancy. In his first exhibition at Paris’s Frank Elbaz, he delivers frostiness and emotion in a single blow.
Three works in the first room, all titled Homo Sentimentalis (all works 2020), involve immense, magnificently polished marble blocks, ranging from ivory white to deep grey, that are carved with ridges, indentations, and geometrical notches. Muscular plastic mannequins wearing eighties-style silk blouses and naked from the waist down pose on and around the marble blocks. One figure, seated on black-veined white marble, has a lump of raw limestone for a head. The head of another figure, half-crouching as if about to pounce, is of marble carved with curved ridges; it holds two dagger-like objects, also marble, in its fists. A third mannequin—this one is headless—looms mid-movement, perhaps running or dancing, at the back of the room. The legs and feet of these vaguely alarming, hybrid forms are all neatly bound with jute bondage rope.
Two of the marble blocks have been hollowed out to contain readymade ice chests, the lids of which are open. Switched on and fully operational, they release cold air into the space; empty …
Ellen Lesperance’s “Together we lie in ditches and in front of machines”
R.H. Lossin
Let us begin with the grid: flat, rational, anti-mimetic, static. The grid, writes Rosalind E. Krauss, “announces […] modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, narrative, discourse.” If the grid can be said to represent anything, Krauss argues, it is the two-dimensional surface of the canvas itself. Nine new gouache- and graphite-on-paper works by the Portland-based Ellen Lesperance present us with evidence to the contrary.
Lesperance’s grids are not austere or empty—the hand-drawn graphite lines hold layered squares of color that combine to produce, from a certain distance, the appearance of tightly woven tapestry. But they are still, insistently, grids—the lines are visible and the shapes emerge from a series of squares whose boundaries are observed. What differs from Krauss’s evaluation here is not the grid itself but its function. These grids speak. Their content is historical, narrative, real. Far from being silent, these artworks are a condensed, formal expression of years of research into feminist, anti-nuclear activism.
In 1981, the Welsh group “Women for Life on Earth” walked from Cardiff to Greenham Common in Berkshire, England to protest the installment of ninety-six Cruise nuclear missiles. The protest turned into an encampment—the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp—that remained …
Bruce Nauman
Kevin Brazil
Even before you enter Tate Modern’s Bruce Nauman retrospective, you are put on edge. Approaching the galleries, you hear a man and woman shout “I hate, you hate, we hate!” from the screens of Good Boy Bad Boy (1985). As you queue at the exhibition’s entrance, Setting a Good Corner (Allegory & Metaphor) (1999), a video of Nauman erecting a wooden fence, assaults you with the nerve-shredding sound of a chainsaw. These sounds are deeply discomforting, but that which makes you uncomfortable is also that which you cannot ignore. Discomfort makes you aware of your own body: the unease caused by screaming, or the grinding of a saw, manifests in the tensing of muscles. Yet discomfort, in never becoming unbearable, induces self-reflection: you remain aware of what unsettles you and why. Attentive, aware of one’s body, reflective: discomfort shares much with how we think we should experience art. Why then does it feel so bad?
Discomfort as a state of awareness, this retrospective reveals, has been one of Nauman’s consistent preoccupations across six decades of work. Much has been made of Nauman’s exploration of media after Conceptual Art; many have traced his influence on later artists. Yet Nauman’s achievement …
State of Relax
Eileen Myles
I’m wondering what it would be like if the United States just let go. Like stopped uniting. Like stop opposing part to part, and a foot say Florida just relaxed shaking all those old bodies free and extended itself deeper into the water maybe nudging Cuba, not even entirely doing that but making wavy gestures in its direction. Texas could just fall back on itself and sprawl into Mexico not being different being the same and really vanishing into Mexico and sliding sliding sliding into Guatemala and El Salvador thinking I’m you some parts skidding into south America. Way up north south dakota and north Dakota go I’m you too. And together both of them forget who they am. Cape Cod goes to Europe. On a tiny boat with Bas Jan Ader his toes leaning over the edges of Provincetown. What’ll Alaska do. Become Canada and Canada says I’m Russia and Russia roars and goes to sleep. California becomes one giant bed. It lies its head on Mexico hello and scratches its toes against Oregon who’s asleep in the arms of Washington who wants to change their name right away. Montana has an excess of sperm which it buries in …
Better things
The Editors
Where art and literature once satisfied our search for meaning, wrote Don DeLillo, “now we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe.” This was back in 1991, it’s worth clarifying, but the point stands. Disasters need not even be real to meet our emotional needs, he continued, given that “reports and predictions and warnings” will suffice. At the start of this particular week, we’ll spare you any more of the latter.
As we hunker down for the latest instalment in the crisis of western democracy, it’s a reminder that watching the news alone will not equip us to change the world that it so unreliably represents. The media landscape has changed beyond recognition since Bush I and Mao II, but the suspicion remains that the spectacle of news entertainment is designed to generate exhaustion or catharsis—an experience of fear and pity as purgative and (however subconsciously) enjoyable—and thus to preclude any deeper understanding of the conditions it represents.
These thoughts were prompted in part by two pieces, published either side of this editorial, that independently identify “discomfort” as something like an ethical principle in the production of art. By making us aware of the …
Amy Sillman’s Faux Pas
Rosanna Mclaughlin
Abstract painting has spent much of the past decade in the doghouse. Not only has it been usurped by figurative painting, the genre du jour of a time defined by identity politics and visual representation, it has also been tarnished by its association with Zombie Formalism, gaining a reputation (often deservedly) for apathy and commercial cynicism. Amy Sillman’s selected writings are a welcome reminder that how you paint, as well as what you paint, is intimately associated with the experiences of the body, and that the affective and intellectual significance of process should not be underestimated.
An influential American painter working in what might be called the afterlife of Abstract Expressionism, Sillman is also an inventive and charismatic writer. Published by After 8 Books, with an introduction by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas comprises seventeen texts written for journals, zines, and lectures between 2009 and 2020. Included are a letter in which Sillman explains that she has broken up with abstraction, which she characterizes as an uptight ex; catalogue essays on peers and influences, Laura Owens, Eugene Delacroix, and Philip Guston among them; and idiosyncratic theories of shape, color, and the diagram, in the form of essays and cartoons. The book …
Runo Lagomarsino’s “I am also smoke”
Natasha Marie Llorens
I vowed to quit smoking (again) in March. Then March happened and discipline of any kind seemed naïve in the face of global chaos that has undermined the assumption that we can control our own fate. Now it is October and we are in the middle of a second (third, twelfth) wave and Runo Lagomarsino’s solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake, “I am also smoke,” does nothing to renew my resolve. It is an ode to the liminality of moments spent with one’s addiction in the face of existential instability.
On one level I read “I am also smoke” as an ode to smoking because it is bookended in the space by works that directly involve cigarettes. The first sculpture one encounters upon entering—Air d’exil (we smoke for the dead, we store the dead, but they are not dead) (2019)—is a neat double row of Duchampian glass globes filled with smoke exhaled by Syrian asylum seekers. The last work in the show, Yo Tambien soy humo / I am also smoke (2020), is a video of the artist’s father relating the experience of his first cigarette on European soil after fleeing Argentina with his young family following the 1976 …
Chto Delat’s “When the roots start to move and get lost”
Ben Eastham
A screen at the entrance to Chto Delat’s first solo exhibition in Athens shows four members of the Russian collective on a Zoom call. Each of them sways, swoons, or sighs along to Maya Kristalinskaya’s interpretation of the 1965 torch song Nezhnost’ [Tenderness] as overlaid script tells the group’s history since its formation in 2003. A wall text states that the ballad was a favorite of Yuri Gagarin, the first man ever to be estranged from the planet, and that this performance was recorded during lockdown. As Kalinskaya mourns an earth left empty by separation from her lover, this short portrait of divided friends introduces the themes of the show: how to resist isolation, what it means to belong, and how to be together.
Chto Delat’s interest in these issues predates the pandemic and political crises which have exacerbated them. Filmed in 2011, and exhibited here in a basement screening room, Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20xx presents a hypothetical scenario in a near-future that may, a decade ago, have seemed dystopian: a group of asylum seekers have escaped deportation and taken refuge in a modern art museum. A resident artist has the bright idea of dressing them up as performers in …
Paris Roundup
Rachel Valinsky
Working in near-isolation in her Parisian bedroom-studio from the early 1970s until her death in 1981, the Alsatian artist Marcelle Cahn took an archive of old tourist postcards—the Eiffel Tower, a train station, a cathedral, a sleek white marble polar bear—and dappled them with shapes of varying sizes and colors. Displayed in the two-part group exhibition “Le plan libre – 1st chapter” at Jocelyn Wolff (the second part opens in early November), this modest intervention by an artist better known for her abstract paintings and collages feels anything but nostalgic: in isolation, one makes do with what one has.
In contrast to those galleries presenting artworks that either respond to the pandemic directly or were made during lockdown, oblique but timely approaches such as this stand out. Seeking to invert the limitations of confinement, this exhibition takes as its premise the titular architectural concept of doing away with interior walls to create one large open space—a conceit which plays out in the show’s uncluttered layout. Like Cahn’s delicate compositions, Georges Koskas’s dotted and lined geometric abstractions from the 1950s evoke the utopian, modernist aspiration to devise a universal pictorial language. Guy Mees’s sly, colored, cutout paper scraps from his …
“Wages for Housework”
Ewa Borysiewicz
In “Wages for Housework,” Paulina Ołowska takes up the ongoing task of writing women back into art history. Foksal Gallery Foundation’s exhibition of the Polish artist’s work—alongside paintings and sculptures by Agata Słowak and Natalia Załuska—reflects on the foundations of modern art, emphasizing the interdependency of gender and capital, by reimagining the modernist environment of Warsaw’s best-known white cube.
The show builds on Ołowska’s longstanding interest in complicating the male history of modernism; her previous work has involved research on artistic personas (including Zofia Stryjeńska, Janina Kraupe-Świderska, and Maja Berezowska) and engaged with media and visual idioms that blend “high” and “low” culture. More recently, she has turned towards an investigation of “the grotesque” as formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin: its main principle of corruption as a means of subverting the dominant discourse is apparent in works focused on points of breakthrough, crisis, and change.
“The grotesque,” notes the writer Tess Thackara, “is inherently associated with the feminine, long having shaped depictions of the female body—prostitutes, femmes fatales, and sorceresses.” These transgressive figures populate the first part of the show. Słowak’s painting The Sacrificial Rabbit (all works 2020) depicts three female personages with the animal offering hanging in the background. The trio, …
“Digital Reincarnations”
Xin Wang / Lu Yang
The practice of Shanghai-based artist Lu Yang is best characterized as a continuous project of world-building. His videos, computer games, and digital avatars combine a distinctive repertoire of intellectual traditions and cultural references: Buddhist and Hindu cosmology (as touched on in the 2015 video Moving Gods, exhibited in the China Pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale), anime and gaming subcultures, neuroscience, and bio-technology. The artist combined these subjects into a delirious multi-chapter video game The Great Adventure of Material World, which featured in the 2018 Shanghai Biennial as part of a massive installation resembling an arcade hall. In the game, players control the Material World Knight through realms such as Hell, Paradise, Space Journey, and Fight with the Self. Among the characters from the artist’s earlier works to make a cameo was Uterus Man—an androgynous character with superpowers tied to the female reproductive system, who first appeared in a 2013 video—and the eponymous protagonist of Wrathful King Kong Core (2011), a Tibetan Buddhist deity whose fearful expressions draw on religion and neurology. Lu’s work is at its most radical when it addresses fundamental issues: life, death, and the (un)knowability of the self.
In Lu’s new project DOKU (2020–ongoing), the …
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim’s “Memory Drum”
Rahel Aima
When the United Arab Emirates began its slip-and-slide towards fully automated luxury neoliberalism in the 1970s and ’80s, artists responded in one of two ways. Some, like Hassan Sharif, addressed the twinned specters of rapid urbanization and hyperconsumerism by taking the influx of plasticky junk as raw materials for maximalist assemblages. Other members of the Emirati avant-garde—a group dubbed The Five, who formed the Flying House Collective and laid the groundwork for the country’s contemporary art scene—doubled down on their connections to the land and to the old ways of life that were in danger of disappearing.
Among those in the latter category is Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, who has always been an alchemist par excellence. The self-taught artist transmutes the rocks, clay, sand, and other natural materials gathered from the Hajar mountains that hug his hometown of Khor Fakkan into land art and, more recently, sculpture and painting. As is the case with all of The Five, his work features an emphasis on seriality and obsessive repetition, particularly in Hanne Darboven-esque ink drawings of tallied lines that accumulate in a frenzied intimation of the skyscrapers and urban sprawl encroaching on his beloved nature. But his visual language, which is …
Jennifer J. Lee’s “Wallflowers”
Travis Diehl
The eleven compact paintings in Jennifer J. Lee’s “Wallflowers,” all dating from 2020, hang heavily on the white walls of Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles. Each work is around A4 in size and plays with layers of texture and detail, transferring source images of intricate scenes—stonework, crocodile skins, flowers, and seeds—onto an unforgivingly wide-woven jute. The slime-aged arches of Abbey, the blood-orange marble of Elevator, the baked psychedelia of Wallpaper—the unprimed material dims Lee’s colors as if with time.
The pictures are further compressed by their cropping. Couch depicts a sofa, patterned in garden-, bruise-, and fire-hued florals of a boomer vintage: the painting’s rough surface, pigmented and oiled, resembles the coarse upholstery of its subject. It lets slip only the tiniest patch of context—a glimpse of a room—in the upper-right corner. The composition is otherwise foreshortened, the pillowy seams of the cushions and pleats cutting a smart diagonal. In Cathedral, Lee’s rendering of tracery and arcades narrows to a blotchy impressionism, as if through a lens with a shallow depth of field. The canted planes in Wallpaper, Elevator, Records, and Security Mirror similarly place their subjects in the middle-distance.
Each image pushes to the edges of the …
London Roundup
Chris Fite-Wassilak
It’s an unlikely benediction: two identical photos frame Dozie Kanu’s exhibition “Owe Deed, One Deep” at Project Native Informant: a small, slightly blurred image of a tower with a hand at the top, reaching awkwardly towards the sky. Emo State (2020) seems to have been taken from a moving car, the landscape around it giving some sense of the sheer scale of the tower, a religious monument modelled on the tower of Babel in southern Nigeria, constructed only a few years ago and torn down in 2019. The ghost of this demolished structure, the two hands waving over the five sculptural assemblages gathered below them, casts the works as their own temporary monuments, momentary markers to whatever spirit or feeling has possessed us, before disappearing. In a corner, St. Jaded Extinguish (2020) is a gray fire extinguisher stand placed forlornly on a flimsy, short set of black stairs, a bottle opener attached to its base that spells out a nihilistic mantra: “SELF SERVE.”
Making my way around exhibitions for the first time since February, it was such slight, haunted gestures that stuck with me. It feels disconcertingly normal to traipse around the city at this time of year, albeit with pre-booking …
“Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration”
Adam Kleinman
The feeling that physical detention is only one aspect of a grander system of constraint haunts “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Amy Rosenblum-Martín, Jocelyn Miller, and Josephine Graf, and based on Fleetwood’s book of the same name published earlier this year, the adroit exhibition at MoMA PS1 features work by past and present detainees as well as their extended family, friends, and advocates, alongside pieces by other nonincarcerated artists. In doing so, the show maps what Fleetwood calls “carceral aesthetics,” referring to the wide-reaching ways in which the US prison-industrial complex affects cultural production, and how such artifacts draw an image of our society at large.
On a formal level, several works note how artists overcome the material limitations inherent to forced captivity. Jesse Krimes’s Apokaluptein 16389067 (2010–13) is a vast fever dream. Hung as a floor-to-ceiling panorama on a curved wall, it consists of heaven, earth, and hell drawn in pencil over newspaper images transferred using hair gel onto 39 bed sheets—each of which were individually smuggled out of jail via the postal system. A low plinth in another chamber hosts Dean Gillispie’s nostalgic maquettes depicting 1950s Americana …
Trevor Paglen’s “Opposing Geometries”
Anna Mirzayan
Machines have eyes. Calculating, extractive, synesthetic, they collect faces, monitor behaviors and habits, capture your fingerprints, eyes, and voice. So what exactly do these machines see, and how? These questions are explored in “Mirror with a Memory” at the Carnegie Museum of Art, a multi-format endeavor encompassing a collection of essays, a podcast, and Trevor Paglen’s exhibition “Opposing Geometries.” At its entrance is a looping video of interviews with artists, curators, and professors discussing the history and current usages of AI and facial recognition, and the impact of these technologies on privacy, governance, and subjectivity. Photography is overwhelmingly indicted as “not innocent,” not objective: it concretizes the perspective of the photographer, they argue, and is a technology of overexposure, riddled with dangerous overlooked biases. Yet as you move through the gallery, Paglen’s own works appear at odds with the responses offered by his peers. The portraits, landscapes, and installations pose more subtle questions about epistemology and art as forms of production.
“Opposing Geometries” consists almost entirely of photographs. Like Ansel Adams’s landscape photography, which Paglen often references in his work, the large-scale images of national parks and other natural wonders—many of which are strangely saturated with hallucinogenic colors, thanks to …
Underlying conditions
The Editors
There is a temptation, when writing these letters, to put forward a hot take on the morning’s news. This is especially the case when the US president announces that he has contracted a potentially fatal virus on the eve of a tinderbox election. That you will already have been bombarded by kneejerk reactions, conspiratorial whisperings, and wild speculations is all the more reason to resist that impulse.
This is not to say that art criticism should be silent on the proliferating emergencies: only that it must take a longer view. Writing last month in e-flux journal, Franco “Bifo” Berardi identified the past four years’ shocks as mere symptoms of a “widespread psychosis” that, in his evocative phrase, “has invaded the scene of the global brain.” Neither this psychosis nor the pandemic can be dismissed as the unpredictable consequence of a freak set of circumstances or as a limited disruption to a status quo that will soon be restored. Both result from historical processes—whether the destruction of the planet or the erosion of truth—that can be traced through artistic production. As Berardi points out in his jeremiad for American democracy, the signs were there for anyone with the courage …
Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken (Eds.), Deserting from the Culture Wars
R.H. Lossin
Desertion is a compelling and complex political strategy. It is the opposite of joining—which is a precondition for political action almost by definition—and it signals more than simply dropping out or quietly withdrawing. Desertion implies active enlistment—voluntary or involuntary—and thus describes either a process of disillusionment or a breaking point. Such militaristic language also raises the stakes of departure: while civilians might make a decision to quit a job, leave a city, or cancel membership of an organization, “desertion” has serious consequences. It is an act that risks real civil and social exile.
The notion of cultural desertion is also, for better or worse, inherently utopian: it requires an elsewhere to escape to. To suggest that we might be able to make a genuine exit from a cultural condition marked by polarized, irrational, and uncritical discourse is to invoke a revolutionary horizon. Deserting from the Culture Wars, a collection of essays by writers, artists, and curators, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken, promises to explore the possibilities that might arise if the “volunteer army” of cultural producers refused to “play these war games.”
The term “culture wars” was popularized by sociologist James Davison Hunter in his 1991 book …
“Studio Berlin”
Alan Murrin
“Morgen ist die Frage”—tomorrow is the question—reads the banner by Rirkrit Tiravanija which swathes the top floor of Berghain’s façade. The statement seems antithetical to the philosophy of the most famous techno club in the world. Before lockdown began and ravers were forced to find their fun at illegal parties in the parks of Berlin and the forests of Brandenburg, Berghain was where you went to forget about tomorrow. If you could brave the lengthy queue and possible rejection by the club’s notoriously mercurial door staff, days of hedonism lay ahead. But for now, the 3,500-square-metre venue, first a power plant and then a nightclub, has become an exhibition space.
When Covid-19 forced clubs and galleries to close in March, Berghain’s owners approached Karen and Christian Boros about mounting an exhibition to provide a platform for artists who live and work in the city. Funded by a 250,000 euro grant from the Berlin Senate, the show does not feature work from the Boros Collection—housed in a World War Two bunker in central Berlin that was itself once a techno club that hosted fetish parties—but they and Juliet Kothe, director of the Boros Foundation, are listed as co-organizers. As an overarching …
Piles of expressivity
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Elizabeth A. Povinelli writes of her relationship to language and considers how her essay on the work of Julien Creuzet, “In the Middle of it,” was shaped by the artist’s own approach to composition.
Language and I are not easy friends. We get along, sometimes very well, but often in a mutually irritated, strained relation. I am sure language would have her own story, but mine is this—she tends to express herself in a straight line, one element unfurling after the other, when what I sometimes want to express is the everything of something altogether in its messy material intersections. I could remind myself that in fact language operates with a spiraling multidirectional dynamic. Each word forces those already written to hold or to lose their meanings; and every word creates a virtual world of other words potentially available. Moreover, these unruly semantic dynamics are shaped by equally energetic metapragmatic dimensions. Every utterance attempts to conjure and hold a type of reality, its material contours, its legitimate actors, its values and wastelands, …
Helen Cammock’s “I Decided I Want to Walk”
Chloe Carroll
Helen Cammock’s 19-minute video They Call It Idlewild (all works 2020) presents, in no particular order, the static framing of: a brick wall, a statue, a frayed cobweb, grasses dipping in the breeze. The result of a pre-lockdown residency at Wysing Arts Centre, it’s the first piece encountered by visitors to “I Decided I Want to Walk,” the artist’s first solo exhibition at Kate MacGarry in London. The video’s imagery documents a space of retreat in rural Cambridgeshire, overlaid with a voiceover in which the artist ventriloquizes writers including Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver, and James Joyce.
Beyond the compact screening room at the exhibition’s entrance, two printed billboards (originally installed at a short-lived March exhibition at Wysing) line the walls of the light-filled main gallery, interspersed with a selection of new screenprints. Both series feature irregularly spaced white text against a monochrome background (crying/ is/ never/ enough; We/ Shared/ the/ Colour/ of/ Thought), and endeavor to rewrite the narrative of laziness, and to question its motives. Who is entitled to idleness? Who is expected to maintain productivity? For whom, in this moment, is idleness an applauded civic duty, and for whom is it a shirking of responsibility? Across the exhibition, …
Glitch Throws Shade
Legacy Russell
Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism explores the relationship between technology and identity. In this extract from her forthcoming book, she considers the work of Juliana Huxtable and Victoria Sin in the context of her proposal that the “glitch” is a means of renegotiating and subverting normative categories of sexuality, race, and gender.
Raised in College Station, Texas, Huxtable was born intersex and assigned to the male gender. During the 1990s, in a moment where the internet and the mythology of its utopia was on the rise, Huxtable male-identified, going by the name Julian Letton. In a conservative Texan, Christian milieu, claiming a trans identity seemed unimaginable. Yet when she left home to attend Bard College in upstate New York, she entered a period that marked a blooming in her sense of self, one she speaks about openly: “I was fully brainwashed by the Bible Belt shit […] but the internet became a form of solitude. It gave me a sense of control and freedom that I didn’t have in my everyday life, because I walked through life feeling hated, embarrassed, trapped, and powerless. I felt very suicidal.”
As her art practice expanded, Huxtable’s engagement with various digital platforms—chatrooms, blogs, social media, and beyond—increased …
Tavares Strachan’s “In Plain Sight”
Orit Gat
How are stories told? Who is remembered, who forgotten, and why? Which narratives last and what histories remain unaccounted for? These are questions of the moment, when representation is crucial to political struggle and debates on decolonial knowledge gain mainstream traction. Tavares Strachan’s exhibition at Marian Goodman suggests that what was neglected was always in plain sight, and that what was missing from the narrative was often not image-making but storytelling.
A large, leather-bound and gilded book is displayed in a mahogany and glass case. Titled The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (Mahogany #9) (2018), it is part of an ongoing project that has featured in different iterations in several of Strachan’s previous exhibitions: its thousands of pages include entries dedicated to people, places, and events that were omitted from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that is, systemically sidelined by Western history. At the most recent Venice Biennale, he displayed another version of the work, subtitled White (also 2018), along with pieces dedicated to Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American astronaut, who died in a training accident in 1967. “In Plain Sight” departs from another African American explorer: Matthew Henson, who was part of an expedition with Robert Peary and four Inuits …
“absences and nothingness”
Johanna Hedva / Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz
Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American writer and artist based in Los Angeles and Berlin whose practice traverses mysticism, music, and astrology, and the politics of illness, disability, and gender. They have relocated Ancient Greek dramas to feminized and queered contexts, and staged doom metal concerts informed by Korean shamanism; their essay “Sick Woman Theory” connects sickness and impairment with gender, class, and coloniality. Their practice encompasses performances, films, novels, music, readings, and installations: all these forms, in Hedva’s own words, “transforming into each other, trespassing.”
In the summer of 2020, Hedva presented their first solo exhibition amidst the rubble of the Klosterruine Berlin. “God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce” showcased a decade of texts, songs, and performances, and audio versions of sections from their 2020 book, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. The installation was designed to be accessible to all bodies: the Klosterruine was empty aside from red ramps, two speakers, and a series of benches, while the exhibition also took place on the website godsauce.black (with the sound pieces captioned and described) and across the city of Berlin.
I first met Hedva last year at the exhibition I co-curated with George Vasey at Wellcome Collection, Jo Spence …
11th Berlin Biennale, “The Crack Begins Within”
Jörg Heiser
“Here, the concept of ownership is abstracted until it disappears.” This is the official slogan of ExRotaprint: a former print-press factory collectively run as a mix of art studios, workshops, and community initiatives in Wedding, north Berlin, and one of four venues for the 11th Berlin Biennale. For about a year leading up to the exhibition’s opening, the curatorial team—María Berríos, Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado, and Agustín Pérez Rubio—hosted a series of readings, screenings, workshops, and performances here which set the tone. Though interrupted in March by the pandemic that prompted the show’s postponement from June to September, the approach could be summarized as: “Here, the concept of curatorial heroics is abstracted until it disappears.”
Which is to say: this Biennale foregrounds work that addresses socio-political traumas past and present, and the effects of violence inflicted on the marginalized. (This is also how I understand the title “The Crack Begins Within,” borrowed from a line by poet Iman Mersal.) Despite curatorial texts that occasionally wax a little too poetic, the team circumvents the usual pitfalls of self-congratulatory gesturing and puffed-up wokeness that reduce artists and their works to issue-tokens or neo-ethnographic trophies. The works at ExRotaprint point towards the basso …
2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, “and suddenly it all blossoms”
Novuyo Moyo
If you can’t beat it, as the saying goes, incorporate it into your curatorial concept. After initially postponing the second edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA), the curatorial team led by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel elected to embrace Covid-19, acknowledging the virus as a “significant author” of the exhibition. Change is the only constant and every end—for the curators, if not for the artists who weren’t able to show their works as initially intended—a potential beginning.
Taking place in the partially derelict port district of Andrejsala, the biennial is haunted by the specters of missing work due to shipping problems brought on by the crisis. Marguerite Humeau’s sculpture of a dying whale The Dead (A drifting, dying marine mammal) (2019), unable to be transported across borders, is represented by a guide narrating the audience through what should be there and a sound recording in an empty space. Elsewhere, such absences are felt in the crossed-out or differently colored sentences attesting to abandoned or amended plans that pepper the catalogue, and the starkly painted lines on the floor of the port building indicating the walls on which art would have been displayed. In juxtaposing absence and presence, “and suddenly it …
Claire Chevrier and Ali Kazma’s “Extracted Foreign Bodies”
Rahma Khazam
In his 1964 essay “Rhetoric of the Image,” Roland Barthes made a key distinction between photography and film: while film produces an awareness of the “being-there” of a thing, photography generates a consciousness of its “having-been-there.” Photography is thus “the return of the dead,” a “flat death,” as Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida (1980), that cannot be brought back to life. Or, as Christian Metz wrote in 1985, expanding on Barthes’s distinction, film makes the dead appear alive, but photography, because of its stillness, “maintains the memory of the dead as being dead.” Some forty years on, this two-person exhibition offers a different perspective on the image: the encounter it stages between Turkish video artist Ali Kazma and French photographer Claire Chevrier challenges the association of film with life and photography with death, turning the conventional dichotomy on its head.
Spread across the labyrinthine spaces of Les Moulins de Paillard—an arts center in a former eighteenth-century paper mill, with a program ranging from Gordon Matta-Clark to contemporary music and dance—“Extracted Foreign Bodies” explores the liminal spaces between the two genres in a series of revealing confrontations. In the first room, Kazma’s single-channel video Safe, Resistance (2015) portrays the Global …
7th Yokohama Triennale, “Afterglow”
Koichiro Osaka
Masked commuters emerging blinking from quarantine and into Yokohama’s bayside district might think that the Museum of Art has disappeared. In place of its 180-metre-wide modernist façade is a dark, striated screen that—in fitting with the subtitle of the seventh edition of the Yokohama Triennale—resembles an analogue television screen patterned with the white noise caused by cosmic radiation from the “afterglow” of the Big Bang. Closer inspection reveals the source of this illusion: mesh drapes, patterned with vertical black-and-white stripes, have been suspended across the front of the building. This optical intervention by Ivana Franke, titled Resonance of the Unforeseen (2020), anticipates the haunting ways in which themes such as “luminous care” and “toxic glow” radiate through the exhibition.
Curated by New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, this edition of the triennale brings together 67 artists—many of them exhibiting in Japan for the first time—whose work engages with diverse belief systems, histories, and forms of sensory experience. The first non-Japanese artistic directors of the triennale state in an introductory text that their curatorial methodology is to “start with the sources” in order to “provoke us to think, to ignite, to learn, and unlearn.” These are collected in a “sourcebook” published …
Paloma Contreras Lomas’s “The Marshland of Souls”
Gaby Cepeda
As a real chilanga, born and raised in Mexico City, Paloma Contreras Lomas is familiar with the ultra-centralized bent in Mexican culture: how the images and discourse produced in the capital solidify into countrywide narratives through their reproduction in the media and popular culture. Her awareness of her own position as a white, middle-class urbanite, an artist who inserts herself into sites of Mexican rurality, is apparent in her critical approach to such typical representations as the rocky Durango mountains and brown-faced white men acting tough (as seen in so many Westerns); the Mexican state’s dispossession of impoverished rural areas on the pretext of “rescuing” them; the concomitant vilification/romanticization of drug-dealing men through the deep yellow filter beloved of Netflix cinematographers. These stereotypes come back to questions of displacement: the agency to tell stories rarely belongs to those who live them, as the stories of Mexico’s rural populations tend to be told by those who exist in geographically proximate but profoundly different realities.
Contreras Lomas’s work explores the liminal space that exists between real landscapes and the fantasies projected upon them. In her portrayals, that space becomes the site of what might be called an Extractivist Gothic. In the video …
Territory without terrain
The Editors
The Yokohama Triennale, according to its artistic director Raqs Media Collective, would this year illuminate the “forces that flow […] between the microcosm of singular lives [and] the connected life of the planet.” Which is a laudable aim, even if the curators were beaten to the punch by the flow through millions of singular bodies of submicroscopic agents reputedly introduced into the connected life of humans by a bat’s encounter with a pangolin in a Chinese seafood market. In terms of illustrating the point that we are each tangled up in complex intersecting global systems, a viral pandemic is hard to rival.
The crisis has thrown issues shaping contemporary art into sharper relief. How to act globally while preserving local difference? How to protect communities without excluding others? Which borders should be torn down, and which reinforced? What does it mean to share, to participate, to conserve? If neither isolationism nor globalization in their simplest forms are satisfactory, then the pressing task is to record how the agents that shape our lives—whether viruses, toxicity, information, or, most pertinently to this publication, ideas—move around the world, how they adapt to local conditions, and how they are experienced in diverse …
Moyra Davey’s Index Cards
Filipa Ramos
During the lockdown, I found solace in books that took me to places beyond my reach. I visited the atemporal lands of the Kesh civilization, brought to life by Ursula K. Le Guin in Always Coming Home (1985); I discovered the outlandish urban bestiary of Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City (2018); I fled to that ancient epoch when animals were gods and humans were animals which Roberto Calasso describes in The Celestial Hunter (2016). In between, I compulsively watched the animal videos posted by the Canadian-born, New York-based artist Moyra Davey on her Instagram feed.
Between March and May, Davey filmed a photogenic bird feeder, an aquamarine box that looked like a vintage television monitor attached to a tree branch, through the lens of a telescope. First came the birds: blackcaps, blue jays, coal tits, goldfinches, and other, less familiar North American passerines. Next came the wild turkeys, then a family of black bears, a mother and two cubs playing in Davey’s porch and on the screen right before my eyes. These snippets made my silent spring. So when Davey’s Index Cards—a compilation of essays written between 2003 and 2019, collected by Nicolas Linnert and published by Fitzcarraldo …
Remembering Rebeccah Blum
Jillian McManemin / Matthew Post
STATEMENT A – SAY HER NAME
Rebeccah Blum was murdered last week. Her body was discovered in the apartment of a male artist. In the days after her death, tabloids and, later, some sections of the art press casually reported variations on the formula: “Brad Pitt’s friend, male artist X, was found dead at a location two hours outside Berlin. His gallerists are sad.” Only further down the report does the reader find out that he had confessed to killing “a woman” before fleeing the city. In some reports, her name was mentioned only in passing, in among a laundry list of Artist X’s career accomplishments. In others, all we get is the make and model of his getaway car. But she had a name. Rebeccah Blum was a woman, she was a valued member of Berlin’s art community, she was a mother, she had a profession and a rich life, and deserves to be remembered as such. Say her name.
At the same time, a campaign has been running on social media. The Women Supporting Women “challenge” sees women ask other women to post black-and-white pictures of themselves as a gesture of gender solidarity. Social media feeds are full …
The Exhibition Catalog
Kimberly Bradley
In his 1931 essay “Unpacking my Library,” Walter Benjamin describes unboxing his collection of books in a single day, working without stop from noon until past midnight. Months after moving house on the first day of Berlin’s lockdown, I’m still working on mine; my books are, as Benjamin would say, “not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.” I’ve been slowed by a desire to read these exhibition catalogs, artist books, and hybrids of the two. With no opportunity to visit IRL art spaces, and overwhelmed by digital “viewing rooms,” my catalogs became my galleries and institutions.
The process reminded me of my earliest brushes with fine art, the pictures in my mother’s Art History textbooks (including a vintage mid-1960s edition of H. W. Janson’s History of Art) when I was a kid in rural America with no access to the real thing. The books in my own collection are artifacts of events I attended, and others I wish I had. They are historical documents, discursive platforms, snapshots of zeitgeists. They are windows or deep dives into artists’ practices, the infrastructures of exhibitions, and the thoughts supporting, diverging from, and swirling around art and all its mechanisms. And …
New York City Roundup
Terence Trouillot
I didn’t think I’d be this excited to go back to a gallery. In some ways, I’ve enjoyed experiencing art within the confines of my Brooklyn apartment over the past months, and I’m still excited by the possibilities arising from the advent of novel digital platforms. But this time away from real-life art viewing has made the experience a novelty, and as galleries started to reopen it felt like a much-needed indulgence—after months of social distancing, and then weeks of defying said social distancing to protest in the streets against the most recent examples of state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies—simply to be back.
At “Jack Whitten. Transitional Space. A Drawing Survey.” at Hauser & Wirth on the Upper East Side—an exhibition which outlines Whitten’s exceptional works on paper chronologically, from the 1960s to the 2010s—I was surprised by the boyish glee I felt just at noticing the pronounced physicality of paper: the deckled edges, the wrinkle in the page, the raised contours of paper cut-outs collaged onto another flat surface. The show demonstrates the careful evolution in Whitten’s work from figuration to abstraction, but also focuses on the artist’s attention to material, and the various techniques that make his later …
Hannah Black’s “Ruin/Rien”
Harry Burke
A 2001 paperback edition of The Black Jacobins (1938), C. L. R. James’s study of the dialectical relationship between the Haitian and French revolutions, rests on a plinth in Hannah Black’s exhibition “Ruin/Rien” at Arcadia Missa (Ruin II, all works 2020). Its cover features a detail of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson’s romanticist 1797 portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, a freed slave who attained the rank of captain during the rebellion and was the first Black deputy elected to the French National Convention. The artist has placed a post-it note on the upper-right corner of the cover. Written on it, in yellow pastel against a blue background, is the word “RUIN.”
By revealing that the Haitian rebellion—which overthrew French colonial rule in one of the most consequential slave uprisings in history—was central to the upheavals in Paris, James argues that the question of slavery underwrites modern definitions of liberty. “Ruin/Rien” features a heterogeneous suite of new sculptures and videos that draw connections between these revolutionary events and the idea of the autonomous artwork. The bricked-up window of Bastille, for example, references both minimalist sculpture and the Bastille cell in which the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned and where he wrote The 120 Days …
“A Language for Intimacy”
Natasha Marie Llorens
“A Language for Intimacy” is an online group exhibition, curated by Amanda Contrada and Terence Trouillot, addressed to the notion of intimacy. The project is set up as a dialogue between nine artists and nine writers. Each page centers images of an artwork at the top, with an interpretative meditation below it. To take one example, Sougwen Chung’s Corpus VII, from the series “(distance) in place” (2020), is a drawing made using a robotic arm, in which Claire Voon sees “the poetic promise of mechanical and artificial systems to imagine forms of closeness in an increasingly estranged world.” Voon’s observation could be extended to the project as a whole. Contrada and Trouillot have assembled a portrait of entanglement between humans, and our entanglement with the technologies of perception we use to try to reach each other. What emerges is the sense that intimacy is in crisis, infused with a profound exhaustion and uncertainty.
In late March 2020, Paul B. Preciado published a short piece in Artforum describing the moments after he emerged from the sickbed in an empty Parisian apartment. The last paragraph struck me as a particularly apt analysis of intimacy during the present pandemic. He wrote a …
Zheng Bo’s “The Soft and Weak Are Companions of Life”
Pedro Neves Marques
The influence of translations of Taoist texts, including the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching, on early twentieth-century ecology in the West and its post-war cybernetic revival is well-known. According to the teachings of Lao Tzu and centuries of Taoist tradition, the Way is found in the encounter of differences: a managed equilibrium, or flow, between hand and plant, culture and nature.
Zheng Bo’s practice often expresses this tension in ways that acknowledge the different ecological philosophies of East and West while queering the relations—and expectations—that humans have about plants. His first solo show in Portugal, at Kunsthalle Lissabon, includes two sets of works: “Drawing Life” (2020–ongoing), a new series of framed charcoal drawings depicting plants the artist found during his walks in Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, where he lives, during the Covid-19 pandemic; and “Pteridophilia” (2016–ongoing), a series of four videos in which naked men in a Taiwanese forest—in groups, in pairs, or alone—have sex with ferns by licking, biting, stroking, and rubbing them.
While the new drawings reflect on the tension between urban development and plant life, the four “Pteridophilia” videos, projected onto a gallery wall, broaden the meaning of queerness by engaging with ecosexuality, a …
“Art’s critical force”
Vivian Sky Rehberg / Maria Lind
I first met the curator, critic, and educator Maria Lind in the early 2000s, while I was working as a curator at the Musée d’Art moderne de Paris and she was the director of the Kunstverein München. We have kept in touch since that time, and my annual visits to Sweden always include trips to Stockholm’s Tensta konsthall, which Lind directed from 2011 to 2018, as she always stops by when visiting the Netherlands, where I have been based for the past eight years. Due to a variety of circumstances, however, it seemed unlikely our paths would cross again anytime soon.
While working from home in Rotterdam, two of Lind’s books—Selected Maria Lind Writing (2010) and Seven Years: The Rematerialisation of Art from 2011 to 2017 (2019)—have been within reach on my desk. As arts institutions face a time of unprecedented change, it felt like a good moment to return to Lind’s 2002 essay “RSVP, or: What Rhythm, Scale, and Format Can Do With Art.” In it, Lind writes: “I know of no better way to approach and get a grip on the world—to address and question life—than through art […] Contemporary art, in its greatest moments, can figure …
Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s “Paintings…”
Cora Gilroy-Ware
As clichéd as it seems today, the association of pink and blue with girls and boys is a relatively recent notion. In both style and color, infants’ clothing was largely gender-neutral as recently as the early twentieth century, and it was not until the 1980s that the pink/blue code was fixed to the gender binary. Almost two centuries earlier, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe projected multiple tints and shades onto girls and women: the “female sex in youth,” he writes in Zur Farbenlehre [Theory of Colors] (1810), “is attached to rose-color and sea-green, in age to violet and dark green.”
The alignment of color with gender now seems antiquated. Yet as I walk into “Paintings…,” the latest installation by Paris-born, London-based artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, I cannot help but notice precisely the feminine palette Goethe described. Rose, sea-green, and violet, with passages of darker green to offset the paler shades, proliferate throughout Cabinet’s exhibition space. The environment offers a subtle, spatial engagement not with feminist discourse, girlhood, or womanhood, but with femininity itself: the material residue of tastes, styles, and their attendant hues that modernity has projected onto people labeled female. Much second-wave feminist literature aims to liberate the female body …
Earth, Works, and Workers in Laura Wilson’s Deepening
R.H. Lossin
At first glance, the brick is a very simple thing. Perhaps the oldest building material still in use, bricks were made and sun-dried in hot climates as early as 7000 BCE; the fired brick with which we are familiar has been around since c. 3500 BCE. The brick’s making is relatively easy to imagine, as is its use. Its lack of technical complication evokes a utopian past unburdened by the impenetrable nature of contemporary technological life, constructed simply from earth and fire.
Deepening (2020), a short video by the Belfast-born and London-based artist Laura Wilson, is set in a 150-year-old brick quarry outside of Peterborough. The video was produced as part of an exhibition commissioned by New Geographies, a project funded through Arts Council England that looks to reimagine the cartography of the East of England through the creative documentation of neglected or overlooked places. Wilson’s project, an installation that included artifacts, original works, a performance and the video discussed here, was organized around a Bronze Age settlement dating to c. 850 BCE that was discovered at the edge of the quarry in 1999. Through the geographical and temporal conjunction of a modern site of industry and an ancient settlement, …
Trisha Baga’s “the eye, the eye and the ear”
Francesco Tenaglia
Contrary to the press materials for Trisha Baga’s “the eye, the eye and the ear,” which liken the presentation to that of a natural history museum, the New York-based artist’s first institutional exhibition in Italy recalls the Egyptian Theater fad of golden-age Hollywood. A procession of “Hypothetical Artifacts” (2015–20), a series of ceramics sculptures precisely arranged on a plinth that zig-zags like a snake, offer the first hint of an architectural craze that followed the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. In this “geological corridor of evolution,” as the artist describes it, everyday objects such as picture frames, a printer, and a microscope are rendered like fossilized movie props. Several of these pieces appear in video installations positioned around the darkened gallery. Spot-lit and decorated with plants, lamps, furniture, and other items, the installations resemble sets on a soundstage.
The “Hypothetical Artifacts” are displayed to one side of the dark, majestic spaces of Pirelli Hangar Bicocca—a cathedral-like black box both geographically and architecturally opposed to the light-flooded, neo-Renaissance Prada Foundation citadel on the other side of Milan. Nearby, another group from the same series—ceramic poodle heads resembling flame-topped Sphinxes—are placed on a pyramidal plinth. Both display surfaces bring to mind the …
Attending to our Houses
Tarini Malik
The world is angry, the world is fearful. I am mobilized and (in part) optimistic. At times, I feel resentful. This is not new. I am not shocked.
Over the course of a few days in early June, I scrolled through hundreds of quotes by Angela Davis, reading lists including books by Reni Eddo-Lodge and Audre Lorde, and images of artworks by David Hammons and Glenn Ligon, posted and shared on social media by museums and galleries, by white and non-black friends and colleagues. I am not saying that these voices should not be heard and shared. We must recognize, and continue to recognize, their urgency. Instead, I ask if this is enough. It is not.
The immeasurable grief and anger that black people the world over continue to demonstrate on the streets was catalyzed by police violence in the US, but it has shed light on the rampant institutional and societal racism that reaches nearly every corner of this earth. Outrage should not solely be directed towards America; outrage should be directed everywhere that upkeeps the same brutalities, and where Western colonialism has enforced its systems of control and bias. In London, where I am based, the art …
In plain sight
The Editors
The first principle of art criticism is to see what’s right in front of your eyes. This is harder than it sounds. What we know—or think we know—comes to dictate what we see. And you don’t have to look too hard, in the current climate, to find examples of those who will reject the clearest evidence of their senses if it contradicts their ideological construct of the world.
The wealthy white couple who pointed guns at protestors from the lawn of their Missouri mansion last week see themselves, it was reported by Artnet, as heirs to the Medici. The McCloskeys’ revealing characterization of a peaceful demonstration as “like the storming of the Bastille”—the fear that they “would be murdered within minutes” and, naturally, that their “pets would be killed”—made more sense after learning that the interior of their home resembles a Florentine palazzo in much the same way that Disneyland resembles Versailles. The obvious conclusion was that these people are so ensconced in their ragbag, neocolonial, quasi-European fantasy land as to have lost all touch with reality.
Yet the McCloskeys also dimly discerned a truth. Perhaps because they live among paintings by Paul Jamin, best known for his depiction …
Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
Wendy Vogel
Though she is best known today for her poetry, Bernadette Mayer’s 1972 exhibition of her durational writing-and-photography project Memory at 98 Greene Street in New York was highly influential: the young Kathy Acker, for one, began a feverish correspondence with her after her immersion in its images and voice. In a journal entry around the same time, Acker wrote that she admired “B. Mayer’s work list of daily events facts,” commenting that “I feel her work touches reality I distrust my own.” Acker, a post-punk appropriationist who devoured classical literature for the creation of her own twisted myths, may have longed for reality, but never for realism. Similarly, Mayer’s genre-busting work was a diary that never settled for the purely diaristic.
For the month of July 1971, the 26-year-old poet kept a stream-of-consciousness journal and shot a roll of 35mm Kodachrome slide film every day. When the month was up, she projected the slides and supplemented her original observations with new details taken from the images—casual scenes of everyday life, from her lover in the driver’s seat of a car to nature walks and late-night chats with fellow artists. Memory, the completed work, comprised a grid of 1,116 photographs …
London Roundup
Ben Eastham
Every time I approach White Cube’s gleaming south London base, I am reminded of a trope in science-fiction films: a professor of linguistics is whisked to a top-secret government facility, decontaminated, and introduced to an alien intelligence whose ominous burps she is tasked with translating. These daydreams are no doubt prompted in part by mental association with Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976), which drily observes that the “ideal” contemporary art space “must be sealed off from the outside world” in order to preserve the closed system of values that operates within it. But pulling on a mask, sterilizing one’s hands, and confirming one’s identity with a security guard lends these visions a new lucidity.
Beyond the hermetic seal, Cerith Wyn Evans’s experiments in sculpture and installation are right at home within the self-contained network of relations that O’Doherty describes, with a roomful of smashed glass screens referencing the high-modernist touchstones of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23) and its documentation by Man Ray. Two potted trees rotating slowly on turntables, their branches splayed over a cruciform bamboo trellis and illuminated by a spotlight that casts their silhouettes over the far wall, suggest an …
A question of degree
Chris Sharp
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Chris Sharp considers the difficulties he encountered in responding to Jean-Charles Hue’s films for his essay “Witness on the Threshold.”
It took me a year to write my essay on the work of Jean-Charles Hue. It was probably the hardest essay I’ve ever had to write. Almost a year after publishing it, I finally have some sense of why. It was due to a combination of factors, the first being that, at the time of the invitation, I was not familiar with the artist’s work. However, a cursory perusal of Hue’s films, which blend documentary and fictional styles and exist in the contexts of both contemporary art and cinema, informed me that it was interesting, strange, and challenging. Little did I know.
As a writer and curator, some of my best and most formative “discoveries” have been made through commissions. So I was happy to accept this one. That said—and this, I believe, more or less accounts for the rest of the difficulties I had with writing about Hue’s films—it was politically ambiguous …
“Garden of Six Seasons”
Merve Bedir
The Garden of Six Seasons, which lends its name to this “precursor” to the forthcoming Kathmandu Triennale, was designed by the architect Kishore Narshingh in 1920 for Kaiser Sumsher Rana’s palatial home in the capital of Nepal. The group show, held across two sites in Hong Kong, takes the entangled infrastructures and cultures that produced the garden—Edwardian neoclassical design transplanted to Nepal—for its organizing concept. In doing so, it establishes a space in which varied vantage points on the world can be expressed and different cosmological systems explored; by packing 150 works together in narrow spaces and under low ceilings, the curation forces the visitor to read diverse works together, and to make unexpected associations between them. Individually and collectively, they relate to local mechanisms of imperialism, feudalism, and modernism, but also indigeneity as a means of resistance, resilience, and remedy.
Para Site’s exhibition space in North Point speaks to how the eclectic design of the Garden of Six Seasons—in which Chinese elements coexist with Roman columns—undoes the positivist and empiricist connotations of neoclassical architecture. You enter via an outer corridor in which, according to the accompanying text, “artworks connect our bodies, their insides, the networked maps of our social worlds, …
The Times of Art
Kevin Brazil
When it comes to a work of art, what is the measure of time that matters? It’s easy to point to where a work of art takes place: to the gallery in which it is installed, the place on a map where an earthwork is sited; even the extent of air in which a voiceover sounds possesses a clear spatial dimension. But to ascribe a time to a work of art is a far more difficult process. Is its time that which has elapsed since its creation, or the time when it is viewed? Does a work last as long as its material, be that marble or data, or only as long as it is remembered? Perhaps all these times matter, and more—but if the times of art are multiple, then which do we privilege, and why?
For the past few years, the only time that has seemed to matter to many museums and galleries has been that of an artist’s rediscovery. A living artist is summoned up from unjust obscurity, their forgotten work presented with fanfare: now, at last, its time has come. And if the surest sign that something is happening is a shift in the market, then a …
“A boundary to throw one’s body against”
Ella Kruglyanskaya / Rachael Allen
Ella Kruglyanskaya’s “This is a Robbery” reopened at Thomas Dane this week, having migrated to the gallery’s website when Covid-19 hit London in March. The transition from a physical to an online exhibition space heightened the intimacy of works—paintings in egg tempera or oil on canvas alongside smaller compositions on paper—in which female characters relate with a closeness that has come, in a time of social distancing, to seem unfathomable. Women lounge around on top of each other, strut side-by-side, or stand in gossipy cohesion. These pictures celebrate women’s bodies while sternly resisting objectification: their forms are hard-curved and muscular, with gazes that are both vulnerable and tough. In the paintings’ complex compositions—in which the artist engages with the traditions of still life, trompe l’oeil, and memento mori—these bodies exist for themselves. In one painting, framed by blue, yellow, and red, women’s limbs merge to create a commingled female form—a multiple-legged structure that resembles an optical illusion. In other paintings, shapes morph into more abstract structures or blend with their surroundings. These manipulations of form dislocate our expectations of what we might expect of gendered bodies in painting.
During her lockdown, Kruglyanskaya also made work for “On The Verge” at …
Erica Baum’s “A Method of a Cloak”
Martin Herbert
Since the mid-1990s, Erica Baum has been coaxing a fragmented poetry from the unlikeliest places, quarantining found snippets of text that never aspired to great significance and dilating both their scale and their associative potential. Early on, the New York-based artist moved her camera close to half-erased classroom chalkboards (“Blackboards,” 1994–96), releasing details of equations, diagrams, and language from the burden of signifying and making them simultaneously abstract and allusive (e.g. the slyly reflexive smidgen of chalked text “TO DEPTH”). Since then, Baum has focused primarily on worldly printed matter; in “The Naked Eye” (2008—ongoing) she took stipple-edged trade paperbacks from the sixties and seventies and photographed them side on, scraps of illustration and text peeking chancily through tightly formalized verticals. For all her scrambling, though, the conceptual dynamic feels legible. A second-wave wrangler of Pictures Generation insights, Baum aims to illuminate a covert, sometimes incriminating largesse in the discarded and to purposefully collapse together not only high and low, as we once called them, but visual and verbal, banal diagram and highfalutin abstraction, the Apollonian and the edgeless.
So she has a furrow and she’s ploughing it diligently, or, to extend the spatial metaphor, Baum …
Angela Su’s “Cosmic Call”
Gaby Cepeda
We are all aware of the circumstances that have led to the glut of reviews of online shows, as opposed to the usual fare of objects under bricks-and-mortar, and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) has responded to them by creating Sala 10, a virtual exhibition space on its website. It’s worth noting the format: a series of two-week-long shows featuring video pieces, displayed on a floating screen that opens unprompted over a page divided into a grid with blocks of curatorial text, an extended interview with the artist, and links to further information and credits. The website has a vertical axis with images and text alternating on each side as one scrolls, and its similarity to the layout of Rhizome’s influential “Net Art Anthology” (2016–19) suggests the emergence of a generic online exhibition design. The combination of background information and work is fitting for an institution known for its dedication to academic research: the artwork as a piece in a contextual puzzle.
That being said, Angela Su’s Cosmic Call (2019) is phenomenal on its own terms. It was originally commissioned for “Contagious Cities,” an international cultural initiative funded by the Wellcome Trust to explore the connections between cohabitation, …
“Unoccupied Territories: The Outlying Islands of America’s Realm”
Patrick J. Reed
At 15°53’N 78°38’W in the Caribbean Sea lies the remote Bajo Nuevo Bank. Population: zero. Formerly claimed by Jamaica and Honduras, this reef and islet cluster is administered by Colombia, though Nicaragua and the US both insist that it belongs to them. Devoid of citizenry, the island is defined by its strategic and economic value to competing nation states.
Bajo Nuevo and ten other islets or atolls comprise a category of US territories known as the Minor Outlying Islands. As the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) describes them in “Unoccupied Territories: The Outlying Islands of America’s Realm,” an online exhibition comprising images from Google Earth alongside texts describing the islands, they are the “tattered fragments of [US] dominion.” To the CLUI, a non-profit producing interdisciplinary work at the intersection of art and geography, these unorganized, mostly unincorporated, mostly uninhabited, and sometimes disputed geopolitical fragments demand investigation.
The islands’ histories of abuse by imperial ambition and damage by global war are distinct, but they share absorption into US jurisdiction under the Guano Islands Act of 1856, a federal law that permitted Americans to claim the scantest ocean topography on the premise that it was stateless and held …
Artists’ film and video online
Erika Balsom
In these days of confinement, I’ve turned to classical Hollywood for comfort. Revisiting Ernst Lubitsch’s sublime Design for Living (1933), I came across a line worth noting down: “Delicacy, as the philosophers point out, is the banana peel under the feet of truth.” If that is so, eager to avoid slipping, I’ll come out and say it from the start: the huge number of moving image artworks that have been made available to stream online in the past few months stresses me out.
With cinemas and art spaces around the world suddenly subject to indefinite closure, film festivals have rushed to organize virtual editions, while institutions and commercial galleries have anxiously maintained their visibility by initiating online programs, often presenting changing selections on a time-limited basis. Just as the news appeared that Julia Stoschek, one of the premier private collectors of the moving image, will likely shutter her Berlin space in 2022, she made more than 68 works—some 15 hours of material—available on her website.
The online display of moving image artworks is nothing new. The curated platform Vdrome.org, which shows a single work for a two-week duration, began in 2013; unauthorized forms of dissemination have an even …
Blues lines
The Editors
Samuel Beckett’s exhortation to “try again,” “fail again,” and “fail better” might be familiar to readers of cultural criticism—to the extent that the quote is barred from this publication—but you don’t often hear it on CNN. Yet there it was at the weekend, as Cornel West eloquently anatomized the historic cycle of violence against “powerless, helpless, hopeless” communities in the United States and the recurring need to protest it.
It is because Beckett’s phrase is so often abused to imply a single, forward pulse of progress (“don’t worry, everything inclines to the good”) that art-agenda’s style guide—honored here in the breach—recommends that it be treated with caution. The words serve no such purpose in their original context, in which to “fail better” might equally be understood as to move towards total failure (the novella’s title is, after all, Worstward Ho). West knows better, of course, and speaking on CNN he characterized the phrase as “the blues line of our Irish brothers.” Which is to say an expression of pain that, like a broken window, has been transformed into art.
Neither broken windows nor the blues are premeditated steps on the road to social progress. But they are transformative encounters: in Gwendolyn …
Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures
Alan Gilbert
What would a photographed utopia look like? While the origins of photography coincided with the birth of various nineteenth-century utopian schemes, human society has never seemed further from realizing them, in part due to developments in technology—including the production and distribution of images—that seek to solidify social surveillance and control.
Recent glimpses of utopia in still and moving images range from Joel Sternfeld’s collection of photographs Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006) to Wu Tsang’s 75-minute film Wildness (2012) documenting an LGBTQ+ bar in Los Angeles. Yet in these examples, and so many more, the viewer feels that a repressive society hovers outside the frame and that these idealized situations are ephemeral. Many of the planned communities in Sweet Earth struggle to survive or have been abandoned; Wildness features a weekly party that Tsang co-hosted for two years before various challenges addressed in the film forced its closing. Similarly, the world captured by Justine Kurland’s “Girl Pictures” series (1997–2002), gathered together in a new publication from Aperture Books, feels transitory in the freedoms that its usually small groups of young women experience across the United States.
Although a few of the earliest images were taken in New York …
“Metro Pictures Online Film Festival”
Anthony Hawley
It might be a stretch to call an online screening program of gallery artists a “film festival,” just as it might be a leap to describe an online viewing room as an “exhibition.” But “Metro Pictures Online Film Festival” offer its viewers something that resonates in our infinitely streamable world: a series of reckonings with time out of joint and objects out of place. Time capsules, time travel, and temporal transformations abound in works exploring the brevity of life and our troubled relationship to the past.
“I suggest we change the function of this building!” declares a character in David Maljković’s Scene for a New Heritage (2004), the title work in a trilogy featured in the festival. The building in question is the Monument to the Uprising of the People of Kordun and Banija in the Petrova Gora mountain range in Croatia, to which the film’s three protagonists have pilgrimaged as part of their “quest for heritage” in the year 2045. The characters’ reality, symbolized by the tin-foil-covered cars they drive, doesn’t match up with the grandiose future promised by Vojin Bakić’s glittering postmodernist monument, one in a series of towering Croatian spomeniks commemorating revolutions and uprisings against fascism during …
“Artists in Quarantine,” public intellectuals, and the trouble with empty heroics
Jörg Heiser
What does it mean to be critical, subversive, nonconformist, and free during a global pandemic? Subversion and resistance are so entwined in the history of art and critical theory—partly justifiably, partly as empty heroics—that even calls for communal solidarity in a public health emergency risk seeming, from that perspective, conformist and submissive. Against the background of that dilemma, influential artists and public intellectuals have struggled to take a coherent position on the crisis. Among them are an internationally famous Italian philosopher, a German theatre director, and a German novelist. But we’ll come to them. The difficulties experienced by artists were demonstrated by the pan-European museum confederation L’Internationale’s “Artists in Quarantine” project.
A shared Instagram account was the stage for 16 artists commissioned to channel, as a press release stated, “perspectives on public/private space, solidarity and critique that are intrinsically connected with the present time.” Running from April 21 to May 7, the project took for a springboard the historic example of Sanja Iveković’s performance work Trokut [Triangle]: when President Tito’s motorcade passed her apartment on a visit to Zagreb on 10 May 1979, the artist sat on her balcony, sipped whiskey, read a book, and gestured as if she were …
Virtually Ever After: art in the post-digital era
Xin Wang / Jakob Kudsk Steensen
I spoke with the artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen from our respective quarantines—me in New York City and Steensen in the south of France, where he was working on a virtual landscape during a residency with the Luma Foundation in Arles. This new project—based on the artist’s detailed studies of the salt marshlands of the Camargue region, using digital technology to create virtual 3D scans of its minerals and simulate their biological properties—builds upon his abiding interest in creating ecologically oriented Virtual Reality (VR) artworks that are tactile, emotive, and fantastical. We spoke at a moment when the virtual—the artist’s primary medium for the last few years—suffused our daily existence in striking ways, from art fairs’ digital viewing rooms to Zoom classes, meetings, and webinars.
The importance of computer games—a source of constant pleasure and intellectual stimulation for both Steensen and myself—was underscored, in March, by the arrival of two new titles: Nintendo’s “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” the latest iteration in a massively popular and customizable social simulation game set in a village populated by anthropomorphic animals, and “Half Life: Alyx,” a first-person VR shooter that navigates mesmerizing post-apocalyptic terrains, including a quarantined city. Each offers a different mode of …
Sharif Waked’s “Balagan”
Orit Gat
The axiom that history is always written by the victors can be rejected by observing how different versions of it meet, merge, and are retold in shifting accounts that tell us as much about the present as the past. Sharif Waked’s work mediates between such versions. It does not explain or explore the histories of his homeland—Waked, born in 1964 in Nazareth to a Palestinian family who fled their hometown in 1948, is Palestinian by nationality and Israeli by citizenship—but confronts their clashing ideas of place, reminding viewers that pressing these versions of history can be an act of resistance. When the official version fails you, tell of that failure, again and again.
Waked works in several media, but his very short videos—often just a few seconds, always less than five minutes—set the tone and pace of the exhibition. By the entrance is a one-second video, Just a Moment No. 4 (Away From You) (2011), a black-and-white moving image of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum stomping her foot while she sings. Under her elaborate dress, her high-heel goes up, then down, in an endless loop: a symbol of Middle Eastern culture in a motion associated with anxious waiting. Just a Moment work, …
Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time” (2009)
Kevin Brazil
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in contemporary art criticism by drawing readers’ attention to an influential text from the past and reflecting on its implications in the present. In this edition, Kevin Brazil introduces an essay by Boris Groys first published in e-flux journal.
I was no comrade in time of Boris Groys’s “Comrades of Time.” I read it in 2014, five years after it was published. And I came to it, as I came to the art world from which it speaks, indirectly. I had just finished a PhD, which became a book, on the ways some twentieth-century novelists thought about art. Art was always something I approached at one remove, or at least that was how I justified never being up to date with the latest theory. One of the many tools Groys’s essay gave to me was a way out of that very feeling: that “art” is something which develops or progresses towards a future, and that if I miss a show, fail to read a catalogue, or don’t know an artist, I’ve fallen behind. Here is one gift this essay offers: you can never be late for art.
Groys argues that when we see art as …
Skins Within: On contamination and digital corporeality
Travis Diehl
Anxiety over contamination, contagion, and infiltration manifests in contemporary art as a genre of digital animations depicting uncannily corporeal human figures. A trio of videos by Kate Cooper—recently displayed in the New Museum, New York, as part of its “Screens Series” program—subjects a female-presenting character to a series of skin-deep threats. In We Need Sanctuary (2016), the character’s creamy hand meets the flayed fingers of a burn victim between manic shots of kitchen brooms and blue sponges. (These hands reappear in Symptom Machine, made a year later.) The video loops, but nothing gets cleaner; no one is healed. Blood pours from the avatar’s eyes, then disappears. Her endless antiseptic regime is as empty as her digital body.
Another piece by Cooper, Infection Drivers (2019), elegantly illustrates a skin overcome by skin. Here, the female nude is trapped in a latex shell that inflates to the muscular forms of bodybuilders. It’s a technical tour de force to render such subtle, rubbery translucency, this wobbling double envelope: a queasy but seductive image of struggle. The characters carry on, resilient in a way human bodies cannot be, sustained by the electricity plugged into the mainframes and monitors that animate them. And yet—like …
Claudia Andujar’s “The Yanomami Struggle”
Rachael Rakes
“Can’t I accept the reality,” photographer Claudia Andujar wrote in her notebook during a 1976 trip to the Yanomami territories of the Brazilian Amazon, “of the poorly resolved contact of the Indians with the ‘Whites’…? Do I want to delude myself? Do I now want to prove that here I found simplicity of living?” By this point Andujar, who has been depicting and advocating for the Yanomami for the past 50 years, had already begun to witness significant changes overtaking these communities, due in large part to the influx of state infrastructure, agricultural projects, and missionaries. Her body of work over these decades is imbued with a belief that an empathic and creative depiction of the indigenous group could help protect them from the same societies that consume these images. Her recurring approach is “salvage,” in the anthropological preservationist sense, and has moved towards that goal through artistic representation, ethnography, and direct activism.
Fondation Cartier’s retrospective “The Yanomami Struggle,” which was first initiated by Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo, traces Andujar’s relationship to the Yanomami, and presents a biographical, anthropological, and psychological portrait of Andujar herself. Born in 1931 in Switzerland to a Swiss mother and Hungarian Jewish father, and …
Public Art
Tom Morton
In June 2016, a few days after Britain’s EU referendum, I met up with a group of old school friends in Grantchester Meadows, a beauty spot outside Cambridge, England, the city where I lived from my early childhood until I left for university in 1996. Picnicking in this shimmering green dreamland where, “flower-lulled in sleepy grass,” Rupert Brooke experienced “the centuries blend and blur”, we watched our kids laugh and tumble near the riverbank, while we grouched about Brexit, reminisced over the long, mildly riotous nights we’d spent drinking here as teenagers, and stole glances at the grey flecks in each other’s hair, the lines that spoked from each other’s eyes. What we didn’t know then, and still can’t truly comprehend now, was that in three summers’ time one of us—my closest boyhood friend A_, who I’d known since I was six years old—would take his own life.
How do we bring back a lost loved one, our own lost past? The short answer is that we cannot. At A_’s funeral service at a woodland burial site a few miles outside Cambridge, our mutual friend David—one corner of a fraternal triangle forged in adolescence, now forever reduced to a single …
How Does Your Garden Grow? On feral signs and displaced landscapes
Natasha Marie Llorens / Antonio Bermúdez Obregón
Antonio Bermúdez Obregón is an artist and architect whose work is about the ways in which representations of nature are shaped by a desire to manage it and contain its threat. We met over the course of our respective residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, and I invited him to contribute to the exhibition I curated for the Jan van Eyck’s Open Studios, entitled “The Wall at the End of the Rainbow.” It opened on March 5, just as the borders started closing.
His contribution, Obedience, was a to-scale reproduction of Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries’s sixteenth-century painting Orpheus Playing for the Animals, which went missing in 1944. In English, the painting is known by an alternate title: Orpheus playing the lyre: trees and rocks move, beasts and birds are enchanted, which also accurately describes what is taking place in the image. This enchantment is framed by an architectural folly, under an ornate domed roof upheld by marble pillars that visually overwhelms the birds and the trees of the garden. Bermúdez Obregón’s Obedience reproduces the painting in red monochrome on 25 blocks of riso-printed paper. Visitors were invited to tear sheets of paper off the wall …
Which way to turn?
The Editors
The ongoing crisis has prompted the circulation of factoids which are intended to galvanize but can have the opposite effect. No writer will ever again need to be reminded, for instance, that William Shakespeare composed King Lear (1606) while sitting out an outbreak of the plague, nor will they want to be. That the Greek root of the word “crisis” describes a turning point (in a disease, in a society) is another of these truisms, used to support the hope that we will emerge blinking from our current confinement into a brighter world. The problem, as we’re beginning to see, is that this change could take us one of many ways, not all of which are to be desired.
How to find our way? The socialist politician Tony Benn divided leaders into “weathercocks” and “signposts”—those who catch the prevailing wind and those who do not waver. The record confirms that the latter fix the course when history arrives at a crossroads. In his worryingly prophetic The Original Accident (2005), Paul Virilio notes that the Chicago school of economists did not engineer the Chilean coup of 1973, but were ready and prepared to set the country’s ideological bearing when it …
Hal Foster’s What Comes After Farce?
Kevin Brazil
For the title of this collection of criticism spanning the past fifteen years, Hal Foster evokes Marx’s famous evocation of Hegel: the observation that “all great world-historic facts and personages” appear first as tragedy, then as farce. For Foster the revelation, after 9/11, that many Americans will accept the “trashing of constitutional laws, the scapegoating of immigrants, and the mobilizing of white supremacists as a small price to pay for even more capital concentration” was a tragedy which recurred as farce with the election of Trump. (Here, as in his other work, Foster never strays from a view centered on the United States.) His question is: “If farce comes after tragedy, what comes after farce, and how do we respond to whatever that is?” Yet something else was happening amid these repetitions: warnings of a pandemic that few heeded and which is now unleashing a crisis whose consequence will define the future to which we must respond. This is not to say this book is already outdated, but it does make it reveal, perhaps against its wishes, the potentials and pitfalls of an approach to criticism that uses art to find “what will happen” next, or to limn the movements …
22nd Biennale of Sydney, “Nirin”
Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange
Nirin—a word found in the language of the Wiradjuri people, an Aboriginal nation in New South Wales—can be translated as “edge.” The 22nd Biennale of Sydney’s artistic director, Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew, explains how this concept animates the exhibition: “Nirin is a world of endless interconnected centers; a space to gather and to share, rejoice, disrupt, and re-imagine.” Led for the first time by First Nations artists, this biennale was to be an articulation of Indigenous internationalism, a refusal of the logics of white supremacy, and an assertion of the creativity, generativity, and resistance of First Nations people.
The physical exhibition was to encompass the ancestral lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Boorooberongal people of the Dharug Nation, the Dharawal people, the Bidjigal people, and the Gamaygal people. Its sites—including Cockatoo Island, a convict prison that became a shipyard in the middle of Sydney Harbor, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which contains a large collection of colonial artworks—were to be central to a curatorial aim to explore the entanglement of dispossession and resistance that emerges from a colonial world-making project, while the artists involved—Arthur Jafa, Tony Albert, Unbound Collective, Latai Taumoepeau, Sammy Baloji, …
Raqs Media Collective, “Is the World Sleeping, Sleepless, or Awake or Dreaming?” (2014)
Ania Szremski
The Rearview series addresses blind spots in contemporary art criticism by drawing readers’ attention to an influential text from the past and reflecting on its implications in the present. In this edition, Ania Szremski introduces an essay by Raqs Media Collective first published in e-flux journal.
In their 2014 essay “Is the World Sleeping, Sleepless, or Awake or Dreaming?,” Raqs Media Collective warn against a “debilitating activist insomnia” depriving artists and intellectuals of the ability to dream. These exhausted figures voluntarily give themselves over (via social media, the news cycle, and the busywork of organizing) to sleep deprivation—“the worst, most damaging technique used by torturers.” I read Raqs’ overture to slumber shortly after it was published, while working at an art space in downtown Cairo. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had just been elected president and was consolidating his oppressive regime; in an adrenalized, dreamless frenzy, I was trying to conduct what I thought of as a dissentious “business as usual,” keeping the gallery open and running a sedulous program in spite of the atmosphere of impossibility. So how seductive it was to read of Raqs’ proposing sleep, not action, as the “gentlest possible refusal of capital’s rapacious claim on time and …
Andrea Éva Győri’s “Bold Head With Tongue”
Vivian Sky Rehberg
Two weeks into my home confinement, the New York City health department advised that, during the Covid-19 outbreak, “you are your safest sex partner.” A few days later, the New York Times ran a feature on nonagenarian sex educator and artist Betty Dodson, author of Sex for One: The Joy of Loving (1987). It therefore felt fitting that my first expedition, when I hauled myself away from the news, should be a visit to Wilfried Lentz’s new Rotterdam gallery to see “Bold Head with Tongue,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Andrea Éva Győri, who has spent a number of years studying and depicting female masturbation, fantasies, and orgasm.
“Bold Head with Tongue” draws on themes of female desire which have long preoccupied Győri. For Manifesta 11, hosted by Zürich in 2016 and entitled “What People do for Money,” Győri, like all the participants, paired up with a local professional from outside the contemporary art world. She worked for five months with a clinical psychologist/sexologist, participated in a practical masturbation course, and later held private sessions in which she drew women masturbating. In addition to exhibiting her drawings, Győri published her research in a weighty artist’s book titled Vibration …
Where does it end?
Martin Herbert
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Martin Herbert considers the processes that shaped his monographic essay on Hubert Duprat’s work, “Bothness.”
My trip to the South of France, in April last year, to meet Hubert Duprat at his home (which contains his studio) called for a layover in Paris, not least to see the artist’s show at Galerie Art Concept. That evening, wandering around at a loose end after ducking out of a panel discussion at Kader Attia’s multifunction venue La Colonie, I started seeing social media posts to the effect that Notre Dame was on fire. I’ll spare you another first-hand reminiscence of that grim event, which, as I’m writing from quarantine, seems a long time ago. The next day, over lunch and a wide-ranging conversation chez Duprat as the afternoon unwound, we didn’t discuss the fire; it seemed unmentionable. The cathedral was an extraordinary human achievement undone by—seemingly—faulty wiring. Talking with Duprat about his work, with its vast timescales and reflection of creative ingenuity, I guess we might have made something of that.
Instead, as we …
Lockdown: on carpets, cats, and cages, and three films by Gernot Wieland
Barbara Casavecchia
I am not working, so I’m working out. Crunch and plank, back and forth. I do it next to my desk, on the ragged carpet brought back from Morocco decades ago, immersed in the most familiar of interior landscapes.
When I was in elementary school, an unspeakable fear of going blind (ommetaphobia; suggested treatment: hypnotherapy) made me secretly walk around my room at night, eyes wide shut, just to rote-learn every inch of its perimeter. Now, there’s an irony in using this domiciliary setting for exercise. On the wall above my desk there are black cats stretching, bending, and arching their backs, stencil-sprayed there by an artist friend, Riccardo Previdi, and inspired by Gatto Meo Romeo, a foam rubber toy designed by Bruno Munari in 1949 as a playful contortionist for young hands. They are a daily remainder of my sentimental education, based among other things on graffiti, punk comics, squatting, absurdist jokes, yoga, and modernist Milanese design.
In Berlin, I think it was the mid-2000s, Riccardo introduced me to his friend and fellow artist Gernot Wieland. We’ve been in touch ever since and I intended to visit his exhibition at Salzburger Kunstverein, which opened in February. But now …
“Dwell with Things as Equals”
Irena Haiduk / Hendrik Folkerts
At the heart of Irena Haiduk’s recent exhibition “REMASTER” was a question: How can we remake the world using its existing infrastructures?
Across the two floors of Swiss Institute in New York, the writer and artist staged scenes taken from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. As in her previous exhibitions, these installations formed a set for Haiduk’s ongoing cinematic adaptation of the book, which satirised the Soviet regime by introducing the devil to 1930s Moscow. Apartment 50 was installed on the second floor and recreated Professor Woland’s living quarters, while The Variety Theater on the institution’s ground floor doubled as the setting for a program of performances and events.
The infrastructure underpinning Haiduk’s world is Yugoexport, her art company—or, more precisely, a “non-aligned oral-corporation”—modelled on a disincorporated Yugoslav clothes manufacturer and weapons exporter called Jugoeksport. Haiduk’s Yugoexport produces objects in the spirit of Yugoslavian material culture—rubbings, books, bags, shoes, dresses—in order to draw attention to current issues of labor, production, and exchange. To mark the exhibition, Haiduk worked with Johanna Rietveld to create a display at Printed Matter / St. Marks bookshop (on the first floor of the Swiss Institute) featuring publications including Bon Ton Mais …
Sung Tieu’s “Zugzwang”
Chloe Stead
“Zugzwang” describes the situation in turn-based games, such as chess, when the compulsion to move puts a player at a disadvantage. In Sung Tieu’s solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst, this becomes a metaphor to describe the asylum process, which compels applicants to provide authorities with information that may later be used against them. Tieu is no stranger to this system. Born in Hai Duong, Vietnam, in 1987, she immigrated to Germany with her mother in the early 1990s, and is now based in London and Berlin.
This experience is indirectly referenced in a set of 31 replicas of official forms (Alekhine’s Defence, all works 2020) that stretch across two of the exhibition’s four walls. Relating to asylum, naturalization, and residency, each of these uniformly framed documents has been edited by the artist to remove any mention of the country where they were issued. Posing basic biographical questions alongside more subjective requests—“[Provide] factual information about the applicant’s intelligence”—these forms aim to assess the “use value” of each claimant, which is in turn balanced against the possible risks, such as ill health or possible criminal activity, which they pose. On each sheet, Tieu has drawn a move from a historic chess match …
Queer: Some notes on art and identity
Rosanna Mclaughlin
“The photo booth provided a safe-space for queer culture,” reads a text on the wall in the first room of Tate Modern’s 2020 Andy Warhol retrospective. How times have changed. Ten years ago, the museum’s exhibition “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” cast Warhol as business-bro godfather to Damian Hirst and Jeff Koons. That narrative has, thankfully, since gone out of fashion, and in its place a new Warhol has emerged: a shy, sensitive outsider fighting the good fight of representational politics on behalf of queer and minority communities in New York City.
Whether or not we prefer the idea of a woke Warhol, it’s almost impossible to square the language of the safe space with his back catalogue. “Warhol often used difficult imagery as source material, exposing the voyeurism inherent in media coverage of traumatic events,” Tate explains, attempting to exculpate their hero. Warhol may have been many things: talent scout, postmodern painter, an artist with a profound understanding of the currency of food, sex, and death. But what security did he extend to Olga Cassanova, the fourteen-year-old photographed falling to her death from an apartment block, whose final moments he reproduced in the screen print A Woman’s …
Jutta Koether’s “4 the Team” / Jana Euler’s “Unform”
Wendy Vogel
Days before New York’s galleries shuttered in mid-March, I saw exhibitions of figurative paintings by Jutta Koether and Jana Euler that read to me like biological weapons threatening the patriarchal history of art. Worried that I may have become an invisible conduit for viral contagion, my heightened bodily self-consciousness found echoes, first, in Koether’s exhibition “4 the Team,” the German-born painter and musician’s first solo show at Lévy Gorvy. For this mini-survey of the artist’s works on canvas from the 1980s to the present, Koether variously adopts vulnerability and heroism as painterly moods. Her practice—born out of the discourses of appropriation, feminism, and institutional critique—often hinges on the theatrics of installation: stage lighting, transparent glass walls, and performance. Here, she chose to leave the gallery’s elegant three-story space free of spatial interventions, allowing for an associative reading of the paintings.
The ground floor debuted a suite of triumphant new works—three large figurative canvases, and two smaller abstract pieces titled Vorhang [Curtains] in her signature palette of reds and pinks. At first glance the portraits Neue Frau [New Woman], Neuer Mann [New Man], and Encore, all from 2019 with a color scheme of contrasting pastels, appear optimistic about the state …
The Online Exhibition
Orit Gat
With every email I receive about new digital programs from museums, galleries, and other art institutions around the world, I feel more conflicted. My sympathy for these institutions, which had little warning before they had to shutter their doors and are now trying to recreate their program online, often for the first time, is coupled with frustration that giving a title to a group of JPEGs does not an exhibition make. Yet this is a moment to explore what exhibitions are, how they serve a general public, and whether there are models for their translation from physical to digital spaces.
The Biennale of Sydney, which opened on March 14, closed ten days later. Its organizers are currently working with Google to create a digital version of the exhibition that will include live content, virtual walkthroughs, podcasts, interactive Q&As, curated tours, and artist takeovers. Google Arts & Culture already offers virtual tours of museums and exhibitions around the world using Street View’s tools. On the company’s website is a list highlighting “6 Now-Closed Exhibitions That You Can Still Explore In Street View.” These include the 2015 Venice Biennale, Kara Walker’s massive sugar sculpture A Subtlety, presented by Creative Time at the …
In times like these…
The Editors
So, what are we to call “these times”? In recent weeks the editors of art-agenda have received scores of emails declaring them to be “difficult,” “testing,” “precarious,” “strange,” “unprecedented,” “dark,” “challenging,” even “unimaginable.” “There is no denying that times are tough,” reads the opportunistic message from a website builder (discount code: STAYSAFE) that just landed in our inbox; a publisher insists that their latest title will offer “comfort in these trying times.” Boilerplate introductions—“I hope this finds you well”—are now supplemented by some variation on the formulation “in these times”, and a reinforcing clause which might be paraphrased as: “but really, this time I mean it…”
To flag these expressions of concern as clichés is not to dispute their sincerity. All of us will take refuge in stock constructions when overwhelmed by an event as massive as that now threatening to engulf us, and few of us have time when writing an email to turn the perfect phrase. But art can work against this tendency to shorthand. It asks us to attend to particulars—images, objects, ideas—and to interrogate how our emotional and intellectual responses illuminate the structures of meaning that support them. Culture exists in relation to the times—the critic …
Peter Saul’s “Crime and Punishment”
Jonathan Griffin
How much is too much, when it comes to the art of Peter Saul? How about: The big high box of the New Museum’s fourth-floor gallery stacked two-deep with more than two dozen large paintings in fluorescent hues? How about: Every gallery on the floor below packed with at least as many again, dating from 1960 to the present? How about: Three paintings that feature Donald Trump? Seven of electric chairs? Countless more figures with bullet-holes spewing glossy gouts of blood? A dog barfing onto the head of Rush Limbaugh, accompanied by a speech bubble that reads “BARF”? How about: One retrospective, only the second of the artist’s career, and his first in New York?
I thought I was a fan of Peter Saul, but “Crime and Punishment,” the five-decade retrospective curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, left me numb. Really, there is no other way to feel after seeing this much of Saul’s work, which trades in violent mayhem, visual noise, muscular kinesis, compositional derangement and—increasingly since the mid-1960s—hard-edged shapes rendered in bold and clashing colors.
There is no question that Saul is a virtuoso technician, as he himself seems eager to demonstrate. His meticulous use of pointillism renders …
Lydia Ourahmane’s “صرخة شمسية Solar Cry”
Fanny Singer
The second time I visited Lydia Ourahmane’s exhibition I was alone save for the young student-docent sitting at the front desk wearing earphones. Standing in the cavernous, quasi-industrial space—most of the internal walls had been removed—it felt appropriate that the last show I expected to see in a long time should be a near-empty room flooded with blue-tinged light (the front windows and skylights are laminated in sheer cobalt film) in which two tape decks mounted on opposite walls play recordings of an opera singer holding one note, and then another. The exhibition took on an elegiac air; the sung notes—a spare, tonal fabric—assumed the weight of lamentation.
This cyanic atmosphere reminded me of visiting Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s retrospective at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, a few days after the citywide attacks of November 2015, through which played a soundtrack of rain. I read the recorded deluge as an aural landscape of mourning, a kind of liquid dirge. That the current climate of fear has been triggered by something invisible to the naked eye—a viral “parasite” so minute that 50,000,000 could fit on the head of a pin—feels germane in the context of an exhibition made by an artist who prizes the ineffable, …
Gabriel Kuri’s “spending static to save gas”
Ben Eastham
Gabriel Kuri’s focus on the everyday exchanges that structure our social lives has, in the context of mass confinement, taken on a melancholy aspect. Insulated from the outside world by a PVC strip curtain, a spiral staircase leads visitors down to the Douglas Hyde’s cavernous lower gallery, its volume halved by a makeshift plastic ceiling suspended by thin wires from the rafters. The surface of this translucent canopy is speckled with dead gypsy moths, verdigrised coins, and crumpled cigarette butts arranged into neat grids. Seen from below, they resemble a constellation of exhausted stars or the beads on an abacus designed to calculate some inscrutable and unpayable debt.
The exhibition literature casually describes this dropped ceiling as establishing a “static field,” which at least sheds some light on its gnomic title: by reducing the space to be heated in the gallery, the installation conserves energy. Further consultation with an encyclopedia—and its tentatively grasped definition of a “static field” as something like the programming equivalent of a grammatical modifier—suggests that we might interpret the installation’s various elements as constituting a network of relations. The meaning of these materials is determined by the systems in which they participate, much as …
Leila Hekmat’s “CROCOPAZZO!”
Alan Murrin
Individualistic societies are driven by the belief that happiness is to be found by accessing our “best” and most “authentic” selves, and that this can be achieved by spending money. Therapeutic practices ranging from the seemingly benign to the dangerously experimental enforce the psychological norms that uphold that system. But what happens if we relinquish control of our drives and desires, rather than trying to make them cohere? And what happens if that process is presented as entertainment? Leila Hekmat’s carnivalesque exhibition—prematurely closed as people are forced into their houses by Covid-19—conducts a dangerous experiment of its own: can a family induce psychosis in one member by forcing that individual to bear the weight of their collective dysfunction?
Hekmat writes, directs, and creates costumes for highly aestheticized experimental theatre pieces performed in intimate spaces. Her previous exhibition, “I Was Not Invited” (2018, co-presented by Bortolozzi and Duddell’s Hong Kong), took inspiration from Franz Schubert’s Winterreisse (1828), the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977), and—like this show—found humor in suffering. “CROCOPAZZO!” is split across three rooms, the first filled with eight mannequins posed as if interrupted mid-dialogue. One figure raises its palms in an attitude of …
1st Stellenbosch Triennale, “Tomorrow there will be more of us”
Sean O’Toole
Ever since the 1960s, groups of idealistic South Africans have periodically banded together to stage ambitious group exhibitions informed by the prevailing zeitgeist and framed by a promise of regular return. Yet if there is a common thread to defunct biennial and triennial expositions like Art South Africa Today (1963–75), Cape Town Triennial (1982–91), Johannesburg Biennale (1995–97), and Cape Biennale (2007–09), it is their brief nature and anemic legacy: their methods and achievements have largely been forgotten. One consequence of this weak transmission of history is that exhibitions like the newly launched Stellenbosch Triennale, a patchy but ultimately engaging project staged at various venues an hour’s drive northeast from Cape Town, end up seeming unique and even daring, particularly in an ecology dominated, over the last decade, by art fairs.
Commercialism has come to define the current zeitgeist, but that is not what makes this large-scale exhibition so of the moment. At a press conference launching the main curated exhibition, a confident showcase of twenty African artists overseen by curators Khanyisile Mbongwa and Bernard Akoi-Jackson, various speakers highlighted what curatorial advisor Jay Pather summarized as Stellenbosch’s “deeply problematic context.” A former intellectual redoubt for apartheid ideologues and bolt-hole for plutocrats …
70th Berlin International Film Festival, “Forum Expanded”
Leo Goldsmith
Finding space for exhibitions within the sprawling architecture of a major film festival is a tricky affair. Berlinale’s packed schedule and multiple sidebars do not easily accommodate excursions to far-flung locations to see an assemblage of works of different lengths and modes of reception. Trickier still is the act of importing into a film festival context those discourses that are currently trending in the art world—at least in any way that doesn’t seem like a cynical bid for political relevancy. This year’s edition visibly wrestled with these problems, hosting three exhibitions that struggled to find coherence within the format of the larger festival—or to break free of it.
For the last 15 editions, Berlinale has housed exhibition work under the aegis of Forum Expanded—itself a subsection of the International Forum for New Cinema, which has been organized by Arsenal–Institute for Film and Video Art since 1971. Taking as its remit “experimental film and video art for both cinema and exhibition contexts,” Forum Expanded presents a dozen or so theatrically presented film programs, panels, and exhibition works, which offers a certain contrast with the gala premieres and red-carpet photo-ops elsewhere in the festival.
This year’s edition of Forum Expanded featured three …
“Before and After Tiananmen”
Xin Wang
Imagine a curated overview of contemporary art from the United States titled “Before and After the Vietnam War.” Imagine the case not as a new direction for explorative scholarship but as the perpetuating, defining framework, over and over again. “Before and After Tiananmen,” Gallery 207 in the 2019 rehang of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presents established Chinese artists such as Xu Bing, Zhang Peili, Huang Yong Ping, and Song Dong in a sparse installation. Yet it registers not as a progressive move towards more inclusive and nuanced narratives of modern and postmodern art worldwide, but rather as a form of institutional gaslighting that raises deeper and stickier issues than the more manifest ills of exclusion or erasure. Reflecting a growing institutional recognition of heterogeneous global modernisms, it illustrates where that promise of progressive inclusivity falls short—and flat—if the historical framing remains uncontested, and situated knowledges are routinely overlooked. Presenting these alternative trajectories using the criteria and assumptions of the old canon—essentially treating them as outposts of western art history—will always miss the mark, limiting the discourse while purporting to expand it.
It is telling that in most reviews of the new MoMA, …
Stan Douglas’s “Doppelgänger”
Kevin Brazil
A thread linking Stan Douglas’s work across various media—installation, film, television—is the creation of what he has called “speculative histories.” Take “Scenes from the Blackout” (2017), a series of large photographs on display downstairs at Victoria Miro’s north London outpost. One photograph (Skyline) shows a blacked-out Manhattan skyline; another (Jewels) a hand stealing diamonds. Elaborately staged, lit with spotlights, and shot from high angles as if by a movie camera, this alternative history of a New York power cut is produced by manipulating the formal artifice of photography as a medium.
This same impulse has produced the main work in the show, the film installation Doppelgänger, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and which is projected onto two square screens hanging side by side from the upstairs gallery’s ceiling (in another of its many doublings, it was also exhibited concurrently at David Zwirner, New York until February 22). Doppelgänger is set in an alternative recent past with futuristic yet analogue technology, where typewritten messages are transmitted in metal boxes. One screen tells the story of an astronaut called Alice (call her Alice-1) who is simultaneously cloned and teleported to a spaceship in another galaxy. Her race is …
Ben Russell’s “La montagne invisible”
In its afterlife, an exhibition assumes different shapes. Once a show has come to an end—its artworks assessed, wrapped, and shipped, walls repainted, and artists, curators, and assistants moved on to a new project—what remains is a complex patchwork of individual and collective memories, embodied by a single object, a display, or an atmosphere. In its afterlife, an exhibition acquires a mythical dimension, and is capable of generating an imaginary that others can adapt, transform, and expand.
Ben Russell’s “La Montagne Invisible,” on view at Paris’s Le Plateau, will leave its viewers with the long-lasting impression of an atemporal, non-Euclidean journey shaped by subtle but fantastic events. With no obvious beginning or end, this exhibition-made trip unfolds in a cavernous environment and is punctuated by arcane light symbols that shine in the dark. The show, one instalment in a multi-part project that Russell is developing (the first of which, “LA MONTAÑA INVISIBLE,” was made in collaboration with composer Nicolas Becker and presented at MUCA UNAM in Mexico City in September 2019), pays tribute to René Daumal’s novel Le Mont Analogue, which describes an expedition to the summit of an invisible mountain, the tallest on earth, which can only be reached by …
“Contagio”
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
The logic of contagion rests on an “us vs them” binary—healthy/sick, in/out, loved/feared—and this exhibition of nine mostly UK-based Latin American artists has the feeling of a diverse group banding together for support. Instigated and curated by the Venezuelan painter Jaime Gili, it foregrounds the importance of collegiality and self-organization in an increasingly hostile environment.
The show tackles pressing political questions with a looseness and lightness of touch characterized by subtle metaphors rather than on-the-nose statements (the exception is a billboard-sized map at the entrance to the gallery, which shows the proliferation of legal and illegal mines across the Amazon basin). In Martín Cordiano’s Host (2020), a tall reading lamp pierces through a mid-century sideboard, on one corner of which a massive sphere of plaster bulges like a tumor. The result is witty, oddly beautiful, and violent. The exhibition text identifies Jacques Derrida’s writing on hospitality as an influence on Cordiano, who seems here to be giving form to the anxieties generated by the a guest’s fragile relationship to their host: a figure who ostensibly extends care while constantly policing the boundaries of the offer of hospitality.
Resting on a nearby plinth is an oversized bronze cast of a …
Metadata
Christina Li
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Christina Li considers the processes that shaped her monographic essay on Neïl Beloufa’s work, “Universes Undone.”
During a visit to Neïl Beloufa’s solo exhibition “L’Ennemi de mon ennemi” [The Enemy of My Enemy] at Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2018, I was reminded of Philip K. Dick. In his 1978 essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” the science-fiction author develops a metaphor of writing as a form of universe building—and undoing.
Walking through Beloufa’s expansive agglomeration of artworks and information, it became evident that a similar process was at play in the gallery. On a series of scenographic display units, each of which had moving parts, a selection of Beloufa’s film installations were displayed alongside artworks by other artists, such as Vann Nath, Pope. L, Gustave Courbet, and Hito Steyerl. Herculean in scale, yet meticulously constructed, the installation examined art as a form of autonomous critique in the contexts of politics, war, and capital. Its shifting clusters of objects and ideas were propped on …
Mexico City Roundup
Terence Trouillot
The title of Jim Ricks’s painting, I’m So Bored with the U.S.A. (2019)—borrowed from the Clash song—might be taken as a comment on how pervasively Mexico City’s Art Week has, in recent years, been dominated by the country’s relationship with its northern neighbor. This teal-colored canvas, the text of its title painted neatly against the surface in a sans-serif font, hangs at Daniela Elbahara gallery among a collection of the artist’s playful and witty works interrogating the structures of democracy and resistance. “This is What Democracy Looks Like” is the first painting show for the US-born Irish artist, whose conceptual work often incorporates sculpture and performance. The exhibition uses humor to lay bare the absurdity and hypocrisy of US politics, and to question the amount of attention paid to the country by the rest of the world.
Perhaps partly in anticipation of the cancellation of Art Basel Hong Kong, a surplus of American and European dealers and collectors were present during this major week of art fairs, gallery openings, and museum exhibitions. Pia Camil’s exhibition “Ríe ahora, llora después” [Laugh Now, Cry Later] was particularly popular with both visitors and locals. For her second solo show at Galería OMR, the …
Hannah Levy’s “Pendulous Picnic”
Ksenia M. Soboleva
Hannah Levy’s sculptures can make you shudder. Working between sculpture and design, she extracts commonplace objects from domestic contexts and defamiliarizes them through her use of unexpected materials, distortion of scale, and exaggeration of their formal properties: their curves and bends. The sculptures in “Pendulous Picnic,” her first solo exhibition with Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, combine silicone and steel—the artist’s signature materials—into multifaceted structures that conflate forms resembling vegetables and body parts in disturbing ways. Take her untitled series of wall-mounted sculptures (all 2019), in which metal fixtures hold up silicone casts of enlarged asparagus, a recurring motif. The artist renders each phallic object limp, drooping over the curved metal as if it might slide off any second—thereby denying any imagined potential for sexual pleasure.
More striking are Levy’s suspended sculptures, something of a departure for the artist. Hanging from the ceiling in the first gallery are three large, untitled structures (all 2020) reminiscent of nursery mobiles—though far too large and hazardous to be suitable for infants. The nickel-plated steel frames curl into chillingly sharp edges resembling fishhooks. The metal is pierced with silicone objects whose surfaces resemble pale skin: in the first sculpture the viewer encounters, casts of …
Camille Blatrix’s “Standby Mice Station”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
As is often the case in public institutions, the provision for small children at this show is minimal. An activity table in the middle of the spartan gallery draws attention to the bare floor surrounding it. In Camille Blatrix’s latest test of how spare an exhibition can be, the large, sky-lit space at the Kunsthalle Basel houses four small wooden marquetry pictures and a number of low (and low-key) sculptures. And in the same main gallery there’s a poster—like the activity table, it’s not listed as an artwork—that signposts the nearest Starbucks. Might we find more comfort there? Presenting quasi-artworks that don’t quite fulfil their purposes and signs that direct us back out again, Blatrix interrogates our reasons for coming to the kunsthalle. Are we here for entertainment or aesthetic stimulation, to find something familiar or novel, personal or institutional?
In two small, dimly lit galleries beyond the main space, Hugo Benayoun Bost’s remix of the eight-bar intro to Stand by Me, the 1961 Ben E. King song behind the title of Rob Reiner’s 1986 film, loops, continually heightening and—almost—releasing tension. The artist’s alter ego, another non-artwork, sits crumpled in one corner: a crying face drawn on an old …
Los Angeles Roundup
Sabrina Tarasoff
“The Magic and Flair of Mary Blair,” an exhibition of the Disney artist’s dreamy, acid-laced concept pieces at the Hilbert Museum of California Art, burned to mind what freakish and caustic things fairytales can be. Best known for her work on Alice in Wonderland (1951), Blair’s mutant gouaches drag you with Alice into the fantastical inversions of Wonderland, a place “more like a corkscrew than a path,” where lawless helixes swallow rooms and minacious figures are found lurking in the Day-Glo darkness. Through the looking glass, everything from the houses to paths act on their own volition; even the flowers have a will (if you’re worth talking to): “You can’t possibly do that,” advises a Rose in Carroll’s sequel, “I should advise you to walk the other way.” Alice considers this bad advice, and so heads in the “wrong” direction, straight back to where she started. Which is to say, she’s quick to realise that in the context of the fantastic, if it appears you’re getting lost then you are probably going the right way.
Though this city is filled with the iconoclastic fantastic, its galleries during Frieze week seem more determined to exploit a bygone image of subversion than …
Rashaad Newsome’s “To Be Real”
Monica Westin
I learned from Being (2019)—an artificial intelligence that Rashaad Newsome has trained with texts from theorists and cultural critics including bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault—that slaves and robots have one foundational thing in common: “They are both intended to obey orders.” Being is nestled in a small dark screening room behind the immersive installation at the heart of “To Be Real.” Its intelligence doesn’t require a body, it reminds me twice, but Newsome has created one for it using 3D modelling software: a metallic humanoid form with visible cords and plates like a steampunk skeleton, and an incongruous wood-textured face dominated by oversized eyes characteristic of an Angolan Chokwe mask. Via computer projection onto the main screen, Being responds to questions I ask into a microphone set up in the middle of the room; like any good chatbot, it redirects to its message regardless of what I ask. While it speaks, its torso swings around languidly, as though dancing or floating.
As a dematerialized, entirely virtual android, Being serves as a nonhuman figure par excellence, the analytic center of an exhibition devoted to Newsome’s examination of dehumanization. This survey is thematically expansive, interrogating race, gender, and sexuality through a …
Jason Hirata’s “Sometimes You’re Both”
Saim Demircan
The ambiguity of Jason Hirata’s exhibition title speaks to his ambidexterity as artist and videographer, two roles that fold into one another in this show. Hirata produces videos for artists, as well as documenting live events and providing technical assistance, and this exhibition presents six videos he has worked on. The precise nature of his labor, however, remains oblique or uncredited, the exception being Hito Steyerl’s 2018 video Unbroken Windows (a piece of paper sellotaped to the wall lists Hirata as production manager and director of photography).
“Sometimes You’re Both” continues Hirata’s recent practice of deconstructing the solo show. For his “25 October, 2015—12 May, 2019” exhibition at Kunstverein Nürnberg in 2019, he exhibited other artists’ work under his own name. Similarly, “Sometimes You’re Both” is neither strictly artist-curated nor collaboratively billed. More liberty is taken here with the display of works than in “25 October, 2015—12 May, 2019”: technical equipment sits out in the open on tabletops. While this could be mistaken for slacker aesthetics, it’s rather another instance of the artist divulging the mechanics of artistic production—or, perhaps more specifically, the invisible labor behind installation. Films play from laptop to projector in a visible circulatory system. The …
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s “Moving Backwards”
Kim Córdova
As I sit to organize my thoughts on Pauline Boudry and Renata Lorenz’s installation Moving Backwards, currently on show in Los Angeles project space JOAN, breaking news alerts slide anxiously across my screen like ephemeral disaster poetry:
Russia closes China land border to prevent spread of coronavirus.
Press Send for Brexit: E.U. Seals UK Withdrawal by Email.
Republicans Block Impeachment Witnesses, Clearing Path for Trump Acquittal.
Netanyahu Plans to Extend Israeli Sovereignty Over Jordan Valley and Settlements.
Boudry and Lorenz’s response to this moment of what they call “reactionary backlashes” is to find power and possibility in backward movement, as a strategy of tactical response. Through a multimedia work featuring, as its centerpiece, a video of a series of dances that play with perceptions of locomotion, the artist duo ask what power could be assumed by disassociating the notion of forward movement from advancement and backward movement with defeat. Put another way, what violence is imposed by a conceptualization of time that is grounded in a colonial understanding of progress as an act of continuous conquest?
Moving Backwards establishes its collaborative …
Museum Installations of Film Art
Robert Bird
The demise of film in its previous modes of production and projection has led to the selective canonization of major filmmakers as artists meriting solo exhibitions in museum spaces. In response, curators have resorted to increasingly ingenious strategies to adapt the medium to the contemporary museum’s infrastructural and institutional conditions. Early exhibitions of film as art frequently focused on its static material apparatus and paraphernalia: cameras and other optical devices, sets and props, screenplays and storyboards, posters and press. Director Stanley Kubrick’s material archive, for example, formed the basis of a massive exhibition organized by the Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum, which has traveled internationally for over a decade. When I saw it in Rome in 2007, its sole dynamic feature was a green-screen device allowing visitors to view themselves within the prehistoric landscape of the prologue to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This interactive apparatus set the scene for my very first digital selfie.
The more ambitious and sophisticated exhibitions of the intervening decade have begun to create a distinct place for film in the museum environment, in part by continuing to blur the boundaries between film, digital media, and installation. A decisive role in the museification of the cinema has …
“Plant Revolution!”
Sofia Lemos
The “vegetal turn” in contemporary art has begun to explore the possibility that plants are sentient, and are thus in constant, contiguous, and contingent interaction with the world. Reflecting this growing trend, the exhibition “Plant Revolution!,” curated by Margarida Mendes, introduces parallels between plant consciousness, advances in genetic and cybernetic research, and visual culture.
A video by Pedro Neves Marques, The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant (2016), displayed on an LCD screen, opens the exhibition. It depicts a looped interaction between a robotic hand and a Mimosa pudica, the iconic plant classified by Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, known for closing in on itself when touched. Adjacent to the video is a display of research responding to the ideas in Teresa Castro’s “The Mediated Plant.” Castro’s essay attempts to reassess (and eventually redraw) the anthropocentric logic of appropriation that divides subjects from objects, placing humans in the former category and animal and plant life in the latter. Excerpts of the text appear next to films—among them the German expressionist Max Reichmann’s 1926 film Blumenwunder [Miracle of Flowers] and Zeline Rostliny [Green Plants] (1955), by the Czech botanist Jan Calábek—and extracts from Charles Darwin and Étienne-Jules Marey’s writings …
“Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011”
Dina Ramadan
Even before it opened, “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” had attracted critical attention. A string of scandals highlighted once again just how embedded museums like MoMA, and its affiliate PS1, are in the military and prison industrial complexes responsible for so much of the devastation on display in this exhibition. Phil Collins’s withdrawal of his work from the show late last year, in protest of some MoMA board members’ investments in private prisons and ICE detention centers, was followed by a request from Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz that the curators “press the pause button” on his video in order to “discuss some recent events.” After PS1 ignored Rakowitz’s request, the artist paused the video himself, in January this year, and posted a statement explaining his position on the gallery wall beside it. The museum quickly removed the statement, despite the artist’s insistence that it “constitutes an essential part of [the] ongoing artwork.” Three dozen participants in the show have since signed a letter urging the museum to sever ties with controversial trustees. Meanwhile, at least four Arab artists, including Netherlands-based Afifa Aleiby, were denied visas to attend the opening. Others knew better than to apply.
The absence of …
Terry Allen’s “Some Pictures and Other Songs”
Rob Goyanes
Terry Allen was born in 1943 in Lubbock, Texas. His parents represent two archetypes of American mythology: a baseball-playing father and a jazz-pianist mother, kicked out of college for playing “devil’s music.” As a teen, Allen was enamored with the beatnik scene when it appeared in Lubbock—everyone started wearing sunglasses at night—and went on to study at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. His record Juarez (1975) is a masterpiece of countercultural country, a song cycle with a cast of characters that cross state and bodily borders: they fuck, fight, flee, and die. An outlaw of the outlaw country scene, Allen is perhaps best understood as a conceptual artist, using Americana to create everything from sculptures and installations to theater.
“Terry Allen: Some Pictures and Other Songs,” at Nina Johnson, consists entirely of drawings, all from 2019. In Storm on the Ghost of Jimmy Reed, Allen presents the bluesman Reed with a mustachioed, half-faded face. A text in the bottom-right of the drawing reads: “When we were kids one Saturday night when it was storming they snuck us in the backdoor of the Cotton Club and let us peek in at him from the dressing room door behind the …
Michael Rakowitz’s “The invisible enemy should not exist (Room F, section 1, Northwest Palace of Nimrud)”
Alan Gilbert
The world has experienced immense changes since the turn of the millennium, including the spread of neo-fascism, a deepening of the climate crisis, and advances in digital technologies. Yet one situation has remained consistent throughout that time: infernal war across the Middle East. Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, the devastation these countries have experienced remains almost unfathomable to those living in the West. For much of this time, Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz has addressed the repercussions of these conflicts through a cross-cultural artistic practice rooted in processes of translation across mediums, disciplines, and national borders. At the same time, Rakowitz aims to engage with a history of the Middle East that expands far beyond the prevailing narratives of war and insurrection.
In an exhibition entitled “The invisible enemy should not exist” at New York’s Lombard-Freid Projects in 2007, Rakowitz used everyday materials from the Middle East, such as food packaging, newspapers, and cardboard, to make replicas of some of the nearly 7,000 cultural artifacts plundered from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad following the disastrous US invasion in 2003. Versions of small statues, friezes, cups, vases, and more from ancient Mesopotamia were displayed in rows on wooden …
Bruce Conner’s “BREAKAWAY”
Jeremy Millar
The work of the American artist Bruce Conner—dime-store assemblagist, quick-splice cineaste—is too little seen in the UK, and so we should be grateful to Thomas Dane Gallery for their recent periodic exhibitions of his work, each focused on a single film. Following CROSSROADS (1976) in 2015 and A MOVIE (1958) in 2017 comes BREAKAWAY (1966): three films from three different decades. Their achronological presentation seems appropriate, given Conner’s fascination with the temporal shifts which film afforded him.
While BREAKAWAY shares some of the concerns of these other films—such as the destructive impulses of desire and the emptiness that lies at the center of things—it is in many respects the simplest of the three. It is also the only one made from footage Conner shot himself, rather than material found from other sources. The location was a collector’s house in Santa Monica. Conner’s friends, the actors Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper, held the lights, and the subject was Antonia Christina Basilotta, a young singer and choreographer whom Conner had met through Stockwell and artist Wallace Berman. The five-minute film opens with a flickering image of Basilotta posing against a black background, dressed only in a black bra and black tights …
“With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–85”
Jonathan Griffin
Pattern and Decoration (P&D), a tendency which crystallized into a movement in New York in the mid-1970s, is one of the few movements of modern art to have self-designated, rather than been identified either by critical champions (think of Germano Celant and Arte Povera) or by sneering skeptics (Finish Fetish, Fauvism). Its members, though heterogeneous in their work, were united in their artistic tastes and temperament: they espoused a maximalist aesthetic that drew from global traditions and sources, also often aligned with feminist art practices that embraced domestic handicrafts. They had no manifesto, but critical allies including Amy Goldin and John Perreault have written eloquently about their work and aims. According to Perreault, “Pattern painting is non-Minimalist, non-sexist, historically conscious, sensuous, romantic, rational, decorative. Its methods, motifs, and referents cross cultural and class lines.”
So it is unexpected, and refreshing, to be welcomed into curator Anna Katz’s survey, “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985,” by works from three artists not typically associated with the movement. Two untitled wall works by Al Loving combining dyed and printed fabrics, one from 1975 and another from 1982, join with Sam Gilliam’s The St. of Moritz Outside Mondrian (1984) and Lucas …
“Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s”
Barbara Casavecchia
I was wrong. I walked into “Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France (1970s-1980s)” thinking the exhibition would be about “her” and “them,” and the past, only to realize that it is about “me” and “us,” right now. About sexism, silencing, inequality, discrimination, patriarchal oppression, rebellion, and about changing narrative paradigms. The show looks beyond Seyrig’s singular persona as “iconic” actress, to reconstruct, instead, a far fuller picture of her life and work as activist, feminist, director, and collaborator with a network of filmmakers who emerged from the MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes). “Defiant Muses” revolves around the eternal question of how (and which) images are constructed and circulated, while interrogating the conflicts that emerge between acting a political position and translating it into personal action. Following Ariella Azoulay’s suggestion that archival documents “are not items of a completed past, but rather active elements of a present,” the exhibition rewrites history by reclaiming what gets suppressed. I spent hours in it, connecting the dots, shocked by how little I knew about these women’s stories, unsurprisingly, alas, themselves transmitted mostly by women.
Curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Giovanna Zapperi, the show—which opened in July 2019 at …
Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s “MAY YOUR THUNDER BREAK THE SKY”
Natasha Marie Llorens
Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s solo exhibition at Kunstraum Innsbruck, “MAY YOUR THUNDER BREAK THE SKY,” is a maze of monitor screens and video projections. Rincón Gallardo’s aesthetics are mesmerizing: silver-faced goddesses; crimson electronic nipple extensions that blink playfully; elaborate handmade costumes in red and gold shot against deep-green cabbage fields and murky river water. The exhibition comprises two works: The Formaldehyde Trip (2017), a constellation of three- to five-minute video fragments that occupies the main gallery, and Opossum Resilience (2019), a new video installation, which is shown in an adjacent room. Crafted sculptures dot the spaces in between the moving images. The axolotl—a species of salamander native only to Lake Xochimilco in Mexico City, and the mythological spirit animal of Xolotl, the god of monstrosities—is everywhere in the exhibition.
On a screen in the main room is a digital animation that resembles a computer game. A figure with Donald Trump’s iconic bouffant bounces maniacally about to a marching band, while an automated voice names forms of structural violence under capitalism: “accumulation by dispossession, subhuman territories,” etc. In an abrupt edit, the screen goes black, and a sound recording of woman human rights defender Bety Cariño plays against the dark screen. The …
Ruth Buchanan’s “The scene in which I find myself / Or, where does my body belong”
Tara McDowell
The Taranaki region on the west coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (the Maori name for the North Island of Aotearoa, or New Zealand) meets the Tasman Sea on three sides and rises at its center to the peaks of Mount Taranaki, a volcano that has been active for around 130,000 years. For the last 50 years, the region’s largest city, New Plymouth, has been home to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, a contemporary art museum that has exhibited and collected chiefly New Zealand art. To mark this anniversary, Govett-Brewster’s co-directors, Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, who joined the museum last year, invited artist Ruth Buchanan to develop an exhibition of work from the collection. Buchanan, who is based in Berlin but was born in New Plymouth and is of Te Atiawa, Taranaki, and Pākehā (or European) descent, worked closely with the museum staff to install 292 pieces across the museum.
Buchanan is acutely sensitive to language and the body, and these concerns shape her foray into the institution. Her methodology is feminist, seeking horizontal relations, and influenced by Donna Haraway’s “split and contradictory self” and Audre Lorde’s exhortation to “bear the intimacy of scrutiny.” Each of the museum’s five galleries is dedicated to …
Hong Kong Roundup
Travis Diehl
A citywide rally on December 8, 2019, marked six months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. 800,000 people attended—a tenth of the total population. When I arrived the following weekend, the streets were quiet. I wasn’t there for the protests—I was there to see art. Yet I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were, as Allan Sekula wrote of the 1999 Seattle protests, “waiting for teargas”—in the lull, anticipating the moment when revolution and counter-revolution show their true selves. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong police were thinking about art, too. On December 12, they posted a parody of Maurizo Cattelan’s Comedian sculpture (2019) to social media; in their version, instead of a banana, a teargas canister is duct-taped to the wall. This is possibly the most pitch-perfect, frank response from the government so far: lobbing riot grenades is a day job for some, but only an artwork can express the underlying depths of official apathy. The Hong Kong “banana” joined the graffiti along the roadways in Central, slogans like “thx president trump / make hk great again” and “je me révolte, donc je suis”: messages meant, on some level, for outsiders like me.
The art scene, too, seemed to be steeling …
Daria Martin’s “Tonight the World”
Brian Karl
We dream in the dark. Repressed memories, daily conflicts, ghosts, and other spirits surge while, unconscious, we sleep, eyes closed. Dreams haunt our waking lives too, though usually with faint traces. Most people remember little of their dreams, and share even less with others. Likewise, audiences have grown accustomed to watching the products of culture industries’ dream factories in closed-off places where little daylight shines: isolated screening rooms in cinemas, art galleries, and museums, in which chosen imagery and objects are foregrounded while much else gets elided.
In “Tonight the World,” Daria Martin teases out fragmentary dreamwork with thoughtful and accomplished layering of history and impressions that both make possible and deny fuller interpretation. The exhibition’s darkened setting lends it the atmosphere of an interior dreamscape, while its overall ambit parallels the unconscious’s processing via dreams’ disjunctive, transformational, and ineffable logics. Martin’s exhibition elaborates conscious attempts by her grandmother, the artist Susi Stiassni, to capture in writing her own dreamwork’s traces. Stiassni kept a dream diary that accumulated over decades to 20,000 typewritten pages, from which Martin has culled five episodes exploring her anxiety about intruders.
The central, large-scale projection of a short live-action film from which the exhibition takes …
David Blandy’s “The World After”
Jamie Sutcliffe
Writing in the late 1930s, the Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga emphasized the generative importance of play to human cultures by delineating its fundamentally nested nature. The rules-bound locales of playgrounds, card tables, or board games all provided what Huizinga termed “worlds within worlds,” magic circles inside which a suspension of social reality might afford opportunities for autotelic rapture. While the appeal of such transcendent rhetoric might persist today, it’s increasingly difficult to square with the evolving tribalism and charged politics of contemporary game space, a context that has seen the messaging boards of hotheaded players segue seamlessly with reactionary electoral campaigns, the harassment of feminist critics dovetail with the emergent men’s rights movement, and livestreamed play platforms like Twitch used to document attacks on minority communities, constituting an unprecedented dialogical optics for broadcast terror.
It seems apposite, then, that “The World After,” an ambitious narrative project by David Blandy, locates novel conditions for dialogue and the consideration of conflicting perspectives within game space itself. The show includes two works: a collaboratively written role-playing module and an essay film inspired by the science-fiction location in which that module is set. Both are presented in a gallery that has been recalibrated as a …
The Drawing Triennial 2019, “Human Touch”
Nora Joung
Cecilia Jiménez Ojeda’s enigmatic installation Maria! Por Qué?! [Maria! Why?!] (2019) is an unexpected thrill in this otherwise unsurprising Drawing Triennial. A large china cabinet filled with kitsch figurines is positioned diagonally across a small room. Hidden behind it is the lid of a casket, strewn with withered roses. Every now and then, a nearby stack of neatly folded towels emits clanking noises, which sound like someone angrily washing dishes next door. The hinting at domestic conflict and connotations of death create a sense of unease, counterpointed by touches of absurdity, such as the engraved plaques featuring stage directions for a soap opera, which are mounted to the back of the cabinet. Displayed amongst these are a series of photorealistic drawings of a bundled leather belt, a broken mirror, a disassembled doll, and what appear to be migration papers issued to the artist as a young child. The tension is enhanced by the installation’s secretive quality, and its wavering between being a drama and a farce.
In the exhibition guide, curator Helga-Marie Nordby writes about the recent unearthing of an artefact from the Blombos Cave in South Africa: a 73,000-year-old flake of stone on which a cross-hatched …
Valie Export’s “The 1980 Venice Biennale Works”
Orit Gat
The two acts for which VALIE EXPORT is most famous are naming herself off a pack of cigarettes and a performance that involved wearing a pair of trousers with the crotch cut out, exposing her vulva. The Austrian artist, so associated with this bold punk aesthetic, represented her nation at the Venice Biennale in 1980, a rare occasion of recognition for a woman artist at the height of her career rather than its tail end, coming at the peak of her most prolific decade. Collecting these pieces together again, almost 40 years after they were shown at the Austrian Pavilion, makes clear how over time, the shock element of EXPORT’s art has faded, yet what remains is an always-pertinent critique.
EXPORT’s work is a reflection on the place women are afforded—that is, must fight for—in the communities in which they live. On view is “Body Configurations” (1972–76), a series of black-and-white photographs that show EXPORT adjusting her body to the city—lying with her back arched to match a curve in the pavement in ABRUNDUNG I [Rounding I] or sitting against the corner of a building, her hands stretched to touch its two sides in VERFÜGUNG I [Available I] (both works …
“Mud Muses: A Rant About Technology”
Frida Sandström
“If I don’t find what I want on the first page, I’ll usually just give up,” stated the American interface designer Aza Raskin in 2006. He later came to be known as the inventor of the infinite scroll—for which he recently publicly announced his regret. While Raskin’s interface dominates most digital media today, The Otolith Group’s Anathema (2011) brings us back to a distant time in the mid-2000s when the first iPhones hit the market. In an abstract montage of moving images from early YouTube, advertisement for touchscreen devices blend in pixelated abstraction, enabling a sublime imaginary of something beyond the responsive screens that we depend on. Much earlier, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Swedish artist Charlotte Johannesson transferred weaving to the few pixels of Apple’s first home computers. This was before conventional printers, so Johannesson had to hack large-format architecture printers to get her colorful abstractions on paper.
The transition of ideas through matter has always been central to aesthetics. Ursula K. Le Guin has written that “technology is the active human interface with the material world”—it is the materialization of an interface that manifests each time we touch a screen, a stone, or each other. At …
Kate Newby’s “Bring Everyone”
Claudia Arozqueta
Kate Newby’s sculptures, which can take the form of wind chimes, rocks, puddles, tiles, shells, bricks, and textiles, emerge from observations of her everyday surroundings. For her 2018 installation at Kunsthalle Wien, I can’t nail the days down, Newby covered the gallery’s floor with bricks embedded with coins, bottle caps, glass, and branches collected from the surrounding area. In her recent yearlong project A puzzling light and moving. (2019) at the lumber room in Portland, Oregon, she produced a range of site-responsive works, such as a puddle embedded in a concrete patio that reflected the outside environment. For her current exhibition at Fine Arts, Sydney, Newby uses clay, glass, bronze, and wire to craft an environment of mundane objects and subtle gestures that refine viewers’ perception of the gallery space to reveal a dialectical play of interior and exterior.
For Bring Everyone (2019), which lends the exhibition its title, Newby replaced several panes of glass in the balcony doors with handmade ones embedded with a number of holes. The crystalized pattern of the glass blurs the colors of the outside world, in contrast with the sharper, unfiltered images that can be observed through the holes. As well as allowing …
Basma Alsharif’s “A Philistine”
Chris Sharratt
An ever-spiraling conflict, a splintered diasporic identity, the subjectivity of experience, the psychology of displacement: in the work of the Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif this heavy load is unpacked and sifted, as history and geography are questioned and clichés resisted. In her attempts to challenge didactic accounts of history and the misrepresentation they can engender, Alsharif often hits rewind. Moving backward in order to propel a narrative forward is a recurring motif in her lens-based work, a device she uses to powerful effect in her compelling 77-minute feature debut Ouroboros (2017), which opens with reversed drone footage of waves rolling away from the Gaza shore before panning back inland across the beach, a busy road, and city blocks.
In “A Philistine,” presented across three distinct gallery spaces at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, Alsharif plays with time in differing ways. A screening room with a two-seater sofa shows three looped short videos that bring the domestic and geopolitical together. In Further Than The Eye Can See (2012), the story begins with Alsharif’s grandmother’s arrival in Cairo after being exiled from Jerusalem in 1948 and ends with her birth in Jerusalem 11 years earlier. Told in English by a male narrator as …
Miami Roundup
Ricardo Mor
In Camille Henrot’s video Saturday (2017), presented at the Faena Festival as part of Miami Art Week, the artist zeroes in on the Seventh-day Adventist Church in cryptic yet hypnotic fashion. Images of church services, baptism ceremonies, and a backstage look at a TV prayer telethon service titled “Let’s Pray!” are paired with images of surfers, medical procedures, and commercial-like footage of whole foods that are part of the church’s recommended diet regimen. Against all of this, chyrons send up a constant stream of bad news and cryptic messages such as “Justice: the door remained shut,” “Education: they’re just parroting what they hear back,” and “Crime: there are bruises where he still grabbed me.” It is an opaque but astonishingly beautiful meditation on keeping one’s faith in a hopeless world.
Not that far away, outside the convention center where Art Basel Miami Beach takes place, members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses would stand outside each day trying to engage passersby on their faith, peddling their beliefs as diligently as the gallerists selling art in their booths. Miami Art Week, which includes the main fair, two dozen satellite fairs, and a seemingly endless cavalcade of events is art at its most …
A Report on Perfect Fit
Sarah Rifky
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Sarah Rifky looks back on her monographic essay on Kapwani Kiwanga’s work “Perfect Fit.”
Saint Louis
I started writing “Perfect Fit” in a classroom at the Institut Français in Saint Louis, Senegal. It was June 2018. The text was untitled. I was with colleagues (read: friends) from the continent (read: Africa), and we were formulating an instruction for France: to establish an Institute of Black Studies in France.
France resisted the intellectual imperative. To them, the continent was a country.
The instruction outlined departments for the filing of imaginary history, for authorizing fiction and unauthorized movements, as well as other methods of disruption.
The confabulations of this meeting were the scaffolding for what later became “Perfect Fit.”
Paris
I had seen Kapwani Kiwanga perform once in Paris, years before. One of my first attempts at writing was to remember the exact quality of the feeling of being in her audience. Her performance two-toned the space in orange brown and cooler, shaped shadows.
On a Saturday in late November 2018, we met …
Charl Landvreugd’s “Movt. Nr. 10: Ososma”
Jonas Staal
The crunch of seashells breaking underfoot heightens my awareness as I navigate a labyrinth of narrow passages connecting a series of 12 elegant pavilions of varying size. These tall structures, constructed from slim wooden beams, create transparency at one moment and evoke entrapment the next. Sometimes the shells form paths; other times, entry is provided by solid, sleek black walkways. Templates have been used to spray-paint names on a pillar of each pavilion: Athina. Paramaribo. Bruxelles. Milano. Qahira. Rotterdam. Displayed inside them are videos, sculptures, photographs, and drawings.
This is Movt. Nr. 10: Ososma (2019) by Charl Landvreugd. Installed in an empty office building under the premises of CBK Zuidoost, it is both an installation and an exhibition environment featuring an overview of artworks and the periods in which they were created—Landvreugd calls them “movements”—that cross his diverse work as an artist, curator, academic researcher, and leading nightclub organizer in Rotterdam in the 1990s. In the Sranan Tongo language (also known as Surinamese) ososma describes the home that is not one’s own house; a space of relational intimacy and belonging that goes beyond individual property. It suggests how the personal and the common connect in Landvreugd’s work. Each pavilion is …
Lari Pittman’s “Declaration of Independence”
Travis Diehl
Lari Pittman’s resonant retrospective at the Hammer in Los Angeles impresses first with the filigreed intricacy of his paintings, second with their special monotony. Three decades of work spills forth in the bold colors of commercial signage, splashed with decorative motifs—Victorian cameos, arrows, tipping pots, teardrops of various fluids, and the accoutrements of Enlightenment science. The more things change, the more they resemble the past. A carousel or color wheel of eighteenth-century silhouettes rolls through a garden of giant roses in This Amusement, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless (1989), as the figures paint on easels or hold measured discussions; a man in the lower right corner exposes his cock. Their human shapes presage the disarticulated dummies or robots that clatter across the compositions of the series “Grisaille, Ethics & Knots” (2016), where the colors give way to apocalyptic chrome, white, and warning-light red. Pittman’s paintings reiterate a history of individual styles: all-over expressionism, minimalist structure, constructivist design, mannerist embellishment, and, emulsifying all, postmodern pastiche.
Still, the dense chemistry of each individual painting burns through the overall clutter. The chronological hang at the Hammer delivers an increasing avalanche of strokes and stencils, but also reveals the tight interplay of small differences …
Ignacio Acosta’s “Tales from the Crust”
Tom Jeffreys
What do the gray-white, snow-laden forests of Scandinavia have in common with the dry red sands of the Atacama Desert in Chile? Both, in the words of Silvia Federici, are “sacrifice zones” of capitalism: places that contain riches extracted by multinational mining corporations with little care to the destruction they cause—to water, soil, air; to human and nonhuman communities.
Ignacio Acosta’s “Tales from the Crust” connects these places in a solo exhibition divided quite neatly into three parts. Covering the gallery’s street-level windows and visible to passers-by are three large-scale photographs of landscapes that have been radically altered by mining: a looming slag heap, a drone shot of a distance marker, and a eucalyptus forest planted to absorb contaminated water. To the right as you enter the gallery is a room of archival materials, filmed interviews, documents, photographs, and rock samples, presented on and around a freestanding metal structure. Here, Acosta not only makes visible his own research process but also acknowledges that struggles against multinational companies are diverse, collective, and ongoing: there are many tales from the crust.
One focus in this room is the corporate group Antofagasta PLC in Chile: a video interview with researcher Patricio Bustamante reveals the …
“All in a Day’s Eye: The Politics of Innocence in the Javett Collection”
Sean O’Toole
In these necessary times of dismantling and revisionism, there is a case to be made for the explanatory wall text as one of the least rehabilitated pieces of museum orthodoxy. Can diagnostic writing reproduce the subtlety, particularity, and even obliquity of literature and still retain a radical function? It is a question I kept returning to reading the numerous, often undeveloped, expository texts that accompany curator Gabi Ngcobo’s exhibition, one of four shows inaugurating a new art museum at the University of Pretoria. “All in a Day’s Eye: The Politics of Innocence in the Javett Collection” stages a kind of truth commission through image and wall text, using works by some two dozen, mostly white South African artists amassed by the philanthropist Michael Javett to reframe sedentary positions of meaning, value, and importance, in particular by highlighting the “economies of access” and “political climate” that informed their production.
The show opens with a hoary genre painting by English-born Ivanonia Roworth, The Return from School, Genadendal (1954). This Barbizon-style work depicts two groups of children outside three thatched buildings, one topped with wispy smoke, in a community that was once a refuge for freed slaves; Genadendal, located at the foot of …
1st Sharjah Architecture Triennial, “Rights of Future Generations”
Melissa Gronlund
The first Sharjah Architecture Triennial brings to the dusty city an art and architecture crowd with varying expectations. Architecture is conceived here in its wider sense—urban studies, environmental sustainability, design—and curator Adrian Lahoud, the dean of the architectural school at the Royal College of Art in London, has widened it further, curating an inclusive and deliberately experimental exhibition.
Lahoud’s project, “The Rights of Future Generations,” rests on the premise that, as Lahoud put it in an introduction to one of the presentations, fighting for the environment is not a new trend out of London and New York, but something which “black and brown people have been doing for the last century.” Throughout the triennial, representatives from a variety of indigenous communities—people coming from regions as diverse as the Chilean mountains, the Great Sandy Desert of Australia, and stretches of Upper Egypt—and researchers from threatened or developing communities in places such as Gaza, Bangladesh, Senegal, and Iran presented strategies of adapting to climate change and ongoing colonialism in talks, performances, and exhibitions. Importantly, the triennial aims for the sweet spot between research and activism, with the goal of affecting change on the ground, rather than simply presenting a display of potential …
Jacolby Satterwhite’s “You’re at home”
Ania Szremski
“Let me tell you about my mother” is a famous line from Blade Runner (1982), the iconic movie that wonders about the violent intersections of life and technology and what really makes us human. A little over a decade later, at a time when technology’s coloring of the human experience had exponentially intensified, those words were recycled as a sample in “Aftermath,” a song off Tricky’s debut, genre-defying album, Maxinquaye (1995), which was named for his mother, Maxine Quaye, who died of suicide when he was little. Now fast-forward nearly 15 years after that, and consider Jacolby Satterwhite’s exhibition “You’re at home,” which rolls up everything I’ve just written about into a dizzying fractal pattern along with a manifold of other references, sounds, and iconography in which, indeed, the artist tells us all about his mother.
Tricky has said his mother used to write poems but had no place to put them. Patricia Satterwhite, too, was an artist without a public, without a means of access to the infrastructure and institutions that would have made her the star Jacolby says she dreamed of becoming. Before she died in 2016, she had lived with schizophrenia. Throughout her life she incessantly wrote …
Mary Josephson, “Ray Johnson at Betty Parsons” (1973)
Astrid Mania
In the wing mirror on the passenger side of a vehicle, objects are closer than they appear.
The texts republished in the Rearview series are those that we wish to draw attention to because they reveal certain “blind spots” in contemporary art criticism. These “found” documents (indeed, quasi-artifacts) are prefaced by one of our writers.
Mary Josephson is, to my knowledge, the first fictitious female art critic conceived of by a man. She is one of Brian O’Doherty’s four, otherwise male, alter egos, among them the (by now late) artist Patrick Ireland. Josephson was born out of lack. Becoming the editor of Art in America in 1971, O’Doherty needed authors to write for the publication he was going to reinvent. Apparently, he made some of them up. That he decided on one female moniker is due to his lifelong fascination with fluid gender roles: “There is a deep curiosity, and certainly I have it as to the nature of the other, the ultimate, that other, the other sex.”(1) The name itself, Mary Josephson, is a twist on O’Doherty’s upbringing in a stoutly Catholic environment.
Writing under a pseudonym comes with a great deal of freedom. Josephson surely thought outside …
Hannah Collins’s “I Will Make Up a Song”
Monica Westin
In 1945, Hassan Fathy, an Egyptian modernist architect and pioneer of sustainable design, was tasked with relocating 7000 residents from the village of Gourna, on the West Bank of the Nile, to a new site several miles away. The original town of Gourna was built on top of a tomb that residents had been illegally raiding to support the local economy for generations; eventually, government authorities commissioned the massive rehousing project in order to preserve what was left of these artifacts.
In his 1969 book Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt, Fathy describes the daunting task of creating the entirely new municipality of New Gourna: “All these people, related in a complex web of blood and marriage ties, with their habits and prejudices, their friendships and their feuds—a delicately balanced social organism intimately integrated with the topography, with the very bricks and timber of the village—this whole society had, as it were, to be dismantled and put together again in another setting. […] It was uncanny enough that a whole village should be projected without reference to the State Building Department, but it was even more unnerving to find myself with the sole responsibility for creating this village.”
Fathy …
“Soft and Wet”
Natasha Marie Llorens
In the video documentation of Burial Pyramid (1974), Ana Mendieta’s body looks like it is lodged in the aftermath of a landslide. Lying on the ground, everything but her face covered with muddy rocks, the late artist seems trapped under the stones’ weight. She starts to breathe great heaving breaths and the rocks slowly shift and then tumble away. The soft flesh of her midriff and the areola of her right breast faintly come into view through the grain of the digitized Super 8mm film.
Mendieta’s film immediately drew me into “Soft and Wet,” a group show curated by Sadia Shirazi at the project space of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. It is shown across the room from the entrance and when I turn away from Mendieta’s immobilized form, I notice a pedestal by the door and return to inspect it. The slim, stapled booklet on it is a facsimile of the catalog of an exhibition curated by Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina at feminist gallery A.I.R. in New York in 1980. “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States” was organized in response to the marginalization of women of color within white feminist …
Danh Vo’s “untitled” and “Cathedral Block, Prayer Stage, Gun Stock”
Harry Thorne
We create our own artworks. Regardless of their maker or mark, we push ourselves through the objects and images that deign to confront us and, as such, shape ourselves and our newfound companions into something other than we were before. It could be said that when we interact with art objects, we actively collaborate with another, with one another, which is a pleasant way of narrativizing our lowly passage through life: we work alongside the many things of the world so as to generate meaning.
This notion of incorporeal co-existence would suggest that the self is an entity less fixed and singular than it is multivalent, multiplicitous, more. The memory of Édouard Glissant floats, preaching the oft-quoted pledge “not to be a single being”; Antonio Gramsci, cited prominently in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), writes of “‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces.” Self as infinity. Infinity as self.
Vietnam-born Danish artist Danh Vo speaks in similar tones: “I don’t really believe in my own story, not as a singular thing anyway. […] I see myself, like any other person, as a container.” But are we containers or conduits? Do …
Montréal Roundup
Stefanie Hessler
A camera pans over a beach littered with driftwood. As the lens approaches a stack of branches arranged as if for a bonfire, a rocket-like screeching sound pierces the scene. An instant later, the wood goes up in flames. The image fades to a view of the artist Rebecca Belmore submerged in the nearby water. Fully dressed, she flails in the shallows with a metal bucket in her hand, gasping for air. Her body is thrown around by something other than the forces of the waves—an interior torment. Belmore exits onto the beach, carries the bucket toward the camera, and with an arduous groan throws its liquid contents against the lens. What we, the viewers, may expect to be clear water is blood-red, dripping down the lens as the artist stands and looks directly at us until the video ends. In Belmore’s installation Fountain (2005), the sequence was projected onto a wall of falling water inside the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM).
In its ambiguity between birth or death, creation or apocalypse, Belmore’s Fountain—her contribution to the Canadian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005—is as potent a metaphor today as it was almost 15 years ago. The …
Emma Kunz’s “Visionary Drawings”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Emma Kunz never called herself an artist. Whether she designated herself in any way is unknown, but her principal activity was research and healing using a pendulum and natural remedies, a practice in which drawings played an integral part. A solo exhibition at Muzeum Susch presents more than 60 of these untitled and undated works, produced from 1938 until her death in ’63. Created in collaboration with London’s Serpentine Gallery, where a show of Kunz’s drawings ended in May, this exhibition features a different selection of works and also a different setting. The museum has softer edges than many: built on the site of a twelfth-century monastery in the Engadin region of Switzerland, with galleries burrowing into the rock, the institutional setting establishes that Kunz’s images can speak on their own terms as art.
Kunz worked on millimeter graph paper, finely marked with brown or blue lines, which she cut into large squares and rectangles to produce around 400 drawings. Framed drawings tile the walls of the tall galleries or are hung singly. A few are laid flat on square plinth-like vitrines, reflecting how Kunz made them. She used pencils, crayons, and oil crayons, which she applied mostly in …
“The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030—2100”
Philomena Epps
According to the data provided by an online carbon footprint calculator, by taking a return flight from London to Moscow, I was responsible for the emission of 0.43 tons of CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent. I was flying to attend the opening of “The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100” at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, which features artistic responses to ecology and nature. The cognitive dissonance required to excuse the substantial environmental impact of traveling more than 2,500 kilometers in order to comment on an exhibition that explores climate change is one of numerous contradictions I encountered during my visit.
This ambitious show is comparable in scale to a museum hang. There are over 50 works by Russian and international artists, including numerous large-scale installations, such as John Akomfrah’s elegiac six-channel film Purple (2017); Anastasia Potemkina’s luminous, site-specific halotherapy environment Pass Me The Salt, Please (2019); and Doug Aitken’s vast The Garden (2017–19), in which viewers are able to enter a glass room enclosed within a verdant greenhouse structure, and, if they wish, to smash up its contents with a baton. Any humor to be found in the cartoonishly violent catharsis of Aitken’s hot-headed hothouse …
The Purple Thistle
Andrew Berardini
Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, in which writers reflect on the experience of writing about art. Here, Andrew Berardini expands on his monographic essay on Mélanie Matranga’s work “A Worn T-Shirt and Expressions of the Inexpressible.”
Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colors with a durability not found in cellular life. What moves lives. What is said endures.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (1982)
I don’t know why anyone makes art or writes about it really, the depthless mystery of this is probably why I do it.
I do know that I can only survive because I can tell you about the purple thistle nestled in the vase of flowers on my table. I’ve touched it many times today, enshrouded in gray-green eucalyptus leaves and daisies bursting with yellow and small white flowers with silky petals. Stiff but still almost insistently soft, the purple thistle looks almost dangerous, with rows upon rows of menacing spikes, its color a shimmer of electricity like the dance of snapped power lines in a cool mist. Once touched, these multiple points (called bracts by …
Okayama Art Summit 2019, “IF THE SNAKE”
Koichiro Osaka / Jaime Marie Davis
It’s hard not to acknowledge the ongoing tension surrounding the Aichi Triennale when writing about contemporary art in Japan at the moment. The recent announcement that the government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs has pulled the Triennale’s funding following a controversy over censorship, sparked protest calling into question the validity of public money poured into the cultural sector. The Okayama Art Summit distinguishes itself from this appalling situation—being a private initiative formed by Yasuharu Ishikawa, fashion entrepreneur and art collector, and gallerist Taro Nasu, both from the city. The two partnered with the local municipality to set their agenda and become part of the city’s transforming cultural and architectural landscape with a pleasant distance from local politics.
Titled “IF THE SNAKE” and convened by Pierre Huyghe as artistic director, the Okayama Art Summit 2019 is comprised of 18 artists and collaborative projects spread across the city, and set up as a living entity, infinitely in formation through its biological, technological, and economic ties. The exhibition’s conceit is open ended, yet it also evokes the well-known ouroboros symbol of continual life and death cycles, mythologies of awakening, and vitality conjured through renewed ways of seeing. Huyghe positions the singularity of this subject …
Fazal Rizvi’s “How do we remember?”
Murtaza Vali
From Siegfried Kracauer to Roland Barthes, a photograph of a maternal figure in her youth has prompted some of the most important critical reflections on photography, and specifically its relationship to memory and death. For these authors, the photograph, despite its veracious claims, remains hopelessly inadequate, at odds with lived experience and unable to accommodate the emotional intensity of an intimate relationship. It requires, at least according to Kracauer, a supplement of oral history to even begin to access a person once known and lost. Prompted by a photograph of his maternal grandmother Jehanara Hasan, Fazal Rizvi’s “How do we remember?” is an investigation in this vein, complicated by Jehanara’s progressive dementia, which resulted in her having forgotten much of her life by the time the artist was old enough to remember her. It is an attempt to reconcile the dissonance between a photograph of youth, beauty, and vigor, around which memories and myths have coalesced, with the decay and deterioration of both the object itself but also the subject it portrays.
The exhibition opens with a pair of works that acknowledge how decay, mnemonic and material, troubles a photograph’s status as document. In She is beautiful on a piece …
Paris Roundup
Sofia Gotti
The most useful warning ever given to me while studying the Parisian avant-garde was “don’t forget they were all sleeping with each other!” A vital reminder that modern art was not the product of a pure and original creative act, but rather the consequence of cross-pollination that occurred thanks to friendships, sexual relations, and confrontations. That idea of purity and originality, still often fed to modern art scholars like mother’s milk, is a construction deeply compromised by power, politics, and, yes, sexuality. This context is inescapable, especially when wandering through FIAC at the Grand Palais. A leftover of the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the Grand Palais is a paradigmatic example of how France displayed its hegemonic power over culture and technology.
As a scholar of feminism and decolonialism, I am determined to deconstruct the canon I was handed. I resolved during my visit to focus on practices that signal a transformation in mainstream narrative and to ignore outdated (albeit seductive) presentations dedicated to contemporary mainstays, or booths like Gagosian’s all-male display dedicated to artists who spent time on the French Riviera. My main inquiry is, how are artists articulating the notions of impurity, disjunction, difference, and desire this week in …
10th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, “Part of the Labyrinth”
Frida Sandström
“When I was nine years old, the world was as old as me […] As I turned ten, all of a sudden it aged ten million billion years.” The Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935–2009) engaged with time and language as constructs. In her prose poem “Part of the Labyrinth,” she paraphrased Descartes: “I think, and therefore I’m part of the labyrinth.” The 10th Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), which borrows its title from Christensen’s poem, centers on the inextricable future of history. Programing both for the current and the next edition of the biennial, curator Lisa Rosendahl has initiated a two-year contestation of the 400th anniversary of the city of Gothenburg, the concluding exhibition of which will be held in 2021. Linking demographic segregation with the discrimination of memory, this pair of consecutive, interrelated biennials examines how the city of Gothenburg can be read as an imprint of Sweden’s colonial unconscious.
In 1784, King Louis XVI of France ceded the South Caribbean island Saint Barthélemy to Swedish rule in exchange for a plot of land in Gothenburg’s port, and securing free trade between both countries. With its dissonant array of archival photographs and abstract prints mounted on …
Moyra Davey’s “i confess”
Brian Dillon
Each time Moyra Davey speaks in her new film i confess (2019)—spinning a narrative that’s at once autobiographical, political, essayistic—she’s preceded briefly by a faint ghost-voice, anticipatory echo. It’s the sound of the artist’s own voice, prerecorded and playing off her iPhone as in-ear prompt, while she paces her New York studio, repeating the script aloud. Davey has used this subtly deranging method before, in films such as Les Goddesses (2011) and Hemlock Forest (2016). It gives her a halting, spacey presence on screen, as though she’s merely the conduit for personal memory, cultural-political reflections and a shelf’s-worth of citation. In the past, Davey’s films have invoked Anne Sexton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Chantal Akerman, and Derek Jarman. When we first see and hear her in i confess, which is shown alongside a series of photo-etchings, she’s thinking about James Baldwin—a famous 1965 debate with William F. Buckley Jr. plays on YouTube in the background—and about the vexed history of French-Canadian identity.
Davey was born in Toronto in 1958, and grew up in Montreal, where she felt ashamed to be an anglophone outsider, and at the same time terrified of the strictures of Québec Catholicism. Early in i confess she tells us …
Cristina Tufiño’s “Dancing at the End of the World”
Kim Córdova
Cristina Tufiño’s “Dancing at the End of the World” presents a grouping of drawings and sculptures that probe the violent effects of digital convenience and the gig industry. With pastel-glazed ceramic sculptures that feature anthropomorphized objects, feminine body parts, and cast-off keyboards, Tufiño adopts sex work as a metonym for the exploitative nature of the online economy. With an unsettlingly sweet aesthetic, she wonders about the consequences of using algorithms to mediate the instant gratification of desire on a vast scale.
In Constellation Sunset (Cubetas del Atardecer) (all works 2019), eggshell-blue arms lithely jut at rigor-mortis angles from two buckets filled with baby’s breath—the flower of innocence. A ceramic head of the same color is an eyeless but coiffed witness to the arms, which may be her dismembered limbs, her torso and legs unaccounted for. Peppermint Hippo (5) features two ceramic feet cleaved from an otherwise absent mint-colored femme, tied up with festive ceramic ribbons jamming a shrimp cocktail of long swollen toes over the edge of stripper heels a few sizes too small, highlighting the vulnerability to violence and the physical toll of desire-fulfillment work.
On the opposite wall, Bocaccio, a ceramic relief of a hand emerging from an arm-shaped keyboard …
The 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, “Immortality”
Kim West
“Overcome the limits of immortality,” reads the catchphrase of the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, curated by Xiaoyu Weng with the overall theme of “Immortality.” It’s a tricky one. I try to untangle it as I visit the vast labyrinth at the fourth floor of the Ural Optical and Mechanical Plant, the biennial’s main venue. A long corridor vanishes into the deep, its walls pierced with myriad doorways opening onto myriad rooms, opening onto further rooms, some of which open onto wide vistas of the Ekaterinburg cityscape. Shell-shocked by the explosive discrepancy between the scale and spatial illegibility of the exhibition, and the sparseness of its guiding framework, I stagger into a large, obscure space, where I’m adequately greeted by a nuclear blast, projected across the wall in mesmerizing, decelerated black and white.
It’s Bruce Conner’s CROSSROADS (1976). In an adjacent space, Peter Watkins’s dystopian docufiction The War Game (1965) is shown on a small video monitor, driving home the annihilatory point. It appears that technical development is not only a path to human salvation. I’m inclined to think that the exhibition’s catchphrase has dialectical finesse. Immortality, we can agree, is the same as non-death. And to …
Paul Chan’s “The Bather’s Dilemma”
Alan Gilbert
The figures in Paul Chan’s work have frequently been subject to powerful outside forces. In the large-scale animated video Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization (After Henry Darger and Charles Fourier) (1999–2003), which helped garner Chan initial acclaim, a group of prepubescent girls with origins in Darger’s writings are threatened by a war raging around them. Every object in The 7 Lights series (2005–07) of digital projections is subject to the same gravitational pull. The physical and sexual violence depicted in black-and-white silhouette in the mural-sized and nearly six-hour-long digital video projection Sade for Sade’s sake (2009), created in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture revelations, is larger than any one person; rather, it is institutional and endemic. Even Chan’s more documentary-style video essay, Baghdad in No Particular Order (2003), was shot during a visit to Iraq and ominously foretells a war that would leave hundreds of thousands dead and a country in near total ruin.
It is understandable that Chan eventually took a hiatus from these labor-intensive screen-based projects, and from the ubiquity of screens in general, while continuing to think about the centrality of images in a rapidly digitizing world. Recently, he has been producing bodies of …
London Roundup
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Chris Fite-Wassilak
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The world is burning. This is not a metaphor. The sky is bleached a searing lime green, tinged with burned orange that reflects off relentless choppy waves. Suddenly, the sky goes blood red and the horizon blackens, the sun a dull hole punched in the sky. Our view shifts, panning quickly to the left, then back again, as if searching for something, anything. The sky then changes again to a blinding sherbet yellow. The screen depicting this scene, mounted on a metal rack above a whirring circuit board, gives us a certain vision of our current reality. The shifting colors are a translation of information from a small atmospheric monitor mounted on the back of the rack. It’s not clear what directly causes the hues to brighten or waves to get that bit higher or more intense in Yuri Pattison’s sun[set] provisioning (2019) at mother’s tankstation—whether the car exhaust from the street outside, or the hungover breath from bodies in the room might make the scene that bit more trippy. The contraption offers a heavily mediated fiction, but it also makes an actuality visible and present: a drowned world, made hallucinatory and beautiful by toxins that saturate the air and …
15th Biennale de Lyon, “Where Water Comes Together with Other Water”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
The postindustrial exhibition site is a cliché of contemporary biennales, but Lyon’s Fagor factory has an engaging history. Founded in 1956, Spanish appliance manufacturer Fagor was for decades the largest industrial worker-owned cooperative in the world. When the company acquired Brandt, the new French subsidiary Fagor Brandt commanded a significant chunk of the European domestic goods market. In the 1980s, almost 2000 people worked at the Lyon factory producing washing machines; by the 2000s, only 400 were employed there. After the 2008 crash, when many people could no longer afford to buy houses, they stopped purchasing home appliances too. An attempted conversion to producing electric cars failed, and the factory closed in 2015. Floor markings that once directed the choreography of the production line remain, as do a handful of windowed structures, from which processes or workers were observed, alongside redundant machinery, and graffiti from the building’s vacant years. Abandoned on site, an absurd 2007 limited-edition top-loading washing machine upholstered in pink satin, by lingerie designer Chantal Thomass, bears witness to Fagor Brandt’s death throes.
While the main venue is monolithic, an immovable monument to a former industrial era, the exhibition emphasizes flows with a title borrowed from a …
Steirischer Herbst 2019, “Grand Hotel Abyss”
Kylie Gilchrist
The “Grand Hotel Abyss” is home to a cast of strange and varied characters, each sheltering from the raging incoherence of today’s world. Whether this lavish destination is a plush cover for paralysis or a temporary abode that opens to glimpses of something new is the knife-edged tension that the theme for this edition of the festival creates.
Director and chief curator Ekaterina Degot’s opening speech at Graz’s stately Landhaushof engaged the courtyard’s imperialist architecture to reflect on the imbrication of art, power, and hedonism at the core of the increasingly troubled European project. Her words announced the red thread weaving through the festival’s program, which balances the spectacular and performative alongside research-driven exhibitions and discussions, as well as ephemeral interventions, throughout Graz and the surrounding Styria region.
The opening extravaganza presented a carnivalesque counterpart to Degot’s trenchant speech, performatively reenacting the seductions of a lifestyle driven by pleasure, or Genuss in German. Genuss is something of an Austrian ideology, and visitors were invited to partake in this local variety of the value placed on aesthetic, culinary, and bodily enjoyment by the global elite—a commentary on the geopolitics of contemporary art running through the broader program. Festivities were hosted in the Neo-Renaissance …
Writing with Art
Nora Sternfeld / Emmanuelle Lainé
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Nora Sternfeld and Emmanuelle Lainé reflect together on Sternfeld’s essay on Lainé, “Working Conditions.”
Art-agenda: Let’s start from the beginning. By pairing a writer and an artist who were not previously connected, TextWork invites them to embark on a sort of blind date. What were your expectations for your meeting?
Nora Sternfeld: One summer day, out of the blue, I received a phone call. It was Emmanuelle Lainé. She presented herself as an artist from Marseille, with a growing interest in political questions and she invited me to contribute a text to a new project called TextWork, where an artist and a theorist meet. She asked me because, reading my situated writings, my positions seemed relevant to her, maybe even more to where she wanted to go than where she stood at that point. The outcome, she said, could be open and experimental, but should be a text that takes her work as a starting point. I did not know her work then, but her interests and ways of thinking, as well as the open and precise way she approached me, immediately …
Joan Jonas’s “Moving Off the Land II”
Barbara Casavecchia
In one of my earliest memories, I’m swimming alone in fins and goggles across a bay in the Adriatic Sea. Everything is illuminated: emerald seaweeds, milky pink actinias, chromed silver fish, and my legs shining like a mermaid’s tail. Which is magic: on terra firma, ichthyosis (from ichthys, Ancient Greek for fish) makes my skin scaly, so that, as etymology suggests and dermatology recommends, salt water is my natural element. Bodies and cells know best. As Joan Jonas likes to point out: “somewhere in our unconscious we remember that we come from the sea. It’s not a memory; it’s a feeling; it’s in our DNA. I think that’s where all these stories come from and our desire to go back to the sea, our desire to swim under water, which I love to do.”
In her multimedia installation Moving Off the Land II (2019), exhibited at Ocean Space in Venice and curated by Stefanie Hessler, we see Jonas swimming in a dress (red and polka-dotted, or dark and transparent) with a cloud of silver hair snaking gently around her head. In these videos, shot in Jamaica by filmmaker Cynthia Beatt, she looks like a luminous apparition, an aquatic creature whose …
Oslo Roundup
Orit Gat
The other day I learned the word flygskam (Swedish for flight shame), which feels like a necessary term for living today. I wrote and deleted several versions of this introduction, which all revolved around the unanswerable question of how to account for travel today, when it feels like a professional necessity, but also nonessential when the knowledge gained is read against the environmental harm that travel propagates. I found myself shamefully wondering if I went to Oslo to learn what I already knew.
To press this, I’ll start with artists whose work I’ve seen numerous times. At Kunstnernes Hus, Ed Atkins is showing as part of Silver Series, a retrospective of an artist’s videos in the institution’s cinema. Only Atkins rethought the format and instead of a screening series opted to make a new work collaged from footage taken from his old videos. Death Mask 5 (2019) combines images from over a dozen of his earlier works, including his CGI alter ego from Ribbons (2014), the haunting empty bedroom from Hisser (2015), and the boy playing a piano from Old Food (2017). It took some googling to remember the narratives of the original videos, and which figure came from where, …
Bergen Assembly 2019, “Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead”
Rachael Rakes
I am trying not to be cynical, I remind myself repeatedly, humming the words in a little song as I tour the exhibitions of the third edition of Bergen Assembly (BA). I am here to evaluate: the scanning and searching of that state makes this instinctual mental cold critique harder to quiet. This is not a biennial press junket kind of cynicism. Rather, this is something a little more desperate: the cynicism of repeated missed opportunities (and wasted resources) by those we sympathize with. Despite good intentions, these failures to reach; these failures to communicate.
Though similar in some ways—it is a large-scale, location-based, regularly occurring (triennial) art event—Bergen Assembly is not a traditional biennial. The initiative launched a decade ago, during the Bergen Biennial Conference, as a response to the global proliferation of biennials, and for the city to produce a show that would attract cultural capital without rehearsing the tokenisms and clichés of biennial culture: its artistic teams are given more agency to work with timing and format, and this has led to an emphasis on pedagogy, long-term projects, community engagement, and gatherings. The term “assembly” itself suggests a gathering, rather than, say, a show.
Titled “Actually, the Dead Are …
Lofoten International Art Festival 2019
Adam Kleinman
Fitting its island context, the 2019 Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) takes the intertidal zone as its inspiration, though, for the life of me, I had no idea what the intertidal zone was. After a quick dive into oceanographic terms, I learned that it is the area of land that meets the sea, and is either flooded or left open to the air, depending on the tide. Although the exhibition’s curators, Neal Cahoon, Torill Østby Haaland, Hilde Methi, and Karolin Tampere, present various works that take this phenomenon quite literally, they have also put together a festival that chooses to wade into spaces of translation and transitions between that which was and that which may come next.
Take, for example, artist Signe Lidén’s invigorating installation, The Tidal Sense (2019). Comprised of a 28-by-6-meter hemp canopy, the work is hung as a taut awning across one of the floors of the Lofotposten Building, a former newspaper complex that is one of the four exhibition spaces of this iteration of the biennial. Mapping the span of an intertidal zone in the nearby village of Ramberg, the work was first stretched across the shoreline so as to create a kind of sounding board in …
16th Istanbul Biennial, “The Seventh Continent”
Murat Alat
A psychiatrist friend once told me that most psychotic patients believe that they will see the apocalypse. If this argument is valid, nowadays either everyone is psychotic or the end of the world is really nigh. As a pessimist, I think both are possible.
The 16th iteration of the Istanbul Biennial, “The Seventh Continent,” is an exhibition about this deadlock. By considering the rise of fascism, misogyny, and the environmental crisis as indicators of this process, the exhibition displays the tragic results of human hubris but does not stop at this point. It creates new experiences and encounters to overcome the existing crisis. This biennial is not only an attempt to criticize society but also an attempt to establish new forms of being.
“The Seventh Continent” takes its name from the Great Pacific garbage patch—a gyre of mostly plastic debris, roughly 3.4 million square kilometers large, adrift in the Pacific Ocean. Curator Nicolas Bourriaud describes the exhibition as an anthropological study of this human-made territory. But the titular continent is more than an artificial landscape. It is, he claims, a way of living, a system of thought that has reached every part of contemporary life and attests to the inverted …
“Fragile Earth: seeds, weeds, plastic crust”
Crystal Bennes
“Man has no power of altering the absolute conditions of life; he cannot change the climate of any country […] It is an error to speak of man ‘tampering with nature’ and causing variability.” Charles Darwin wrote those words in 1868, nine years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. His view that human action has no lasting impact on nature remains widespread. It has underpinned disagreements among the geological community in determining whether or not humanity’s impact on the planet warrants its own named era: the Anthropocene. The conception of the Earth as a fragile system threatened by the actions of its human occupants, actions which could lead to adverse consequences on geological timescales, is relatively recent.
Given the steep rise in social and political attentiveness to climate change in recent years, it is hardly surprising that cultural institutions have followed suit. In 2019, a number of major exhibitions around the world have focused on nature and climate: “Broken Nature” at the Milan Triennale, Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in New York, and the travelling exhibition “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment” that opened at Princeton University Art Museum. London’s Tate Modern has tried to pass off the …
Mike Nelson’s “The Asset Strippers”
Jeremy Millar
The relationship of sculpture to industry and its processes is a long one, and heroic—think of all those bronze figures emerging from armory foundries, of Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi wandering jealously through the 1912 Paris Aviation Show, of Richard Serra rolling steel at a Baltimore shipyard—but seldom is it elegiac. Such a description would however be fitting for The Asset Strippers (2019), an extraordinary installation of sculptures by Mike Nelson. The work has been assembled from machinery and industrial materials and fixtures bought from auctions disposing of the assets of UK factories, although Nelson does not simply turn the expanse of Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries into a storehouse, but rather places them in new configurations. Despite the technical difficulties of moving these massive objects—their total weight is estimated to be approximately 40–50 tons, close to the loading capacity of the gallery floor—Nelson’s touch is assuredly light. Often little more is done than stacking objects on top of each other—a cement mixer is placed high upon two wooden work benches, its drum upturned as if yearning to peer even higher—but the effect is transformative. One begins to see them not only for what they once were, but for what else …
Paul Maheke’s “OOLOI”
Natasha Marie Llorens
In Octavia Butler’s classic sci-fi trilogy Xenogenesis (1987–89), the ooloi are a third-gender alien species of the Oankali. Notorious shape-shifters, they are the bioengineers of their kind and are able to gather genetic material from others and build that of their offspring, therefore embodying the complexity of queer kinship theories and the socio-political potential of a third subjective space. “OOLOI,” Paul Maheke’s exhibition at La Friche de la Belle de Mai, the former tobacco factory where Triangle France is located, borrows its title from Butler’s Oankali aliens.
In the space, Maheke suspended layer upon layer of diaphanous red fabric in large square panels from the ceiling of the massive open room. The fabrics undulate slightly in the wind created by fans placed on the floor along the length of the exhibition hall. Large theater spotlights click on and off abruptly, or glow slowly into force and then fade. Brass and copper spheres roughly the size of soccer balls are scattered on the floor throughout the space. Though daylight and the shadow of fabric moving are faintly reflected on the sculptures’ semi-polished surfaces, these orbs remain static, acting as anchors for everything “OOLOI” comprises but does not materialize: the unseen characters, the …
Laurie Parsons’s “A Body of Work 1987”
Amelia Groom
Not long before visiting Laurie Parsons’s exhibition at Mönchengladbach’s Museum Abteiberg, I had learned that the word “scrutiny” means “sorting garbage.” I was pretty pleased with the etymological alignment of the idea of critical examination with the condition of trashiness. To scrutinize is to look closely at that which otherwise goes unnoticed—but if trash can hold treasures, the reverse is also true; anything that has been sorted out can be turned back over to the generalized condition of the discarded.
Parsons, whose art career began with sorted garbage, is part of a lineage of artists whose work was once mistaken for worthless trash and thrown away: apparently, a well-meaning worker at a storage facility binned the rubble that the artist had collected for her work Field of Rubble (1988). She is also one of a number of artists remembered for having ghosted the art world. She started exhibiting in the mid 1980s, and less than a decade later (in what can be read as another act of scrutiny) she withdrew to do social work instead. Today, she mostly works as a service provider and advocate for people without homes and people with mental illnesses in and around New York City.
“A Body …
Dineo Seshee Bopape’s “Sedibeng, it comes with the rain”
Lauren Houlton
Dineo Seshee Bopape’s installation Sedibeng, it comes with the rain (2016), the one work on show in her exhibition at Eastbourne’s Towner Art Gallery, darts between person and place before gesturing upward. Sedibeng, a Sesotho word meaning “the place of the pool,” can be a person’s given name and is the name of a district in the Gauteng province of South Africa. The work’s title is an apt introduction to Bopape’s approach to material associations, which, through a process of collage, allows references to complicate, fracture, and loop back on themselves. There are many avenues through this work, all contingent upon the vantage point from which the viewer enters. Knowing where to begin is tricky, but it is also the joy of navigating the puzzle.
Six sculptures made from steel bars are adorned with crow’s feathers, medicinal herbs, spices, cut-out photographs of flowers and fruit, charm jewelry, bent copper wire, and green potters’ foam. The sculptures incorporate simple, geometric shapes such as ovals and triangles, amalgamating abstracted spiritual symbols drawn from cultures across the world. No information about these sources or materials is provided. As a result, understanding this exhibition can be a daunting challenge. Navigating the periphery of …
“City Prince/sses: Dhaka, Lagos, Manila, Mexico City and Tehran”
Sohrab Mohebbi
Just when certain worn-out frameworks of exhibition making appear to finally become obsolete, they are repackaged and mounted once again. The exhibition “City Prince/sses: Dhaka, Lagos, Manila, Mexico City and Tehran” seems like a throwback to 1990s curatorial expansionism, if not straight up nineteenth-century colonialism. Preliminary questions such as why these cities, why now, why in Paris, are not addressed, and no attempt is made to clarify the geographic focus of the show. The curatorial statement for the exhibition has deftly appropriated the hackneyed language of nonfixity and fluidity and eschews the more anthropological tone of the ’90s. Instead it presents a soft exoticism that is nominally reflexive, sealed in postcolonial lingo, and avoids salting the historical wounds of the local context by its geographic treatment, opting not to include any former French colonies. Therefore, the five cities’ “cultural, political and social singularities teem with numerous narratives which are all side-tracks providing glimpses into their identities, devoid of anything that could be univocal.” Yet the statement makes clear that the dissecting, omnipresent curatorial eye cut through these heterogeneous multiplicities, excavating glimpses into their equivocal identities. From this critical vista, the curator could not only present this multiplicity of positions, but …
Mother Tongue, Unholy Father
Ana Teixeira Pinto
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Ana Teixeira Pinto reflects on her monographic essay on Pauline Curnier Jardin’s work “The World Inside Out.”
It is a strange thing to be a writer who writes in a language that is not her mother tongue. Whenever I write in English—which is almost every time I write, and I write every day—I feel as if I am wearing heavy gear that weighs me down, slowing my pace. Constrained by my lack of vocabulary and grammatical shortcomings, I feel the text never soars, bogged down by doubt, dangling modifiers, subject-verb disagreements, and too many commas. The discomfort is heightened when speaking in public. The experience always feels like wearing a miniskirt that is too tight and too short: somehow your underwear always shows, no matter how composed you try to appear, you always feel exposed and ashamed (yes, I struggle with body image issues, in case you are wondering about my choice of examples). Writing at least has the advantage of allowing me to hide behind a thesaurus and Grammarly. Over the years, I have developed coping mechanisms. I became a syntax …
“Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery”
Philomena Epps
“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick,” wrote Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor (1978), “although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” This quote opens “Misbehaving Bodies” at the Wellcome Collection, which places Jo Spence’s healthcare work from the 1980s in conversation with Oreet Ashery’s 12-part web series “Revisiting Genesis” (2016). Through references to chronic and fatal illness, identity formation, medical discourse, and the politics of healthcare, the exhibition pays particular attention to how citizenship to the “kingdom of the sick” might productively disrupt and diversify common understandings of life and death, the body, and community.
Spence’s autobiographical artwork Beyond the Family Album (1979) takes the conventional form of the family photo album—photographs and press clippings are affixed to large sheets of paper, accompanied by captions and extended passages of text—but subverts the form by manifesting as a counter-archive of the self. By charting her divorce, her parents’ ill health, and her own struggles with chronic asthma, in addition to interrogating the invisibility …
Pio Abad’s “Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite”
Jeanne Gerrity
Pio Abad’s solo exhibition begins, paradoxically, with a work by another artist: The Bridge (To Sonny Rollins), a hard-edge painting from 1981 by Leo Valledor. This prologue to the main act serves a number of purposes. It connects the show to its site through a local artist (Valledor spent much of his life in San Francisco). It reminds us of the impossibility of divorcing art from politics: while the painting is a formal, abstract work with no apparent agenda, the accompanying text posits that Valledor’s lack of wide recognition as compared to his (white) peers was most likely related to his race (like Abad, he was of Filipino heritage). It also introduces Abad’s technique of deploying individual stories to deliberate on historical moments.
Over the past seven years, Abad’s work has engaged, both directly and obliquely, with the cultural legacy of the kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines with an iron fist from 1965 to 1986. Themes of mythmaking, collective memory, and amnesia are explored in this exhibition without dogma. Instead, Abad expresses the absurd cruelties of authoritarianism through quietly persuasive, poetic works. He plucks objects from history and expands their meanings through shifts in form and …
Nicolas Lobo’s "Wellness Center"
Rob Goyanes
Rather than the Belgian town of Spa, where, starting in the sixteenth century, the diseased and melancholic would drink chalybeate and engage in other watery therapies, I was in Detroit, sitting in SAUNA SHELF by Nicolas Lobo (all works 2019). The one-person octagonal sauna was encased in pink waterproof fabric, pulled taut and tie-dyed with black, marbled patterns. With deep breaths of the mist pumping in, my lungs and dermis chemically merged with the Vicks VapoRub and cuttings from the red cedar tree in the yard out front. This was the first recommended step in Lobo’s exhibition “Wellness Center,” located in the final project completed by artist Mike Kelley before his apparent suicide. Mobile Homestead (2006–13) is a replica of Kelley’s childhood home, a ranch-style house in the Detroit suburb of Westland. The full-size replica, which stands next to the parking lot of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, is used for community gatherings, AA meetings, and exhibitions unrelated to Kelley and his work. As I sat in Lobo’s sauna, an artwork within a larger artwork, listening to the hum of a nearby fridge, my senses of public and private, wellness and not-so-wellness, started webbing together.
Half an hour later, …
“Food: Bigger than the Plate”
Chris Fite-Wassilak
Welcome to a review of the latest blockbuster exhibition at the world’s largest museum of decorative and applied arts, focusing on the simple matter of food. As a precise, expansive look into the future of food, the exhibition includes a smorgasbord of over 70 artists, designers, and producers. I’ll be giving you a tasting menu.
To start, the appetizer is an assortment of the types of descriptions and phrases we use to talk about food, seasoned heavily with useless generalizations and limp truisms: we all eat; food connects us; food is more than just food; and so on. Such language dots the exhibition, presented on a bed of colorful, hyper-designed alcoves and panels, as we are led on a sumptuous journey through sections titled “Composting,” “Farming,” “Trading,” and “Eating.”
Our main courses are presented as a series of altars, spot-lit objects placed on pedestals, most often accompanied by a video of the people who made what sits in front of us, and some context as to why they made it. The first course is a pair of plastic toilets sitting side by side. We are apparently not intended to use them, but instead appreciate the plastic bag that lines the bowl. Loowatt’s …
The 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts
Tom Jeffreys
Question: How do hedgehogs have sex? Answer: very carefully.
Animals are represented at every turn across the 10 venues of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. In the main building, the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC), vitrines contain back issues of Slovenian satirical magazine Pavliha, its pages overflowing with lions and cows, lobsters and giraffes. An owl with a quill pen sinks its hooked bill into the ear of a man in a top hat. Upstairs, Sachiko Kazama’s punningly titled large-scale woodcut print Nonhuman Crossing (2013) shows a dystopian Tokyo alive with rat-faced soldiers, birds with human legs, and humans with beaks and wings. War-Pup (2005), also by Kazama, is a group portrait of fluffy white puppies wearing gas masks. “The harshest of all voices is the voice of the ass,” says an imam in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s film The All-Hearing (2014) about Islam and “loudspeaker libertarianism” in Cairo. The biennial’s logo is a hedgehog: its jaunty form a striking marker outside every venue.
We should not be surprised. The curatorial debut of the collective Slavs and Tatars, best known for their publishing and research projects, the 33rd edition of the biennial is an exploration of satire. With its etymological roots …
Agatha Gothe-Snape and Wrong Solo’s “Certain Situations”
Tara McDowell
Double bill aside, the current exhibition at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) is less a two-person show than a series of tentacular, prismatic relations and encounters that produce more relations, encounters, and situations, per the show’s title. Wrong Solo is an ongoing collaboration between Agatha Gothe-Snape (the ostensible solo artist here) and writer and performer Brian Fuata. Together, they debut a major new work, Five Columns, itself a collaboration with five interlocutors: Sonya Holowell, Ruark Lewis, Sarah Rodigari, Brooke Stamp, and Lizzie Thomson.
Five Columns occupies the most space—physically, but also emotionally, kinetically, and acoustically—in the exhibition. The first of its two rooms is an antechamber replicating the Sydney studio the two artists share, in which Five Columns was filmed, including lavender walls and royal blue carpet. Like a set or stage, the room conjures a sense of artificiality as well as propositional emptiness, a vacant staging ground charged with the sensation that something could happen there. Five screens hang in the center of the second room, each presenting a video that captures 10 minutes of a day-long improvisation session featuring Fuata, Gothe-Snape, and one of their five collaborators (or columns) as they move, stretch, talk, walk, engage, disconnect, film …
“The Enigma of the Hour: 100 Years of Psychoanalytic Thought”
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Psychoanalytical theory might have fallen out of favor in the visual arts, but the fields still share a number of core concerns. Both create conditions in which the unconscious can materialize through processes of language, translation, metaphor, and interpretation. With these common terrains as a starting point, Dana Birksted-Breen, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP), commemorates the journal’s centenary in an exhibition at London’s Freud Museum which comprises two overlapping threads. One maps the origins of the publication in a thoroughly researched cabinet display containing letters, photographs, paintings, and archaeological artifacts, including Egyptian sphinxes and Etruscan mirrors from Sigmund Freud’s collection. The research pays close attention to the role that women—most notably Joan Riviere, Marjorie Brierley, Anna Freud, and Alix Strachey—played in the development of the IJP. The materials also evidence a fascinating link to the Bloomsbury Group via two of its one-time editors: James Starchey, who with wife Alix translated Freud into English, and and his successor Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s younger brother. Both psychoanalysts are present via letters and issues of the journal and by two stunning portraits painted by Duncan Grant.
The exhibition’s second thread is curated by Simon Moretti and Goshka …
Condo New York
Orit Gat
I’m leaving New York in a month. The other night I told that to an acquaintance who asked if I had read Goodbye to All That (2013), a collection of writing about “loving and leaving New York.” I’ve only read the 1967 Joan Didion essay that gave the book its title. A friend suggested we go to the used bookstore around the corner. “They probably have a shelf dedicated to it,” I said.
“You see I was in a curious position in New York,” Didion writes: “it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.” She came for a few months and stayed for eight years. I came with an intention to stay, but “a real life” is elusive or impossible under the current political system. The third iteration of Condo New York, an initiative begun in London in 2016 in which local spaces host visiting galleries, opened in the same month MoMA closed for renovations as it soaks up the building of its displaced former neighbor the American Folk Art Museum, and in the same week I skipped an opening at the New Museum because I didn’t want to cross the picket line of its …
Suzanne Lacy’s “We Are Here”
Monica Westin
The dominant form of Suzanne Lacy’s work is dialogue. Deeply collaborative and painstakingly structured without being scripted, the conversations she produces combine formal elements of happenings (Allan Kaprow was one of her mentors) with politically focused content that is often activist in approach and always attuned to power as it plays out in the lives of everyday people. Lacy came of age as an artist during the beginnings of feminist art (she left a career in zoology to study with Judy Chicago), and her work from the 1970s first foreshadowed and later shaped much of what we now call social practice. Her thought has also been deeply intersectional long before most white feminists learned about the concept.
“We Are Here,” Lacy’s first major retrospective, is massive, spanning two very different institutions in San Francisco. (Currently based in Los Angeles, Lacy was previously the chair of what is now the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.) Curators from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts co-organized the exhibition, and the two arrays of Lacy’s work in their galleries offer different curatorial approaches to presenting an opus that itself operates largely as a …
Oslo Biennial
Barbara Casavecchia
“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were still coming, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing at all, there would be no present time.” Substitute “time” with “biennial” in these lines from Saint Augustine’s Confessions (397–400 CE), and you may find yourself at the inquisitive heart of the Oslo Biennial (OB)—a new infrastructure for art in public space that operates programmatically as a work in progress whose duration and outlines cannot be easily assessed.
This first edition—which, despite being called a “biennial,” will run until 2024—opened on the last weekend of May. It features 16 works, performances, and temporary projects spread around the city and the central venue in Myntgata 2, a municipally owned nineteenth-century building that hosts a visitor center, offices, film and radio production facilities, and over 60 artists’ studios. Ten new commissions will be unveiled next October, while others will be added (or reactivated in new …
The opposite of experience
Mike Sperlinger
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Mike Sperlinger reflects on his monographic essay on Laurent Montaron’s work, “Machine Learning.”
The exhibition I most regret not seeing is “Voids: A Retrospective,” which took place at the Pompidou Center in Paris ten years ago. The show was a restaging of nine works involving empty gallery spaces (Art & Language, Michael Asher, Maria Eichhorn, Laurie Parsons, and others). I bought a compensatory catalogue online: an almost parodically superdeluxe, 500-plus page production. But I regularly wish I had gotten on a Eurostar to walk through those (as I imagine them) repletely empty rooms.
What is the relation between experiencing something (or nothing) and writing about it? It seems, at first glance, incredibly obvious: that whereof we have not experience, thereof we must remain silent. How can you write about artworks you have never seen, for example? And yet we do, all the time, and I find myself asking, less and less rhetorically, what relationship artworks actually have to the meanings and experiences we ascribe to them.
Just over a year ago, I sat with Laurent Montaron in his farmhouse studio outside of Paris, …
Eliza Douglas’s “Josh Smith”
Eliza Douglas’s “Josh Smith”
Eliza Douglas’s “Josh Smith”
Christina Catherine Martinez
When I took a fiction workshop in community college, the professor had a rather solemn habit of handing everyone’s manuscripts back to them with a gnomic phrase of critique or encouragement. He’d stop at your desk, plop the thing down, and say something like “you’re not delivering the goods” or “the text is incorruptible” and the rest of the class would blush or cringe in empathy. One day he lingered in front of Matt, uncharacteristically nonplussed, before gently handing over Matt’s paper. “I don’t know how else to say this,” he said, “but…lesser writers spend years trying to figure out how to write this badly.”
The rest of the class looked at one another, unsure of whether to laugh with Matt or at him, or ourselves.
Looking at Eliza Douglas’s work brings up all of this. Her paintings are awkward but somehow cool, deadpan but not cynical, unskilled but self-aware, surfeit with gall but not bravado. Douglas embodies an elusive up-to-the-second vibe, the je ne sais quoi of late-capitalist modernity, found also in the flat, sure-footed prose of Natasha Stagg, the low-register vocal fry of the girls of the Red Scare podcast. It’s a kind of affectlessness. (While writing …
Raqs Media Collective’s “Still More World”
Mark Rappolt
In recent years, the route from India to Qatar has been heavily and not uncontroversially travelled by hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Almost a quarter of Qatar’s estimated 2.6 million population is Indian; there are more newspapers printed in Malayalam (the principal language of the South Indian state of Kerala) than in Arabic or English; and in 2019, India is Qatar’s partner nation in a year of cultural exchange. Although in some ways that last might be the icing on a cake that is already baked.
It’s fitting then that Raqs Media Collective’s contribution to this cultural union opens with a new work (one of two in this 16-work, eight-year survey) that is simultaneously site specific and imported. Located in Mathaf’s atrium, Dohas for Doha (2019) introduces some of Raqs’s favorite themes: translation, migration, doubling, and miscegenation. It comprises five dohas—aphorisms in the form of rhyming couplets, a type of Hindi poetry most famously deployed by the fifteenth-century Indian mystic Kabir (who occupies a double position as both a Muslim and a Hindu saint). Each flashes up on an LED screen in English and Arabic and is ostensibly a comment about Raqs’s process of creation—“This doha talks in shadow speech …
Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda’s “The Auratic Narrative”
Helena Tatay
The title of Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda’s exhibition, “The Auratic Narrative,” alludes to the kind of stories collectively told and repeated by art professionals to frame artists or their works in a way that contributes to their aura, or their presentation as unique and authentic, while creating “fictional expectations” of a future success.
Text and art wrestle throughout the show, which is divided into four chapters, each of which takes up one floor of the Kölnischer Kunstverein and includes, alongside the works, a long introductory text by the artists, who write in a singular I. Surprisingly, the speech of this self is molded from an amalgam of quotes from other artists. On the wall at the entrance, the text for the first chapter begins, “I hate competition, but the reality is that artists are engaged in a kind of race,” and carries on about the roles and games artists must play to achieve success. If the four chapters’ narratives, articulated as four stages in an artist’s life, have a personal, emotional tone that is easy to empathize with, the works are displayed in a sober, hermetic presentation. No text, only a leaflet with a floorplan and the works’ titles. …
Shilpa Gupta and Zarina’s “Altered Inheritances: Home is a Foreign Place”
Mahan Moalemi
The inaugural exhibition at the nonprofit Ishara Art Foundation—the newest addition to Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, an art and culture hub housed in a former industrial compound—is built around an intergenerational dialogue between two Indian artists, Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976) and Zarina (b. 1937). Curated by artistic director Nada Raza, the show is a clear mission statement that sets the agenda for an artistic platform concerned with contemplating South Asia and the Gulf from a transnational perspective. Drawing on a wide array of each artist’s works, the exhibition allows for anecdotal as well as formal undercurrents to surface and resonate with each other.
Zarina’s “Home is a Foreign Place” (1999) is a double inauguration. Comprising a series of 36 woodcuts, the work sets the conceptual tone for the show and lends one of its motifs (Aasman [Sky]) to the foundation’s logo: a delicate, geometric pattern of rectangles, squares, and circles in perfect symmetry. In each of the woodcuts, processes of abstraction and translation feed into textual, visual, and numerical markers of how the artist relates her own life to ideas of home and belonging. Faasla [Distance] shows a straight line with “7438 miles” written above it—the distance between Aligarh in …
Basel Roundup
Ingo Niermann
Next year, Art Basel turns 50, and animals are still not allowed. There’s not even a “Pets Lounge,” as there is for kids, even though the fair’s premises are big enough to host a whole circus. Art Basel was founded in 1970, a year before Swiss women gained suffrage. Women were allowed in the fair from the very beginning, but animals will probably have to achieve parliamentary representation before the fair will welcome them. While male collectors of visual art have long been fine with consulting their wives and mistresses, they tend to ignore the taste of their pets. Probably not because they give women’s taste on visual art more importance but because it allows them to bond in placid, post-sexual ways. Sounds boring? That’s what non-humans must think about visual art.
Entertainment needs surprise and trust needs solidity. Visual art tries to combine both: to make a joke that works forever. All arts are polluted by this uncanny ambition, but only visual art confronts us as a permanent physical manifestation. In that sense, it shares similar traits with nationalism. Both intend to eternally occupy Earth’s limited space. Nationalism has caused far more casualties and suffering, because artworks can’t fight …
Sol Calero’s “Archivos Olvidados”
Sofia Lemos
For her first exhibition at Berlin gallery ChertLüdde, Sol Calero transformed the typical German altbau into a luminous and colorful family home inspired by the artist’s grandmother’s farmhouse in Los Llanos, Venezuela, a grassland plain south of Caracas, where Calero and her cousins spent the summer months.
In Jesús Martín-Barbero’s seminal study of the role of media in the formation of national cultures in Latin America, social memory emerges as vivid mise-en-scène where popular iconography and labor struggles are ambiguously combined, creating a new social sensibility predicated on access to forms of expression. Experiencing and expressing the world becomes a matter of public fiction, wherein moments of systemic muting and glossing over the collective archive grow deeply entwined with class imaginaries. In this recurring scenario, oral histories, with their warranted omissions and excesses, reclaim an important effort in tracing personal and social routes. For Calero, the turn from personal archive to social space lays the foundation for “Archivos Olvidados” [Forgotten Archives], a thoughtful tribute to the fluidity of memory, childhood anxieties, and the artist’s late grandmother, the painter Luisa Hernandez, lovingly referred to as “Abuli.”
As a widow, Hernandez raised six children, studied fine art in Caracas, and returned to Los Llanos …
In conversation with Stockholm’s Mint
Frida Sandström
In 1939, the German artist Hans Tombrock (1895–1966) inscribed the words of his contemporary Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 poem “Questions From a Worker Who Reads” onto a wooden board. Both in exile from the Nazis, Brecht and Tombrock met in Stockholm earlier in 1939. They collaborated on several works and developed a longstanding dialogue on art in the workers’ movement, a set of riots and strikes at the turn of the twentieth century, and the institutionalization of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), and social security. This spring, Tombrock’s piece, which borrows its title from Brecht’s poem, was exhibited in the group show “Den folkliga självstyrelsens livsluft” [The air which the autonomy of the people breathe] in Stockholm, alongside contemporary artworks that explore labor, exhaustion, and leisure. It was the first exhibition at Mint, a new non-profit art space in Stockholm founded and run by curators Emily Fahlén and Asrin Haidari. Last year, together with artist Thomas Hämén, Fahlén and Haidari curated the 2018 edition of the Luleå Biennial in northern Sweden. Titled “Tidal Ground,” the biennial critically investigated the local and global extraction of natural resources and workforces, alongside the role of art in antifascist …
Carsten Höller’s “Sunday”
Terence Trouillot
I was required to make a choice upon entering Rufino Tamayo’s famed museum in Chapultepec park in Mexico City. Wait up to an hour (or more) in line to crawl through Decision Tubes (2019), an interconnected web of mesh tunnels suspended in the sundrenched atrium that leads to different areas of the museum, or skip the wait and walk through Seven Sliding Doors (2014), a wall-to-wall mirrored hallway with automatic sliding doors that lead viewers into the main gallery space. These are the introductory artworks that open “Sunday,” Carsten Höller’s first survey in Latin America. Though the works in the exhibition all seem to promise a certain sense of amusement and playfulness, they are at best bewildering and surprisingly not fun.
This is not to say that Decision Tubes (myself and a group of friends finally decided to wait in line, begrudgingly) doesn’t spark a certain childlike glee, or at the very least a novelty experience, when awkwardly squirming through it. The work reminded me of a McDonald’s PlayPlace at every turn—a play area that most American children who grew up in the 1990s can remember with great fondness. But unlike its predecessor Decision Corridors (2015), a maze-like structure of …
Cici Wu’s “Unfinished Return”
Leo Goldsmith
The “unfinished return” in the title of New York–based artist Cici Wu’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong refers to a legendary incident in the city’s recent history. In August 2000, Yu Man Hon, a 15-year-old autistic boy, was separated from his mother in an MTR metro station in Kowloon. Somehow, the young man made it to a checkpoint at Hong Kong’s border with Shenzhen, where he was able to cross into Mainland Chinawithout identity documents. Once on the other side of the border, unable to make his way back to Hong Kong, Yu disappeared, never to be found.
For many, the story of Yu resonated as an allegory of Hong Kong’s relations with Mainland China in the early days following the handover of the former British colony to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. There is indeed the shocking indifference of the authorities, especially in dealing with the most vulnerable. But there is also the sense of loss, of blurred national and cultural identities, and of the border as a liminal zone where one’s very body might dissolve into evanescence. Revisiting the story some 20 years later, Wu’s exhibition ponders the cultural resonance of Yu’s ambiguous fate, even offering …
David Hammons’s “Ted Joans: Exquisite Corpse”
Bruno Marchand
David Hammons has long been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the so-called art world. While his professed admiration for Marcel Duchamp appears to have brought him a clear sense of the symbolic and transformational power that contexts confer to objects, it has offered an even sharper awareness of how the mythographic, star-making mechanics of the art world can be used in his favor. The ongoing mythography that has defined the latter part of Hammons’s career—his no-shows at his own openings, his reluctance to engage with critics and the press, his refusal to comment publicly on an “unauthorized” retrospective at Harlem gallery Triple Candie in 2006, thereby leaving open the possibility that the exhibition was his idea—now arrives in one of Lisbon’s most interesting venues, Lumiar Cité, which serves as a platform to promote yet another chapter of this story.
At the heart of “Ted Joans: Exquisite Corpse” is a peculiar version of the famous Surrealist game that poet, musician, and artist Ted Joans initiated in 1976 and which ended in 2005, two years after his death. As the title suggests, Joans conceived Long Distance Exquisite Corpse as a travelling exquisite corpse that would find its 132 invited contributors in different …
Peter Friedl’s “Teatro”
Raimar Stange
Puppet theater is something you don’t see often in an art exhibition, and here the characters are four historical figures who were important in times of transition in diverse ways: John Chavafambria, known as the “Black Hamlet” of psychoanalysis; Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company; violinist Julia Schucht, the wife of Antonio Gramsci; and Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804. Rooted in disparate places and times, the protagonists of Peter Friedl’s puppet show The Dramatist (Black Hamlet, Crazy Henry, Giulia, Toussaint) (2013) enact potential performances of counterfactual historical narratives. These productions do not follow such conventions as the description of a linear sequence of events, accepted historical research or its usual forms of representation—they remain in the realm of the possible. Concurrently denied, the puppets hanging there lifelessly await their use even though their strings are hung so high that playing them would be impossible.
Change of scene: the video installation Report (2016) stands at the center of “Teatro,” this remarkable, critical exhibition which dissects hegemonic forms of thought. The work, previously shown at Documenta 14 (2017), initially shows the stage of the National Theatre of Greece in Athens, empty, with no stage design and hardly any …
August to May, The Years and a Day’s Work, Writing is a Way of Reading
Orit Gat
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Orit Gat reflects on her monographic essay on Alain Séchas’s work, “Vacances.”
Essays have invisible bibliographies. The books that are on your desk when writing. The books you reach to because something you looked at or thought about reminds you of something you once read. Books in which you find something new through writing.
I remember what I was reading when I was in France last July. I took the train from London to meet Alain Séchas in Paris. We then took a train together to see his exhibition, “Passe-temps,” at the Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix in Sables d’Olonnes. On both train rides, I read the same book, Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008). It was just published in English. Somehow, I had never heard of Ernaux until that summer. (This is not true: in December, I found a copy of La Place, for which she won the Prix Renaudot, at my parents’ house. The price is in francs. I must have bought it as a teenager and forgotten it on a visit more than a decade ago.) But it seemed fitting …
Plants
Patrick J. Reed
Severed ears make for convenient plot points—they signal instant mystery. An example: To whom did the pair of ears in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500) once belong, and what in the actual hell are they now? Yoked by an arrow and sandwiching a blade, this pictorial element of the Medieval altarpiece is the act of ear amputation compressed into a single, mythological being. The Christian context makes for an easy segue to another moment of religious conjuring: Christ’s last miracle before crucifixion; the replacement of Malchus’s ear (lopped off by Simon Peter) in the Garden of Gethsemane. Recounted in the Gospels but considered apocryphal by some, the story is doubtless a parable about the consequences of blasphemy. It provides a clue as to the meaning of Bosch’s monster.
Hear no evil.
Ear amputation is the most agreeable, maybe the most forgivable, type of mutilation to the human face. Unlike eye gouging or nose cutting, ear amputation creates a surface wound; the orifice is neither widened nor deepened, and the inner organ retains its basic function. Ear amputation is also the furthest logical extent to ear yanking, that schoolyard punishment exerted by bullies and authorities alike. Perhaps …
79th Whitney Biennial
Travis Diehl
Remember when America was hard to see? Boy, is it obvious now. The Whitney Biennial 2019, curated by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, has a marked interest in the alter-local, doing some overdue national soul-searching, as well as catching up to artists who have been doing this kind of reparative work all along. There is Joe Minter from Birmingham, Alabama, whose assemblages of rusty tools and metal imagine an “African village” in America, a stunning euphemism that is lost on no one. The agglomerations of plant matter and mass commodities by Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos (such as Maria-Maria [2019], in which an emergency FEMA tarp clothes a Virgin-like figure) are at once elusively bitter, ritualistic, and ruthlessly compromised, like a straw on a Caribbean beach. Curran Hatleberg’s lucid photographs document America’s rural poor over the past decade: folks on their stoops between weedy squares of lawn (Untitled [Front Porch], 2016), children in what seems like the aftermath of a natural disaster (Untitled [Girl with Snake], 2016), a half-dozen men in an auto junkyard waiting (for what?) around a fresh, grave-sized pit (Untitled [Hole], 2016). A half-hour video by Steffani Jemison, Sensus Plenior (2017), portrays a gospel mime in Harlem …
Janet Laurence’s “After Nature”
Claudia Arozqueta
“After Nature,” the latest exhibition by Australian artist Janet Laurence, calls on its viewers to become aware of the interconnectedness and interdependence of the natural world at a time when the pernicious impact of humans on nature is evident. To create this recognition, the Sydney-based artist refers in several of her works to the act of breathing and to illness.
Respiration unites almost all living organisms: we are a breathing biosphere. Plants, animals, and humans depend and are co-dependent on the consumption and generation of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The essential rhythmic cycle is a vital and restorative force, and, like nature, it is something that humans take for granted unless signs of sickness are perceived. This dismissal of nature is the concern at the foundation of Laurence’s work.
With ecological devastation and climate crisis looming on the horizon, Laurence engages with plants and animals endangered by habitat deprivation. Cellular Gardens (Where Breathing Begins) (2005) shows endangered plant specimens from the Australian rainforest in glass vials resting on metal stands, all connected to long silicon breathing tubes. By presenting these threatened plants as intubated patients who need assistance to breathe, Laurence aims to generate empathy. However, more than achieving an emotional resonance …
Brussels Roundup
Chloe Stead
Often referred to as the chocolate capital of the world, it’s said that no visit to Brussels is complete without a trip to one of the city’s famous chocolate shops. In Hank Willis Thomas’s exhibition “Donnez votre main” at Maruani Mercier, the American artist shows a new body of work which posits an uncomfortable truth: Belgium’s predilection for chocolate is explicitly linked to its colonization of Congo under King Leopold II. The grizzly practice of cutting off the hands of the wives and children of workers who didn’t meet the king’s strict quotas for natural resources like cocoa, ivory, and rubber is represented throughout the exhibition, most notably in a collection of framed Antwerpse handjes—traditional Belgian chocolates shaped like hands—which Willis Thomas has arranged into patterns traditionally associated with Congolese textiles. The rest of the exhibition is dedicated to a number of screenprints mostly based on archival photographs of Belgium and Congo during colonization—made on retroreflective material that is only fully revealed when photographed. It can sometimes feel tedious, if not downright gimmicky, to view an exhibition through a cellphone screen, but this is an admittedly clever way of linking historic examples of exploitation and human rights abuses in Congo …
58th Venice Biennale, “May You Live in Interesting Times”
Adam Kleinman
Gemini came a little too early to Venice. While the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale was clearly born under the sign of Taurus, the exhibition’s mood is that of the mercurial twins who oscillate between opposing states of mind. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the exhibition’s title, mired in borrowed orientalist apocrypha, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” ambiguous mirroring is the true structuring principle of the show. To this end, the curator of the international exhibition, Ralph Rugoff, played his two houses—the Arsenale and the International Pavilion in the Giardini—against each other by having each of the participating artists present work in both venues. The effect of this maneuver creates an odd form of creative bookkeeping wherein 79 artists are stretched to perform the work of 158.
Rugoff’s display is likewise dotted by recombinant forms as salient features of works are meant to act as anchors, but end up flattening the art into objects grouped rather glibly by kind or theme as opposed to intention, code, or context. For example, repetitions of sculptures based on the same source material such as Arthur Jafa’s series of chained monster truck tires, “Big Wheel” (2018), that I read as …
Allan Sekula’s “Photography, A Wonderfully Inadequate Medium”
Kylie Gilchrist
In one gruelingly unedited scene of Allan Sekula’s three-hour film essay Lottery of the Sea (2006), a figure suited head-to-toe in white Tyvek hauls a gluey black lump across a slate-gray jetty. Steely waves wash up pebbles of oil, which she collects by rolling or smashing the lump upon them. Her mass will soon be lobbed into a rubber basket, foisted up a dune by a chain of hands, and deposited in a sea of oily baskets awaiting removal. The labor of viewing this protracted sequence faintly echoes its subject: the Sisyphean task of cleaning an oil spill on Spain’s Galician coast, accomplished by volunteers and by hand. In a world where most things are—as Sekula says of a Greek fish market at the film’s start—“fresh but dead,” the scene’s weary, weather-worn figures testify to the fragile solitaries born in struggles to resist the wholesale extermination of human and non-human life.
The film is housed in a screening room at the center of an exhibition purportedly dedicated to Sekula’s photography, underscoring the latter medium’s distinctive feature for the artist: its insufficiency. True to the exhibition’s title, photography’s limitations are foregrounded throughout. The opening sequence of works features Sekula’s early engagement …
Ericka Beckman and Marianna Simnett
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Daisy Hildyard
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Marianna Simnett’s videos, currently on show at FACT Liverpool, are played on a continuous loop, so you can’t tell how they begin. The same blonde girl is sent on hallucinatory adventures in The Udder (2014) and Blood (2015): inside a cow’s udder, around an Albanian mountain, through agricultural machinery, and up her own nose. The narratives are, in both senses, loopy, and the videos are screened in a square room on adjacent walls: while you watch one, the visuals of the other flicker in the corner of your eye. The effect is disorientating. Viewers were squirming.
Simnett’s videos are notoriously visceral. The Udder shows the dissection of a cow’s teat; Blood gives a keyhole-view of a brutal operation, and has two personified nose-bones gnawing on a septum, complete with gristly slurping sounds. But Simnett’s third work in the exhibition challenges in a different way. Faint with Light (2016) is a room with a large panel of white striplights which flash, irregularly, in correspondence with a reverberating soundtrack of the artist hyperventilating violently until she passes out. It’s physically uncomfortable in there. The show asks how far your body is willing to go, whether it’s because Blood makes you feel squeamish, …
What to fall back on
Rachel Valinsky
Once a month, art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Ricard Foundation, jointly publish a Meta text. Here, Rachel Valinsky reflects on her monographic essay on Eva Barto’s work, “Eva Barto’s Gamble.”
There’s trouble in achieving writing’s focus when its objects are most evasive. A year ago, I was writing about an artist, Eva Barto, whose work is willfully fugitive: few photographs of it exist or are available, while its operations and internal mechanisms are complex, inscribed within set logics and systems though often upturning or diverting them from within. I went to visit her in Paris and we spent hours talking about her work in a café near Canal Saint-Martin and continued to send her questions to which she graciously responded over Skype and email after I returned to New York. Finally, I had filled myself to the brim with details of process, form, and reference. I paid intense attention to relations between things brought into focus by someone other than myself, but offered to me so that they might take on, through the text I was writing, some complementary expression and precision. I looked for what poet Lyn Hejinian once described as the writer’s paradise when I finally …
Siah Armajani’s “Follow This Line”
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Ania Szremski
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“Habit is like a cotton blanket. It covers up all the sharp edges, and it dampens all noises,” Vilém Flusser mused in his 1984 essay “Exile and Creativity.” Comfortable and self-affirming, the familiar is “a mud bath where it is nice to wallow.” There’s a sensation of wading into that warm gooey tub when you first encounter Minneapolis-based artist Siah Armajani’s sculptures from the 1970s at his Met Breuer retrospective, “Follow This Line.” His models of houses, bridges, rooms, and gates draw from an old-timey tradition of plain vernacular architecture gleaming with middle-American wholesomeness, but look a little closer, that air of comfort turns out to be a trick—an innocently nondescript bridge doesn’t let you out the other side, a dependably sober log house refuses entry, a Norman Rockwell main street is shuttered and shrouded in black. The noises of strangeness rush in, forebodingly.
For the expelled, who has been uprooted from a life of cozy continuity, “everything becomes unusual, monstrous, in the true sense of the word un-settling,” Flusser wrote. And it’s this perception of the world that drives the exiled “to discover the truth” of experience, inconstant and fractious. In her catalog essay for “Follow This Line,” curator Clare …
Hana Miletić’s “Materiale”
Vincent van Velsen
Encompassing both surrounding environment and exhibition, tactile transitions define Hana Miletić’s solo show at LambdaLambdaLambda gallery. The first work in the exhibition, taken from a series collectively titled “Softwares” (2018–19) and displayed in the gallery’s entrance, is made from varieties of gray thread. This “pictorial weaving”—the term Anni Albers used to describe hand-woven artworks rather than fabric for everyday use—consists of a pattern vertically repeated four times.
Roving the streets of her hometown of Zagreb, or her current home of Brussels, Miletić documents found situations and portrays them in her work. One “Softwares” piece, dated 2018, is an abstracted image of a photograph Miletić took of something she saw on the street, a broken car window fixed with tape: the kind of makeshift repair people do when pragmatism is encouraged by financial necessity. Such traces of necessity and care—protection, maybe—are among Miletić’s central interests. The shape that defines the pattern of this “Softwares” work is also based, in part, on the machine it was made on: a Jacquard loom. Developed to produce household textiles, the loom’s efficient design replicates any given pattern four times. “Softwares” also evidences an artistic process of translation, in which a reparation becomes a photograph, …
New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse & Emilija Škarnulytė)’s “Erotics of Counter-Prospecting”
André Gali
Situated at the intersection of science, new materialist philosophy, film, and contemporary art, New Mineral Collective are an artist duo formed in 2012 by Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė. Their work questions geography, landscape, ecology, and human relations with nature. It comes as no surprise that their exhibition, “Erotics of Counter-Prospecting,” ventures into diverse landscapes of varying geopolitical significance: Svalbard, Kirkenes, Las Vegas, the Dead Sea. At times, landscapes of snow, ice, earth, and mountains resemble skin, able to give and receive touch and warmth. The works open a space for a sensual connection with nature. As I move through the gallery, Susan Sontag’s famous words in Against Interpretation (1964) keep coming back to me: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
The exhibition opens with Hollow Earth, a widely shown and reviewed film from 2013. It shows poetic images of snowscapes and mines at Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Norway, where coal mining was once the core activity but is almost abolished today. New to this exhibition is the transfer of Hollow Earth from HD video to 16mm film. The sound of the projector and the grainy images …
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “First Person Plural”
Stefanie Hessler
Who was Lynn Hershman Leeson between 1965 and 1994? The Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Móstoles, a city just southwest of Madrid, is showing “First Person Plural,” focusing on three decades of Hershman Leeson’s oeuvre. The exhibition pivots on questions of identity, technology, and the female, or rather woman-identified, body. As the title suggests, in sidestepping fixed notions of identity of herself as a person and as a woman artist, while considering cyborgian possibilities and the limits of technology, Hershman Leeson’s work today feels relevant and historical at once.
The first work on view in the modest-sized exhibition is The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson (1984–96), distributed over four screens installed one behind the other. In these confessional and often disturbing video diaries, the artist films herself as she speaks directly to the camera, telling stories of her youth, physical and psychological abuse, binge eating, and trouble with self-acceptance, which are interspersed with sequences of news coverage. The connection of current affairs with diaristic accounts anchors the work in second-wave feminism’s assertion that the personal is political. For instance, a statement of Ronald Reagan dismissing the Iran-Contra affair is followed by Hershman Leeson’s ruminations on lying, betrayal, …
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s “The Word for World is Forest”
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s first major solo show in the UK is a surprisingly understated affair. Comprising two new and two existing works across two galleries, the show’s modesty is not only quantitative, but also aesthetic. Best known for his appealing curtains of colored aluminum mesh, which have occupied gallery spaces and fair booths across the world, in this exhibition the Rio de Janeiro–based artist has embraced more inconspicuous gestures.
A new commission, Living Thoughts (2019), brings the biodiversity of the Atlantic Forest into a brightly lit white cube. This rainforest, which stretches along the Atlantic coast of Brazil and into parts of Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina, is home to some 23,000 species of plants and more than 2,000 species of animals. But with only 7 percent of its original extent preserved, it has become Brazil’s most endangered ecosystem. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, two of the world’s largest cities, were built over areas of the forest.
At the gallery, dozens of native plants protrude from hand-blown vases shaped like branches. Ferns, bromeliads, cactuses, and orchids sprout out of the small orifices of the transparent vessels, which are either resting on the floor or hanging from the ceiling at the height they …
Andrea Geyer’s “On this day”
Ksenia M. Soboleva
A series of slide projectors are supported by stacks of books and pieces of wooden furniture. The space is darkened, only illuminated by streams of light exuding from the projectors, as well as the images they produce: a range of abstract squares and rectangles in various shades of white that linger on the walls in a quiet rhythm. From a handful of speakers spread across the room, a recording is transmitted, with the sound of the artist’s voice, speaking English with a subtle German accent.
Titled Feeding the Ghost (2019), this multimedia installation is the centerpiece of Andrea Geyer’s current solo show at the Hales Gallery. The project was originally conceived as a performance lecture delivered by Geyer at Dia Art Foundation in September 2018. Indeed, this installation mimics the interior Geyer created at Dia, where she performed her lecture around an audience seated in the middle of the room, surrounded by small wooden classroom tables. The artist sat and read at each table for about 15 minutes, before switching to the next, while the audience’s gaze followed her, some awkwardly rotating their chairs. The text Geyer reads is always the same, an intimate account of her watching Chantal Akerman’s one-hour …
Sophia Al-Maria’s “BCE”
Philomena Epps
Sophia Al-Maria’s exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery—in which two films are separated by a thick PVC industrial strip curtain, one screened in a room painted black, the other white, one rooted in the future, the other the past—is the culmination of her position as the gallery’s writer in residence. Over the last year, the artist organized a series of associated events (intended specifically for women and non-binary guests) that correspond with the rhapsodic narrative texts written for the Whitechapel website: “We Share the Same Tears,” “We Swing Out Over the Earth,” and “We Ride and Die With You.”
Al-Maria was inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which posed an alterative, non-linear, feminist form of storytelling realized through speculative fiction. In the essay, Le Guin writes that the first useful tool for humans is a carrier bag for food—“a leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container”—rather than the “sticks and spears and swords” of masculine domination. For her, the carrier bag becomes a metaphor for the telling of multiple stories that resists the narrative of the “bashing, thrusting, raping, killing” …
Hong Kong Roundup
Marcus Yee
Hong Kong floats, at least according to Xi Xi’s short story, “The Floating City.” In this sensitive portrait of Hong Kong, the city has stabilized into myth, while its inhabitants have turned into a group of happily amnesiac petits bourgeois, desiring only for peaceful homes. After a few years of toil, the city became prosperous and cosmopolitan, boasting art festivals and books from all over the world. The floating city was a miracle.
This sensation of floating is best captured by Art Basel Hong Kong’s public art section, “Encounters.” In Elmgreen & Dragset’s City in the Sky (2019), the global financial metropolis is literally turned upside-down; whereas Lee Bul’s Willing To Be Vulnerable – Metalized Balloon (2019), a shiny emblem of high modernity’s aspirations and failures, hangs languorously from the convention center’s ceiling. By virtue of their scale, these spectacles were well received by a public hungry to update their WeChat or Instagram feeds. At same time, looking at these monuments aloft in the air, the question remains: What keeps everything afloat?
This was also the source of trepidation by inhabitants of Xi’s floating city. Unnerved by the possibility of an Icarian fall, they wished to pack up and leave the city …
Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s “The Conditions”
Alan Gilbert
A gaze without a frame might be a form of direct perception, or, in the digital age, unprocessed information. Frames are always accompanied by categories, which in turn bring their histories and memories along with them. In this sense, a gaze is only as powerful as the frames and categories, discourses and institutions that support it. When attached to an apparatus for seeing, a gaze becomes structural or systemic. It should also be remembered that a gaze, as feminist scholars and theorists of race have insisted, is an aperture that holds the potential to open onto physical violence.
This may seem a grim way to introduce Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs, which attentively celebrate queer identities and relations. Yet what is most striking about Sepuya’s current exhibition, “The Conditions,” is how strongly it foregrounds the camera’s gaze and the studio as site of image-making. Using sets fashioned from wood, mirrors, and black velvet drapery, Sepuya constructs carefully composed photographs. These images feature his camera, parts of his body, and on one occasion—A Portrait (0X5A6109) (2017)—his entire figure reflected in mirrors.
This desire to oversee both sides of the gaze is crucial to Sepuya’s photographic practice, with its blending of portrait and self-portrait. A …
Madrid Roundup
Andrew Berardini
“Slightly shattered shards of substance thrown within the grasp of the current of a river / Ligeramente dañados pedazos de sustancia arrojados a la merced de la corriente de un río”: you read Lawrence Weiner’s writing in English and Spanish splattered across a wall as the flow of humans drags you through the endless booths of the art fair. (Was it Galería Horrach Moya from Palma de Mallorca? The tide moved too quickly to catch it.) You’re not sure if you’re the shards or the art is or you both are, but you know that the river is ARCOmadrid 2019. Spain’s biggest art fair has distinctive qualities. The giant convention center simultaneously hosts an air-conditioning convention, a huge concentration of Latin American galleries, planeloads of VIPs flown in for private conferences, along with a scatter of curated sections trying to find distinctive voices amongst the glut all the other fairs. Frieze LA last week, Armory next.
Into the limestone bench of RAPTURE (2017), Jenny Holzer carved “Rapture Screamed Toward the Clouds.” The poetic clarity and political force of Hauser & Wirth’s booth, dedicated to a survey of over 30 years of the artist’s work, set a mood. In MOVE (2015), …
Cady Noland
Laura McLean-Ferris
A “gross internalization of the game at its most spartan” is how Cady Noland described the mechanism of psychopathy in her urtext “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil.” It’s one description of several in that cold read of power dynamics in 1980s America, that (it has been frequently noted) also apply to the artist’s own work. Her sculptures glint with something stark and cruelly observed, and include potent symbols that have been weaponized in the shaping of North America: guns, handcuffs, walls, flags, celebrities, and beer are orchestrated into cool metallic frameworks. One of art’s most famous absentees, Noland ceased to exhibit new work in the early 2000s, and has declined to make or authorize exhibitions for much of that time. That makes this grimly elegant survey show at Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), curated by Susanne Pfeffer, a rare event of some note. Magnificently executed, the exhibition features more than 80 works as well as a number of consonant works by artists in MMK’s collection such as Charlotte Posenenske, Andy Warhol, and Steven Parrino.
The brutal and asocial qualities of Noland’s work are accentuated by the particularities of MMK’s large isosceles exhibition spaces. Hans Hollein’s architecture, which has a viewing-machine quality …
Suzanne Jackson’s “holding on to a sound”
Jennifer Piejko
Suzanne Jackson was drawing two lines by 1968: One she traced over and over in watercolors and oils and strange new acrylics, of wingspans and the receding landscapes of her adolescence; the other was a limit, drawing a boundary against a relentless decade and the demands of her contemporaries.
Her lines intersected at Gallery 32. Sectioning off half of her live-work studio in the Spanish-style Granada Buildings in MacArthur Park, Jackson handed the floor over to her classmates and teachers from the then-nearby Chouinard Art Institute (which has since merged with CalArts) and Otis College of Art and Design, including David Hammons and Charles White. She also hosted fundraisers for the Black Arts Council, Watts Tower Arts Center, and Black Panther Party, as well as “Sapphire Show” (1970), the first survey of black women artists in Los Angeles. Evidence of this history is on view in the foyer of O-Town House, a new gallery located in the Granada Buildings, just a floor above and a half-century behind the original Gallery 32. Folds of handwritten invitations, curling photographs, price lists, exhibition announcements, and contact sheets fill a line of vitrines, laying out an ephemeral context for the exhibition of Jackson’s works from …
Beatrice Gibson’s “Crone Music”
Jeremy Millar
In her 1988 essay “The Fisherman’s Daughter,” Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on how women writers have long supported one another: “there is a heroic aspect to the practice of art; it is lonely, risky, merciless work, and every artist needs some kind of moral support or sense of solidarity and validation.” In content and form—a loosely assembled collage in which the author is placed in a position of kinship with her readers and those writers who came before—the essay shares much with “Crone Music,” an exhibition by Beatrice Gibson of two new films which are complemented by a program of screenings, rehearsals, readings, and performances by many writers, artists, and musicians who Gibson collaborated with for her films.
While Gibson’s work has long been made in relation to the work of others, these have usually been major male figures—William Gaddis, for example, or Cornelius Cardew—in these new films, the references are to more marginalized figures, notably women, queer communities, and poets. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from the 1990 album by Pauline Oliveros. Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs [Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters] (2019) takes its title from a film script written in 1929 by Gertrude Stein, …
New York City Roundup
Amy Zion
Twenty-five years ago, a group of young dealers, including Pat Hearn, Colin de Land, and Matthew, Marks started the first contemporary art fair in New York at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Titled the Gramercy International Art Fair, it spanned floors 12, 14, and 15 (there is no 13, of course) of the hotel, with each gallery taking over a room or suite. In the first iteration in 1994, Tracey Emin slept in the bed in the room where her work was displayed (by Jay Jopling/White Cube). In 1997, Holly Solomon installed two TV screens as part of a work by Nam June Paik in her room’s bathtub. After outgrowing the hotel, in 1999, the fair moved to the original site of the infamous 1913 Armory Show and changed its name. Now it fills two West Side piers and includes a modern/twentieth-century art portion alongside the contemporary. There are more fairs that share the week with the Armory—the Independent, which celebrated its 10th anniversary, Volta (more on that later), and Spring Break, among others.
Amid talks and other initiatives marking the quarter-century celebrations, at the fair there was a room several booths wide that included documentation and restaging of works from the …
Arthur Jafa’s “The White Album”
Fanny Singer
Arthur Jafa’s newest video The White Album (2018) is an open-ended work. At its premiere at the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, where the work is being screened on a continuous loop, Jafa went so far as to imply that a newer cut might be ready later that evening. Rarely are moving images premiered in chrysalis states. But a work positioned in rebuke of a terminal condition is one that fundamentally resists stasis and, moreover, tidy conclusions. The method feels appropriate: despite the title, this video is less about whiteness than the porosity, corruptibility, and ultimate fragility of race.
In The White Album, consecutive scenes wobble in and out of focus as Jafa moves between readymade internet footage and his own. Though the imperious watermark of Getty Images never flits into the frame, as it does repeatedly in Jafa’s earlier video, Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), the blear of an image hovering at the edge of legibility remains the prevailing digital facture. His own footage—primarily portraits of staff at his gallery Gavin Brown’s enterprise, located in the historically black neighborhood of Harlem, including Brown himself—is filmed in high-definition. Whether these portraits of the people …
Mette Edvardsen’s “Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine”
Frida Sandström
In the totalitarian America of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), books are outlawed and routinely burned. Resisting the destruction of literature and defending the existence of dissenting ideas, characters in the novel return to oral traditions and learn books by heart. Mette Edvardsen’s project Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine (2010–ongoing) transforms Bradbury’s idea into action. Since 2010, she has accumulated 80 living books—human performers who enact pieces of literature. The work is typical of the artist’s choreographic oeuvre, which often includes minimal gestures, mundane objects, and language. While such approaches are common to contemporary choreography, Edvardsen’s piece questions these tools and their impact on the choreographic turn in contemporary art.
A selection of these living books is present at Index Foundation in Stockholm alongside the original novels, which are displayed on white shelves. There is also a “shadow library”: a collection of printed books that might come alive, or were about to, but have not yet. I choose a title from the list of living books. A few minutes later, I’m approached by one of the performers. “Hello, I’m In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje,” she says, and asks …
Sharjah Biennial 14: “Leaving the Echo Chamber”
Melissa Gronlund
What was reading life like before the “echo chamber,” the term for the bubble in which one’s own biases are rehearsed and confirmed by other like-minded people? It was not as dominated by single subjects, probably a bit calmer, more demanding in terms of homework and criticality, and with the odd issue you’d want to pass by. The Sharjah Biennial 14—titled “Leaving the Echo Chamber” and put together by Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif, and Claire Tancons, each of whom has curated their own section—doesn’t have much to do with algorithms, the singularity, or other advances from digital technology. Despite itself, due to the diversity of geographical regions and formal types of work overseen by its curatorial trifecta, this is a biennial with surprises, broad scope, and solid curation.
Disembodiment is a key theme throughout Kholeif’s section, “Making New Time,” which is anchored in a strong historical painting show in the Sharjah Art Museum and a more politically driven display at Bait Al Serkal. The painting exhibition opens on the geometric works of Anwar Jalal Shemza, a modernist artist who worked in Lahore, and moves toward formal dissolution: from the Turkish artist Semiha Berksoy’s scratchily rendered figures to the thick …
Bronwyn Katz’s “/ // ! ǂ”
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Sean O’Toole
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Axis is a signifier in sculpture, and South African artist Bronwyn Katz has a history of making resolutely vertical sculptural pieces. Installed in the main gallery of her phonetically engaged exhibition “/ // ! ǂ” at Blank Projects are two dozen slender columns made of steel wool and cardboard, their gray surface covered with a weave of raspy copper mesh. Flanked by three flowing wire tapestries of variable lengths and widths, titled kx (i)–(iii) (2019), the vertical form of Katz’s enigmatic floor piece, x (2019), recalls her breakthrough BFA work, Ouma Grootjie [Grandma] (2015), a freestanding column made of gray bricks and green soap blocks that, still now, reads as steadfast exclamation mark from a year colonial statues were toppled in South Africa.
Katz, who graduated from the University of Cape Town in 2015 with an impressive cohort that included Simphiwe Ndzube and Siwa Mgoboza, has quickly distinguished herself with her coolly minimal abstract sculptures exploring social issues around land, homelessness, and belonging. A founding member of the all-women collective iQhiya, who participated in Documenta 14, Katz’s personal work has been widely exhibited too, notably in Dakar, Marrakesh, and Paris. The artist’s 2018 solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo featured …
Linder’s “Ever Standing Apart From Everything”
Chris Fite-Wassilak
Let’s put it all up front: this exhibition is made up of 73 small collages, created between 2007 and 2019, each featuring one or two human bodies, accumulatively displaying 23 nipples (four of which have a more apparently male owner), four pudenda, and one (erect) penis. Some of these people lounge about in bygone versions of tastefully decorated interiors, looking confidently into the middle distance; a few in a state of semi-undress contort into various suggestive poses, giving the camera a dead-eyed stare; most of them, though, are preoccupied with the furniture and silverware being shoved into various orifices. In The Model 5 (2015), one woman looks on while another has a set of black enamel drawers angled between her legs, while in Magnitudes of Performance III (2012), a man looks ready to introduce an old hi-fi amplifier to his supine male partner. Most of the imagery for these collages seems to come, to start with, from porn magazines, and the rest from home décor catalogues. The excerpts from the latter—sofas, vases, and one well-placed tiger-striped lounge chair—act like a form of comedy censorship, blocking out the revelations and penetrations of the former to give the new images a more …
Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska’s “Epilogue (A Form of an Argument)”
Anders Kreuger
In the age of belated terrestrial awareness and multiple other opportunities and threats foisting themselves upon us daily, the joint solo exhibition by Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska at the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje may not appear immediately “urgent” (a much-overused term in contemporary art) or “topical” (another term serving as a hurdle for artists). Yet, “Epilogue (A Form of an Argument),” by the duo who represented Macedonia at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, is no exercise in art-specific introspection. Straddling the visual, the architectural, and the political, it becomes an extension of the museum’s concrete walls and the historical moment they embody: the organized acts of international solidarity to rebuild Skopje after the earthquake that destroyed around 80 percent of the city on July 26, 1963.
Japanese starchitect Kenzo Tange contributed a new “metabolic” city plan that was only very partially realized (Calovski exhibited the surviving parts of Tange’s exquisite wooden model as part of his installation for Manifesta 7, 2008). Poland contributed the funds and architectural know-how to build a museum of contemporary art. Calovski and Ivanoska thematized one of the architectural proposals for such a museum in their print-based work Oskar Hansen’s Museum of Modern Art …
Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s “DAU”
Robert Bird
In 2009, the film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky resolved to expand DAU—a biopic of Soviet physicist Lev Landau, which he had been working on since the release of his feature film 4 (2004)—into a vast multimedia project. With the support of businessman Sergei Adon’ev’s Phenomen Trust, alongside a number of European film production companies, Khrzhanovsky constructed an entire campus in Kharkiv, Ukraine, modeled on a Soviet-era scientific research institute. He recruited dozens of participants to live on-site, for periods upward of two years, immersing themselves in the life of the institute and the material culture of the Soviet Union between the 1940s and ’60s. Blurring the boundaries separating fiction from everyday life, these performers lived their roles before a camera, resulting in over 700 hours of footage, which has now been edited into 13 feature-length films running, in total, more than 30 hours (the films are numbered, without individual titles, and dated 2019). Available evidence suggests that most dialogue and at least some of the action was improvised, thus also blurring the boundaries separating film from other visual and performance media (the closest analogue that springs to mind is Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle,” 1994–2002). The director’s inconsistent and self-aggrandizing PR …
“We are the people. Who are you?”
Izabella Scott
Farley Aguilar’s cartoonish Bat Boy (2018) is hanging in the first room of “We are the people. Who are you?” at Edel Assanti, an unsettling group show featuring 11 artists that examines mass-media and the rise of populism. As the painting’s title suggests, it depicts Bat Boy, a fiendish mutant with huge eyes and sharp teeth popularized in the early 1990s by the American tabloid Weekly World News. Here, this devilish man with pointed ears is depicted reading the Weekly World News on his porch. He casts a blood-red shadow; the headline reads, “KILL BAT BOY.” Morphing subject and reader, Aguilar points to the danger of becoming the very media one consumes.
Bringing together artists from different political climates such as Ukraine, Nicaragua, and Turkey across drawing, sound, video, sculpture, and installation, “We are the people” embraces scope rather than focus. The curatorial breadth allows for illuminating juxtapositions to emerge between pairs or clusters of artworks. On the wall near Bat Boy is Jamal Cyrus’s triptych Kennedy King Kennedy (2015): laser-cut reproductions of front pages from the Chicago Daily Defender announcing the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy.
This juxtaposition is echoed in the present political …
Mexico City Roundup
Kim Córdova
A man wearing pajamas and a bathrobe clutches a branded coffee mug and ponders the distance through the drawn curtains of the Museo Jumex terrace gallery window, his graying eyebrows knitted in maudlin unease. This is Mike, artist Michael Smith’s alter-ego who in the exhibition at Jumex, “Imagine the view from here!,” considers buying a “curated timeshare living experience” at the museum, marketed by the fictional International Trade and Enrichment Association. In promotional videos and trade fair–like booths, his bone-dry humor critiques the private interests that have a stake in the promotion of Mexico’s contemporary art scene to foreign and local markets as well as the clichéd banality of its consumption.
The show is particularly resonant in the context of Art Week CDMX, the annual week of cultural offerings organized to coincide with Mexico City’s art fairs. Playfully seeding his fictional timeshare with coopted real elements such as photos from past museum events, the omnipresent juice at the museum’s openings, and cameos by the museum’s curator, Smith constructs a conceptual art version of an investable real estate lifestyle package. The show’s trade-fair aesthetic is a reminder of how easy it is to harrumph fairs as too mercantile, too convention center ticky-tacky, …
Los Angeles Roundup
Christina Catherine Martinez
“This is a stupid town. It’s lazy, it’s polite, it’s so sissy in its mentality, so go along with everything that goes along. It’s corporate-owned, it’s a town owned by Hollywood, and it’s about time it grew up. It’s about time that it took art and said come on baby, show me something!” Thus spoke John Cassavetes in a behind-the-scenes documentary for his 1977 film Opening Night. The clip played as part of an intro bumper at Now Instant Image Hall, a microcinema in Highland Park with a bookshop selling various zines and small press titles related to its eclectic programing, from Susan Cianciolo’s films to historical gems like Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972). The latter screened just a few days before the cultural Leviathan known as Frieze Week descended upon the city, bringing with it a deluge of rain and the attendant disenchantment.
Cassavetes’s diatribe drew laughs and cheers from the 60 or so rain-soaked people nestled into the space (I love the way he hisses out the word sissy—his hatred for Los Angeles is unimpeachably authentic) and it does presciently, if cynically, encapsulate this moment of arrival. The LA art scene grew up. Or at least, the kids …
“Samaritans”
Rob Goyanes
The first lines of the song “I See a Darkness” (1999) by Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, go like this: “Well you’re my friend / That’s what you told me.” Dan Nadel, curator of “SAMARITANS” at Eva Presenhuber, suggests viewers read the lyrics while visiting the exhibition: they are printed in full in the press release. Instead, I listened to it about 25 times: “Many times we’ve shared our thoughts / But did you ever / Ever notice / The kind of thoughts I got?” An alt-country ballad, “I See a Darkness” is tender, bordering on saccharine. Its voice, piano, and guitars are aching, then hopeful, then not. It is about, among other things, friendship: “Well, you know I have a love / A love for everyone I know.” And though the artists in the exhibition, according to the press release, are “connected to at least one other [artist], and usually more, by friendship, inspiration, and influence,” the connections between the works feel tenuous.
On a wall in the first room is Xeno (2017) by Takeshi Murata, a slick, totemic, geometric sculpture whose enamel paint glows like radioactive candy. On the wall adjacent is The Golden Age: The Jaguar and …
Daniel Pflumm
Kirsty Bell
A cloud of stale smoke still hangs in the air the day after the opening of Daniel Pflumm’s exhibition at Galerie Neu, a throwback to another time—15 years ago, perhaps, when Pflumm had his last show at his hometown gallery and smoking indoors was still the norm. This new exhibition not only recalls the 1990s techno scene from which Pflumm’s work emerged, but also an ambivalence toward the art-world context in which it came to find itself. The commercial gallery trappings have been removed: reception desk and gallery assistant replaced by a shiny metal clothes rack with a sign, red on white, reading “SPECIAL” and two mirrors framed on the wall. Inside, the gallery has been transformed into an intimate cinematheque, with GDR-era folding chairs and portable metal ashtrays. Two dark windows offering clandestine views back into the reception reveal those mirrors to be two-way glass. Pflumm’s two new video works have all the harsh relentlessness of his early ones: as sharply edited as they are critical.
While in Pflumm’s previous videos, content was usually derived from, and shown on, a TV screen, the main work here, Hallo TV – FFM (2019), is a luxuriously large projection in the cinema/gallery that …
Wong Ping’s “Golden Shower”
Chloe Stead
Without wanting to yuck someone else’s yum (as the saying goes), the breathless list of perversities on view in “Golden Shower”—Wong Ping’s first solo exhibition at a major institution—is enough to make an adult film star blush. There’s the elderly man who gets off on the smell of his pregnant daughter-in-law’s soiled underwear; the husband who darkly fantasizes about turning invisible and sodomizing a police officer; and the teenager who’s obsessed with the, shall we say, unusual placement of his classmate’s breasts on her back. All of this in sharp contrast to the relentlessly cheerful aesthetic of the films themselves, which bring to mind the color-saturated, blocky simplicity of 1980s computer games. It’s this world that the cross-generational protagonists of Ping’s animations must navigate; and they are not handling it well.
Misogynist, violent, and jealousy-fuelled thoughts consume the minds of Ping’s characters, which we hear mostly in first-person accounts, read by the artist himself in deadpan Cantonese. But the activities in each of the seven films featured in the exhibition are communicated free of judgment and—excluding part one and two of “Wong’s Fables” (2018 and 2019 respectively), which are moralistic by design—any discernible lesson. If anything, there is an element of …
Madison Bycroft’s “Gong Farmer, Shit Stirrer and the Maiden of Grief”
Vivian Ziherl
On a recent episode of The Astrology Podcast, astrologer Chris Brennan and his guests reflected on the United Astrology Conference, held in Chicago in 2018, and noted a pronounced generational shift. “The Pluto-in-Scorpio generation has landed,” remarked occultist and astrologer Austin Coppock, referring to the surge of conference attendees born between November 1983 and November 1995. Visiting Madison Bycroft’s semiotically maximalist show “Gong Farmer, Shit Stirrer and the Maiden of Grief”—with its immersive fields of sculpture and smoke, furniture and video, combining the mundane and the mythic—I wonder whether the Pluto-in-Scorpios have landed in contemporary art as well.
Pluto is the event-horizon of the zodiac. The third of the non-visible planets—a “dwarf planet,” according to NASA—Pluto makes its way around the ecliptic once in about 250 years, and leads transformation through bracing encounters with totality: with all that is present but unseen. Generationally, the 1980s and ’90s installation art of the Pluto-in-Virgo cohort (born between 1958 and 1971) constructed space with a nod to mediality, editing down ever more finely what differentiates “painting” from “sculpture,” for instance. Bycroft’s work, by comparison, is intent to manifest audiences in or as painting and sculpture. At 1646, viewers are ushered into an exhibition-world in …
Lorna Macintyre’s “Pieces of You Are Here”
Tom Jeffreys
Living beings leave traces in the fabric of the world. In “Pieces of You Are Here,” Lorna Macintyre’s solo exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), some of these traces are material; others can only be imagined.
One starting point is a fragment of terracotta tile dating from the Roman occupation of the region. It was found during excavations at Carpow Roman Fort in Abernethy, a few miles upstream from DCA, and brought to the McManus Art Gallery and Museum in Dundee. Strikingly, the tile bears a double indentation of a dog’s paw. Macintyre’s large-scale black-and-white photograph of the object (Paw, 2018) roots the exhibition in the earth, in archaeology and archiving, and in the material presence of a lost living moment. One can only imagine the dog sauntering across the surface of the clay as it was left to dry, not yet fully hardened to the world. What must the dog have felt as her paw pressed gently into the surface? How might the maker have responded?
Across photography, printmaking, and sculptural installation, “Pieces of You Are Here” consists of many such moments, where a body touches a world: hands and handles, tools, techniques, and forms of making that stem sometimes …
“Nancy Spero: Paper Mirror”
Travis Diehl
Who was here first—Nancy Spero, or Hernán Cortés? It may be too much to call Spero (or anyone) a “universal” artist but her work certainly speaks to the weird postcolonial hybrids that survive as culture in the twenty-first century. Especially in this retrospective at the Museo Tamayo, a Brutalist building that shares a civic park and former world’s fair ground with Mexico City’s renowned Museo Nacional de Antropología, the scrolls, codices, and friezes that give form to Spero’s last four decades of printmaking—her Mediterranean references—make uneasy sense. In modern Mexico, layers of Spanish colonial, Aztec, and agrarian socialist civilizations build on the last’s rubble; for instance, a pre-contact, snake-shaped stone bowl fitted to a Mission era octagonal plinth becomes a font for holy water that is only superficially Catholic. Spero’s work, likewise, both matches and clashes perfectly with what’s already here. Thus the slight dissonance when you recognize in something like her series of figures dancing across long horizontal framed “scrolls,” such as Sheela and the Dildo Dancer (1987), the format of certain Mayan temple carvings. Whether this correspondence was the specific intent of guest curator Julie Ault and/or her Mexican hosts, or simply a kind of generic congruence of …
Rashid Johnson’s “Monument”
Stefanie Hessler
Driving along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, one traverses the former Confederate capital from the wealthy West End to the central Fan district near the newly opened Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA). Originally conceived in 1890 as tree-lined home to the memorial for Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War and slave owner, the boulevard has since seen additions of other massive, plinth-mounted statues, including Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and, since 1996, also incongruously and controversially African American tennis star Arthur Ashe. Half a mile from the Lee memorial, on the top floor of the ICA, Rashid Johnson’s exhibition “Monument” confronts the state of monuments, questioning collective consciousness and whose stories are granted visibility. The show couldn’t be more timely, as the American South is debating the legacy and future of its Confederate monuments, many of which were erected long after the end of the Civil War and well into the twentieth century.
Johnson’s exhibition consists of the new work Monument (2018), a temple-like structure made from a steel shelving system coalescing references to Minimalism, like Sol LeWitt’s sculptures, and mass-produced IKEA furniture. The installation is …
Cécile B. Evans’s “Amos’ World”
Chris Sharratt
In the world of self-regarding architect Amos, there’s really only one thing that matters—Amos. There he is, sensibly chic in a black roll-neck sweater and neat gray trousers: “I want to build something important. I want to change the world. I want to express myself.” Amos is Cécile B. Evans’s amalgam of the twentieth-century starchitects who shaped the post-war built environment. Conceived as a mock TV series set in a Brutalist housing estate, her exhibition at Glasgow’s Tramway comprises three separate videos (or “episodes”). Made between 2017 and 2018 and collectively titled “Amos’ World,” each is screened concurrently in accompanying installations with soundtracks played on headphones. Dotted around the space are props and sets used on screen: scale-model shelves of colored binders, a miniature forest. As “Amos’ World” suggests, the egoistic visionaries Amos parodies were not ultimately in control of their designs. Evans emphasizes this point by rendering Amos as a jerky puppet.
Recent decades have seen the tearing down or repurposing of many of these architects’ buildings. Yet, Evans suggests, Amos has a far more influential contemporary equivalent in today’s social media monopolies and search engine monoliths—data architects whose mission is to “organize the world’s information” and …
Stéphanie Saadé’s “L’espace de 70 jours”
Natasha Marie Llorens
A thick layer of breadcrumbs covers the floor of the upstairs room at Galerie de la Scep in Marseille. Early in the evening of the opening, there are only a handful of footsteps that show the passage of other viewers through the space. No one has yet tracked baguette particles—sourced from local bakeries over the course of several months—downstairs and into the two other rooms that comprise Stéphanie Saadé’s solo exhibition, “L’espace de 70 jours” [The space of 70 days], which is the show’s running time.
This installation, Miettes de Tradition [Crumbs of tradition] (2018–19), produces a subtle sense of estrangement. It separates the act of walking into cause and effect, denaturalizing it just enough to place me at a distance from my own movement. I walk about gingerly, aware of the crunching beneath my sneakers. I do not shift my weight from foot to foot, I conserve my steps, staying before the other objects in the room rather than walking around. I am made aware of my participation in the crumbs’ displacement and their gradual disintegration. Every time pressure is applied to the floor something irreversible happens.
Saadé refers to her work as creating a sense of “artificial nostalgia.” Her nostalgia …
Raphaela Vogel’s "Son of a Witch"
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Raphaela Vogel turns her chaotic, insistent, and reflexive gaze on religion in her video installation “Son of a Witch,” presented at the Berlinische Galerie as part of the 10th anniversary celebration of the Videoart at Midnight Festival. After walking through a portal delicately molded from white plastic and featuring dragons and a phoenix, viewers enter a dark gallery spanned by two huge metal frames used in agricultural tunnels. These nested structures resemble a complex ribcage, yet the space has the feel of a church. Viewers are drawn to Sequenz (2018), a video projected on a large screen at the far end, where the church’s apse would be. Spinning, round motifs fill the screen: for much of the video, the artist films herself lying in a circular bed, staring into the camera. Both watching and watched, she lures the camera closer before presenting her sweatpants-clad bottom and slapping it with her hands. On the soundtrack, a classical motif is picked out slowly on a keyboard. There is a choral piece by Benjamin Britten, a brief blast of Low Deep T singing “Please don’t / stay with me / go home”—then the screen goes blank.
The architecture and symbols of most places of …
Christina Dimitriadis’s “Island Hoping”
Kimberly Bradley
Long ago, before the euro and the internet, I was a young backpacker on my first trip to Greece. Beaches were broad and unpeopled. I traveled on boats to islands large and small, always noticing the tiniest ones jutting from the Aegean like beacons or sculptures. In the midst of youthful island-hopping, the romance of the Aegean and the Mediterranean—their mythologies and histories—caught me.
German-Greek artist Christina Dimitriadis—whom I met years later and whose art and life has taught me much about what one could call the contemporary Greek condition—takes the act of moving between isles as the most direct point of departure for her photography exhibition “Island Hoping,” curated by art historian Denys Zacharopoulos. The notion is embedded in the punny title (I’ll get to the “hoping” part in a moment). But like any of Greece’s 6,000-odd islands, this show possesses multiple layers and approaches.
Along the far wall of the white, windowless exhibition space are 30 photographs (all 60 by 90 centimeters and collectively titled “Island Hoping”). Each depicts an island or group of islands too small for human habitation rising from the sea, centered in the frame. The images share a horizon line where water meets sky, just below …
“The New Alphabet — Opening Days”
Nick Currie
A city with an institution like the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)—Berlin’s House of World Cultures, a cantilevered cockle shell sitting on the Spree River beside the chancellery buildings that fund it—is a happy city indeed, for it can boast a progressive intellectual hub, a cultural engine spitting with vigor and restless curiosity. HKW is a bulwark against commercial logic, the surging tides of populism, and the threat of Western “endarkenment.” Massive subsidy is required, of course. Offered here by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, the German state culture fund, that subsidy is neutral enough to allow the institution’s directors to strike the right balance between affirmation and contestation, observation and critique.
Events like “The New Alphabet — Opening Days,” a four-day launch for a program of events that will run for the next two years, exploring cultural, political, and critical approaches to alphabets and code, do not play to empty rooms. Berlin supplies an audience of culturally active people filled with enthusiasm for questions that might strike the citizens of more pragmatic, phlegmatic towns as heavy and pretentious. The blurb for “The New Alphabet” begins with three such questions: “Is it possible to imagine an overabundance of multifarious fields of …
Ebony G. Patterson’s “…while the dew is still on the roses…”
Monica Uszerowicz
When C. Austin Miles wrote “In the Garden,” a 1912 gospel hymn that speaks of quiet joy and equally silent pain, he was in a basement, no garden in sight, entranced by a vision of the meeting of Jesus and Mary. “I seemed to be standing at the entrance of a garden,” he said, “looking down a gently winding path.”
When I met the singer and artist Lonnie Holley in 2013, in a garden, he told me, “The sun will reach down with its rays—‘I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses,’” quoting the song’s opening. “Maybe Father Sun is the ‘I’—his many rays touching, precipitating, rising up the dew.” In the hymn, God walks with the solitary narrator, sings sweetly in her ear, “And the joy we share as we tarry there / None other has ever known.” She’d “Stay in the garden with Him / Though the night around me be falling / But he bids me go—through the voice of woe.” She’s alone—but not really—anywhere. The garden is merely a suggestion.
Ebony G. Patterson’s garden in “…while the dew is still on the roses…” is nocturnal, and the song it sings is woeful, …
Amie Siegel’s “Backstory”
Filipa Ramos
Continuously reappearing throughout the French version of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris [Contempt], Georges Delerue’s melody Thème de Camille is the epitome of contained tragedy. Composed for a string orchestra, it has a regular, continuous motif traversed by arpeggios in counterpoint. This combination creates an immensely pleasurable (and sad) tune that flows back and forth, like the player’s hand bowing across the cello’s strings; like the calm Mediterranean summer sea waves that surround the Casa Malaparte in Capri, in which the central moments of Le Mépris take place; and like Amie Siegel’s elegant and sharp exhibition “Backstory,” whose interplay of absences and presences pay tribute to a fundamental knot of twentieth-century Western film culture.
“Backstory” honors its title. Through a set of paper works, “Body Scripts” (2015), and two video installations (Genealogies, 2016, and The Noon Complex, 2016), the exhibition gravitates around Godard’s stunning depiction of the collapse of a marriage between a submissive screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) and his loveless wife (Brigitte Bardot). Remaining close to Siegel’s ongoing inquiry into how value is achieved and generated and her interest in the meta-reflexivity of cultural production, the show brings forward a set of literary, cinematic, and pop-culture references that contextualize and …
“World Receivers”
Amelia Groom
“Solar and logical / decadent and symmetrical / angels are mathematical.” Lyrics from Coil’s song “Fire of the Mind” (2005) come to me while I look at Emma Kunz’s gorgeous large-scale drawings. Kunz was a Swiss healer who began making these works in 1938, when she was 46. She had no formal artistic training, and the 500 or so drawings she made were never exhibited during her lifetime. For her, they were tools crafted as part of broader therapeutic and divinatory practices. Today they appear like a crew of decontextualized mathematical angels, as intense as they are inscrutable.
The exhibition “World Receivers” puts Kunz in the company of Hilma af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, two women who also developed abstract visual languages as part of their personal esoteric investigations—af Klint in Sweden in the first decades of the twentieth century, Houghton in England in the second half of the nineteenth. The three differ from one another in important respects, but there are intriguing commonalities, including the fact that all of them trouble the notion of autonomous authorship by posing that creating be understood as a matter of receiving. Describing her process, af Klint wrote: “The pictures were painted directly through me, …
“Post-Nature—A Museum as an Ecosystem”
Tess Edmonson
What will come after what we know to be the twilight years of a livable earth? Though this question is implied in the title of “Post-Nature,” this edition of the Taipei Biennial, curated by Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda, the exhibition itself offers impressions of natural life in the present, on the precipice of an unnamable future.
Alongside the biennial’s artists are non-artists—writers, documentary filmmakers, environmental groups, activist organizations, scientists, and designers—proposing the twinned dissolution of the boundaries between art and non-art, human and non-human. This provocation makes the exhibition a compelling vehicle by which to engage with theorists of the Anthropocene, and yet poses difficulty for those who think that art’s difference from other discourses is also what makes it good.
In thinking about what the environment means, or what it means to exhaust the earth, I return to Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects: “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” There’s something of the Romantic conception of the sublime in hyperobjects in that they exceed the scale of perception, a resonance Morton inscribes in his book with an epigram from Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley: “the awful shadow of some unseen power.”
In Taipei, the shadow …
4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, "Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life”
Balamohan Shingade
In August 2018, four months before the fourth Kochi-Muziris Biennale opened, Kerala was hit by a catastrophic monsoon. It resulted in the worst flooding in the region for over a century: more than 300 people died and an estimated 220,000 were left homeless. The devastation of the floods brings the biennale’s idealistic curatorial vision—to develop “the warm solidarities of community” and a “politics of friendship,” in the words of its curator Anita Dube—into sharp relief. So do allegations of sexual harassment by prominent figures in India’s art world, including one of the biennale’s co-founders, artist Riyas Komu, who stepped down as the biennale’s secretary in October. Visitors may wonder how the biennale can achieve its ambition to engage with local audiences, while at the same time confronting institutional sexism, addressing its international publics, and responding to natural disaster.
A number of the exhibited artworks engage with the ecocatastrophe directly. Prominent among them is Marzia Farhana’s installation Ecocide and the Rise of Free Fall (2018). Suspended on wires in several rooms in Aspinwall House, the biennale’s main venue, are objects salvaged from flooded areas in Kerala: refrigerators, ceiling fans, vending and washing machines, books, and so on. At the Pepper House, Veda …
Dineo Seshee Bopape’s "〰️ [when spirituality was a baby]”
Tom Jeffreys
At once named and unnamable, Dineo Seshee Bopape’s installation 〰️ gathers myriad references (astrology, classical sculpture, Afrodiasporic spiritual practices, the Anthropocene) and materials (soil and rocks, satin and spices, glass and plastic, charcoal, jute, feathers, clay). It weaves them together thrillingly, with gold wire, cotton thread, and lines scraped into the concrete floor. In scale, the installation oscillates from tiny holes made by drawing pins to the vastness of a universe. Seen as a single entity, this is a work that marks itself, maps itself, archives its own making and its own meanings. It is a work that prompts a pile-up of words and renders them all inadequate. All my notes are lists.
The first mystery of the exhibition is its title: a glyph designed by the artist consisting of six wavy vertical marks, represented here by the “〰️” symbol. In print it is like rising steam (or is it falling rain?). Scratched into the gallery floor, or marked in tiny biro lines on the wall, these wobbly lines read more like the Egyptian hieroglyph for water: a linguistic echo of tidal marks in sand or the flowing of a river. It does not translate into letters or sound or language; …
Tensta konsthall
James Voorhies
On a late November Saturday morning in Tensta, a suburb 10 miles northwest of downtown Stockholm, a double-decker bus idled in the plaza of a shopping mall. People stood around drinking coffee and chatting. A woman wearing glasses and a hijab informed them in Arabic to board because the bus would soon depart. Her name is Fahyma Alnablsi. Originally from Damascus, she is 68 years old and has lived in Tensta for 25 years. While her official duties at Tensta konsthall include administration and education, Alnablsi is by all accounts a social conduit between the arts institution and community of Tensta. Built between 1967 and 1972 to provide homes to young families, today people from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kurdistan, Somalia, Syria, and Turkey live in the suburb. Alnablsi, trained as an educator, previously worked with some of these communities by volunteering at women’s organizations, teaching Swedish language classes, and advising on maneuvering government bureaucracy. In 2012, she was hired by the curator Maria Lind, who in December 2018 finished an eight-year tenure leading the institution. I visited Stockholm to conduct research for a new book that will study in part how modest-scaled institutions in Western cities connect to …
“The Broken Shell of the Hermit Crab”
Bruno Marchand
Seclusion, misanthropy, and asceticism came to my mind when I first saw the title of curator Samuel Leuenberger’s group show at Galeria Vera Cortês, featuring the work of four international artists. Contrary to my initial belief, however, the hermit crab does not get its name from being a loner but by virtue of its appropriation of empty shells to protect the soft parts of its body. Dragging its makeshift armor along as its body grows, there are times when the hermit crab requires a bigger, safer, better shell—the kind of strategy and necessity on which many of the routines, expectations, and symbolic exchanges of capitalist societies are based.
The arrangement of works in Vera Cortês’s otherwise sparsely occupied gallery results in a feeling of congestion. Four meters in length, Teresa Solar’s Nut (2018) is primarily responsible for this effect. Based on the stylization of a nude elongated female figure lying on one side, painted pale orange, and decorated in star-shaped circus patterns, it draws a diagonal line through the middle of the gallery’s main room, establishing a barrier that is both physical and conceptual. The pieces distributed on either side of this body-come-bench form two distinct constellations: clean-cut, allegorical, two-dimensional on …
Amal Kenawy’s “Frozen Memory”
Ania Szremski
By the time I knew her in 2009, before her death in 2012, at only 37, Amal Kenawy seemed to gleam with elite art world prestige, the kind that one assumes would protect against forgetting. The Egyptian artist’s darkly eerie, fungible, genre-defying productions were shown in major exhibitions and biennials around the world, and now, a retrospective at the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF), “Frozen Memory,” seems to attest to the continued endurance of her legacy. Co-curated by SAF’s director Hoor Al Qasimi and Suha Shoman, the executor of the artist’s estate, the exhibition brings together Kenawy’s major works: 11 videos, several paintings and drawings, together with volumes of archival material, from notebooks to sketches to funding proposals, spread out among the many chambers that wrap around the two-story courtyard of the Bait Al Serkal.
The show is presented non-chronologically, opening with one of Kenawy’s late pieces, the one most often shown abroad: the controversial Silence of the Sheep (2009), her first (and only) performance in public space. Silence of the Sheep saw Kenawy lead a group of a dozen people (artists and friends, but also day laborers hired for the job) as they crawled through the streets of downtown Cairo. The …
“Te toca a tí”
Mariana Cánepa Luna
Two pairs of hands play a game of cat’s cradle, forming a star from a loop of string; viewers may imagine one person pulling the string while the other interprets their instructions. This photograph, which appears on the cover of the booklet accompanying the group exhibition “Te toca a tí” [It’s your turn] at the Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló (EACC), epitomizes the exhibition’s conceptual framework. Curated by Laura Vallés Vílchez and including works by ten artists, the show asks whether a gallery can become a site of negotiation, and if so, in what ways it can be re-signified.
At the entrance are five striped tapestries and three sewn oil paintings made by Teresa Lanceta between 2003 and 2018. Hung from the double-height ceiling of the EACC, they generate a labyrinthine opening to the exhibition. Further inside the gallery, the white walls are partly painted in primary colors to indicate which works the public are invited to interact with. Luca Frei’s Simone Forti’s See-Saw (2015) and Sticks and Chains (2010) are perhaps the most playful of these. The latter consists of 13 wooden sticks measuring 240 centimeters each leaning against a yellow wall, joined at both ends by thin chains of …
Joana Escoval’s “The word for world”
Jennifer Piejko
The Minimalism nurtured in SoHo and Marfa produced industrial cubes, steel beams, and gleaming planes until it was fortified and impenetrable, refracting metaphor or intimacy. Exposing rather than building up, its economical materiality favored the truly elemental, ruling out the human, or even the organic, as frill. So what to make, literally, of a substance like gold—an element weighed equal parts malleable and stable, mythical luxury, electrical conduit, and vitamin? The average human bloodstream contains a fraction of a milligrams of it; it is the treatment for both rheumatoid arthritis and dental cavities.
Joana Escoval’s fine, elegant gold wires embody Minimalism’s essentialism but not its burdens. She makes lines. This exhibition is an arrangement of soft, flat sculptures in pleasing shapes hanging on walls that share the movement’s austerity: the components of Escoval’s sculptures take up room in the way of Fred Sandback’s yarns delineate negative space, but refuse to occupy their volumes; they echo the gilded repetition of Walter de Maria’s Broken Kilometer (1979) while sidestepping its mass. Installed, her sculptures are aware of but don’t draw attention to each other, a whisper network over a choir ensemble. Lithe, skinny forms like An empty list of things missing (all works …
Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni’s “The Everted Capital”
Tara McDowell
It’s fitting that “The Everted Capital,” the opening salvo of the second and third seasons of Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni’s sweeping, unwieldy, and often exquisite magnum opus “The Unmanned”—a three-season series of films, sculptures, and performances—debuts at an end of the earth: the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, Tasmania. Season one of “The Unmanned” limned an unorthodox history of computation via eight episodic film allegories, each representing a vital year in a reverse narrative from 2045 to 1542, and was shown and funded by several European and North American institutions over the course of its production, mostly recently in this exhibition’s first part at Mona earlier this year. “The Everted Capital” aims its sights on a subject no less vast: the history of capital. Mona not only debuts the work, but serves as its muse, patron, subject, and site. Carved into the subterranean sandstone rock of the River Derwent, Mona is as dazzling as it is idiosyncratic, a private museum built with (and partly to redeem) the online gambling winnings of its owner, David Walsh, and opened to the public in 2011 with Gatsbyesque West Egg benevolence. This November, Australia overtook Switzerland to become the …
Eileen Myles’s “poems”
Alan Gilbert
It’s so easy to ignore what’s directly in front of you when it seems more sullied than that which is imagined to be just beyond a particular moment or place. Digital technologies seek to eradicate this gap by making a better or more convenient life, via an image or purchase, only a click away. In the process, desire is replaced by need as online streams of ads and information, many of which are targeted to sell some sort of aspirational product or lifestyle, arrive with greater speed and density—not for nothing are these streams called feeds. At the same time, social media has created spaces for alternative communities, identities, and politics that refuse the increasingly tenuous status quo. And while their cooptation can happen quickly, and their tracking—the consumer-friendly word for surveillance—is ubiquitous, these spaces are also seedbeds for a different world.
The most striking visual aspect of the photographs from the writer Eileen Myles’s Instagram account (@eileen.myles) currently on display as enlarged (ca. 24 x 18 inches) digital prints at Bridget Donahue is how oriented they are on the image’s frequently messy foreground. In the selection of 20 photographs (out of more than 6000 on Myles’s Instagram), this foreground includes …
Pierre Huyghe’s “UUmwelt”
Flora Katz
Five large, freestanding LED panels fill the spaces of the Serpentine. Despite their technological nature, they look like temporary plaster walls and give the rooms a stripped appearance. Images scroll onscreen at high speed. In the darkened exhibition space, they have peculiar light and colors, cold and clear tones. Sounds can be heard, but like the shapes on the panels, I don’t know what they relate to: A microphone? A bird? Nothing corresponds to anything entirely; the sounds oscillate between machine, human, and animal. The same is true of the strange scent diffused in the air. Dust clings to viewers’ shoes. It will spread to the gardens, the streets, the tube. It comes from a large mural on the wall of the main room, a version of timekeeper (1999). Timekeeper is an archeology of the place, a mural that looks like the impression of the rings on a tree trunk, made by sanding down the wall of the exhibition space, each layer of exposed paint forming a different color circle. Here, the same sanding process is at play but it forms sinuous lines, like a map of an unknown territory. Flies roam overhead. They were born in the gallery’s ceiling, …
Donna Huanca’s “Piedra Quemada”
Rose-Anne Gush
Flatness, surface, posture, and the notion of cycles animate Donna Huanca’s “Piedra Quemada” [Scorched Stone]. The exhibition, displayed across Vienna’s Lower Belvedere museum, is a Gesamtkunstwerk consisting of 33 works including paintings, mixed-media sculptures, and live models whose bodies, painted by the artist with bright colors, move slowly throughout the space. In the first room, blue, green, white, and pink oil and acrylic paints billow across ten canvases. The paintings’ titles (all works 2018) point to forms of containment, growth, process, and sedimentation, as in MOULD, CYANOBACTERIA (bacteria which gain energy through photosynthesis), and ACRITARCH (an organic microfossil believed to be up to 1400 million years old).
In the center of the room is a platform covered in a layer of almost invisible white powder, which carries traces of foot and body prints made by Huanca’s models. Displayed on the platform is the steel frame of PARA ELYSIA (MARIPOSA) [For Elysia (butterfly)], one of the five mixed media sculptures presented in the show. Stretched and pulled around the skeletal structure whose shape evokes a head and torso are scrunched plastics painted with opalescent oils and acrylics. A rope made from synthetic black hair further anthropomorphizes the work. In the multi-screen video …
Jean-Marie Appriou’s “November”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
The show is called “November”; I write as the month draws to a close. It’s cold and slightly damp, albeit not enough to offset the long, dry summer and autumn. But the apples sold at the market are still crisp, the Raebeliechtliumzug—an annual walk through the dark, originating in harvest festival celebrations, in which children sing songs and carry lanterns carved out of turnips—took place last week, and now we’re getting ready for Christmas. To everything there is a season. Jean-Marie Appriou illustrates this circle of life in two chapters. In the first gallery are sunflowers in full bloom and thick fields of corn; the second features a collection of waist-high caves, tall dark cypress trees, and bats flying around the viewers’ heads.
All the sculptures were made this year, cast in aluminum from clay models formed by traditional tools and the artist’s gouging fingers, which have left deep, irregular, tactile indentations. The aluminum varies from silvery to blackened. The works are striking, like the two-and-a-half metres-tall corn thicket Crossing the parallel worlds; the faces and limbs that appear elsewhere are spindly, verging on grotesque. It is hard to gauge this aesthetic, which is unfamiliar in a contemporary art context—as is …
Gary Indiana, “Janet Malcolm Gets It Wrong—Part II” (1986)
Kim Levin
This is the second part of Gary Indiana’s “Janet Malcolm Gets It Wrong—Part II” (1986). See the first part here.
Between 1985 and 1988, early in his career as transgressive downtown playwright, director, and actor, and before he became known for his true-crime novels, Gary Indiana wrote art criticism for the Village Voice. For those three years his weekly columns caustically deconstructed exhibitions, critiqued the art world, and questioned the limits of art itself. Individually his highly personal and insidiously political columns always provided a terrific read. As a whole, the newly republished essays in Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns 1985–1988, edited by Bruce Hainley and published by Semiotext(e), add up to something much more. They are an essential account of the East Village art scene and its context. They are also institutional critique with an early focus on women artists. Their appearance in print is especially timely at this semi-nostalgic moment after the demise of what remained of the Village Voice, which in its heyday was an alternative paper known round the world.
This is the second half of Gary Indiana’s two-part article from 1986, in which he slyly deconstructed Janet Malcolm’s pair of 1986 New Yorker profiles …
Aura Satz’s “Listen, Recalibrate”
Genevieve Yue
On the night of July 16, 2006, Mazen Kerbaj stood on a balcony in Beirut as Israeli Air Force bombs fell in the distance. He picked up his trumpet and played along to the ominous pops, some louder than others. Starry Night (2006), the composition that resulted, asks the unanswerable question: What is the value of an aesthetic response to a political situation? Aura Satz’s film Preemptive Listening (Part 1: The Fork in the Road) (2018) dwells in the same conceptual and acoustic space. This spare work, which beyond a few close-up glimpses of a light bulb depicts only a dark void punctuated by pulses of light, obscures its sources to the point of unrecognizability: actor and activist Khalid Abdalla, whose voice we hear, never identifies the emergency sirens he describes occurring in Egypt during the Arab Spring; an alarm light rotates according to the cadence of his speech; and Kerbaj again plays his trumpet, this time as a low drone imitating the sound of a siren. Satz turns a moment of questioning into reckoning, when one is called to attention by a distant siren, but not yet certain how to act. Played on a loop in the gallery’s back …
6th Athens Biennale, “ANTI”
Kimberly Bradley
It was strange to visit the sixth edition of the Athens Biennale weeks after its kick-off and at times nearly alone. Writers covering megaexhibitions usually move in herds, but this time there was no press conference to provide me with pithy quotes to explain the title, “ANTI,” and no on-site, real-time assessments from fellow critics. I ran into a Greek artist I know shortly after arriving. Later I saw the artist Poka-Yio—a founding director of the first Athens Biennale, “Destroy Athens,” in 2007, and a member of the current edition’s curatorial team, alongside Stefanie Hessler and Kostis Stafylakis—giving a tour. But for the most part it was just me and the work of the biennale’s 100 artists.
This solitary contemplation turned out to be a perfect way to take in this extensive show, which in part functions as a statement on the herd behavior to which the various publics it addresses often succumb. A major thread in “ANTI” is the normalization, appropriation, and capitalization of what society not so long ago considered nonconformist, disruptive, or antiestablishment. The majority of works on view resist quick judgment. They are multilayered, complicated.
This complexity, however, isn’t immediately obvious. “ANTI” opens to a familiar sight: …
lauren woods’s “American MONUMENT”
Travis Diehl
As of this writing in mid-November, “American MONUMENT” by lauren woods has been “paused” (not withdrawn) by the artist. It is a gesture meant to protest the firing of Kimberli Meyer, director of the University Art Museum at California State University in Long Beach and an instrumental collaborator in woods’s project, only days before the show opened. The 25 turntables on white plinths still stand at attention, formed into a grid in the gallery’s center. Under other circumstances, however, these would have borne 25 vinyl records which, when the viewer lowered the needle, would have played audio related to the last moments in the lives of 25 black Americans killed by the police: body cam recordings, smartphone streams, documents read by actors, and audio from court. A set of 25 metal boxes on metal tables and shelves would have contained facsimile case materials related to each slaying.
It was always going to be an austere, formal show. Now it’s assuredly formalist. The boxes, open on the table or closed and put away on shelves, are uniformly sized, and uniformly empty, like the plucked lobes of a Donald Judd stack. The plinths, too, are identical, and recall the stelae of Berlin’s Memorial …
12th Shanghai Biennale, “禹步 Proregress: Art in an Age of Historical Ambivalence”
Tianyuan Deng
While exhibitions that question the modernist promise of progress are hardly new, a biennale that takes stock of the current state of regress raises high hopes. Historical regression is proceeding on several fronts. One is the collapse of the neoliberal faith in the end-of-history narrative—that liberal democracy and free trade economics triumphed over fascism and communism in 1989—as democracies across the West have embraced isolationist hard-right policies that indicate a return to fascism. Another is the resurgence of geopolitical antagonisms whose Manichaeism echoes the Cold War. Despite this golden opportunity for examination, “Pro-regress: Art in an Age of Historical Ambivalence,” curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, María Belén Sáez de Ibarra, Yukie Kamiya, and Wang Weiwei, is a largely uninspiring reflection on our times.
The biennale’s ambition, as indicated by its subtitle, is to reckon with “art in the age of historical ambivalence.” But the curators’ statement makes it clear that such ambivalence does not primarily pertain to current disillusionment, but rather to the stuttering back-and-forth movement of modernity in general. The premise thus echoes that of the 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, which posited global reality as “one of constant realignment, adjustment, recalibration, motility, shape-shifting.” One of the centerpieces at …
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s “Earwitness Theatre”
Jeremy Millar
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s latest project emerged from his involvement with an extensive—and emotionally harrowing—2016 investigation by Forensic Architecture into Saydnaya Prison in Syria, commissioned by Amnesty International. (The investigation was presented in Forensic Architecture’s exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts earlier this year, for which they were nominated for the Turner Prize.) Given the lack of images of Saydnaya, and that prisoners were often kept in darkness or blindfolded, the investigation made use of the inmates’ memories of sounds heard within the prison, sensory experiences made all the more acute given the silence that was brutally enforced. Although the work became one of Amnesty’s biggest campaigns of recent years, and arguably helped to shift perception of the Syrian regime in the West, much of the testimony gathered was of little use in court, although it was not without meaning; such might broadly be considered the status of art, and it was within the space of art that Abu Hamdan found somewhere for that which was previously inadmissible.
As with Abu Hamdan’s earlier video Rubber Coated Steel (2016), in which the artist analyzed audio recordings of a 2014 protest in the occupied West Bank to ascertain whether live rounds or rubber …
“A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism” and Lucy Beech’s “Reproductive Exile”
Philomena Epps
At the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, André Breton referred to a series of paintings by then-obscure artists Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff as being the “best and most truly Surrealist” of all the English contributions. Pailthorpe, a surgeon and trained psychoanalyst, and Mednikoff, an artist 23 years her junior, began living and working together a year prior, a collaboration they remained devoted to until Pailthorpe’s death in 1971. Their practice, which they termed “Psychorealism,” blurred the boundaries between psychoanalytic theory and art. By engaging with early memories and traumas, the artists believed their therapeutic practice would have widespread constructive and philanthropic use.
Pailthorpe and Mednikoff made notes about each other’s artwork in their psychoanalytic sessions, devising an elaborate taxonomy of “hieroglyphs” to decode their automatic writing and drawing, translating shape, color, and line into expressions of the unconscious. Due to the often explicit, erotic, or scatological nature of these interpretations, they were inscribed discreetly in the back of frames, or kept in personal papers. In “A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism,” a survey exhibition at De La Warr Pavilion, several works have been mounted on freestanding metal frames arranged throughout the …
Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, “The Sound of Screens Imploding”
Barbara Casavecchia
The press schedule for the opening days of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (BIM) included a special visit to CERN’s “Antimatter Factory.” Our guide was a cheerful Chinese-American engineer who laughed at my astonishment when he explained that our knowledge of the universe—stars, planets, galaxies—amounts to its visible 4 percent. The remaining 96 percent is composed of “dark matter,” i.e. something we know nothing about. Given the dim political climate around the globe, the idea of an ontological fumbling in the dark with the help of a risible fraction of enlightenment felt spot-on.
As in deep space, darkness and dark energy also abound in this year’s well-researched BIM. Its thunderous title, “The Sound of Screens Imploding,” echoes the Big Bang, but also the collapse of a dying star: the Big Screen. “The long era of projection on screens is coming to an end,” curators Andrea Bellini and Andrea Lissoni state in their introductory text in the exhibition booklet, “and will give way to environments that reverberate with the radiant echo of their implosion.” It’s exciting to think of moving images as light and sonic waves expanding across space and cyberspace, past the constrains of beamers, reflective surfaces, or human vision. …
Detroit Roundup
Rob Goyanes
In early October, I went to Detroit for the first time. I was invited on a press trip by Culture Lab Detroit. Positioning itself as a socially conscious arts organization, its annual conference hosts discussions at different sites throughout the city. This year’s summit was dubbed “The Crisis of Beauty,” which to me sounded like a hollow if catchy turn of phrase. While waiting for my Lyft at the airport, a huge Ford truck approached with a bright blue LED Uber sign in the windshield. The driver was a large white man wearing a camo Trump hat. It portended a weekend of strange, overlapping contradictions regarding the future of Detroit, the political fungibility of what is deemed beautiful, and who finds beauty where—especially within the industrial ruins of Midwestern American cities.
Much contemporary art operates on an axis of crisis capitalism, with the promise of revitalizing downtrodden places. The name Culture Lab is a bit sus, considering that Detroit has been revolutionizing culture for a long time. The first panel, “The Aesthetics of Tomorrow,” was held at the Senate Theater, in Southwest Detroit. With a burning-red marquis and rectangular art deco flourishes, the building is an old silent film theater from …
Jeffrey Gibson’s “I AM A RAINBOW TOO”
Alan Gilbert
If there ever was an ars poetica for house music, it might be the one articulated by Chuck Roberts that Larry Heard incorporated into a 1988 remix of his own groundbreaking single “Can You Feel It” (1986). Roberts’s proclamation is a nearly two-minute-long origin story delivered in sermonic fashion featuring a figure named Jack: “In the beginning there was Jack, and Jack had a groove.” Roberts describes house music being born with an utterance by Jack, just as the Judeo-Christian God named the world into being, before announcing: “And in my house there is only house music. But I am not so selfish because once you enter my house, it then becomes our house and our house music.” The slightly modified “Because once you enter my house it becomes our house” is one of many phrases derived from dance-music tracks that Jeffrey Gibson incorporates into the paintings, sculptures, and beaded weavings featured in his exhibition “I AM A RAINBOW TOO.” Some, such as “Last night a dj saved my life,” will be recognizable to casual dance-music listeners; others require deeper digging in the crates (or lots of googling).
Gibson’s exhibition title is also shared with its opening work, a series of …
57th Carnegie International, “International”
Orit Gat
I first came to the United States as an “international student.” At the risk of bothering the current administration, I stayed here. I remember every moment that I’ve learned something new about the culture and place I live in: class, labor, and racial relations, geography, history, the political system. I picked it up as I went along in an attempt to seem less foreign, never feeling the positive spin of the description “international” except on my university paperwork.
At the Carnegie International, I learned about an American cultural phenomenon I haven’t been privy to: the children’s television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a staple of American childhoods which aired from 1968 to 2001. There’s a local connection—Mister Rogers was from Pittsburgh—but I learned about it from Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil (2018), a house made of neon lights and populated with a three-hour loop of 57 videos in which Da Corte and friends play Rogers as well as other characters, from Bugs Bunny to Big Bird. It’s a colorful, light-hearted installation that encapsulates the exhibition’s attitude, what its curator Ingrid Schaffner calls “museum joy”—the satisfaction of seeing art, in public, and the contemporary work of interpretation, of creating connections and making …
“Long March Project: Building Code Violations III – Special Economic Zone”
Alvin Li
The dedication of the guidebook accompanying “Long March Project: Building Code Violations III – Special Economic Zone” reads: “To the freezone imagineers.” A portmanteau combining “imagination” and “engineering,” “imagineering” was first coined by the Alcoa Corporation during World War II, and later popularized—and trademarked—by the Walt Disney Company during the 1970s to extol the modus operandi of their construction of Disney theme parks worldwide. The imagineers, their parks, and the visitors hooked on the promise of speed and disequilibrium: this sci-fi-infused image makes an apt analogy for the Special Economic Zones that have mushroomed in China since the Reform and Opening Up process. It also offers a point of departure for this timely survey on artistic investigations into the great acceleration of China’s technological epoch.
Four decades after the Reform, the zeitgeist of China today can best be summarized as “an unfettered optimism for the future and the rapid development of China’s technological infrastructure,” as curator Zian Chen and artist Liu Chuang write in “Revisionist Accelerationism,” their essay for the exhibition’s catalogue. Arguably, the seeds of this futurist disposition were first sewn by Deng Xiaoping’s cabinet in Shenzhen, China’s first Special Economic Zone, the original site of the country’s tech hub …
Opening Fall Exhibitions
Vivian Sky Rehberg
In January 2018, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy took over as director of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, replacing Defne Ayas who, like me, started working in the Dutch “second city” in 2012. Witte de With’s directors are initially hired for three years and their contract can be renewed once for a finite six years. This sets a tempo and creates momentum for the institution and its publics, which anticipate structural transitions and shifts in direction and content that impact the institution’s identity and legacy.
You might have noticed that Witte de With has been the focus of attention lately. The contemporary art center celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2016, during Ayas’s tenure, and she developed a number of exhibitions, publications, and public programs around institutional histories and heritage. These include the fascinating “Rotterdam Cultural Histories” displays Witte de With still co-produces with the art center TENT, which is housed in the same building on Witte de Withstraat, and whose local mission is to support artists based in the city. In addition, Ayas invited Rotterdam-based artist-duo Bik van der Pol—Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol—to work closely with Witte de With’s staff on the 2016 exhibition “WERE IT AS …
“A Void”
Natasha Marie Llorens
In his press release for “A Void,” a group exhibition at 601Artspace, curator and artist Paul Ramírez Jonas provides an epigraphic clue to the relationship he sees between various forms of displacement that result in a void: “When books burn, people burn.” The phrase, according to the press release, is a quote by Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, one of eight artists in the show..] Their works render the violent displacement and death of people: Palestinians, Syrians, African Americans, Bosnian Muslims, Colombians, French Jews during the Holocaust, and female victims of domestic abuse in Ecuador.
The exhibition is bifurcated: on the largest wall of the narrow gallery, Ramírez Jonas has painted eight large black rectangles, which are meant to represent the absence of eight Western European paintings destroyed over the course of World War II by both sides and, thus, to illustrate his curatorial intervention. Past these voids and into the gallery, eight artworks are installed simply but effectively. A new work by Aida Šehović, Family Album (ŠTO TE NEMA): Wall 6 and 7 (2018), covers the gallery’s back corner with a one-to-one scale photographic reproduction of two walls in the Women of Srebrenica Association office, a nonprofit dedicated to identifying the …
Gary Indiana, “Janet Malcolm Gets It Wrong—Part I” (1986)
Kim Levin
For three years early in his career, Gary Indiana—“toxic downtown savant” and novelist—was an art critic for The Village Voice. Born in New Hampshire and schooled at UC Berkeley, Indiana has written, directed, and acted in off-off-Broadway plays produced in such places as the Mudd Club and in experimental films. The year after he left The Voice, he published the first of his novels, Horse Crazy (1989), based on those three critical years. William Borroughs compared him to Jean Genet and Tobi Haslett, who introduced the novel in its reissuing this year, called him “among the best living prose stylists in English.”
Indiana’s weekly columns for The Village Voice have now been gathered by Bruce Hainley and will be published by Semiotext(e) this month. Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns 1985–1988 is a terrific read, especially if you happened to be there during that “stunningly deranged decade” (to quote Indiana quoting Carol Squiers) that saw the thrilling rise and tragic fall of the East Village art scene. During those years, I was also writing on art for The Village Voice but, intimidated by Gary’s unapproachable aura, I barely knew him. In those days, most of us wrote at home and …
Haroon Mirza’s “The Night Journey”
Monica Westin
The source material for The Night Journey (2018), Haroon Mirza’s sound-based multimedia installation, is a miniature painting from the collection of the Asian Art Museum that is conspicuously absent from the final exhibition. The original painting, The night journey of the prophet Muhammad on the heavenly creature Buraq, created in India around 1800, depicts Muhammad on his journey from Mecca to Jerusalem with his face unveiled: a type of representation that has often been prohibited on the grounds that images of the Prophet can encourage idolatry. There is a roughly contemporaneous miniature painting of Muhammad included in Mirza’s exhibition: this one is, pointedly, veiled.
The theme of iconoclasm—the destruction of images—is thus woven into Mirza’s installation, which teases out from the perennial contentiousness of representing religious figures a more formal question, asking how the relationship between a subject and abstracted information extracted from it and converted into another form can be understood, whether as an appropriation, another type of depiction, or a form of censorship. In other words, iconoclasm is a starting point for the artist’s exploration around the limits of translation that transcend ideology into form.
Mirza’s exhibition “The Night Journey” includes a pixelated inkjet printout of the c. 1800 …
Zardulu The Mythmaker’s “Triconis Aeternis: Rites and Mysteries”
Ania Szremski
The summer of 2018 was grifter season. Starting sometime in May, a strange coterie of glittering personages came coasting along: hustling socialites, scurrilous aventuriers, faux–Saudi princes. The hoax has always had a special place in American mythology, from a newspaper editor convincing his readers there were unicorns on the moon in 1835 to P.T. Barnum’s unveiling of an exotic mermaid in 1842, but there seems to be a renaissance in a present-day America where the sociopolitical order feels like it’s crumbling. And these swindling apparitions with the power to dupe the richest among us (think of Anna Delvey, a young Russian woman reborn as a German aristocrat in New York City[1]) have the gleam of folk heroes.
The anonymous performance artist who goes by the name of Zardulu the Mythmaker has a keen understanding of this bunk that resides at the heart of the American imaginary. It’s the fundamental stuff of her work: she crafts an outlandish con, then tips off a credulous media outlet, and sees it go viral. The work is over when the artist chooses to trigger the reveal—the gotcha moment that shows everyone what a fool they’ve been to believe. (It can take years to come, if …
Paris Roundup
Lauren Mackler
Stamina This is by no means comprehensive, so I’ll get my highlights out of the way. Rounding down, and starting with the experiential: I found the hunt for the various venues of Avant-Première compelling. This casually organized event was comprised of small Parisian galleries and emerging ventures opening their shows a few days before the fairs and driving traffic from post-Frieze London. Out-of-towners (this year, Los Angeles galleries) were embedded in unconventional spaces: up spiraling staircases and behind doorbell-laden portals. At the Beaux Arts, Nairy Baghramian’s exhibition of self-reflexive, materially seductive sculptures—in which shims and buffers, made of aluminum and cork, held up large unwieldy shapes—defied definitions of form; at Balice Hertling’s Marais space, Isabelle Cornaro’s detail-oriented objects and careful placement evoked stilled narratives; small captivating pictures by Lisetta Carmi hung quietly in Galerie Antoine Levi, capturing tender backstage scenes between sex-workers, trans lovers, and friends. A night, at the legendary club Les Bains Douches, where the smell of chlorine and the reflection of the indoor pool added to the intemperance of its crowd; a day prior, at a small hotel lounge, when our bartender told us that Oscar Wilde died just over there, a few feet away from our …
12th Gwangju Biennale, “Imagined Borders”
Amy Zion
What is art’s role when geopolitical tensions run high and technology makes it difficult—perhaps even irresponsible—to tune out of the perpetual state-of-emergency news cycle that promises, and often delivers, news that impacts the daily lives of people near and far. That’s a reasonable question on many curators’ minds when they are tasked with organizing a large-scale exhibition like a biennale. In Gwangju, the small Korean city’s well-respected biennale, currently in its 12th edition, was concerned with geopolitics from its inception, and the title of the inaugural exhibition was “Beyond the Borders.” It opened in 1995, amid great political change in the Korean government, and the Biennale itself was founded as a memorial to the May 18, 1980 student uprising, which took place in Gwangju. This year’s iteration reflected on that first exhibition, and reopened the theme of “borders” with the title “Imagined Borders.” In April this year, the US-North Korea Summit in Singapore began the discussion to end the war that has divided the Peninsula. And on the weekend of the Biennale’s opening, the South Korean President crossed the Korean Demilitarized Zone for the North’s Independence celebrations, making the exhibition’s title seem more and more like a speech act. However, …
Trisha Baga’s “Mollusca & The Pelvic Floor”
Leo Goldsmith
Trisha Baga’s third exhibition at Greene Naftali is also her most ambitious. “Mollusca & The Pelvic Floor,” like its cosmically hilarious and dizzyingly psychedelic predecessors, features a dazzling and untidy collection of found, handmade, and moving-image works: from doctored lenticular posters of human anatomy to idiosyncratic ceramic representations of everyday objects, all arranged around and within a deliriously complex 3D video installation.
Baga has made more than 40 ceramic pieces of various sizes and dimensions representing an array of often comical real-world objects. There’s a full rock-band set-up, complete with drum set, guitar, and tip jar; a log fire; a cardboard box with the Amazon swoosh logo; a portrait of Baga’s dog, Monkey, swimming; and a quintet of poodle heads in the shape of Mesoamerican pyramids (temples of the dogs?), with titles such as Kimberly and Butchie (both 2018). Encountering life-sized versions of a crumpled rhinestone Elvis suit or a cockatoo in the gallery, you get the feeling of entering the artist’s psyche—or, simply, of her ideas made flesh, birthed into the world in a way that’s as simultaneously magical and quotidian.
Baga’s ceramics have an amusingly DIY quality that both belies their complex material origins and butts up against the more …
“Heavenly Beings: Neither Human nor Animal”
Alenka Gregorič
“[A]re humans able to resist together with plants and animals?” With this question, Zdenka Badovinac and Bojana Piškur invite viewers to consider the possibility that all living things can coexist—and co-resist. Most animals are so dependent on human actions and choices for their survival: they likely do not ponder ways to revolt against capitalism. Unless, like the animals in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), they already have an anthem, a flag, and the Seven Commandments necessary to rise against humans. Indeed, we might imagine that animals have already elected a new species to act as leaders, and decided what position humans will occupy. But why would humans—who use animals for food, religious rituals, transport, and entertainment—be granted any position in the animals’ new world?
Several works in “Heavenly Beings” explore potential synergies between humans and animals. Maja Smrekar’s Hybrid Family (2016), for example, is a series of black-and-white photographs documenting a three-month performance during which the artist trained her body to produce breast milk, which she fed to a puppy she was living with. Correlated in content and form is Opus et domus (2018), in which Smrekar spins yarn from dog and human hair on a spinning-wheel. Broaching gender, family values, …
London Roundup
Mariana Cánepa Luna
Just as Frieze Art Fair opened last Wednesday, Prime Minister Theresa May gave her keynote speech—and dared to dance again—at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. She announced that freedom of movement would be terminated “once and for all” by limiting access to “highly skilled workers” (in short, migrants earning over 30,000 British pounds per year). Countless art professionals earn much less (including entry-level curatorial staff at Tate, and yours truly), as well as doubtless many of the myriad gallery and museum folks involved in the city-wide jamboree of Frieze week. How do we imagine London’s contemporary art ecology post-Brexit, a scene that has grown exponentially since Tate Modern’s opening in 2000 and the first Frieze Art Fair in 2003? The question of how the 2019 edition of the fair is going to be affected was the elephant in the tent. Most people I asked shrugged: negotiations are still ongoing, consequences are yet to be seen. “It’ll be fiiiiine,” a London museum director told me. “Maybe we’ll visit a smaller fair, like the first editions—remember those days?” opined a British gallerist friend working in New York. Although one could put this upbeat denial down to the cliché of dark British …
Camille Blatrix’s “Somewhere Safer”
Patrick J. Reed
Please consider this a compliment: Camille Blatrix’s solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig is so spartan it teeters on the razor’s edge of not enough. Its vibe is expectant and hungry, and it leaves viewers feeling the same. The artworks, too, are cold, hard morsels. Their most prominent quality is want. One might anticipate these conditions from an artist who is known for his expertly machined, mystery objects, but possibly less so from an artist who also claims to make, in the most heartfelt sense, “emotional objects.” I cannot stop thinking about “Somewhere Safer.”
The show’s pervasive self-denial leads to descriptions in the negative. Unlike so many installations with a minimalist edge, “Somewhere Safer” does not recall a temple. There is nothing tranquil about its emptiness. There is nothing sacred about the cardboard boxes sitting on the floor, nor the harsh, flat light from the ceiling. There is nothing that does not deflect a head-on approach to what is presented. Hence, a caveat for what follows: the only recourse is a sideways path to understanding.
I read that Blatrix enjoys romantic comedies, so I am watching Pretty Woman (1990). The film is very charming; it sparks minor insight as I contemplate the …
Steirischer Herbst 2018
Adam Kleinman
Although I forgot who was fighting, I clearly recall a statement made by former heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman while providing ringside commentary. After weathering a devastating hit, a seemingly unfazed boxer smiled back at his opponent as if to show he could take it; Foreman, on the other hand, read the grimace and said it exposed how badly hurt the pugilist really was. Such feigned and pained smiles stretched eerily on my own face no less that twice while attending Steirischer Herbst, a multidisciplinary arts festival held annually since 1968 in Graz, Austria.
To inaugurate the festival, and her five-year tenure as its leader, curator Ekaterina Degot presented an opening speech in the Europaplatz, a central square in front of the city’s train station. When in transit, polite strangers typically say “excuse me” to initiate conversation. Following this convention, Degot let forth a rhetorical line of questions with “Excuse me, do you know where the tram stop is?” and so forth. These banal queries then moved to far more serious and personal questions such as “Excuse me, are you for immigration or against it?” Degot then asked the crowd, numbering possibly over a thousand, “Excuse me, do you have Nazi …
Chicago Roundup
Orit Gat
The Tribune Tower in Chicago’s Downtown, home to the Chicago Tribune until a few months ago—it is being converted to luxury apartments—includes a collection of stones from famous buildings around the world embedded into its exterior. The newspaper’s journalists on assignment brought these stones back from Notre Dame and the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon and Hagia Sophia, and they were laid into the building with an engraving noting their origin. It epitomized the spirit of the place: a historically international city whose architectural monuments, from Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s modernism, are studied around the world, but also a city which attempts to bridge regionalism and internationalism, allowing this dichotomy to become a defining sense of its culture.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the world’s most illustrious encyclopedic museums, both temporary exhibitions relate to Chicago’s history: there is “John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age,” focusing on his Chicago patrons (the painter never lived in the Windy City, these are simply the Chicago elite who traveled to Paris or London, and one patron who took Sargent on a watercoloring trip to the Florida Keys). Alongside it is an exhibition charting the short history of …
Gallery Weekend CDMX 2018
Kim Córdova
On the eve of Gallery Weekend 2017, at 11 a.m., sirens blared and a city of 22 million dutifully marched outside, allowing emergency team leaders to check and count them. Mexico holds an earthquake drill yearly on September 19, both a preparedness measure and a memorial to the 1985 earthquake that killed 5000 residents of the city. Two hours later, a rumble sounded like a passing jalopy semitruck. As it grew louder, the ground began to tremor, visibly churning the asphalt in the street. Those who could, ran outside into the roil. Electricity lines and lampposts lazily swayed, incongruent with the collective seethe of adrenaline. For a society accustomed to immediate information, the reality of the force of the earthquake was eerily delayed. The improbably perverse coincidence of a second devastating earthquake on the anniversary of the 1985 one remains diabolically astounding.
The next day it was announced that Gallery Weekend was postponed indefinitely. It would have been grotesque to consider forging ahead. Many of the galleries are located in some of the most seismically unstable land in the city. Situated on the bed of a massive drained lake, when the earth shakes the soggy ground turns to wobbling aspic amplifying …
“bauhaus imaginista: Corresponding With”
Filipa Ramos
On arriving in Japan in 1933, the German architect Bruno Taut (1880–1938) declared: “When modern architecture first came into being around the 1920s, it was the simple and entirely free Japanese living room, with its large windows, wall cupboards, and the purity of its design that provided the strongest impetus for the simplification of the European living space.” Taut shared the belief that a progressive design contributed to the edification of an emancipated society with the Bauhaus, the “School of Building” founded in Weimar in 1919 by his contemporary Walter Gropius (1883–1969). In the books he wrote during his stay in Japan, Taut reflected on the functional and simple qualities of Japanese architecture and design, comparing them with the western modernist values of his time.
Held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the first chapter of the exhibition series “bauhaus imaginista: Corresponding With” does a parallel operation by unveiling the exchanges between the Weimar school and parallel educational contexts in Japan and India. More precisely, the show offers an accurate, serious, and elegant observation of the contemporaneous reformist purposes of three pedagogical institutions: the Bauhaus; the School of New Architecture and Design (former Research Institute for Life Configurations), co-founded …
Mika Rottenberg
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Shucking oysters, turning wheels and levers, sitting in a rammed plastic warehouse while staring at a mobile phone—to enter Mika Rottenberg’s universe is to fall down a rabbit hole of stoic drudgery. The worlds the artist conjures in her video installations are populated by extraordinary characters, such as the fantasy wrestlers who pulverize red fingernails into maraschino cherries in the artist’s MFA degree show piece Mary’s Cherries (2004), or the women who produce cultured pearls by turning cranks to power fans which inflate cartoonish noses in NoNoseKnows (2015). They are all committed to odd tasks with resigned zeal, as if there was no escape to their abstruse internal logic. Rottenberg’s works offer piercing critiques of the absurd conditions of labor under neoliberalism: the precariousness of the gig economy has turned millions into impoverished workaholics, and while AI and automation are threatening countless jobs across the globe, presenteeism still reigns supreme in most cubicles and departments. The aroma of lives wasted on futile endeavors might dominate here, but instead of opting for kitchen sink tragedy, Rottenberg plunges into Technicolor farce: grotesque reflections on unhinged times.
Goldsmiths’s new Center for Contemporary Art (CCA), run by curator Sarah McCrory, is opening its doors with …
The Current II Expedition #1: “Spheric Oceans”
Chus Martínez
Expedition: “Spheric Oceans” led by Chus Martínez Participants: Julieta Aranda, Claudia Comte, Francesca von Habsburg, Eduardo Navarro, Ingo Niermann, Markus Reymann, Teresa Solar, Albert Serra
I decided to name this three-year cycle on artistic intelligence, philosophy, science, and nature the Spheric Ocean. The Ocean is spherical because it is not beside the earth nor below it, but all around it. Its form is not what our eyes see, or not only. Its reality cannot be separated nor told apart from anything else on the lived earth. Therefore it poses us a demand: the need for a philosophy to help us exercise the Ocean. It is difficult to describe what we are aiming for. I would say we are aiming for a philosophy more than anything else. It would be wrong to think that when we say “Ocean,” we are naming a “subject.” We could be as radical as stating that today, to say “Ocean” is to say “art.” Art without the burden of institutional life, without the ideological twists of cultural politics, art as a practice that belongs and should belong to the artists, art facing the urgency of socializing with all those who care about life. Or, in other words, …
Revisiting Manifesta 12
Arseny Zhilyaev
Arseny Zhilyaev traveled to Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial. Back in the day, it was one of the Old World’s most experimental art venues. “The Planetary Garden,” its twelfth edition, opened in June in Palermo.
The attempt by Italy’s newly minted right-wing populist government to reject a boatload of 629 refugees from Africa this June triggered a story that became Manifesta 12’s epigraph. A few days before the biennial’s official press conference, Palermo’s mayor, Leoluca Orlando, stormily announced he was ready to take on the federal government in Rome. He argued Italian authorities were violating international conventions and humanitarian principles, thus leaving him with no choice but to let the ship carrying the refugees dock at the port of Palermo, a city that has long incarnated hospitality and cultural intercourse. Orlando spoke on nearly the same topic at the opening press conference. Needless to say, given the previous two biennials—Manifesta 10’s “window on Europe,” held amid St. Petersburg’s imperial splendor, and Manifesta 11’s discussions of how artists could make money, held in one of the world’s most expensive cities, Zurich—the rhetorical tone adopted by Manifesta 12 seems timelier and more in keeping with the biennial’s original brief to exhibit new, …
9th Busan Biennale, “Divided We Stand”
Amy Zion
“Divided We Stand,” the 9th Busan Biennale, opened over the same weekend as the 70th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which split the peninsula in 1948 and precipitated the Korean War. On TV, with limited English-language options, CNN International played a rotating news package which contrasted Kim Jong-un’s notably missile-less parade celebration with “the latest bombshells from the White House.” State-restricted coverage of the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang, flashed between segments on far-right riots in Germany, and seemingly endless, stale, rhetorical discussions about whether the umpire at the US Open displayed sexism toward Serena Williams in her match against Naomi Osaka. “Divided we stand” is certainly a popular way to describe the zeitgeist.
In Busan, the biennial (curated by a committee led by artistic director, Cristina Ricupero, curator Jörg Heiser, and guest curator Gahee Park) gathers works by South Korean and international artists who address the theme of split territories, with reference to various international separations—physical, ideological, and psychological. The triumph of the presentation is the way in which the exhibition, led by two Europeans, highlights a considered selection of work by South Korean artists who exhibit internationally but are lesser-known on such …
Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi)—Art, Anthropology and Mongol Futurism
Philomena Epps
“Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi)” opens with video Gee, Ulaanbaatar, October 2017 (2018), an interview with the Mongolian rapper Big Gee filmed by artist and researcher Hermione Spriggs (who curated the exhibition) with Alice Armstrong and Curtis Tamm. Gee reflects on the complicated relationship between the Mongolian government, population, and the rapid economic and political changes in the country—themes which are further explored by the other works in the show. “In 2011, foreigners used to call Mongolia mine-golia,” Gee says. The country’s government told people they would get rich from mining. In fact, the selling of mining resources caused environmental degradation and starved citizens of any benefit. By 2015, the miners had relocated, leaving a polluted landscape and a country in debt.
“Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi)” emerged from an ongoing, five-year research project led by anthropologist Rebecca Empson in the Department of Anthropology at University College London (UCL). As part of the research, five artists and artist collectives were paired with five anthropologists—all of whom are carrying out fieldwork in Mongolia on its volatile economy and vast mineral reserves—to conceptualize and critically engage with the possibilities of financial and political crisis. The Tavan Tolgoi that lends the exhibition its title is Mongolia’s …
Channa Horwitz’s "Progressions and Rhythms in Eight"
Rob Stone
Channa Horwitz produced a large body of works which she derived from mathematical equations and equivalences. She took simple sets of numbers and applied different operations to them to produce varied convolutions, which she then expressed as graphic marks, spoken words, or gestures. Individually, the geometries that emerge from these processes—whether drawn, voiced, or danced—might be redolent of a Charles Rennie Mackintosh frieze, the whispering of a stand of birches in autumn light, or the texture of gingham. Whatever they may become, the pieces always evince a scrupulous commitment to the unfolding of a defined arithmetic. Unlike certain other American artists of her generation who explored serial techniques, systems, and numerical progressions—Lucinda Childs, Christian Wolff, and her friend Sol LeWitt—Horwitz gained little recognition until the last years of her life. She passed, aged 80, in 2013.
Nigel Prince, director of Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG), has worked closely with Ellen Davis (Horwitz’s daughter, who manages her mother’s estate) to curate an intimately scaled exhibition that does more than simply outline the themes of her intellectual biography or harvest a series of visual highlights. The exhibition collates a satisfying and provocative range of materials which include drawings, performance scores, archival documentation, and …
“Jacob’s Ladder” and “Astronomy Victorious”
Crystal Bennes
In an episode of the experimental storytelling podcast Imaginary Advice, host Ross Sutherland reflects on the way cultures over the centuries have exaggerated the meaning of the moon, distorting it from astronomical body into an open, figurative channel. “The moon has a powerful gravitational field,” Sutherland says. “In poetry, the moon draws in concepts, it draws in language. Words just seem to stick to the moon. I maintain that a poet can pretty much compare the moon to anything.”
Two recent exhibitions exploring the moon’s magnetic allure are “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Astronomy Victorious,” a two-part display across Ingleby and the University of Edinburgh Main Library. Although the two shows ostensibly survey humanity’s broader relationship with the universe through a combination of contemporary artworks and rare books, the most compelling works share a lunar focus. The unofficial figurehead of both exhibitions is the nineteenth-century Scottish engineer and artist James Nasmyth. Both galleries display plates from Nasmyth’s 1874 book The Moon Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, which reveal the author’s deep curiosity and ingenuity in pursuit of the moon’s mysteries. Hindered by early photography’s technical limitations, Nasmyth was unable to take close-up photographs of the moon. Instead, he collaborated …
Vincent Fecteau
Fanny Singer
Nature has a habit of reproducing its best engineering––why reinvent the circuitry of veins if you have their blueprints in the roots and branches of trees, in the shapes of rivers flowing from tributaries? Fractal patterns are iterated everywhere: in succulents, cauliflowers, snail shells. Vincent Fecteau’s sculptures, too, feel borrowed from natural forms such as grottoes and caves. In fact, there is something rather grotesque about them: organic nooks and stalactite-like shapes coalesce into liminal, terrestrial landscapes.
In the main room of Fecteau’s current solo exhibitions at Matthew Marks’s Los Angeles space, four sculptures sit on plinths ringed sparsely by four wall-mounted collages while a second, smaller gallery brings together a single sculpture with a single collage (all of the works are untitled). Collages previously shown in 2014 at Marks’s New York gallery are reunited with others from the same period, and brought together for the first time with sculptures made for an exhibition at Vienna’s Secession in 2016. The juxtaposition of pieces from different moments and contexts affords the viewer an opportunity to consider how Fecteau’s two dominant mediums––which can read as distinct conceptual and formal strands––have been in critical dialogue over the last several years.
In his 2014 exhibition at …
SITElines 2018: “Casa tomada”
Sam Korman
How the right foot of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate came to be a part of the latest SITElines Biennial is a secret conspicuously guarded by the exhibition’s curators, but what is known about the appendage grants a revealing illustration of the thrilling noir that enfolds an object—or person, for that matter—when it enters the museum. The story begins 420 years ago on the Acoma Pueblo in what is today northern New Mexico. A dispute had erupted between the Acoma and members of the Spanish guard, leaving Oñate’s nephew dead. The colonial governor’s retribution was brutal: he ordered the mass enslavement of the Acoma and a foot cut off each man over the age of 25. Ironic, then, that a statue celebrating Oñate would be erected in 1993 at a visitor center dedicated to the area’s indigenous heritage. A local community claiming Spanish ancestry was responsible; four years later, a group calling itself the Friends of the Acoma cut off the statue’s right foot to protest the ongoing occupation of indigenous lands. Few have been permitted access to the original foot since.
Just like the statue’s initial provocation, the inclusion of Oñate’s foot at SITElines relies on symbolism, subterfuge, and …
FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art
Travis Diehl
Ask Cincinnati native Tony Tasset for a sculpture and you’ll get anything from a giant eyeball to a depressed Paul Bunyan to a steel-and-resin rainbow. Invited to the inaugural FRONT International Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio, he made Judy’s Hand Pavilion (2018), a mammoth silver-colored fiberglass hand modeled on that of the artist’s wife, severed at the wrist, resting on its fingertips. It’s macabre and wacky, it provides some shade, and it’s a perfect selfie op—everything you could ask of a public work. On the other “hand,” it’s hard to shake the impression that, like some god-large developer, Judy’s Hand is reaching down to grab itself a piece of Cleveland.
FRONT is a new triennial that aims to bring the world’s crowds to Cleveland. Its many off-site locations pull the completist to remote corners of the host city, as well as nearby Akron and Oberlin, and thus FRONT courts (or can’t avoid) some degree of urbanism, since between each venue, inevitably, is the rest of the city. The filmy hopes of real estate speculators patinate Cleveland the way soot once did. One participating venue, Transformer Station Contemporary Art Space, so named because it used to be one, is now helping to “transform” …
Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art
Tom Jeffreys
The inaugural edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA) presents work by 104 artists with the intention of “taking the temperature of the human condition at the present moment.” The Anthropocene looms appropriately large, as do capitalism, technology, migration, work, time, identity (be it individual, regional, or global), and Latvia’s post-Soviet history. Diana Lelonek’s installation Centre for Living Things (2016–18) touches on nearly all these concerns. Displayed like laboratory specimens in a series of vitrines is a selection of discarded, human-made objects, now home to various vegetal life forms. Lichen covers a baby’s boot, feather moss grows from an old paint roller, more moss grows among the bright wires of a discarded circuit board, and so on. Lelonek has collected these objects from the edgelands beloved of the psychogeographers—“an illegal waste dumping ground near a pine forest,” reads one accompanying label—grouped them under invented categories, and listed the names of the minerals and plant species.
In assembling these hybrid forms that are neither simply natural nor artificial, Lelonek highlights the wastefulness of consumerism and speculates on possible environmental futures. The approach feels apt given the installation’s setting in the University of Latvia’s former biology faculty. This grand neo-Renaissance …
Fernando Palma Rodríguez
Jennifer Piejko
The coyote nods to himself, self-assuredly, keeping his eyes steady while his body shifts balance—the motion sensors make his gaze relentless. He brushes his limbs back until he is resting on his hind legs, bracing for a gallop. He retreats, his tail is taut, his front paws are winding up—literally—to ensnare his prey. The kinetic animal in Soldado [Soldier] (2001), an angular cardboard head leading a red metal sketch of a body, can be a stand-in for its creator, artist and engineer Fernando Palma Rodríguez. In the Uto-Aztecan language Nahuatl, the coyote is a mythological animal that fluctuates between wild and civilized states, entering and exiting each side of the divide with sensitivity. Nahuatl tradition also tells us that the heart, yóllotl, has the same etymological root as motion, ollin—and that this dynamism is the defining characteristic of what it means to be alive. Sentiment plus movement equals life. Collapsing both variables, the coyote conceives his own life through reactive animation.
Moving past the anxious canine that paces the first level of House of Gaga / Reena Spaulings, Coatlicue / Xipetotec (2018) guards the entrance to the next level. A nearly blank visage with a fleshy mouth rests on top of …
Jaou Tunis 2018
Andrew Berardini
When you land in Tunis, all the press materials are in a language you barely understand and despite everyone’s best efforts, you constantly end up lost, looking for places you never find. You’ll spend hours of research and late-night web searches, riding air-conditioned buses between scattered events, gathering as many stories from locals as you can, arguing with taxi drivers in a mix of English, French, and Arabic, stepping over an awful lot of dead cats, and running your fingers over exquisite carvings in ancient palaces. Despite all of this, what Tunis actually is (nonetheless how an international art festival might fit into it) remains as elusive as before you ever went. Somewhere in the mix of friends and acquaintances, the newly met and sometimes haunting characters and strangers that make up the voyage, you try to get a sense of the atmosphere of a place you never imagined you’d see. You find Tunisians to be warm and sad with a dark humor, the country crawling forward despite 2000 years of colonialism and more than a half century of dictatorship, its hope unbroken even if its spirit feels tired. In a car ride between parties at 3 a.m., a Tunisian …
Dora García’s “Second Time Around”
Sean O’Toole
Among the artifacts assembled by curators Manuel Borja-Villel and Teresa Velázquez for their illuminating survey of Dora García’s work since 1997 are nine posters detailing the program for “The Inadequate” (2011), a 26-week investigation into radicalism, dissidence, and marginality staged by the artist in the Spanish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. The “occupation,” as García has referred to her Venice exhibition, commenced with a screening of Just Because Everything Is Different It Does Not Mean That Anything Has Changed (2008), an hour-length document of actor Harli Ammouchi performing imagined material by comedian Lenny Bruce, as well as various screenings, live performances, and public conversations. Some works were repeated, but The Inadequate was largely a durational event, one that was difficult to fully experience. I felt a similar sense of insufficiency visiting García’s Madrid show.
Even after two lengthy visits to the exhibition, which explores the fluid interplay between performance, film, and writing in García’s practice, there were films not fully watched, letters only parsed, and performances not wholly experienced. “Second Time Around” is a mosaic of temporalities. It invites frequent, purposeful encounters with its many and concurrently operating parts. Repetition doesn’t necessarily afford clarity. On the two days I visited, …
David Horvitz’s “Água Viva”
Sofia Lemos
Pioneering ecologist, science communicator, and marine biologist Rachel Carson found the rhythms of the ocean to be largely indifferent to the rhythms of humans. Coastal forms, she observed, merge and blend in variegated patterns with the ancient surf and with new life, ultimately with the sole agenda of the “earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.” Los Angeles–based artist David Horvitz’s solo exhibition at Belo Campo, a nonprofit space hosted by Galeria Francisco Fino in Lisbon, borrows its title from this ever-emerging movement as well as from Clarice Lispector’s 1973 novel Água Viva [Living Water].
Horvitz, like Carson, found in the compelling motion of large bodies of water the motivation to consider the passage of time, ignoring boundaries between identities, legal demarcations, and online or offline realities. Carson, whose work on the sea greatly inspired Horvitz—see Rachel Carson is My Hero (2016), his outdoor billboard near the bridge named after her in Pittsburgh—is quoted by the artist in his exhibition statement: “each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of …
“Hyperobjects”
Travis Diehl
In the back of Ballroom Marfa plays Emilija Škarnulyte’s video Sirenomelia (2018)—a short apocalyptic trilogy that explores the ruins of some of our species’ most advanced achievements in physics. A camera drifts, disembodied, through the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan. Pieces of CERN’s giant supercollider in Switzerland peel apart as our view rotates through virtual models of the experiments. The longest segment follows a mermaid as she explores the icy waters of a nuclear submarine pen. There is no dialogue, no didactics—only the watery abstraction of (our idea of) what our planet would look like without us. But the average contemporary viewer doesn’t need to be a scientist to interpret these images more thoroughly than a future mermaid. Why? It’s as Brian Eno put it before awarding the 1995 Turner Prize to Damien Hirst: Science has done a decent job explaining its own value to the general public. Art hasn’t.
The exhibition “Hyperobjects” takes up the challenge. Where other exhibitions nod to philosophy (a.k.a. “theory”) this one is co-curated by the institution’s director Laura Copelin and an ecological philosopher, Timothy Morton, author of 2013’s Hyperobjects, and originator of the term. A hyperobject, in short, is something finite, yet too large or …
“Signals: If You Like I Shall Grow”
Isobel Harbison
“Signals: If You Like I Shall Grow” is an exhibition of works that come from a past that was alive to the future. Initiated by Mexico City’s kurimanzutto, held across the two spaces of London’s Thomas Dane gallery, and curated by Isobel Whitelegg, the exhibition echoes the interdisciplinary alliances of its subject matter: London gallery Signals’ activity between 1964 and 1966. As well as being a commercial entity, Signals was also an innovative project space, an experimental publishing endeavor, and a loosely associated set of artists primarily active between the UK (London and various regional centers) and Latin America (Venezuela and Brazil, primarily).
Both moderately sized spaces are dense with works, 42 in each. But an absence of durational work (with the exception of Gustav Metzger: Auto Destructive Art, by Harold Liversidge [1965] and Free Radicals by Len Lye [1958–79], shown consecutively on a monitor, on loop) and the careful editing of archive material (there’s a vitrine of editions near the entrance and, further into the gallery, a bench/table structure featuring excerpts from several publications), means that navigating through it is not an overwhelming documentation-heavy endeavor. There are no wall labels; the works are not divided by medium, geographical origin, theme, …
Hiwa K’s “Blind as the Mother Tongue”
Ania Szremski
Hiwa K doesn’t believe that art can change anything.
Following a screening of his videos at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Iraqi-Kurdish artist explained his frustration with the uselessness of the whole contemporary art enterprise in the face of profound global violence. To hear him say that he doesn’t believe art can offer anything in terms of repair felt startling, at odds with the political nature of the works we had just seen.
But it also felt breathtakingly familiar. I worked at an art space in downtown Cairo in the years following Egypt’s 2011 revolution. As I was mounting exhibitions in the center of clouds of tear gas and violent clashes, against a backdrop of forced disappearances and mass killings, I was constantly, brutally, forced to ask myself why we were doing what we were doing. There was an incredible sense of urgency to persist, but at the same time, the crushing knowledge that it was largely pointless, that art wasn’t going to get anyone out of jail, for example. Hiwa K left the context of crisis out of necessity, I left out of choice; we both settled in the so-called Western world, where we watch those traumas continue to …
Étienne Chambaud’s “Nœuds Négatifs”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Marriott Edgar’s 1930s monologue Albert and the Lion recounts how the Ramsbottom family, on holiday in Blackpool, go to the town’s menagerie. There, little Albert is so disappointed with the spectacle that he pokes the lion, who promptly eats him, upon which his mother gives the manager an earful: “Right’s right, young feller; I think it’s a shame and a sin, For a lion to go and eat Albert, And after we’ve paid to come in.”
In Edgar’s day, the London Zoo was already a century old and it would provide the modern zoo model internationally. The zoo’s two competing interests have always been to enable the display of animals (and by extension the public’s education and entertainment) and to conserve and breed animals. Pursuing both agendas, zoo architecture in London and elsewhere has evolved from miserably poor, via famous enclosures like Berthold Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool in London—which, though attractive, was not suitable for the penguins and afforded smaller visitors only a limited view—to spaces that try to cater for the animals’ needs for room to move, shelter, privacy, and stimulation, while keeping it worth the price of admission.
Étienne Chambaud grew up in Mulhouse. In the city’s Botanical and Zoological Park …
Groundwork
Izabella Scott
Cornwall’s picturesque fishing villages, tearooms, and sandy beaches attract 15 million visitors a year, and its southern coastline is dubbed—only half-jokingly—the Cornish Riviera. Part of its attraction derives from art: in the 1930s, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron, Naum Gabo, and other leading modernists established a colony in St Ives, transforming the coastal town into an internationally recognized hub of the avant-garde. If tourism now contributes around £2.6 billion to the area annually, it also breeds discontent (“emmets”—“the ants”—is an old Cornish nickname for non-locals). The decline of mining and finishing industries throughout the twentieth century have left Cornwall the second poorest region in Northern Europe, with some of the worst deprived neighborhoods in England. But recent years have also seen an influx of arts funding to the region, from both local and national governments. Tate St Ives reopened in late 2017 after a £20 million redevelopment, while smaller venues such as Kestle Barton, a gallery and farmstead on the Lizard peninsula, have improved their spaces and launched more ambitious exhibitions. Against a backdrop of contentious debates about the role of art in Britain’s deprived communities in an era of austerity, Groundwork—a five-months-long season of art in multiple venues …
Louise Bourgeois’s "The Empty House"
Kimberly Bradley
It’s intimidating to review the work of an artist the stature of Louise Bourgeois, about whom so much has been written, to whom so much has been ascribed. Bourgeois’s life spanned nearly the entire twentieth century and helped redefine what a (feminist) artistic practice can be, how art can intertwine with life. Her legacy is outsized, but Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon—a nonprofit art space in a GDR-era structure, run since 2007 by artist Nina Pohl—has put together a portrait of Bourgeois’s late work that is accessible and intimate.
The pavilion’s main space, an octagonal room with floor-to-ceiling windows, hosts a single work: one of the “cells” that Bourgeois began making in the early 1990s. Peaux de Lapins, Chiffons Ferrailles a Vendre [Rabbit skins, Scrap Rags for Sale] (2006) is an oval metal cage in the room’s center containing other sculptures: two humanoid figures, hand-sewn in dark fabric, hang upside-down like voodoo dolls from an apparatus attached to the cell’s ceiling. Also suspended are textile sacks, mostly in shades of beige and cream (one is hot pink), arranged in flock-like groups. A thin stack of white marble stones ascends from the cell’s wood floor—atop this elegantly curved “spine” hangs an old-fashioned fur headband. …
Joan Jonas
Philomena Epps
When I was a child, I received a disco ball as a birthday gift. Hung haphazardly above my bed and lit by a repurposed old desk lamp, it reflected a scintillating constellation across the ceiling. In a flick of a switch, the quotidian transformed: I had entered a secret world. A kind of Proustian magic occurs when an artwork triggers not only an involuntary memory but an ineffable bodily feeling. Walking into Joan Jonas’s installations—Reanimation (2010/2012/2013) and Wind (1968)—in the East Tanks of Tate Modern did precisely that. The cavernous space had become an enigmatic new universe: the rough walls animated by shimmering video projections, with crystal spheres refracting flickering light, and the howling noise of gale-force wind intertwining with strange percussive sounds.
Jonas’s oeuvre eludes genre. Throughout her career, she has blended technology—video screens, re-recorded backdrops, overheard projectors—into historical systems of communication, engaging with traditions of shadow puppetry, mythology, ritualistic music, and Noh theatre. Her work travels from factory lofts to wasteland docks, across landscapes and seascapes, deserts, cities, and hilltops. Jonas’s show at Tate Modern eschews a chronological retrospective in favor of a nonlinear survey paired with live performance and cinema programs. In alignment with Aby Warburg’s logic of …
Made in L.A. 2018
Jonathan Griffin
Not so much a city as an unevenly populated, multi-centered megalopolis, and not so much a year as a point in an escalating concatenation of national and global crises, there might seem to be no possible way to get “Made in L.A. 2018” right. Add to that the divisions within LA’s art community that mirror many of the historically entrenched divisions within the city itself—between east and west, north and south, white and non-white, gentrified and gentrifying, young and no longer young, left and far left. If artists, as “Made in L.A. 2018” curators Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale write, are “some of our most active citizens,” then biennial curators might be something akin to well-intentioned politicians, expected to represent a plurality of impassioned positions while trying also to retain sight of their own.
Against these odds, Ellegood and Christovale have succeeded in organizing an exhibition that is hard to fault, in large part because of their scrupulous avoidance of curatorial overreach. While Hamza Walker and Aram Moshayedi’s “Made in L.A. 2016” (pretentiously subtitled by the four-word poem “a, the, though, only,” and including multidisciplinary contributions both inside and outside the museum) was clearly intended to stretch the possibilities of its …
Public Art Munich "Game Changers"
Orit Gat
Curator Joanna Warsza titled the 2018 edition of Public Art Munich (PAM) “Game Changers,” choosing to focus the festival on 20 live events, shifting the definition of public from sites to subjects. In lieu of outdoor sculptures there are events, and in place of a map a schedule. Conceptualizing the festival, Warsza focused on three historical moments that took place in Munich: the proclamation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 (established and disestablished within less than 30 days); the inauguration of the Olympic Stadium ahead of the 1972 games (a moment of optimism shattered when Palestinian organization Black September killed 11 Israeli athletes and a German police officer); and the welcoming of refugees at the Munich train station in summer 2015. These events are game changers, according to Warsza—short episodes that affect societies years later.
The ideologies that underlie these three events—radical politics, short-lived revolution, long-standing struggle, and the lasting aftermaths thereof—inform the commissions for PAM, which address different political, historical, and social questions from numerous angles. On the festival’s website is a glossary of terms, from “Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany” to “Relational Specificity,” “datafication,” and “countersurveillances.” It’s an ambitious framework for what is essentially a slow and …
“Metamorphoses – Let Everything Happen to You”
Adam Kleinman
Long before we, as a species, were categorized as Homo sapiens, Plato proclaimed humans to be “featherless bipeds.” As a retort, Diogenes grabbed a chicken, plucked it, raised it aloft, and sarcastically declared “Behold: Plato’s man!” Not be outdone, Plato added “with flat nails” to his description. Aristotle later weighed in on the matter by declaring that we are communal beings who possess language, which we use to divide the world into categories available for rational and political inspection. Though a final decision was never reached in ancient Athens, one thing is certain: these dudes were obsessed with definitions.
Considering that museums began as collections of objects grouped by kind, it could be said that they too are products of the urge to collapse reality into neat taxonomies. However, the world is a bit messier. While most humans share psychical features, we do not necessarily share similar minds, histories, or desires—and the reduction of these social characteristics into set and didactic narratives has led museums to misrepresent, and even marginalize, aspects of society and nature at the cost of privileging other figures. The group exhibition “Metamorphosis – Let Everything Happen to You,” curated by Chus Martinez at Castello di Rivoli, attempts …
Guy Mees’s “Espace Perdu (Verloren Ruimte)”—an exhibition in two chapters
Helena Tatay
Guy Mees (1935–2003) was a leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde whose enigmatic work combined formal diversity with conceptual rigor. A consecutive pair of exhibitions at Barcelona’s ProjecteSD—the first from March to April, the second from May to June—shed light on his career, offering carefully curated series of works alongside archival materials that situate his practice in a wider art-historical background. Mees’s interest in serial structures, repetition, formal reduction, and industrial materials was in some ways typical of minimalism. But as these two exhibitions attest, his highly personal artistic language balanced formal rigor with fragile materials—stretched lace, pale neon, narrow strips of paper—to lend his work its characteristic delicacy.
Each exhibition loosely corresponds to a distinct period in Mees’s career, during which he produced a series of works under the collective title “Verloren Ruimte” [Lost Space]. The first group, made between 1960 and 1967, feature simple, geometric wood and aluminum sculptures overlaid with industrial lace. The second, which Mees began in the mid-1980s and completed in the mid-1990s, is looser and more vivid, comprising strips of colored paper pinned to the wall. Despite their formal differences, both series investigate the relationship between art objects and their exhibitionary environments. Displaying these works …
Manifesta 12
Barbara Casavecchia
In 2001, Maurizio Cattelan invited a group of the 49th Venice Biennale’s VIP guests to join a satellite event in Palermo: a cocktail reception in Bellolampo, the city’s main landfill, where the artist had installed a larger-than-life replica of the Hollywood Sign overlooking the Conca d’Oro, the defaced coastal “golden bowl” once filled with citrus groves. It was a vitriolic triumph of trash and a homage to the fictionalization of “a city that has to struggle every day with its own conceptions of its past and present,” the artist said. A few months later, Diego Cammarata, the candidate from Silvio Berlusconi’s party Forza Italia, won the local elections. His victory ended the long tenure of Leoluca Orlando, who during two nonconsecutive terms as mayor between 1985 and 2000 championed the anti-mafia movement known as the Palermo Spring.
Seventeen years later, Orlando is back in the mayor’s seat for the fifth time, as leader of a center-left coalition; a new biennale has landed in town; and another work—art collective Rotor’s installation Da quassù è tutta un’altra cosa [From up here, everything looks different] (2018)—invites viewers to visit another devastated hill perched atop the city. Nicknamed “the hill of shame,” the Pizzo Sella …
Abigail Reynolds’s “The Universal Now and further episodes”
Tom Jeffreys
“Many artists consider books and libraries to be oppressive hierarchies of knowledge, dogmatic and hectoring,” writes artist Abigail Reynolds in her new book Lost Libraries. But Reynolds does not agree: “I consider them the gates of freedom.” Three simultaneous exhibitions in east London exemplify this fascination with books and their material relationship to time and knowledge: a display of artist books at bookartbookshop, an artists’ bookshop; a retrospective including collaged book pages at PEER gallery; and a new film work, Lost Libraries (2018), showing on two television screens among the books and computers of Shoreditch Library.
Both book and film versions of Lost Libraries are the result of a journey undertaken by Reynolds between 2016 and 2017. Given financial and logistical support as the third recipient of the BMW Art Journey, a project by BMW and Art Basel that commissions artists to visit foreign locations and create new work, Reynolds travelled by plane and motorbike along the Silk Road from Xi’an, China, to Rome, Italy, visiting the sites of 15 libraries lost or destroyed over the past 2000 years. In Nishapur, Iran, she went to an empty field where a library once stood. In a museum in Xi’an, the characters of …
Michael Snow’s "Closed Circuit"
Erika Balsom
The four works assembled in Michael Snow’s “Closed Circuit” are not among the artist’s best-known. Visitors expecting the long mechanical arm of De La (1969–72) or the recto-verso double projection of Two Sides to Every Story (1974) will be disappointed. For all the bombast associated with the Guggenheim Bilbao, this is a small, quiet show. Yet its unassuming stature belies a conceptual clarity, as judicious selection creates a sharply honed portrait of an artist long devoted to exploring vision—embodied vision, machine vision, and the nexus between them. It is a portrait in which film, the medium for which Snow is best known, takes a backseat to questions of interactivity, real time, and surveillance.
Snow’s concern with perception is signaled immediately by the titles of Sight (1968) and Observer (1974). Positioned at the entrance to “Closed Circuit,” Sight is a black window covering made of aluminum and plastic, mostly blocking the view of the Nervión river outside, save for a diagonal rhomboid aperture excised from its geometrical patterning. Faced with the resulting tension between interior and exterior, surface and depth—themes that recur elsewhere in the exhibition—binocular vision falters, leading to a phenomenological reduction whereby I see myself seeing.
A similar self-consciousness emerges from …
10th Berlin Biennale, “We Don’t Need Another Hero”
Patrick J. Reed
During the press conference for the 10th Berlin Biennale, henceforth snappily referred to as “BBX,” the attendees were given the opportunity to contemplate Hakuin Ekaku’s lesser-known koan—“what is the sound of one person’s inappropriately timed clapping?”
The lone applauder, whose ruckus died away with all the glory afforded a deflating balloon, was prompted by Yvette Mutumba’s statement that, unlike her fellow curatorial team members, who were speaking English, she would be making her opening comments in German. Respect for a host country’s mother tongue notwithstanding, the clapping was a blunder considering the strong international representation in the room and the curators’ refusal “to be seduced by unyielding knowledge systems and historical narratives that contribute to the creation of toxic subjectivities.” Language, of course, is one such system.
For curator Gabi Ngcobo, BBX is entrenched in a war against oppression—and, as the abovementioned faux pas confirms, there are landmines everywhere. It is therefore unsurprising that the accompanying exhibition texts read as though written with an awareness that each word is potentially lethal to their curatorial cause. The authorial challenge was doubtless intensified by the biennale’s sweeping thesis: to ignite “a conversation with artists and contributors who think and act beyond art as they …
The Colonial Museum
Natasha Marie Llorens
The main floor of the Musée du quai Branly, inaugurated in 2006, is structured with thick, earth-toned walls. Like the walls of homes one would imagine in villages where an ambient heat requires two feet of earth to maintain the cool of the interior. I run my fingers along one wall lightly, reveling in its softness, before turning to really look at the surface that extends everywhere, like an organizing logic. It is leather. Real leather, aged by the passage of myriad fingertips over it, embossed at strategic intersections of the exhibition plan with maps and other contextual information. The galleries are lined with skin dyed in a lustrous and uniform shade of golden brown. The symbolism of spatially delineating an exhibition space that is exclusively devoted to the arts and material cultures of indigenous and “non-European” civilizations with animal skin reads immediately as a metaphor for the psychological and economic structures of colonialism.
The use of leathered skin throughout the permanent galleries of the quai Branly reminds the viewer that what is really at stake in glorifying the material cultures of the colonized is the exposition of a colonial prerogative to treat living beings as things to be captured and …
Stefan Tcherepnin’s “The Mad Masters”
Tom Morton
It’s hard to think of another Muppet, or any other fictional character, with so streamlined a motivation as the Cookie Monster. Debuting in the kids’ TV show Sesame Street in 1969, this bug-eyed, blue-furred humanoid has spent almost five decades in the relentless pursuit of sugary biscuits, to the exclusion of all else. Notably, the Cookie Monster never actually eats the cookies he crams so voraciously into the dry, felt cavern of his perpetually hungry mouth. Lacking an esophagus, his tragic fate is to chew, but never swallow. Every bite he takes turns to dust, and then spills from his lips. An avatar of appetite, and perhaps of addiction, the Cookie Monster cannot be satiated. He could munch through every cookie on earth and still never experience the giddy high of a sugar rush.
“The Mad Masters,” Stefan Tcherepnin’s solo show at the Stedelijk Museum, appears to ask what would become of this Muppet if he were to attempt to put aside his monomaniacal focus on baked comestibles and search for meaning elsewhere. Entering the gallery space, the viewer encounters four spot-lit sculptural dioramas, in which a series of Cookie Monster–like creatures are displayed in the manner of taxidermied animals in …
Ed Atkins’s “Olde Food”
Patrick Langley
A boy in a bruise-pink jacket jogs through a dusky idyll, limp-kneed and panting for breath. The grass that flanks the path is dappled with blooming flowers: purple, yellow, orange, and white. In the foreground is an upright piano, incongruously plonked between two trees. The boy staggers past it and out of sight. Seconds later, he’s back where he started. He falters past the piano, vanishes, and rematerializes in an endless, purgatorial circuit. He looks exhausted. Watching this digital animation, I begin to feel exhausted too. Is he being punished, condemned to enact a pitiless ritual? If so, for what purpose?
Across from Good Wine (the animations all date from 2017, the year they were shown at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau), and past a pair of monumental steel clothes rails hung with a spectacular array of old opera costumes acquired from the archives of the Deutsche Oper Berlin (Masses 1 and 2, 2018), a salvaged door is mounted to the wall (Untitled, 2017). Its darkly varnished surface is laser-etched with a cryptic text: one of several such works (all untitled) co-written by Atkins and whoever’s behind the acerbic, anonymous blog Contemporary Art Writing Daily. Some offer arch commentaries on the exhibition (“Old food …
Bruce Conner’s “Out of Body”
Claudia Arozqueta
Bruce Conner’s solo exhibition, “Out of Body,” takes its title from a life-changing experience the artist had when he was eleven years old. Mesmerized by a patch of sunlight on the floor of his bedroom, he was overcome by the sensation of being “an old ancient person” within his infant body, existing “in worlds of totally different dimensions.” This ineffable experience was the genesis of Conner’s lifelong fascination with the mystical idea that the self and the universe were interconnected, and that the former was a microcosm of the latter. From the 1950s until his death in 2008, he worked in virtually every available medium—painting, assemblage, moving image, drawing, performance—and his polymathic approach reflected a wide-ranging interest in syncretism. He mingled spiritual beliefs in a bid to reach higher levels of consciousness, and as a way to explore countercultural alternatives to the spiritual impoverishment that he identified, and vehemently despaired of, in mainstream, consumerist American society. “Out of Body,” Conner’s first major exhibition in Southeast Asia, comprises 20 works that, by reflecting on consumerism, nuclear disasters, and spirituality, resonate with the Philippines’ past and present.
Entering the gallery, viewers first encounter the ink drawing CROSS (1963). Drawn after a sojourn in …
Haim Steinbach’s “Mojave”
Max L. Feldman
“Mojave” is the name of the rectangular desert-yellow color furthest to the left in Haim Steinbach’s mural eswürdesoaussehen [itwouldlooklikethis] (2018). Painted on the back wall of the gallery, this 13-color dissection of an Ellsworth Kelly painting is individuated by English translations of the Austrian names of wall paint hues (Hitradio is “Loyal Blue,” Zwetschenfleck becomes “Plum cake”) written underneath the colored squares in their manufacturers’ branded typefaces. Placed at the back of the exhibition, it is both typical of Steinbach’s non-hierarchical organization of objects in the space and of his strategy of transferring commercial materials to the walls.
Three other mural works on view—the yellow Pantone color of pantone7549c (2018), playboy of the west indies (2018), and the lion king (2018)—reflect Steinbach’s long interest in brands and consumer products, as well as his 30-year battle with Marxist critics’ dismissive use of the term “commodity art” in relation to the “extreme ambivalence” of his practice, described variously as emulating “the narcotic rhythms of the marketplace”, or being “not unlike flower arranging.” Steinbach rejects Marxist concepts like commodification and labor, but his activities—evaluating, choosing, buying, arranging, and displaying items—are just like those of the consumer. For Marx, alienated labor immiserates individuals by distorting …
Olivo Barbieri’s "American Monument and Monument"
Ilaria Bombelli
Olivo Barbieri’s new solo show—the title of which winks at The American Monument (1976), the acclaimed, anti-spectacular photography book by Lee Friedlander, in which he photographed grand civic monuments against the quotidian surroundings of billboards, streets, and parks—comprises a group of 20 large-format photographs, almost all taken in 2017 in California, alongside a few that relate to Italian art, such as photographs of paintings by Piero della Francesca and Guercino. At first, the show appears to present a stereotypical America: the America of Silicon Valley (Apple Park Cupertino CA), guns (South Boulder City NV), fertility clinics (Redwood City CA), heroic artists (Hamburger Monument #2 after Mark Rothko White Center 1957 LACMA Los Angeles), liposuction centers (Los Angeles CA), or donut-shaped signs (Long Beach CA).
But for Barbieri, this America—which stands, for him, for the West more broadly and, as Oswald Spengler saw it, its imminent decline—is also a personal fund of memories. “I happened to be passing through Florence, in Arizona,” he says, pointing Tom Mix Monument Florence AZ, a photograph of a battered metal cut-out of a horse riddled with bullets, “when I recognized this monument to [American movie star] Tom Mix that I had seen in one of Friedlander’s …
Yto Barrada’s "Agadir"
Mitch Speed
Just before midnight on February 29, 1960, an earthquake hit the Moroccan city of Agadir, killing between 12,000 and 15,000 people—roughly a third of the city’s population. As many were injured; at least 35,000 were left homeless. Yto Barrada’s “Agadir,” in The Curve gallery at London’s Barbican Centre, invokes the disaster in oblique and poetic ways across drawings, audio recordings, collage, and film. Despite the breadth of media employed, this is a show that lacks the depth of historical context one might expect from such a weighty subject, compelling viewers to keep reading, watching, and learning after they’ve left the exhibition, in order to fill in the gaps.
Entering the dim gallery was exciting. Its dark lighting and dramatic colors—the long curving wall painted black, the carpet beneath it blood red—recalled the set of a camp Italian horror film. (The cinematic influence is in keeping with the artist’s broader practice: in 2006, Barrada founded the Cinémathèque de Tanger, an independent project that, operating from Tangier’s Cinema Rif, is dedicated to the local and international promotion of independent Moroccan film.) On the Barbican’s curving wall are sixteen large drawings, “Untitled (Agadir)” (2018), executed by scratching broad white lines from the black paint. …
“The Red Hour”
Vivian Ziherl
Dakar’s elegantly dilapidated Ancien Palais de Justice hosts the Dak’Art Biennale for the second time. Inaugurated in 1958, the courthouse was closed to juridical business in 1992—coincidentally the year that Dak’Art was established. Officially signed over to Senegal’s Culture Ministry in 2017, the Old Courthouse is an architectural dream for art, with a cavernous central hall featuring an enormous open-air atrium presided over by a stately mango tree.
In “The Red Hour”—curator Simon Njami’s second edition of Dak’Art—the mango tree literally anchors the exhibition, with the floating shutters of Pascale Monnin’s Elevation Matthew (2016) tethered about its waist. Long strings hung with shutters painted blue spin out from the tree to form a suspended roof above the courtyard. These wooden window and door parts were salvaged from the artist’s home in Haiti, which was destroyed by Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. When shown in Dakar, Elevation Matthew extends beyond its Haitian origins to summon the devastations that have globally constituted the African diaspora—both historically, through slavery, and in the present day, via the direct and indirect forces of exodus. Offering a shared canopy beneath which disparate works are displayed, Elevation Matthew’s gesture of encompassment and inclusion reflects the curatorial approach of …
Chris Kraus’s "In Order to Pass: Films from 1982–1995"
Patrick Steffen
Dear Chris,
How sweet it was talking with you at the opening of your show. You allowed me to introduce myself, so I could share some words I have longed to tell you since I arrived in this city. I was introduced to Los Angeles through your writings: a primal, unfettered education in the local art scene; I know it well enough now that my interest has begun to wane. I feel like Gravity—the main character in your film Gravity & Grace (1995), one of nine on view at Château Shatto—when a stranger rests his head between her legs and she stares into the void, seeking something meaningful, relevant, eternal. The way you edited that scene—the way you edited your entire filmography—reflects the way you write. You speak the way your characters speak.
I hear your voice throughout these films. Formally, they range from documentary—such as Voyage to Rodez (1986), in which you recount an episode in Antonin Artaud’s life, and Traveling at Night (1990), about a field trip to a deconsecrated Wesleyan Methodist Church in Darrowsville, New York—to fiction. Sadness at Leaving (1992), for example, is based on Erje Ayden’s 1987 autobiographical novel of the same name, about his time as …
Peter Shire’s “Drawings, Impossible Teapots, Furniture & Sculpture”
Andrew Berardini
Los Angeles is an unruly city. Under shaggy palm trees and the bruised purple blooms of jacarandas, roads snarl in mile upon mile of naked asphalt and concrete lined with buildings from every conceivable shape and era. Mostly there are low-slung, postwar ranch houses and bungalows with yards swollen with succulents alongside patches of grass, strip malls with packed parking lots under a patchwork sign advertising dozens of shops, hawking everything from soul food and vegan tacos to Thai massages and pot dispensaries in three different languages—and all of it, caught at dusk, wearing the rich, smeary colors of smog-smothered sunset. Then again, tucked between the hills and highways, you’re just as likely to find fruit orchards and high-rises, marble palaces and shantytowns. All over, things jut and stick out. The brash cacophony of visions and the tucked-away secret gardens make up a city that is both a mess and a dream, constantly resisting just about anything you can say about it and existing like Venice in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), as every city and none. You might hate it, but LA has got style. And few artists capture its gleeful and garish, brash and beautiful resistance like Peter …
Ken Lum’s “What’s old is old for a dog”
Monica Westin
Ken Lum is a prolific writer as well as a conceptual artist, deeply attuned to semiotics across media, whose past work includes a series of “language paintings” that depict nonsensical words in colorful designs. He would probably be amused to hear that I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary while trying to reconcile the seemingly divergent bodies of work currently on display at the Wattis Institute.
The exhibition “What’s old is old for a dog” (as far as I can tell, an invented idiom very much in keeping with Lum’s other fictional deployments of signifiers) is divided in two by a temporary wall in the middle of the main gallery. Each space contains formally and thematically distinct sets of works separated by over a decade. The first comprises Lum’s earlier and more familiar pieces, which experiment with how individuals convey or project identity through language conditioned by class. These include his 2001 “Shopkeeper Series,” simulacra of small business signs spelling out messages of quiet desperation in short word limits (like “SUE, I AM SORRY/ PLEASE COME BACK” beneath a sign for “Jim & Susan’s Motel”); several photographic portraits of real and fictional characters from the “Historical, Youth and Attribute Portraits” series …
Frieze New York
Orit Gat
It’s summer in May. It’s been a long winter, and a long semester teaching art history is drawing to a close. The past four months I’ve been talking to my students about the political possibilities of art: trying to convince them not to look away, but to be moved, to pay attention, and to think of that participation as a form of political agency. We’ve talked about how to look at historical work with an eye to 2018. “Is this still useful?” I ask them of 1950s painting, or video work from last year. My students don’t always have an answer. Nor do I. But I keep asking and looking, knowing that, while I may not always find answers, paying attention is important.
At Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Beirut/Hamburg) are drawings from Rabih Mroué’s Leap Year’s Diary (2006–16). Small framed works are composed of clippings from mostly Lebanese newspapers, cut out and glued onto paper. There are objects (a bell, a truck, a military plane flying across a blank white-paper sky) and full scenes (a boy reaching for a string tied to a bird’s foot); there are shells of homes, and figures standing alone, looking at what may have been landscapes before they …
Goutam Ghosh’s “Morph, blend and flatten (space) of Bird, Reptiles and Flower”
Milena Hoegsberg
Religion, magic, art, physics, and mathematics blend in Goutam Ghosh’s solo exhibition “Morph, blend and flatten (space) of Bird, Reptiles and Flower.” The delicate, sometimes dreamlike paintings gain energy from the friction between ideas from different disciplines and systems of thought as they come into contact. Ghosh draws on conversations with Indian scholar Kaustubh Das about tantra and its understanding of consciousness as a source for both his thinking and making. “Tantra,” Sanskrit for loom, weaves together complex concepts and practices. In the tradition of sacred art, tantra drawings and paintings of abstract geometric shapes were used as meditative tools to awaken heightened states of embodied consciousness. Tantra is of interest to Ghosh because it is a phenomenological tradition that validates knowledge resulting from direct experience which would be difficult to empirically account for, like the movement of energy or time. Yet, his paintings also show an awareness of the human process of cognition and its reliance on quantifiable data or pattern. The mind wants to recognize and categorize, to find a pattern.
Paintings like Untitled (all works 2018), Glycerin, and Tennis Ball exhibit a subjective pattern, while they bring up references to systems of order and logic. All three paintings …
Gallery Weekend Berlin
Filipa Ramos
There are occasions in which the multifaceted shape of time becomes obvious. Occasions in which the concentration of similar initiatives, aimed at similar audiences and presenting similar outcomes, attest to the different moments in which organizations, individuals, and their mentalities are situated: how, despite coexisting simultaneously, collective mindsets aren’t contemporary to one another. Aimed at showing trendsetting cultural production and hosted in such a temporally dysfunctional city as Berlin—located in a permanent identity crisis between its haunting past and its daunting ahistorical future—the Gallery Weekend provides a good example of the heterogeneous configuration of this non-time called the present and how art participates in it. The present seems to be constituted by retrospective and anticipatory instances and institutions: individuals, objects, and imaginaries that live in parallel timeframes, either looking back or forward.
Sometimes, these temporal gaps are so large that different centuries span across the more than 50 exhibitions that opened during the Gallery Weekend. While some address the events and concerns that shaped the twentieth century, others look ahead, imagining the future. The moving image-based shows of two North American artists—Kara Walker and Ian Cheng, presented respectively at Sprüth Magers gallery and at the Berlin venue of the Julia Stoschek …
Mike Cooter’s “The Mimic, the Model and the Dupe”
Isobel Harbison
What’s the difference between a model, a mimic, and a dupe? Taxonomy? Strategy? Spin? Mike Cooter attempts to answer such questions in this exhibition. Radar—a commissioning body based at Loughborough University—have tasked him with considering Polish dramatist, director, and artist Tadeusz Kantor’s (1915–1990) interest in the latent theatricality of and around objects (notably mannequins and stage props), which Cooter combined with the research conducted into animal mimicry by the naturalist Henry Walter Bates (1825–1892). Cooter’s exhibition draws on Leicester’s New Walk Museum’s collection and the industrial collections from another city museum, the Abbey Pumping Station, which he displays alongside his own works, to present a riff on the quirks of duplication, the whirl of object relations, and the droll inflection of human perspective on any given spectacle.
Cooter’s selection of paintings, prints, glassware, fossils, models, Victorian machinery, and damaged taxidermy—all set within an elegantly partitioned and color-coded space in this bright, nineteenth-century museum—is commanding. Large display shelves are cut to fit arrangements and hung at different levels. These horizontal undulations run through vertical sections of color, in mint green, acid yellow, and reflective silver, the scheme offset with vitrines and fabricated rails. Cooter’s sculptures, Guidance 1 and 2 (both 2018), are …
Liu Wei’s “Shadows”
Ming Lin
Liu Wei’s “Shadows” is a rigorous exercise in time-space travel. A series of heavily pigmented, depthless shapes hang on the walls of the gallery’s foyer (“Caves,” 2018) serving as oblique entry points into the main exhibition space, where the viewer encounters a cluster of studded and welded metallic structures (Shadows, 2018). Rough edges and hollowed interiors are undergirded by steel supports, revealing these industrial constructs’ two-dimensional, prop-like nature, and giving the impression that one is entering the show from backstage. Emerging on the other side of the installation, it becomes apparent that this is indeed an elaborate set.
Liu employs a method akin to archeology, mining the fragmentary landscapes of Beijing for the collateral, the surplus, and using those found materials for his works. But if an archeologist’s job is to reconstruct the past from extant remains, Liu is instead committed to depicting an ever-evolving, shifting present as ahistorical and perpetually in flux. His endless reconfiguration of materials results in non-narrative tableaus that point to temporal and ideological dissonances rather than attempt any historical continuity.
Working in a variety of mediums, including video, sculpture, painting, installation, and performance, Liu’s practice is notable for lacking any consistent aesthetic, and his projects are unified …
“Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture”
Naomi Pearce
In his 2014 lecture “The Future of Forensic Science in Criminal Trials,” judge Thomas of Cwmgiedd, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, identified a communication problem. In light of the increasingly complex science used in court, he called for a set of judicial primers: standardized documents, written in “plain English,” to relay core scientific principles to lawyer, judge, and jury. Contrary to narratives propagated by popular crime dramas, he argued: “however eminent and reliable the expert, the presentation of forensic evidence is rarely black and white.”
The slippery, kaleidoscopic status of evidence feels like the point and not the problem in “Counter Investigations,” a survey of work by Forensic Architecture, a research collective of academics, investigative journalists, and creative practitioners including architects, programmers, and filmmakers. Slickly installed across the Institute of Contemporary Art’s two floors, a series of multi-disciplinary investigations into human rights abuses and armed conflict unfold across video installations, models, and wall graphics. Described by Forensic Architecture founder Eyal Weizman as “the archaeology of the very recent past,” the group use forensic methods to map and reconstruct sites, such as the Saydnaya Prison in Syria, or events, such as Israeli military operations in Rafah, Gaza, in August 2014.
The …
Sebastian Jefford’s “Procrustean Flatulence”
Kimberly Bradley
Procrustean—what does the word even mean? In Greek mythology, Procrustes was the son of Poseidon, and a thief who tortured his victims by making them lie on an iron bed. If their bodies were too long, he’d cut off the oversized bits; too short, he’d stretch their limbs to fit. Both procedures were fatal, and, Goldilocks-style, few victims fit the bed. “Procrustean bed,” the idiomatic phrase in which the word is most often used, denotes an arbitrary and brutal standard.
Yet conformity—aesthetic, thematic, or otherwise—is not what a visitor gets from Welsh artist Sebastian Jefford’s exhibition in Gianni Manhattan, a skylit, subterranean space in Vienna’s third district, open since January 2017 and arguably the most daring and international of the city’s crop of new galleries. Hung on the wall beside the downward metal ramp leading into the gallery is Aggressively Indeterminate Biscuit (all works 2018). It’s arresting enough to make me stop.
The core of the sculpture appears to be a flattened cardboard box, overlaid at its edges with thick, bulbous protrusions clad in patchworked sheets of gray polyurethane foam, their surfaces indented with what appear to be shoeprints and studded with the colorful, plastic snap-fasteners found on jaunty sportswear. On the …
Dave Hullfish Bailey’s “Hardscrabble”
Travis Diehl
Like a thesis hidden in a footnote, a small projection in one corner of an exhibition of junkyard complexity shows a loop from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), starring John Wayne and James Stewart. In the scene, Stewart’s character, a lawyer in the frontier town of Shinbone, sits before a schoolroom full of kids and adults. He’s learnin’ them readin’ and writin’, where no one else will. He is also, lawyerly, teaching them about the law of the land, paraphrased thus: “The people… are… the boss!” It is a lesson in the John Ford mold—as self-evident and patronizing as Stewart’s words of praise: “That’s fine. That’s just fine.” The same goes for the film’s plot, which pits the outlaw and rustler Valance against the fence- and property-line-loving townsfolk, who just want to raise their sheep in peace. The film is a latter-day Ford allegory: “liberty,” an old idea, must be gunned down, now that we’ve outgrown untrammeled, unfenced ranges and need regimented “lots,” “towns,” and “ranches” instead. REDCAT being an exhibition space and not a grade school, the viewer is encouraged to be skeptical about the purity of such motivations as the anti-entropic philosophy of manifest …
Matthew Angelo Harrison’s “Prototypes of Dark Silhouettes”
Jeanne Gerrity
In an early scene in the recent blockbuster hit Black Panther, the black supervillain Erik Killmonger disputes the narrative spewed to him by a supercilious white curator regarding an African artifact on view in the “Museum of Great Britain,” asserting instead that it is a spoil of war from the (fictitious) country Wakanda. Immediately following their verbal exchange, she drops dead from poisoned coffee, and he repossesses the pillaged object in an elaborate heist. This example from popular culture demonstrates that the need to address the complicity of western museums in colonialist narratives has reached beyond the confines of the art world. The complicated politics of museum display are one of several interconnected issues—including commodification and authenticity, the role of industry and labor in cultural production, and black identity—that Detroit-based Matthew Angelo Harrison addresses in his first solo commercial gallery exhibition.
Twelve sculptures of varying heights comprise “Prototypes of Dark Silhouettes” at Jessica Silverman Gallery. Mounted on minimalist pedestals made of anodized aluminum legs and acrylic tops, tinted resin blocks that evoke the translucent geometric forms of the Light and Space movement encase what appear to be African art objects. The figures, heads, and masks are visible through varying levels of …
Alexandre Estrela + João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s “Lua Cão”
Patrick J. Reed
Watching João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s Cowfish (2001) is harrowing. The poor fool struggles on a plate and then pukes a little water before going still. Any viewer would assume the film’s subject—a cowfish—dies, but in the end its survival remains unclear. Death is withheld by a flicker and a loop back to the start. Gusmão and Paiva prefer the contemplative over the didactic.
Compare to Alexandre Estrela, their contemporary in the Lisbon moving-image scene, who revels in combining video, sculpture, and text. His projects—some of which are included in the show, alongside those of Gusmão and Paiva—possess stroboscopic effects and hypnotic sounds that challenge conventional legibility.
Given their aesthetic and philosophical differences, it would seem the artists’ orbits opposed fruitful alignment, yet, under the auspices of “Lua Cão,” they form a rewarding trine that places their respective works in dialogue. Translated from the Portuguese as “Moon Dog,” the title refers both to an optical phenomenon, in which refracted light creates a halo around the moon, and, via a nod to the American composer Moondog (1916–1999), idiosyncratic third stream jazz—rare essences woven into a phenomenal collaboration.
Described by its creators as an “immersive moving-image experiment,” “Lua Cão” is tailored to the elegant …
Laure Prouvost
Alan Gilbert
Eager to see the art in Laure Prouvost’s first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in New York, visitors might breeze through its central installation: Uncle’s Travel Agency Franchise, Deep Travel Ink. NYC (2016–18). Situated at the entrance to the gallery, it looks like an unkempt and outdated version of an art gallery’s normally pristine front desk featuring a guest book, a stack of press releases, and a 3-ring binder containing an artist’s curriculum vitae and relevant press materials. Instead, Prouvost has surrounded the gallery attendant with promotional airline posters, maps, a bookshelf lined with travel guides, a coat rack and umbrella stand, an outmoded printer, a dirty water cooler, and even the requisite framed family photo on the desk. To the right of this configuration is a table with two chairs and a ceramic teapot in the shape of a pair of buttocks that is the first explicit clue to the whimsy and weirdness of Prouvost’s art.
The exhibition’s conceit is that all the work on display—including installation, sculpture, painting, textile, and video—is connected to this travel agency. Three other workstations feature stacks of plane-ticket receipts and travel magazines with the company name, “Deep Travel Ink,” printed on white labels affixed …
Gerard Byrne’s “In Our Time”
Stefanie Hessler
The year is 1977. Iggy Pop just released “The Passenger,” Eric Clapton mourns his son’s death in the 1990s-hit “Tears in Heaven,” and Ronald Reagan’s nuclear weapons build-up has the world holding its breath. Time is warped in Gerard Byrne’s seamless amalgamation of historical events, rock hits, and news reports from different years and political eras. With a hint of nostalgia and a subtle dose of humor, his film installation In Our Time (2017) takes us on a vortexed journey through the past, dodging monolithic history for ambiguity, conjuring an image distorted by our fallible memory and extending to inhabit the present.
Byrne is a master of reconstructions, of revisiting and restaging situations from recent history. In the three-channel video New Sexual Lifestyles (2003), he convened actors to appear on a panel that was originally published by Playboy in 1973 to debate “emerging behavior patterns, from open marriage to group sex.” The cameras circle around the cast, who impersonate figures such as the sex educator Betty Dodson, Deep Throat (1972) star Linda Lovelace, gay church founder Troy Perry, and Al Goldstein, editor of the pornographic weekly tabloid Screw. They speculate about a future that now lies in the past, though some …
Charlemagne Palestine’s “CCORNUUOORPHANOSSCCOPIAEE AANORPHANSSHHORNOFFPLENTYYY”
Eli Diner
Marveling over the evolution of his latest exhibition, Charlemagne Palestine remarked: “This idea or obsession that I had with a few animals at the beginning, never did I imagine that it would become such a maximal, enormous work like this. It’s the biggest ever with about 18,000 or more. That we found them quite easily and quickly. And there are hundreds of thousands more out there so it’s like some kind of social phenomena [sic].” The animals are stuffed, and all of them used, or used up—orphans, as inscribed in the title. Together with a variety of props and sounds, they fill the cavernous main gallery at 356 Mission, which has played host to some of the most ambitious exhibitions in Los Angeles over the past five years and which last week announced that this show would be its last. Palestine’s précis provides the key markers for navigating his mesmerizing, heavily Instagrammed, carnivalesque installation: magnitude, the bounteous resource, the obsession “at the beginning,” and some kind of social phenomenon, though what kind exactly is the question for us.
Together with orphans, two horns of plenty appear in the title, both in English and Latinate formulations, plentitude making a fine watchword for …
Art Basel Hong Kong
Alvin Li
Those of us who willingly attend and return to Art Basel Hong Kong must still see hope in the global convolution of capital. If you don’t, call yourself a pessimist. When this hope is solely financial—which seems to be the case for many galleries—it belies a detached cynicism that ridicules the very nature of hope. For others, hope can be a polyvalent state of mind, geared toward the possibility of provoking social change in a hyper-capitalist context.
The global #MeToo movement finally had a breakthrough moment in China in March earlier this year, when Xu Gang, a former professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy, was removed as the curator of the forthcoming 2018 Shenzhen Art Biennale following accusations of sexual and physical assault lasting decades. (The forthcoming “Xi’An Contemporary Art Exhibition 2018,” of which Xu acts as chief curator, has yet to respond.) While most galleries at Art Basel Hong Kong did not openly react to the news—Gang’s dismissal occurred 15 days before it opened—this fact provides an important context for the appreciation of works at the fair, in which booth presentations of defiant works by and about women stand out.
In the main …
"Women Look at Women"
Lucy Reynolds
I almost walk past the entrance to “Women Look at Women,” the inaugural exhibition at Richard Saltoun’s new space on London’s New Bond Street, delayed and disorientated by the glossy rows of designer shops and galleries that surround it. Catherine—a friend on a break from the picket line where she, like many UK university lecturers, is fighting to keep her pension rights—is already there, taking succor from women’s images of themselves and each other. “I was just looking at this,” she says, pointing to Marie Yates’s photographic installation The Missing Woman (1982–84). Catherine’s gesture encompasses a wall of irregularly spaced photomontages: a mixture of grainy, hand-tinted images, polaroids, photocopies, and text rendered in Courier typeface and neat handwriting. One image—a color photograph of a telephone receiver and a telegram overlaying that of a roadside in blurred black and white—is accompanied by the line “Somewhere there is a point of certainty.” It holds out an unattainable promise of clarity in the game of decipherment and elusive autobiographical disclosure which Yates’s images put into play.
The Missing Woman speaks of a time—broadly stretching from the 1960s to the mid-1980s—when women’s images were troubled and interrogated by a newly confident feminist articulation, finding its …
Los Angeles Gallery Share
Jonathan Griffin
At least Condo, in London and New York (and soon also Mexico City and São Paulo), and Okey-Dokey, in Düsseldorf and Cologne, had snappy names and branding. The latest manifestation of the increasingly popular gallery share model, hosted by three Los Angeles galleries, does not have a name. Its program, in which eight international galleries and one peripatetic “off-space” have descended on Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Kristina Kite Gallery, and Park View/Paul Soto for the month of March, seems to have evolved very organically. One might even call it ad hoc.
Such a low-key approach may not necessarily be such a bad thing, indeed might even amount to an ideological and/or aesthetic stance, except that it also conveys the impression that nobody involved really expected anyone to talk about it much, or—especially—to write about it.
So, why am I? Firstly, because the endeavor occasioned the display of some very good art, much of it previously unknown to me. And because gallery shares are a format that is becoming increasingly common, and will only get better if we take them seriously, critically. Also because such declarations of international allegiance between galleries are nearly always comment-worthy, especially when they converge on Los Angeles, which, …
“Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest”
Stefan Heidenreich
Museums are known today as natural habitats for art. But in Renaissance Europe, before their collections specialized in works of art, museums hosted cabinets of curiosities, with their awkward mixtures of rare and bizarre objects. In the eighteenth century, demand arose across Europe to open museum collections—typically owned by royalty, noblemen, and affluent merchants—to the general public. In most cases, artists created products better suited for exhibition than nature did, and over time art and nature museums parted ways. From here, one could almost write a biogeography of the museum as part of an ecosystem that provides space for exhibitable objects.
The term “biogeography” remains tied to the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin whose contributions to the theory of evolution, though eclipsed by those of his colleague, were pioneering. Yet their approaches differ on one very interesting point. While Darwin argued that competition is evolution’s main driving force, Wallace focused on the diversity caused by geographical separation. That is perhaps one reason why those who wish to encourage eternal struggle and competitiveness—be they capitalists, militarists, or racists—hold Darwin so dear. Today, Wallace is mainly known for the Wallace Line, which marks the boundaries between Asian fauna …
“The Summer Vocation of a Teenage Bee”
Neringa Černiauskaitė
The lifespan of a bee, with its strict trajectory and tireless labor, is a common metaphor to describe hard work. It’s a figure of speech that functioned well in the industrial economy, where the individual was diminished to a cog in an endless assembly line, working in and for a factory. But in a postindustrial economy driven by derivatives rather than physical assets, where self-employed individuals are their own harshest bosses and identity is part of self-branding, the principle of thinking outside the box or diverting from a predetermined solutions is enthusiastically encouraged by employers and the “creative class” in general. “The Summer Vocation of a Teenage Bee,” a group exhibition curated by Audrius Pocius and Nicholas Matranga, explores ways to diverge from the economy-driven existence, proposing that art might be one of them, since it is a sort of excessive gesture, wasteful, devoid of intention to directly contribute to the biological survival of the species.
The exhibition struggles to grasp the slippery status of art today, lingering between autonomy and subsumption in the market, by focusing both on how artists operate within the realm of abstracted signs and how they attempt to break existing codes by displacing objects or symbols …
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s "Ze & Per"
Philomena Epps
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s practice, with its hubbub of miscellaneous and licentious references, evokes a mood of historic and anthropological ambiguity. Her works enmesh periods of cultural rebellion over the centuries, from medieval history, folk plays, and pagan festivals, to the genesis of Dada, and from the DIY culture of drag balls and punk to alternative living, squatting, and co-ops. Chetwynd’s spontaneous intertwining of performance, installation, video, sculpture, and painting can also be figured within the space of play: an arena dedicated to experimentation and risk without a predetermined outcome. This gesture toward facilitating an impermanent escape from reality is best read through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque: free interaction between people; eccentric or non-traditional behavior; sacrilegious events; and the nonsensical (mis)alliance of opposites. Absurdity, humor, and hyperbole are de rigueur. The world is upside down. The body is inside out.
Chetwynd’s topsy-turvy approach to performance is expressed in a quieter register in her solo show at Sadie Coles HQ. Ten colorful, collage-like pieces are hung on the gallery’s walls, while three illustrative paintings—one (Samurai Bat) depicts a bat’s head; another (Dulac’s Perman, both works 2018) shows a carp eating from a mermaid’s palm—lean against walls and columns in thick gold …
Allora & Calzadilla
Mariana Cánepa Luna
A piercing whistle punctuates the blaring of a trumpet. But in the columned central space of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the only visible instrument is a grand piano. For three days a week throughout the course of the exhibition, the instrument is played—and, one could say, worn—by a pianist who stands in a hole cut into its center. Leaning over the rim of the piano to strike the keys, the performer energetically interprets the fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (1824), while slowly pushing the wheeled instrument around the space. The building has become a musical box, the exhibition orchestrated so that one movement flows into the other, spilling through the gallery’s spaces to create a dissonant soundscape.
The piano of Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano (2008) could be thought of as the lead performer of Puerto Rico-based duo Allora & Calzadilla’s show. Popularly known as “Ode to Joy,” Beethoven’s piece has often been interpreted as a defense or celebration of humanist values, and in 1985 the European Union adopted it as its official anthem. Yet, as Slavoj Žižek has noted, the tune’s “universal adaptability” has made it vulnerable to use …
“The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind”
Tom Jeffreys
To shit on a book—surely only an animal could do such a thing? In a former farm building, now home to Hauser & Wirth Somerset, lies an early edition of a book by Mark Twain: A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur (1889), a satire of medieval European chivalry told through the eyes of a nineteenth-century Connecticut engineer named Hank. On the left-hand page is an annotated diagram of a tree, its roots taking nourishment from the “soil of common sense.” On the right-hand page, Twain’s text advocates something universally human: “A man is a man, at bottom… even the Russians; plenty of manhood in them—even in the Germans—if one could but force it out.”
Weighting the pages open and obscuring some of the text is a pair of slender turds made from gleaming bronze. It’s unclear exactly what creature might have left them—my guess is a pine marten. They’re from “British Mammal Shits” (2012), Marcus Coates’s series of bronze casts of the droppings of foxes, otters, hedgehogs, and other animals. If Twain is emphasizing a shared humanity against the differences accentuated by the rising nationalism of the late nineteenth century, then Coates—with a sense of absurdity characteristic …
Cerith Wyn Evans
Chris Sharp
I’m not usually a fan of art about art, for the simple reason that it tends to perpetuate the potential solipsism of a perilously self-involved discipline, but something about Cerith Wyn Evans and his consistent ability to transmute art-historical references into quasi-mystical arcana has always struck me as agreeably mystifying. As such, I feel like he cogently, if urbanely, conveys one of the greatest secrets of art: that it is a secret. Or at least this is what I tell myself while walking around his first monographic exhibition in Mexico, as people rush around to take selfies in front of elaborate neon sculptures hanging from the ceiling. Virtually and refreshingly devoid of didactic wall labels, the exhibition both secretly and not-so-secretly (if you are an adept of the cult of Art) teems with references to some of the more recondite practitioners of art in the 20th century. I can’t help but wonder how the general public gains access to works that directly cite Marcel Duchamp or Marcel Broodthaers? The short answer to my rhetorical question is: they don’t. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s enough to obscurely intuit that just beyond the mere appearance of a given thing lies a …
The Armory Show and Independent Art Fair
Ania Szremski
The art-fair think piece is as stale as the art fair itself. What could be said already has been, from puzzling over the mysterious machinations of the market, to annual denunciations from gallerists, and ethnographies of those who buy and those who sell. The form of writing that is truest to the form of the art fair is the nimble listicle, the best-or-worst-of reportage, the photo-heavy guided tour; the spirit of the fair is inimical to the weightier, slower-moving thousand-word reflection.
Even though visiting the storied behemoth that is The Armory Show and the leaner, more winsome upstart Independent was something of an exercise in “seen one, seen them all,” I was nonetheless startled to be confronted by works that I actually liked—that offered a cool respite from the surrounding fervor of the art-mall experience, that compelled dreamier reflection. And so begins my own inevitable best-of list: at The Armory, Upfor Gallery from Portland, Oregon, showed Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari, who commanded sustained attention with her spellbinding videos Huma (2016), Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj (2017), and Aisha Qandisha (2018), each depicting voracious Near Eastern goddesses and fever-causing spirits with glitched-out animations and oracle-like narrations. And even as Nam June Paik’s multimedia sculptural …
“Memories of Utopia: Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Collages de France’ Models”
Leo Goldsmith
In 2006, French filmmaker and polymath Jean-Luc Godard was commissioned to curate an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, devising a series of 18 maquettes—nine large, nine small—as a plan for “Collage(s) de France: Archaeology of the Cinema.” The exhibition would link a series of rooms—each with its own title, like “Myth (allegory of cinema),” “The Camera (metaphor),” and “The Real (reverie)”—featuring objects, artworks, and videos. The result would be a kind of funhouse excursion through the director’s major themes and obsessions: cinematic and media images, the patrimonies of Europe, Hollywood, and their cultural and ideological peripheries.
But the exhibition was not to be: after two years of work, Godard abruptly abandoned the project, leaving the museum’s then-director of cultural development, Dominique Païni, to construct an attenuated version in its place: “Travel(s) in Utopia, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006, In Search of a Lost Theorem,” in which paintings by Nicolas de Staël and Henri Matisse were exhibited in proximity to excerpts from films by Godard and his idols (like Fritz Lang and Robert Bresson) and collaborators (like his longtime partner Anne-Marie Miéville).
While Godard’s original idea for the show was never realized, his maquettes (all from 2004–2006)—eventually deposited in one of the rooms of the …
Helsinki Roundup
Patrick Langley
En route to Helsinki this February, as the plane dropped through patchy cloud on its descent to the Finnish capital, I peered through the window at the country’s south coast. Instead of a clean line demarcating land from sea, there was a fragmentary confusion of dark islands set amid wastes of ice. From the elevated vantage of the plane, the arrangement of earth and water, snow and stone formed a dazzling pattern of light and dark, making it hard to tell where Finland ended and the Baltic Sea began. Here was a place where boundaries, if not exactly meaningless, were complex and hard to map. For the next three days, walking the snow-laden streets to the national museums, commercial galleries, and artist-run spaces of the city, the ongoing negotiation of borders—geographical, political, and cultural—emerged as a pertinent theme.
At Kiasma, the recently renovated airy museum in central Helsinki, the group exhibition “There and Back Again” presented contemporary art from the Baltic region. As the title of the show made explicit, Baltic art and identity were here understood through the lens of transport, of departure and return, implying that travel between nations was a defining feature of the region. Being in-between, in …
“A Thousand Times The Rolling Sun”
Tessa Laird
The Old Beechworth Gaol, northeast of Melbourne, was founded in 1864, just as the importation of convicts from Britain ceased, but kept its doors open—or rather, shut—until its closure in 2004. The most notorious prisoner in this Jeremy Bentham–inspired panopticon was Ned Kelly, the iconic “bushranger” and gang-leader who killed policemen and famously wore a suit of armor made from stolen plough parts while on the run. It was his mother Ellen’s incarceration in the Beechworth Gaol in 1878, for assaulting a police officer, which led Ned to his last shootout and eventual hanging two years later. Kelly’s life and death have inspired poetry, paintings (such as Sidney Nolan’s famous “Ned Kelly” series, painted 1945–1947), and a 1970 film starring Mick Jagger in the title role.
For Melbourne artist Gabriel Curtin, who grew up in Beechworth, the Kelly mythos is suffocating in its historicity. Throughout the state of Victoria, prison tourism capitalizes on “outlaw chic”—a photo taken of Kelly the day before he was hanged, with perfect coif and full beard, could be a blueprint for contemporary hipsters from Brunswick to Brooklyn—while ignoring the reality of incarceration in Australia today. While white Australians often exhibit a perverse pride in their country’s …
Judy Chicago’s “PowerPlay: A Prediction”
Tess Edmonson
After the completion of The Dinner Party (1974–89), for a five-year period from 1982 to 1987, Judy Chicago interrupted her study of female subjecthood to focus instead on its political other, masculinity. The result is a series of paintings and bronzes titled “PowerPlay,” a selection of which is currently on view at New York’s Salon 94. It’s affixed with the subtitle “A Prediction.” Of what?
Four large-scale paintings in the main gallery figure variations on a male nude in a wash of taupe and technicolor. In each, he appears bald, white, and muscled, engaged in the performance of symbolic action. Driving the World to Destruction (1985), for example, shows the surface of a bald man’s torso, its hypertrophy defined by dark shadows. His overlarge hands hold a steering wheel affixed to the surface of the earth, whose deep greens are caught in a swirl of flames. In their rendering of male violence, these allegories are not complicated.
A second gallery location in Freeman Alley housed an additional suite of works on paper, whose surface is sculpted to protrude from its frame. (This part of the exhibition is now closed.) Two among these works qualify the show’s claim to prophecy: Doublehead with Green …
Július Koller’s “Subjektobjekt”
Max L. Feldman
Július Koller’s “anti-happenings” are reflexive practices, acting out a lived situation—relating mostly to Czechoslovakia’s repressive, post–Prague Spring “normalization” period between 1969 and 1987 and the limits of artistic activity at the time. Documenting silly or banal everyday activities, including ping-pong games, taking photographs of groups standing in a question mark (his signature symbol), or simply painting and teaching, Koller turns being together with others into Subjektobjekt, a position of personally and artistically transformative “subjective objectivity,” raising collective awareness of the relation between private life and the official public space monopolized by the regime.
The key anti-happening in the exhibition, which stretches across three floors and still displays only a tiny fraction of Koller’s vast output, is the black-and-white photographic grid Question Mark 1-4 (1969). Showing a shirtless Koller etching a question mark into the clay of a tennis court with his finger, we see two themes converge: for Koller, tennis is a non-artistic activity requiring fair play and obedience to the game’s predetermined rules, while the question mark symbolizes free, democratic communication. This anti-happening then becomes a quietly anti-authoritarian demonstration of the value of intersubjective know-how, granting others—friends, tennis partners, fellow citizens—the same status we would have them grant us.
The anti-paintings …
ARCOmadrid 2018
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
This year’s edition of ARCOmadrid embraced a temporal and conceptual gambit: the Future. It was, however, mostly corralled in the eponymous section at the fair, curated by Chus Martínez, Rosa Lleó, and Elise Lammer and featuring works by artists from 20 international galleries, including Nara Roesler, São Paulo; Union Pacific, London; Crèvecoeur, Paris; and A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro. The works were all installed in a booth-less platform, which made the viewing experience more akin to a group show than a traditional art fair. The elevated area, designed by architect and Manifesta 12 co-curator Andrés Jaque was carpeted with a bright green fabric—theater stage meets mini-golf course—which flattered the playful solo presentations. Eva Fàbregas’s installation for London’s Tenderpixel was generating plenty of attention on preview day. Featuring drawings, sound pieces, and large-scale inflatable sculptures sprawled on the floor and hanging from poles like giant millipedes, Picture Yourself as a Block of Melting Butter (2017) explored the dissolution of the body-object frontier through the lens of somatic experimentation, ASMR techniques, and the commodification of wellness.
Nearby at Berlin’s Chertlüdde, Alvaro Urbano’s sculptures, which borrow architectural elements from Archizoom’s Teatro Impossibile (Impossible Theatre, 1960) stood on the floor awaiting their activation on …
Singapore Art Week
Kathleen Ditzig
Developed by the Singapore government in 2013 in an attempt to create hype around the fair Art Stage Singapore, Singapore Art Week (SAW) is a loose collection of events organized by museums, art spaces, and cultural producers. This year’s edition featured a series of festivals that turned the Civic District’s museums into glowing canvases for art projected on its walls and a relentless deluge of installations, performances, and exhibitions. Yet recently, news sources have focused on the decline of Art Stage as a pronouncement on the state of the arts in Singapore. Amplifying the claims of Art Stage founder Lorenzo Rudolf that the Singapore art market has stagnated and that there is a lack of domestic art production due to state censorship, the South China Post remarked that Singapore had lost its edge to Hong Kong, and the Asia Times ran the headline “Singapore Swings and Misses at the Arts.”
Is Singapore an art hub in decline? Singapore’s development of art infrastructure and support of Art Stage have been attempts to define itself as a delta to Southeast Asian art. These efforts have been successful for the most part. The National Gallery Singapore has arguably one of the best existing collections …
New Museum Triennial, “Songs for Sabotage”
Kevin McGarry
“Songs for Sabotage,” the fourth New Museum Triennial, is suavely branded as a survey of 26 subversive practices from around the world. The curators, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld, frame the exhibition with an astute awareness of the challenges it faces as an institution that would seem to reify the repressive ideologies it purports to dismantle. In his catalog text, Gartenfeld—who might be considered the most precocious institutional mind of the generation still younger than Jesus, and thus keenly attuned to the trappings of dwelling on age—addresses the wise move to excise the word “generational” from the show’s identity (though it remains a round-up of artists under 35), writing, as a kind of disclaimer: “Previously described as a ‘generational’ survey, the Triennial implicitly and explicitly weds the notion of youth to international movements in order to link artistic potential (both criticality and marketability) to demographics.”
Further, he parses how the Triennial is positioned in such a way that makes it an increasingly impossible curatorial undertaking: “The implicit task of the Triennial is to contrast the spirit of internationalism—solidarity, diversity, autonomy—with the deleterious, dominating processes of globalization, and to observe and propose points of connection that might be liberatory, rather than merely …
Juan Downey’s “With Energy Beyond These Walls”
Axel Wieder
Juan Downey (1940–1993) has been recognized as an early pioneer of video art, but like many of his contemporaries, his interest was much broader than a single medium. Initially trained as an architect in Chile, where he was born, he traveled throughout Europe, meeting artists working with kinetics and interaction, such as Julio Le Parc and Takis. After moving to the US in the mid-1960s, he became a part of the discussion around the magazine Radical Software and associated groups that used early video technology to create alternative media channels. Downey’s own use of new technologies was often extremely speculative, exploring their potential to address and facilitate communication across space, between human and non-human participants, such as machines or plants. Presented in the Stockholm exhibition “With Energy Beyond These Walls” as a drawing, Three Way Communication by Light (1968–1972), for example, created a setup in which three participants in isolated rooms were filmed; the images of their faces, superimposed, were played back to the participants, engaging them in a loop of playful feedback. Downey saw electromagnetic signals, such as video or audio waves, as forms of “invisible architecture,” which create infrastructures. Invisible Energy in Chile Plays a Concert in New …
Sofia Hultén’s "Here’s the Answer, What’s the Question?"
Aoife Rosenmeyer
I just didn’t get Sofia Hultén’s work Pattern Recognition (2017). Several sets of 12 small perforated metal sheets, like those that hang on workshop walls, are arranged in tidy grids. Each set holds a number of tools or objects, short pieces of chain on one, plastic cutting templates on another, for example. I should have been able to recognize patterns, because the work is inspired by computer scientist Mikhail Bongard’s “Bongard problems,” a series of tests of machine intelligence. But I couldn’t. Eventually—some time later—the obvious dawned on me. I had not to find a pattern within each sheet, or compare each sheet to its neighbor, but identify a pattern occurring in each of a set of six that was not repeated in the opposite six. I had framed the problem incorrectly.
Reframing is an approach that becomes familiar in this survey exhibition, an extended version of which was shown at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham last year. In works dating from 2008 to 2017, Hultén undertakes projects or records actions in which she challenges the logics operating throughout contemporary life and, in particular, surrounding labor and waste. To this end the artist often generates a comprehensible scenario, then undermines the causality …
Transmediale, "face value"
Patrick J. Reed
To my left the casual love of mismatched hearts is expiring. The American woman says, “you’re sad,” and the Frenchman nods. She tells him to calm down. It is breathtakingly awkward. They resign themselves to stillness until a grinding electronic drone heralds their graceless end. She makes a break for the cash bar, and he, with less determination, joins the nearest crowd. He stares with them in solidarity at a webcam feed showing empty winter highways projected large, and finds solace.
This is transmediale, Berlin’s premier art/media/technology festival and sometimes boneyard for feckless romance. Over three decades it has showcased ideas by those working at the forefront of digital aesthetics and theory. Its mandate, by its own decree, “…aim(s) at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies.”
“Face value” is this year’s umbrella motif, and, like past themes, it is highly accommodating. Spanning five days, the lectures, exhibitions, conversations, and screenings investigate the power of surfaces, from the origins of “face value” as economics lingo to its application by racist ideologies within the mediasphere. With so many experiences to be had and shared here, both visitor and contributor are apt to become lost in the …
International Film Festival Rotterdam
Matt Turner
The scale and ambition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which packs 593 short and feature films into 12 days of independent cinema, as well as talks, performances, and gallery installations in venues across the city, makes it almost uniquely difficult to approach, even for the experienced visitor. The sprawling program—divided into four sections entitled “Bright Future,” “Voices,” “Deep Focus,” and “Perspectives,” then subdivided again thematically—suggests a festival more assembled than curated. But in its 45th edition, two more considered strands provided some comfort and cohesion.
In the “Deep Focus” section, the experimental films of Zhou Tao were presented in a selective retrospective that, in its interest in the passage of time, led naturally into the competition screening of his latest work, The Worldly Cave (2017). An awareness of duration is central to this film, each image elongated and the experience of time stretched. Two early works—relatively simple but satisfying in both concept and execution—explore the individual’s relationship with their environment. Set in Shanghai, 1234 (2007) presents a series of corporate drills in which employees exercise and chant, a “corporate socialism” through which unity is achieved in uniformity. Time is taken—if only momentarily—for workers to come together in ritualistic, fixed positions. …
pascALEjandro’s “Alchemical Love”
Andrew Berardini
For true mystics, there is no division between the real and the spiritual. The symbolic folds into our lives, shaping the world and us in it. The cool kiss of rain can be a curse or a blessing from the gods. Stumbling in the street en route to meet your lover might signal deeper misgivings and potential pratfalls of your coupling. Rather than a pseudoscience, astrology can, in tracking the paths of celestial bodies, chart our hidden natures. The card flourished from the tarot deck for many unveils the true shape and contour of a life: its past, present, and future. To practitioners and adherents of the esoteric, the interior and the exterior, the natural and the supernatural are one. “As above, so below,” to quote the legendary father of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus.
Drawn by filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and colored by costume designer/artist Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, the drawings that make up “Alchemical Love,” conceived and realized by this married couple (under the portmanteau of their two first names pascALEjandro), reveal a world of magical forces shaping their lives, a spirituality that weds the deeper mysteries to their love story. They are deceptively simple, each strange scene almost pulled from a children’s book …
Sondra Perry
Natasha Marie Llorens
For Sondra Perry’s solo exhibition at Bridget Donahue, New York, all the walls are painted Rosco Chroma Key Blue. The deeply saturated color is used on television sets and in the production of special effects for movies and videogames because it contrasts so profoundly with most human skin colors. Chroma Key Blue is the obverse of the color of being, Sondra Perry pointed out to me at the opening. No human skin exists in an adjacent shade, and so it can be used as the negative space onto which context for any body can be manufactured and projected. The color of ultimate negativity, or the absence of existence.
Perry’s interest in the condition of visibility is influenced in part by Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), which analyzes the way people of color are visualized using surveillance technologies and, through this visualization, de-humanized. Browne traces the containment of blackness from basic technologies, such as branding and lantern laws, to more technically advanced forms used in contemporary policing.
Black bodies are often represented in the aforementioned visualization techniques against a ground very similar to Rosco Chroma Key Blue: one of the conditions of their visibility since slavery has been …
“That, Around Which The Universe Revolves: Chapter V: Berlin”
Mitch Speed
In the basement of a former Berlin crematorium, a small brass instrument sputters and hisses. The sculpture—Vartan Avakian’s Composition With A Recurring Sound (2016)—could be the baby cousin to a trumpet or saxophone. It is also the closest this group exhibition about rhythm gets to danceability. No surprise there. SAVVY is a space that emphasizes colloquy, meaning that its exhibitions and programs often seem less concerned with a central subject than that subject’s relation to a lived world. This exhibition concludes a program that extended into Berlin’s HAU theater and in 2016–2017 to Lagos, Düsseldorf, Harare, and Hamburg. It suggests an ad-hoc social nervous system, situating a willing viewer between the uncertainty of thinking and the affirmation of feeling.
The exhibition’s conceit is that artists can elucidate the unseen rhythms that structure life, while the rest of us—by implication—are bewitched by so many abstractions and constructs: work, finance, love… Not suffering from humility, this theme becomes modestly obliging in function: a discursive matrix interlinking the work. IQhiya—a collective of South African women artists—has modeled the possibility of questioning power through lines of free-association inquiry that one might liken to beats in social space. Monday (2017) is made from school desks covered …
Survival Research Laboratories’ “Inconsiderate fantasies of negative acceleration characterized by sacrifices of a non-consensual nature”
Rob Goyanes
A modernist critical framework would have you believe that the difference between a machine and sculpture is the same as between politics and aesthetics: a machine uses power to fulfill a function, while a sculpture is all about form and taste. Knowing that this is bullshit—that there is no apolitical aesthetic—our contemporary lives are defined by the somewhat analogous understanding that the difference between war and terrorism is the same as between art and non-art: purely a question of legitimacy.
Started in 1978 in San Francisco by Mark Pauline, Survival Research Laboratories is a collective of technicians who build freakish militaristic machines. They’re then employed in spectacular public productions that are part hilarious war zone, part robot drama, consisting of modified jet engines that shoot hurricanes of fire; remote-controlled six-legged crawlers that skitter and stab; and spark shooters and shockwave canons and wheelocopters that provoke a sort of childish, anarchic delight. However, there’s a political rigor to these radical machines.
Revered in the social circles of punk, noise, outsider junk art and other so-called “extreme” American subcultures, SRL’s VHS tapes documented these chaotic public events, which often ended in pissed off cops and fire departments even though proper permits were (usually) always …
Juliette Blightman’s “Nightshift”
Claudia Arozqueta
A cactus in a terracotta pot stands beside a laptop playing music through a speaker. The balcony doors are wide open. A cool breeze prompts me to the terrace. I see a brick building, leafy trees, and people crossing the street. I can hear foliage rustling. I look around the room, scrutinizing what at first glance seems insignificant. The computer alone on the floor implies someone’s absence. The domestic environment invites me to sit in front of the laptop and watch a music video that is hardly worth mentioning because within a few seconds my eyes turn towards the sky. I see, in the course of few minutes, an airplane, two common mynas, and a magpie fly by. The sky turns gray. It seems that it’s going to rain. Another track starts, a new rhythm that catches my attention. It’s reggaeton, loud and festive. It is 3:50 p.m. in Sydney, or 6:50 a.m. in Berlin.
Based in Berlin, Juliette Blightman is known for calling attention to the subjective experience of time and for using personal objects and images of friends or family members in her performances, installations, portraits, drawings, and films. She is of a generation of artists—also including Kate Newby, …
“Publishing Against the Grain”
Sean O’Toole
One of my earliest writing gigs was for Casper, a short-lived little magazine founded in May 1998 by artists Luis Felipe Ortega, Daniel Guzmán, Gabriel Kuri, and Damián Ortega. I was vacationing in Mexico City and during a two-week stay with Kuri was co-opted into writing about Osaka’s noise music underground for one of the magazine’s eventual thirteen installments. My expertise was tenuous: I lived in Japan at the time, had attended a couple of live shows, and owned copies of Matt Kaufman’s ribald zine Exile Osaka. Kuri though was an encouraging editor. Months later, I received a decorated A5 envelope containing a staple-bound issue of Casper, my wonky article included among its mix of original and plundered content.
This ludic way of creating a community and sharing ideas may seem quaint in the age of social media, but it nonetheless persists. Included among the thirty-eight mostly print magazines in “Publishing Against the Grain,” a surprisingly diverse showcase of independent publishing from five continents, is Stationary. Published by Mimi Brown, of not-for-profit Spring Workshop in Hong Kong, and distributed by word of mouth, Stationary first materialized in 2015. The launch issue was guest edited by artist Heman Chong and Christina Li, …
"in search of characters…"
Patrick J. Reed
When the clock struck twelve in Berlin, “in search of characters…” transitioned from Galerie Neu’s final offering of 2017 into its first of the new year. Twenty-two works by fourteen artists comprise the exhibition exploring “questions of artistic identity/ies, authorship, and authority,” per the gallery press release. These perennial investigations take on various forms, but whether a painting or a minibar, all are aerated by two mischievous thoughts.
The gallery text conveniently articulates one: a rendition of the Duchampian “readymade” concept that, in 1914, crumbled the menhir of originality into the gravel upon which conceptualism has been driving in donuts ever since. At Galerie Neu, the most obvious benefactor of this tradition is Pubblicitá, pubblicitá, a 1988 advertisement designed for Philippe Thomas’s elusive faux company called “readymades belong to everyone ®.” Appearing as a poster and a postcard, it promotes the company’s initiative for a “total revision of authorial rights,” providing on-demand readymades ripe for inclusion among “all the best museums, galleries, and private collections.” Once in hand, the readymade product is in the custody of the buyer, who becomes its “sole and absolute author” (and art history’s exclusive canon becomes oversaturated with consumer anarchists). Sujet à discrétion (Subject to discretion) …
Gerasimos Floratos’s “Soft Bone Journey”
Ilaria Bombelli
As you walk up to Armada—through a courtyard ringed with industrial sheds and machine shops—placards appear to the right and left that read “adagio” (“drive slowly”), “non urtare” (“caution”), and again, “adagio.” Even if you aren’t the size of a truck, these signs have a way of making you proceed carefully, tentatively. As if moving through some large, lethargic organism. Armada is a former warehouse on the northern edge of Milan, converted into an artist-run space in 2013. The name brings to mind the fleet of Philip II, though there doesn’t seem to be any real connection. Except insofar as it’s managed by a crew of about 20 young people, with a range of artistic aspirations. What they all have in common is the experience of having studied at the Brera Academy under Alberto Garutti, a great figure in Italian public art whose presence can be felt here—the courtyard even contains a plaque with “Garutti” and a notice above it: “reserved, no parking.” His studio is close by.
Gerasimos Floratos’s solo show at Armada, “Soft Bone Journey,” is comprised of three large paintings in oil and acrylic, and three sculptures, each the size of a person, made of painted styrofoam. (All …
Pablo Bronstein’s “The largeness of China seen from a great distance”
Simone Menegoi
The fashion for Chinese decoration, architecture, and craft in Europe was the first great wave of exoticism in Western culture. It lasted for more than a century, from roughly 1670—when Louis XIV commissioned the Trianon de Porcelaine, a Chinese-inspired architectural folly, for Versailles—to the end of the eighteenth century. It reached manic heights (Augustus the Strong, prince of Saxony, almost drained the state finances to fuel his collection of porcelains), and left an indelible mark on the history of taste (the “English garden” was also born of a desire to imitate Chinese landscape architecture). So it’s surprising that it’s taken Pablo Bronstein, whose oeuvre draws on eighteenth-century architecture and décor, so long to devote an entire exhibition to it. Perhaps the venue persuaded the Argentina-born, London-based artist that the time had come: a wonderful eighteenth-century apartment in the center of Turin, a room of which is still decorated with frescoes in the Chinoiserie style.
The aspect of this Sinomania that most interests Bronstein is distance. The geographical and cultural distance separating Europe from China is cause for both fascination and misunderstanding, with the representation of each by the other swinging between idealization and caricature. The show’s opening work evokes that distance. …
Holly White’s “Orange World”
Lizzie Homersham
“If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.” I was sent into a cold rage when I read these words what feels like a never-ending day ago in the transcript from Theresa May’s Conservative Party Conference speech of October 2016. The sentences still reverberate. Supposedly they targeted “people in positions of power [who] behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street.” They simultaneously scorned free movement, no-borders politics, and international solidarity. For those opposed to the Leave campaign’s catalyzing effects on xenophobia, disinvestment, and abstract nationalist desire to “take back control,” a heavy blow to hope had already been struck by the vote back in June. Following her appointment as prime minister, May’s formal response to the referendum result set the electorate’s action into cruel and condescending relief.
“Orange World” opened in Barcelona two months after the Catalan referendum for independence from Spain. During my stay there, the city is punctuated by pro-independence yellow ribbons tied to railings or graffitied onto walls. Apartment buildings are …
“Sonic Rebellion: Music As Resistance”
Seth Kim-Cohen
“Sonic Rebellion” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit offers two substantial proposals. First, it posits that the music of Detroit, ca. 1965–2000, was an active participant in the contemporaneous political and social struggles of the city, voicing and, in some cases, enacting resistance to the existing power structure. Second, it suggests that this conception of music and/as politics issues a call to the future, soliciting responses from contemporary artists including the well-known (Glenn Ligon, Juliana Huxtable, Cauleen Smith) and the somewhat lesser-known (Diamond Stingily, Ben Hall, Sterling Toles).
One leaves MOCAD feeling that the exhibition’s curator Jens Hoffmann is being deliberately coy about its theses. “Sonic Rebellion” presents historical artifacts and contemporary works, but not much context or information that would allow the spectator to engage with the show’s proposals. If, in fact, music participates in resistance, does it do so equally and by the same means, regardless of era, maker, genre, or issue? And what, precisely, is the relation of the historical artifacts in the exhibition to the contemporary artistic responses? Do the latter pay homage, revise, or amplify the positions and meanings of the former? The exhibition sidesteps such thorny questions and their thornier implications by adopting a …
Delia Gonzalez’s “The Last Days of Pompeii” and “Pompei@Madre. Materia Archeologica”
Barbara Casavecchia
I had forgotten about The Day After until the North Korea/US missile crisis brought it back to mind with a bang. Aired in November 1983, the American TV movie terrified over 100 million viewers with its graphic images of a nuclear conflict between the US and the Soviet Union, leading to the manmade destruction of humanity. The poster image of the giant mushroom cloud, towering over the horizon, was everywhere. Maybe every era has a different cloud to fear, the current one being the capitalized Cloud propelled by Capitalism. And maybe that’s why the cloud “like an umbrella pine” that erupted from Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and buried Pompeii under flaming rocks, pumice, ash, and sulfur gases still fascinates us. As evergreen disaster story and hyperfictionalized icon of a past apocalypse, it exorcises our fears of termination.
Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei [The Last Days of Pompeii], an Italian silent movie directed in 1913 by Mario Caserini and Eleuterio Rodolfi, was one of the first “Kolossals” of the disaster genre. It opens with a view of Pompeii’s busy streets, where peplum-clad citizens cross a city gate, flanked by two candid stelae. Its plot is based on a novel of the …
“Cosmic Communities: Coming Out Into Outer Space—Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity”
Alan Gilbert
There is an astonishing sequence in Robert Mugge’s 1980 film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, a documentary about the great intergalactic avant-garde jazz musician, artist, and poet. It occurs when Sun Ra is playing a solo during his band’s—the Arkestra—performance in a Baltimore ballroom. Sun Ra stands in front of his synthesizer and makes a glorious cacophony of smashed and pounded notes. He then spins and turns his back to the keyboard, playing it with the tops of his fingers and hands. The music is quite literally meant to transport: Sun Ra believed that life on this planet was doomed, especially for people of African descent, and that his music and philosophy would carry people to other worlds. Even Jupiter would be better than the ongoing slave ship called Earth.
Sun Ra features prominently in “Cosmic Communities: Coming Out Into Outer Space—Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity,” a sprawling, ambitious, and occasionally overreaching exhibition organized by Diedrich Diederichsen and Christopher Müller for Galerie Buchholz. Eight Sun Ra vinyl record sleeves are included along with three of his original designs for other album covers—two in red swathes and lettering, one in shiny gold and black. Nearby vitrines contain over 50 black-and-white photographs …
William Forsythe’s "Choreographic Objects"
Jennifer Piejko
There were no hesitations, no missteps; no point at which one limb converged onto another, when one cut of cloth got caught up in another. A pair of machines, whose materials were listed obliquely, solely, as “readymade industrial robots,” rest promenade-style, side by side, oriented toward the entrance—toward me—before the flailing rods’ algorithm-determined chassé started up again. Each figure is a slab of steel on the ground, plane extending several square meters, and anchoring an eight-ton robotic arm at its center, grasping a five meter-high carbon fiber flagpole from which hangs an enormous raven nylon flag. The entire display is murdered out, from the seven heavy rotating joints to the high-voltage cables bundled together, snaking to the obscured generators powering the 28-minute-long duet.
Supplanting industrial, motorized instruments for the medium in which he is best known—movement for humans—these “Choreographic Objects” are impossible to comprehend without a preface of the codes that William Forsythe has written to program breathing bodies. The American choreographer was staging for the Stuttgart Ballet in 1976 before he was named artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet in 1984, leaving only after three decades, when the city’s strapped arts funding administration proposed more conservative, populist productions. He established …
“A Synchronology: The Contemporary and Other Times”
Tom Jeffreys
Flowers fade at different rates. In the November chill of a Glasgow art gallery, cut flowers—carefully arranged in a vase on the floor, their silhouette cast against the wall by the light from a projector—are taking their time to die, or to appear dead. (When exactly do cut flowers die?) At a certain moment of decay, a new vase will be selected from a nearby glass shelf, and a florist will arrange another bouquet, precisely styled to match the historical period of the vase that will contain it. This process has been set in motion by artist Corin Sworn and forms a work called Temporal Arrangements (2010). The vases come from Sworn’s own collection. The projector, I’m told, came from Yugoslavia—a country that no longer exists.
The multiple temporalities that Sworn’s work draws attention to form the irregular heartbeats of “A Synchronology,” a group show at Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery. The exhibition, curated by art historian Dominic Paterson, is itself a temporal marker: it has been conceived to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Common Guild, a Glasgow-based arts organization which runs a gallery in the city and commissions off-site projects including, in 2013, “Scotland + Venice” at the 55th Venice …
Runo Lagomarsino’s “We Have Been Called Many Names”
Maria Kjaer Themsen
Nils Staerk is the latest commercial gallery to spring up amidst the coffee shops and organic wine bars in Nordvest, a district of Copenhagen that the local media are more likely to associate with violent crime and unemployment. A further reminder of the uncomfortable coexistence of two worlds stands directly outside the gallery’s doors, in the shape of a mobile shelter for the homeless.
It seems fitting, therefore, that Swedish-Argentinian artist Runo Lagomarsino’s “We Have Been Called Many Names” highlights the invisibility of undocumented migrant workers in the United States. The exhibition consists of an installation of 28 white plaster casts of hats placed on wooden plinths, which occupies most of the gallery’s main room. The hats from which these sculptures have been cast—some made of straw, others the caps worn as part of a uniform—belong to workers in Los Angeles. These cleaners, security guards, gardeners, and service laborers operate on the fringes of American society, with few rights and no voice even as they perform the essential tasks that those from more secure backgrounds might turn their back on.
The array of wooden stools that serve as plinths form a square grid through which visitors can walk and inspect the diverse …
David Blandy’s “The End of the World”
Patrick Langley
In his three-volume book Principles of Geology (1830-1833), Charles Lyell pioneered a theory whose clunky title belies its elegance. Uniformitarianism, as Lyell’s argument is known, suggests that the earth was shaped, over hundreds of millions of years, by incremental processes that are observable all around us: erosion, sedimentation, and so on. As Stephen Jay Gould remarks in his book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987): “the present must be our key to the past.” We can deduce how the earth was made because the forces that shaped it billions of years ago continue to do so today. Thanks in large part to Lyell’s work, geological accounts of the earth’s formation have supplanted Biblical ones. Scripture tells us that our planet was created 6,000 years ago. We now know that it is closer to 4.55 billion years old. The discovery of deep time—in John McPhee’s evocative phrase— compares with the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions in its importance to science. Deep time is also a vertiginous concept. Geological history mocks the brief careers of civilizations, dozens of which may rise and fall in the time it takes a coastline to crumble into the sea.
A dismal fact of life in the Anthropocene—the geological epoch …
Art Basel Miami Beach
Ricardo Mor
Remember to React. Jenny Holzer is trying to tell us something. She has been trying to tell us something since the early 1980s, when she conceived her “Survival” series, from which that sentence emerged. If you’re looking closely, it’s one of the first things you’ll see at Art Basel Miami Beach (on a small plaque inside the booth of Sprüth Magers, Berlin). Like many great artists from her generation, she was reacting to an especially volatile sociopolitical climate and this provocation was a pointed reminder of the necessity to fight apathy in outrageous times. It’s also a reminder that many of the galleries within the fair seem to have missed.
Last year, there were only a few short weeks between the American election and Art Basel Miami Beach’s schedule of events, and only a few artists and gallerists were able to properly respond to what had transpired: Jonathan Horowitz’s edited photograph Does she have a good body? No. Does she have a fat ass? Absolutely (2016) showed Donald Trump shooting golf balls into flame-colored skies; Rirkrit Tiravanija painted the phrase “The Tyranny of Common Sense Has Reached Its Final Stage” on November 9 editions of the New York Times; Blum & …
Gallery Weekend CDMX
Travis Diehl
On September 19, 2017, Mexico City was hit by one of the most destructive earthquakes in the country’s history. Gallery Weekend Mexico City was originally scheduled to open September 21, by which time everyone who could was out in the streets clearing rubble and handing out food and water. The participating galleries met to formulate a response—the first time that they had come together to coordinate anything. The gala opening was called off, and it was decided to reschedule the event for November 9-12. Gallery Weekend also opened up: before the quake, exhibitors had to buy their way in; afterwards, organizers freely distributed purple markers bearing the #GWCDMX hashtag to anyone who wanted to join in.
Spanning a room at Galeria Enrique Guerrero is Adela Goldbard’s El salón de los pasos perdidos (2017), an airy stick-and-cardboard scaffolding in the shape of one of Mexico City’s most overbuilt civic symbols—the Monumento a la Revolución. The four-sided triumphal arch, guarded at its corners by the towering socialist-realist figures of workers, mothers, and architects, is in fact the cupola of an unfinished palace, re-appropriated by the people when the money ran out. The first stone was laid on Independence Day, 1910, the same day …
“The Undercover Economist”
Stefan Heidenreich
For some people, economy is mostly about money. But that is stupid: economy is actually about something else. Money is just the medium conventionally assigned to all tasks understood as economic. In the end, money is just a medium. For all those who firmly believe that the medium is the message, this might resolve the issue. In general I tend to count myself among these late McLuhanians, but when it comes to economy, I beg to disagree. Economy is not about money. It’s about distribution. And at this task, money performs worse and worse, as we know.
This misalignment hasn’t served the art world badly so far, at least for a small chunk of it. Maybe in a near future we will learn to read much of contemporary art’s output as an undercover service to this weird cult of liquidity.
The group show “The Undercover Economist” is centered around a sculpture by Liz Magor, titled Carton III (2006). Seen from the entrance of the gallery, it looks like a pile of old workers’ clothes. Shoes at the bottom, some trousers, a thick woollen pullover, and a heavy gray shirt on top, all neatly folded. Now, as if carried from one place to …
Haegue Yang’s "Quasi-ESP"
Sofia Lemos
Not having a story to tell from the beginning or possibly starting from the middle is how Taoism describes time: continuity without a starting point. Stories abbreviate and expand in “intensiveness,” a term Haegue Yang uses, in dialogue with Jimmie Durham, to describe a mode that, similarly to belief, can exist beyond linear narrative form. Yang, who is recognized for her forays into domesticity and response to the assumed neutrality of exhibition spaces, seeks to find a home in the political, constructing spaces of being and belonging in an ever-recurring cycle of unbound histories and narrations.
While in her discourse Yang positions abstraction at the frontier of form, collapsing real and imaginary kinds of value (including that of the human body and technological gimmicks), her studio practice convolutes these tropes. This is the case with the series “Hardware Store Collages” (ongoing since 1994), where indexed images of hardware and quotidian electronic components are released from their functional context and framed as unfamiliar organic assemblages. At Chantal Crousel, Media Markt smartphones and Saturn Bluetooth speakers are the subject of compositions that intensify technological narratives of hybridity. Swaying Television Ball (2017) places a two-sided flat-screen monitor atop an exercise ball made with artificial …
Dublin Gallery Weekend
Ben Eastham
Dublin is a dirty and disjointed city, a tangle of loosely connected neighborhoods best navigated on foot. On arrival my smartphone gave up the ghost, transforming the schedule of Dublin Gallery Weekend—a semi-coordinated program of exhibition openings, performances, and events—into a Situationist strategy. Deprived of online mapping services, I was forced to plot unusual paths between galleries across the city using a frayed, decade-old mental map. The resulting three-day drift along canal towpaths, through post-industrial edgelands, and down streets named for poets made it impossible to disentangle the experience of art from the emotional disorientation of travelling through the city hosting it.
Douglas Hyde Gallery is located at the bottom of Nassau Street, where students from Trinity College mingle with bookish tourists and frazzled shoppers. Abbas Akhavan’s “variations on a garden” seems initially to offer an oasis from the Black Friday bustle, the silence in the space interrupted only by the meditative drip of water into a shallow pool. That impression of sanctuary is reinforced, and then shattered, by an arrangement of bronze leaves, palm fronds, and flower stems (Study for a Monument, 2013-2016) arranged on the floor of the downstairs gallery. From the balcony, the sculptural installation resembles a set …
Vienna Roundup
Orit Gat
Walking home at night, I pass by Campaign (1972), a two-channel video installation by Ferdinand Kriwet projected onto the storefront windows of Georg Kargl Fine Arts. In the dark street, the images of television footage from the 1972 US presidential campaign fronting Richard Nixon and George McGovern are silent; at the gallery during the day, they almost disappear against the light, but the field recordings, collected by the artist on a trip to the US to witness the primaries, are audible.
The sound of talking heads and debates shapes the experience of the exhibition, a last remnant still on view from curated by_Vienna, a festival inviting international curators to organize fall exhibitions in the city’s galleries. The theme of this year’s iteration was language in contemporary art, and curator Gregor Jansen honed in on the 75-year-old German artist’s longstanding interest in media and focus on text and dissemination. These are crucial issues in our divided societies, in which it is inconceivable that any candidate could win a landslide like Nixon’s (who won 62 per cent of the vote, taking every state except Massachusetts and Washington DC). Jansen did not need to spell out a connection to contemporary politics: speech and its …
“Never Free to Rest”
Devon Van Houten Maldonado
What does it mean to present a group show of black artists based in the United States and United Kingdom—Mark Bradford, Charles Gaines, Rodney McMillian, Julie Mehretu, Kara Walker, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—in Mexico City? Here, the white/black binary of racial discourse in the US and (to a lesser extent) Western Europe is complicated by the centrality of “mestizaje” (mixed ancestry) to the national identity. While this exhibition fails to fulfill its promise to “utilize the radical language of abstraction to destabilize black representation and systems of control,” it does offer the opportunity to reflect on some of the contrasts between postcolonial societies—whether real or imagined—in North and Latin America.
“In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest—and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle,” reads the passage by James Baldwin that inspired the show’s title. But what this superficial collection of “hits” by popular black artists fails to consider is the context of both the country in which it is staged and the discourse that has shaped it: globalization and (post)colonialism as a double-edged sword. Globalization homogenizes and monetizes even as it makes possible new hybrid forms, like the jazz music Charles …
“Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA”
Jennifer Piejko
During his two terms as mayor, Eduardo Paes rewired Rio de Janeiro into a leading “smart city”—a raise of the six-million-resident city’s foundation that he was able to parcel out into a few crisp segments of a neat, satisfied TED talk. He dispensed the recipe for urban achievement: find and open green spaces; install and expand high-capacity public transportation; urbanize favelas, or, “favelas are not always a problem”; and, most important, institute a centralized operations system, or “no files, no paperwork, no distance, 24/7 working” (“a city of the future has to use technology to be present”). Follow these rules and your city can too attract tourist dollars and host the Olympic Games.
It is the latter point, molding a brain for your smart city, that is the most striking, most vulnerable to manipulation, and was met with the most roaring applause from the Long Beach, California audience. The IBM-engineered Operations Center of Rio monitors municipal services around the clock, offering live transmissions from any city bus and trash pickup truck, relieving traffic jams, illustrating weather reports in granular detail. The surveillance state, now a source of celebration and case studies, is a twenty-first-century course correction for a city—region, continent—suffocated …
Joep van Liefland’s “Time To Die”
Nick Currie
It felt entirely appropriate to see “Time To Die”— Joep van Liefland’s first solo exhibition in Japan—on Halloween. As evening fell, the Blade Runner-esque streets around Nanzuka Gallery began to seethe with a human froth of staggering zombies, gibbering corpses, and wounded cosplay nurses. Despite their macabre costumes, the crowds of young people gathering in Shibuya were abuzz with youth and happiness; death never seemed more vital.
A similar paradox was at work in van Liefland’s show. In a hipsterish version of the Day of Judgment, dead video formats were resurrected and celebrated: cabinet installations displayed battered satellite dishes, coiled SCART cables, assorted ugly remote controls, and spools of outmoded ferrous tape. Mounted on pegboard were stickers for half-forgotten electronics brands, prosthetic limbs, bionic skulls, generic batteries, faded adverts for once-futuristic formats.
Beginning with the collage Untitled (Theology of technology 7) (2015)—a juxtaposition of images of color wheels, space tech, classical Greek statuary, and mineralogy—the exhibition led into what appeared to be a 1980s video repair shop, but on closer inspection turned out to be an assemblage of installations featuring remote controls in a light box. Here—thinking of the protests that greeted Omer Fast’s recent exhibition “August” at James Cohan Gallery—I began …
17th Jakarta Biennale, “Jiwa”
Melissa Gronlund
The 2017 edition of the Jakarta Biennale proposes a soulful understanding of Indonesia, in which “jiwa” reigns. Jiwa is a pre-Islamic, polytheistic, and specifically Indonesian concept that signifies a way of living in which thinking and feeling go hand-in-hand, and of living in harmony with nature and with one another. (For clarification on the idea, I was told that Indonesia’s neighbor Singapore has no jiwa: sorry, Singapore!) It might be helpful also to think of what jiwa is defined against: a variety of forces that have threatened to claim Indonesia, such as Dutch colonialism, Suharto, American-style capitalism, Islamification, and nationalism.
Jiwa thus activates a particular social and political background, which the exhibition grounds further with a historical focus. The show’s artistic director, Melati Suryodarmo, and her team Annissa Gultom, Hendro Wiyanto, Philippe Pirotte, and Vít Havránek, returned to the Indonesian generation that emerged in the mid-1970s. This was the moment when a group of artists in Jakarta rebelled against the academicism of the Second Jakarta Painting Biennale of 1974 and instead linked themselves with anti-Suharto activism. For Eceng Gondok Berbungan Emas (Water Hyacinth with a Golden Rose, 1979/2017), Siti Adiyati, for instance, made an artificial pond in the wide gulley between …
Douglas Huebler’s “Works from the 1960s”
Kim Levin
“The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and/or place.” That once startling, now iconic statement by Douglas Huebler (1924–1997) was crucial to the foundation of Conceptual art. It was his contribution to Seth Siegelaub’s “January 5 – 31, 1969,” the exhibition without objects that launched Conceptualism. With those sentences, aimed at an art world dominated by Minimalist objects, Huebler announced that art was no longer an object: it was an idea, documented by means of language, photographs, or diagrams. It was also a matter of time and space. He was the eldest and most famous of the Conceptualists—including Robert Barry Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner—who participated in that objectless exhibition, but in retrospect he was also the most elusive, puzzling, and least understood.
Almost half a century later, the current exhibition is not about what Huebler went on to do after that announcement—his “Variable” series, “Location” series, and “Duration” series (all begun in 1969)—and his quixotic attempt to document everyone on earth. Instead it offers the work he made shortly before that revelation: the quasi-Minimalist objects that …
Charlie Godet Thomas’s “Roman-fleuve”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
An exhibition vitrine in a contemporary exhibition is a knowing nod to long traditions of display. By recreating a form of museum presentation, it relates to what Tony Bennett calls the “museum idea” and its way of defining knowledge and, more broadly, power. Museums, according to Bennett, are places where visitors are taught their place in a society. But Vitrine gallery’s two locations, while behind glass, are antitheses of such authoritative presentation. Founder and director Alys Williams’s model is to create shows displayed in large shop window spaces, visible 24 hours a day. Her London gallery, in Bermondsey Square, is relatively simple; the Basel site, in comparison, has an irregular pentagon footprint with walls placed within, its minute office at the center. Though behind glass, exhibitions are effectively on the outside, not a protected interior. The gallery hunkers under a road bridge, surrounded by a fast food kiosk, a spiral staircase, a supermarket, and a tram stop. Artists have to compete visually and aurally with their surroundings and the everyday life that plays out in a space far from most hermetic art contexts.
Vitrine Basel thus demands mettle from artists; it is never self-evident that their work should be there, entangled …
Ferdinand Kriwet’s “KRIWET”
Kimberly Bradley
Whirlpools of words, sans-serif swirls: language is both subject and material of Ferdinand Kriwet’s exhibition at Georg Kargl Fine Arts, part of this year’s curated by_Vienna. In some of Kriwet’s text-based works, the typographical forms take clear precedence over linguistic sense; in others, the words’ meaning packs the stronger punch.
“KRIWET” explores the multidisciplinary, multipronged, and until recently underexposed oeuvre of German artist Ferdinand Kriwet, whose practice began in the early 1960s. Back then, at the age of 19, he produced his first “Hörtexte” [aural texts]; proto-podcasts in which meaning was obscured, the sounds and phonemes creating a sonic collage. Over the following decades Kriwet would return to expanded notions of collage and experiment with words-as-visual-material in mediums as varied as pencil on canvas, aluminum signage, wallpaper, even a series of oversize artist’s books.
Curated by Gregor Jansen, director of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, this exhibition is essentially a mini-retrospective whose choreography immerses the viewer in the artist’s practice. Viewers are drawn in from the street by Campaign (1972–73/2005), an image-sound collage projected outward through the gallery windows, which here act as giant television screens. Kriwet collages black-and-white TV footage of Richard Nixon and George McGovern’s 1972 US presidential campaigns with broadcast news and …
“Dysfunctional Formulas of Love”
Jonathan Griffin
If your first associations with Colombia are cocaine, paramilitary violence, and the rapacious plunder of natural resources by neo-colonialist corporations, then you are only half right, according to this spirited, unkempt, and organizationally flawed exhibition of Colombian artists at The Box, Los Angeles. Along with all these clichés (eagerly resold to Western audiences through film and television), Colombia is a society of familial warmth and communal resilience, a place where humor, love, and magic play important roles in the survival of its people.
Curators Víctor Albarracín Llanos (who is Colombian) and Corazón Del Sol (who grew up there) allow all of these narrative threads to entwine through the work of 32 artists, most of whom live in Colombia but some of whom now reside elsewhere. One is Los Angeles-based Gala Porras-Kim, who fled Colombia when she was a child, packing hastily in the middle of the night after her family was threatened. The small trove of items she brought with her is arranged on a low table as an untitled and undated installation: comics, letters, some dried leaves, and a cheat sheet for Mortal Kombat 3 (1995). Collectively, the objects reaffirm a tired narrative of dysfunctional Colombian life, but individually they …
Elaine Cameron-Weir’s “wave form walks the earth”
Andrew Berardini
The medieval wardrobe of a sadomasochist, the secret torture chamber gear of a conflicted superhero, grim relics of gods from the deepest abysses of a broken dimension, or, as they truly are, artworks, sparsely hung, dangling from ropes, splayed like bodies, and rippled into curtains of parachute silk, with one emanating scent (as has become a regular ritual in Elaine Cameron-Weir’s exhibitions). Here it’s the ancient aroma of freshly warmed labdanum cooking in a laboratory heating element.
Nearby, cast pewter breasts and belly dangle from the fine mesh of a long-sleeved chainmail hauberk, shouldered with leather harnesses, a long, thin metal tube spreading the arms in prayer or supplication, all hanging in the air with industrial pulleys anchoring it to the hard cement floor with a cinched sandbag. The scenography of the last bit makes it feel like a prop in some lost play by H. P. Lovecraft costumed and propped by H. R. Giger. A sinister future or distant present, the clandestine fetishes hidden in the dungeon of our collective psyche. A fucking awesome costume to a really sick goth party.
The artist lends her voice to the curious titles of these works—the hauberk’s named dressing for altitude (2017)—but even more …
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Lucy Reynolds
Cosey Fanni Tutti’s exhibition at Cabinet Gallery is divided into two parts, a photographic exhibition and a film, which together invite the visitor to negotiate not only questions of morality but also archival memento mori. Upon entering the upper gallery, the viewer confronts frames from Cosey’s 1977 photographic collaborations with the American photographer Joseph Szabo, selected from his archive by the artist and retitled Szabo Sessions (2017). Their collaboration plays upon the blurred boundaries between commerce and art, which the artist has confronted through the interposition of her own body in the course of a career stretching back almost half a century.
Szabo’s photographs raise again the uncomfortable questions that Cosey has posed about women artists’ agency to perform and spectacularize their own bodies and their own desire, particularly when that agency touches upon female power as a form of monetary exchange. But Cosey exceeds the neat lineage which a feminist discourse might trace from Hanne Wilke’s S.O.S Starification Object Series photographs (1974-82) or Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975) to the riot grrrl abandonments of Pipilotti Rist or Tracey Emin’s confessional video Why I Never Became A Dancer (1995). Those works signal a critical deployment of the body within the context …
“When my eyes saw and when my ears heard”
Patrick Langley
In her 1974 memoir Handbook in Motion, Simone Forti describes how, when she moved from San Francisco to New York in 1959, the city seemed a “maze of concrete mirrors.” New York didn’t just disorient: it “shocked” her. She took solace from the city’s alienating architecture by rooting herself in her body, paying close attention to the effects of gravity on her anatomy. “I tuned into my own weight and bulk as a kind of prayer,” she writes. Forti’s 1960s works, structured by game-like sets of rules, were highly influential for Yvonne Rainer, the Judson Dance Theater, and others. In the early pieces, performers interact with simple props, such as gym rope or plywood boxes. These “dance constructions”—Forti’s own usefully ambiguous term—blur the distinctions between choreography, performance, and minimalist sculpture. That Forti’s work resonates in 2017 speaks both of the lasting relevance of her themes—the friction between individual actions and collective rules, for example—and of the dynamism and flexibility of the works themselves, interpreted afresh with each performance.
Forti’s See Saw (1960) is an integral art-historical, thematic, and aesthetic reference point in “When my eyes saw and when my ears heard,” a group show at Hollybush Gardens that explores how bodies …
Katinka Bock’s “Smog”
Simone Menegoi
Katinka Bock compares works to words and exhibitions to texts. The analogy explains the relationship between the two aspects of the Franco-German artist’s work: the sculptures, silver prints, and occasional films, on the one hand, and the sophisticated displays that she creates out of them, whose value is greater than the sum of their parts, on the other. These correspond to two ways of reading Bock’s practice: to focus on the single work, with its delicate material qualities, or to embrace the whole, with its syntactic properties.
If Bock’s exhibitions are texts then “Smog,” her third solo show at Berlin’s Meyer Riegger, is particularly poetic. Two rooms are arranged as if they were two long sentences, rich in subordinate clauses and parentheses; sentences that could have been written by Marcel Proust, full of internal symmetries, of repetitions and variations, aimed at pursuing a nuance of perception or memory. The first room revolves around Grosse Liegende (2017), which is made out of several elements: a horizontal support (an old mattress coil topped by a glass pane), upon which the artist has placed the metal mold of a fish, a matte brown ceramic sculpture, and another ceramic sculpture with abraded blue enamel. The …
Paris Roundup
Tom Jeffreys
The wide eyes and open mouth of a child are a reminder that, even at art fairs, there is still space for the occasional moment of wonder. The girl has good taste: she’s enthralled by Endless (2012), a sculpture by Claire Morgan at the FIAC booth of Galerie Karsten Greve. A three-dimensional grid of dead flies has been suspended in mid-air on vertical lines of nylon weighted with little pieces of lead. Around them, similarly hung dandelion heads form a slim, delicate frame. It is a gossamer-light and enchanting piece, whose dark eco-political agenda has been lent new urgency by recent research into insect decline.
Animals seem, nonetheless, to be scampering throughout Paris this week. Also at FIAC, London’s Sadie Coles’ booth lures visitors in with Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (2015), a black-and-white painting of a photograph of a squirrel. At the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Sophie Calle interweaves the personal, the political, and the philosophical through a series of interventions, including covering the museum’s famous stuffed bear in a white shroud. Especially intriguing is a series of photographs (“Liberté Surveillée,” 2014) of deer, pheasants, and hares taken at night by automated cameras sited on the bridges and …
Cassils’s “Monumental”
Wendy Vogel
The practice of Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Cassils expands upon—and queers—a feminist performance-art tradition, molding their transgender masculine physique through rigorous fitness regimens and durational actions. Though in “Monumental,” Cassils’s current New York exhibition, abstraction has entered the artist’s repertoire. Cassils grapples with their political desire to represent transgender lives and the media’s desire to spectacularize transgender bodies. The most traditional monument on display is Resilience of the 20% (2016), a bronze cast of a one-ton block of clay that Cassils attacked during a previous live performance in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts’s casting hall. The sculpture, which reveals impressions of Cassils’s hands, feet, and limbs, is spotlit at the center of a room painted a sober, dark gray.
A suite of five photographs depicts the artist’s creation of Resilience of the 20%, punching and kicking their way through a ton of clay in total darkness. The only illumination comes from the hard flash of the cantilevered camera, capturing the artist and wide-eyed audience, as well as a cast of Michelangelo’s David (1501-4) behind them. Earlier this year, Cassils led a site-specific performance with Resilience of the 20% in Omaha, Nebraska, called Monument Push. A series of local activists pushed …
Hildegarde Duane’s “Western Woman”
Michelle Standley
As respite from the dark clouds that have lately been gathering over women’s heads in the United States—most recently in the announcement of plans to restrict women’s protection from workplace harassment and access to birth control—perhaps a little comic relief is in order. One contender for the role of feminist humorist is Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Hildegarde Duane. Her tongue-in-cheek brand of humor, exacted over four decades, punctures the conventional narratives about women and female sexuality that suffuse American popular culture and media and are now shaping government policy.
“Western Woman” at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart is Duane’s first solo exhibition in Europe. Spread over two floors of the airy, sun-drenched former suitcase factory, the exhibition consists of fifteen pieces curated by Duane, Steven Cairns, and Fatima Hellberg. The works range from large-format prints (such as Seven Snow Whites, 1981) and framed texts and photography (Marilyn Monroe - 14 Stations, 1982)—displayed in glass cases and vitrines—to short videos such as the one-minute Down with Cocaine (1983) and the sixteen-minute Canelo (2008-2016) that play either on monitors with headphones or in small curtained rooms. Perhaps intending to stress either the timelessness of her preoccupations or an ongoing dialog with her own work, the curators …
Ruth Asawa
Alan Gilbert
One of the three gallery spaces at David Zwirner’s Ruth Asawa exhibition contains a display case featuring archival photographs taken by Imogen Cunningham of the artist in her studio and with her family; an earlier photo of Asawa in class with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College; a letter Asawa wrote to her future husband, architect Albert Lanier, with enclosed drawing; and more. It also features a small color photograph of Asawa in Mexico placed near a flattish, oval basket made of thin, metal wire. This latter, relatively unassuming object, barely highlighted within the overall exhibition, is in fact a key to Asawa’s important art, which until recently has been neglected, despite a scattering of noted shows. Similar to the painter Etel Adnan, who like Asawa lived and exhibited locally in the San Francisco Bay Area for decades, Asawa did not achieve international renown until much later in life. And like Adnan, she was displaced by war.
While a teenager, Asawa was one of the roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans forced by the United States government into internment camps during World War II. Asawa’s father, a farmer in California, was detained first and sent to a separate location; she didn’t see him …
Amar Kanwar’s “Such A Morning”
Colin Perry
Amar Kanwar’s latest video installation delves into more mystical concerns than the documentary format, for which he is known, might seem capable of containing. The eponymous single-channel video at the heart of “Such A Morning” (all works 2017) is an exquisitely installed piece of visionary slow cinema—a work whose mode comes close to magical realism, speculative fiction, or fractured moral parable. Where Kanwar’s earlier films always had one foot in reality, this 85-minute work unfurls a loose narrative in which a famous but unnamed mathematics professor quits his job for no good reason (his colleagues guess at a “deep inner question of the soul” or “a complex conflict of ideology and prejudice”), and retreats to the wilderness to live in an abandoned train carriage. Previously installed at Documenta 14, Such A Morning voices a general existential question: how to live in the present?
Such A Morning is a cinema of affect at its most seductive. Kanwar’s camera captures verdant leaves, rust, and old wood; his soundtrack includes traditional Indian music of flutes and strings. Immersed in this sensorial world, the mathematician’s mind appears to transcend the world of logic, deduction, and syllogisms, to a new plane of emotional resonance between environment …
Frieze Art Fair
Herb Shellenberger
Leave or Remain, Trump or Clinton, terror, peace, boredom, or indifference: no matter where the world is at culturally, politically, socially, or existentially, there will always be another Frieze fair in early October. If last year’s edition occurred within the shadow of a particularly pronounced period of political uncertainty, by now the cards have all been shuffled and we know where we’re at (or more likely, where we’re heading). But “art”—often thought of as a mirror of society at large—can feel particularly distorted in the art-fair setting: both figuratively, in terms of the forms and themes highlighted; and quite literally, as in any number of the inordinately large selection of selfie-ready mirror works that hang in wait. And selfie I did, in an untitled 2015 work by Isa Genzken at New York’s David Zwirner that provided a low-tech, analog method of pixelization.
Perhaps it’s not wise to expect this enormous commercial endeavor to do justice to the things that make art something that we want to look at, make, or participate in, something we think about incessantly. Maybe the art fair has as much to do with art as a wedding convention has to do with love. But as art is …
Olga Chernysheva’s “Algunas Canciones Lindas” and Jaan Toomik’s “How the West Was Left”
Ana Teixeira Pinto
Ever since the end of the Cold War, an aesthetics of mourning has characterized contemporary art’s understanding of its own critical history. “Burdened with a sadness it cannot dispel,” several generations have been delving into these “realms of defeated utopia,” looking back rather than forward. At Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn, Anders Kreuger curates two simultaneous exhibitions, thematizing Tallinn’s soon-to-be-bulldozed Central Market: one at the gallery and the other inside the old market building, marked for demolition.
It is difficult not to feel sentimental about the photographs by Russian artist Olga Chernysheva, one of which, Before Closing (2017) depicts the city’s once-thriving Central Market. Grouped under the equally sentimental title Algunas Canciones Lindas [Some Beautiful Songs] (2002), which the artist borrowed from an old LP featuring Cuban folk songs, the alternating black-and-white and color plates depict a resting cow, two elderly ladies dancing, a young woman holding her pet dog, a manhole, a florist disposing of stale water into a drain, several Soviet-era buildings, a boy holding a piece of see-through fabric with floral motifs, and a young man surrounded by soap bubbles. Though most images were shot recently they do not feel contemporary; Chernysheva’s “eye seems to seek out those persistent …
14th Biennale de Lyon, “Floating Worlds”
Isobel Harbison
Emma Lavigne’s “Floating Worlds” is the second in a “thematic trilogy” of Lyon Biennales exploring the “modern” (a perhaps onerous keyword issued by its artistic director, Thierry Raspail). Lavigne’s title references the Japanese idea of “the floating world” (ukiyo), a mindset originating in the seventeenth century which recognizes life as transitory and the value of sensory and hedonistic pleasures as release from mundane obligations. In various handouts, wall texts, and a catalogue essay, Lavigne also pegs to the curatorial framework Zygmunt Bauman’s distinct concept of “liquid modernity” as a recent period symbolized by flexibility and plasticity. As the infrastructures of social institutions liquefy, Bauman saw self-identification becoming a relentless task, suggesting the liquid modern was neither an aspirational nor entirely pleasurable mode but rather a state of transience and precariousness. The middle ground between these two ideas remains unclear, however, as the biennale is full of suggestive couplings and atmospheric liaisons.
A Buckminster Fuller dome in Place Antonin Poncet is the centerpiece of the exhibition, sitting between the two main venues, the MAC to its north and La Sucrière to its south. Radome (1957) was designed as a shelter but also to enclose radar antennae, attenuating electromagnetic signals and protecting nearby …
Lofoten International Art Festival 2017, “I Taste the Future”
Orit Gat
You put on headphones and wander across a football field at the end of the world. There are instructions: “Go to the corner of the field, or if there is someone there, stand at the goal line at a place where you can see the entire pitch.” From an iPod shuffle emerge four narratives: a Japanese folktale, two stories written by the artist who made the work, and one by Walter Benjamin, in which a mountainside restauranteur’s livelihood is threatened by the picturesque location’s appeal for suicides, are followed, inexplicably, by the novelty song “I’m my own grandpa.” Daisuke Kosugi’s sound work Good Name (Bad Phrase) (2017) is set in the soccer stadium in Henningsvaer, a fishing village (population: 460) in Lofoten, an archipelago on the northwestern Norwegian coast. Beyond that pitch is the Norwegian Sea, scattered islands dominated by enormous peaks, and a sky so blue it merges with the ocean.
At LIAF, a biennial that has been taking place in Lofoten since 1991, landscape is a large, looming subject that demands a response from artists, curators, and viewers alike. The regional economy relies heavily on the natural environment, from whaling and fishing industries to tourism, and the territory is …
Godfried Donkor’s “The First Day of the Yam Custom: 1817”
Tessa Jackson
Copying and re-using others’ images or artworks always generates considerable debate. Just like solving a crime, it becomes necessary to establish a motive. Almost 200 years separate Thomas Bowdich’s original colored aquatint The First Day of the Yam Custom (1818) from Godfried Donkor’s large replica, which takes the same name and hangs center-stage in his first solo show in Ghana since 2006. His purpose is not repetition or appropriation, but re-imagination and re-presentation.
This nine-panel painting, along with three other pieces also on wood and a series of ten collages, is the product of Donkor’s recent four-month residency with Gallery 1957, Accra. Supported to set up a studio, and given time to reconnect with his country of birth and childhood, the artist has re-produced and re-conceived a number of Bowdich’s images, occasionally introducing details from his own observations. The works are hung around a newly created gallery space, in the midst of which sits A Gold Stool (2017) placed upon a plinth covered with a dark cloth.
The First Day of the Yam Custom (2017)—almost eleven meters wide—repeats the layout and composition of the earlier and smaller image, a mere 725 mm across. Using oil and acrylic rather than resin and ink, …
Vava Dudu’s “Vertige profonde”
Natasha Marie Llorens
Vava Dudu’s “Vertige Profonde” at Marseille’s Salon du Salon is visually balanced to the point of stillness. The solo show occupies two adjoining rooms on the third floor of a spacious old bourgeois apartment on l’Avenue du Prado, a wide boulevard radiating out of the city center towards the south and into the city’s richer neighborhoods. Grids of pen-and-ink drawings on notebook paper and intertwining compositions scrawled across thin cotton sheets can do nothing—in the sense that desire is unstable and the drawings are about the movement of the body with another—to disturb the exhibition’s equilibrium.
Small mounds stand out invitingly, sketched with slim lines, tucked inside abstract folds. Holes weep as the silhouettes of fingers slide into them. Disembodied breasts drip, lightly cupped by large hands. What kind of soft volume is that finger spreading beneath it, with its insistence on the vertical axis? “Does it matter?” Dudu’s drawings ask. There is nothing balanced about desire, and yet here it is, stilled, caught on rectangles of paper and cloth, so that one can focus on the implications of just that one mouth and the hand that is tangled around whatever it is sucking on.
“Vertige Profonde” translates as intense or deep …
“the silences between”
Sean O’Toole
The flourishing of South Africa’s commercial galleries over the last two decades has coincided with the atrophying of infrastructure, collections, and curatorial programs at the country’s major public museums. State neglect, hobbled budgets, and poor leadership at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, as well as important municipal museums in Johannesburg and Durban, have resulted in, among other things, the ceding of curatorial narrative to the marketplace during the post-apartheid period. Over the last decade and in the absence of competition, retail enterprises like Goodman Gallery, Stevenson, and Whatiftheworld/Gallery have all staged ambitious group exhibitions mobilized around worldly themes that have served to introduce artists like Karo Akpokiere, Stan Douglas, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Paulo Nazareth, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye to a South African audience. For all their mobility and capital, commercial galleries also work within a system of constraints, with worldliness often shrunk to fit a partisan narrative.
“the silences between” typifies this history. Taking its title from a 1982 book by New Zealand author Keri Hulme, Goodman Gallery curator Emma Laurence’s feminist-inflected exhibition explores what Hulme described as “the writing of history and what is left out.” Her exhibition is, however, wholly made up of Goodman Gallery artists, …
15th Istanbul Biennial, “a good neighbour”
Jörg Heiser
Given the current political situation in Turkey, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the curators of this year’s Istanbul Biennial, Berlin-based artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, and IKSV, the corporate-funded foundation organizing the event, had decided to call the whole thing off. Since its first edition in 1987, the biennial has weathered numerous crises in Turkey. But this time, things are especially grim: in the wake of the attempted coup in July 2016, political purges have antagonized the country under the authoritarian rule of President Erdoğan. Tens of thousands of university teachers, hospital doctors, and judges have been dismissed while not only dozens of members of parliament have been imprisoned, but also hundreds of journalists. Artists have also been targeted, usually based on sweeping allegations ranging from insulting the president to supposedly supporting Kurdish terrorism: in March, the painter Zehra Doğan was sentenced to two years and ten months in prison for a picture in which she painted Turkish flags on buildings destroyed by the Turkish army in the Mardi province, a Kurdish region of Turkey; and in August the writer Doğan Akhanlı, who is a German citizen, was briefly detained in Spain due to an Interpol warrant …
Art Berlin
Stefan Kobel
Can the German art market support four art fairs? The battle over market share is in full swing. Art Karlsruhe is a bit out of the game. Although it seems like a major event with more than 200 exhibitors, it can only cater to the country’s southwestern local audience due to its weak contemporary section. The two traditional strongholds of the market—Cologne and Berlin—are experiencing a major shake-up. The world’s oldest still-running fair for contemporary art, Art Cologne, faces a new competitor with Art Düsseldorf, set to open in November, less than an hour’s drive north. Set up by a company that had successfully run a low-level art fair in Cologne, the new fair has found support from MCH Group. The company owns Art Basel, which took a minority share in Art Düsseldorf as part of a strategy to boost its international activity in regional art fairs—with the option to take over the whole enterprise. So far the success seems somewhat dubious, not least because of the track record of Art Düsseldorf’s two founders, who in 2008 failed in establishing an international art fair in Cologne’s rival city under the name “dc.” So far only 9 galleries from Düsseldorf and …
“The Space of Dreams”
Ingo Niermann
Earlier this summer, after a public talk between Elena Sorokina and my wife, Chus Martínez, the three of us were invited by Eduard Mayoral of Galeria Mayoral to dinner. We hadn’t yet reached dessert when Eduard asked us what to make of Salvador Dalí. They were about to open a group exhibition, “The Space of Dreams,” curated by poet Vicenç Altaió, that would include Dalí’s work. Last year the gallery had also exhibited a series of six of Dalí’s fashion sketches from 1965, with elegantly absurd designs for beachwear and evening robes. These drawings were still for sale for 100,000 euro each.
Apart from his major paintings, the market for Dalí remains murky. Not only did he flood the market by signing all and everything, his historical importance is also in question. When I interviewed Boris Groys in 2010, he used Dalí as a perfect example of an artist who didn’t manage to appeal to both “the mass public and the informed part of the audience.” “Dalí overdid it, lapsed too far into poor taste and did not stand in any central tradition.”
The typical counter-example of someone catering to the art elite and the masses equally (who Groys also mentioned) is …
Nancy Holt’s “Holes of Light”
Helena Tatay
Nancy Holt’s works seem to be camouflaged in the hangar that hosts her Ibiza exhibition at Parra & Romero. This sense of spaciousness is relevant to Holt’s practice, who remains best known for her site-specific earthworks. Like many artists of the 1960s and ’70s, Holt was critical of the gallery system, and her pieces for indoor spaces are rare. The Ibiza exhibition displays two of the very few installations that were conceived for interiors or that could be activated in both interior and exterior spaces, such as Locator with Mirror (1972), the first piece visitors encounter upon entering. Holt’s “Locators” are steel vertical pipes that support shorter horizontal pipes that direct the viewer’s gaze towards a specific point—in this case, towards a mirror on the wall, which returns the viewer’s own image, a disruptive experience in an exhibition. The “Locators” are a seminal body of work; they include Missoula Ranch Locators: Vision Encompassed (1972), eight locators in a circle measuring 12 meters in diameter in the middle of a field surrounded by mountains in Montana, which was Holt’s first device in a natural landscape that framed vision to change reference points or scale.
The exhibition’s main installation, Holes of …
6th Yokohama Triennale, “Islands, Constellations and Galapagos”
Cameron Allan McKean
The city of Yokohama blends almost seamlessly into Tokyo, forming one of the largest and most disaster-prone urban agglomerations in the world. But there are subtle differences between Yokohama and its northern neighbor—the smell of the Pacific, the quiet, moat-like boulevards—and major ones: this is where Western modernity breached the wall around “traditional Japan.” Coerced into trading with the West by the arrival of American warships led by Commodore Perry in 1853, the opening up of the island nation turned Yokohama from a quiet fishing village into a noisy port town. So it makes sense that an art festival—a machine for generating contemporaneity—emerged here in 2001, as Japan entered a new century.
The sixth edition of the Yokohama Triennial, titled “Islands, Constellations and Galapagos,” opened on August 4 at the Yokohama Museum of Art and three nearby sites. The event includes 38 artists and groups, with a significant contingent of Japanese names. New productions include East Java-based Joko Avianto’s The border between good and evil is terribly frizzy (2017), a large braided-rope-style sculpture woven from 2,000 pieces of bamboo, and Yukinori Yanagi’s updated Project God-zilla (2017) assemblage installed in the basement of the Yokohama Port Opening Memorial Hall. Other commissions, especially …
“The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.”
Erika Balsom
THE BOAT
The metaphor of the ship of state is best known from Plato’s Republic. In the “collective exhibition concept” developed by Udo Kittelmann for the Fondazione Prada, this maritime trope of political community is evoked unmistakably yet only obliquely, mediated through the titular citation of Leonard Cohen’s devastating 1988 song “Everybody Knows.” Ancient foundations meet our contemporary crisis in a palimpsestic detour perfectly befitting this brilliant, bewildering, and highly intertextual exhibition. Across three floors, Kittelmann interweaves the work of three German artists, each preeminent in their respective field, each with a distinct interest in the politics of illusion and the textures of modern experience: photographer Thomas Demand, filmmaker Alexander Kluge, and scenographer Anna Viebrock. The result is less an experience of disparate practices, let alone single artworks, than it is an encounter with a holistic, albeit fragmentary, reflection on truth, falsity, and the public sphere in an age of “alternative facts.”
If the political community is a ship, this vessel is our quotidian domicile. Yet the ship is also a heterotopia—a space with its own time, its own rules. Inside Prada’s baroque palazzo—itself set apart from the tourist bustle—Viebrock has meticulously recreated an array of such “other spaces”: a …
Containers
Travis Diehl
The latest installment of Spaces considers the history of displaying contemporary art in shipping containers.
In August 2016, as global logistics firms slumped toward overcapacity, South Korean shipping giant Hanjin went conspicuously belly up. Over 80 of their cargo ships were suddenly turned away from ports around the world, while hundreds of multinational crew faced the further problem of securing either safe repatriation or another job. It was disaster for Hanjin, but a lucky break for Vancouver’s Access Gallery: among the sailors on a Hanjin carrier drifting beyond Tokyo was an artist, Rebecca Moss, whose “Twenty-Three Days at Sea” travelling artist residency stretched to a tense twenty-five. Suddenly, the obscure transit over distant ocean—what Allan Sekula calls the “forgotten space”—was making headlines in a way that an art project rarely does.
Hanjin bowed out just 60 years after Malcom McLean, a truck driver-turned-logistics capitalist, patented the 33-foot precursor to today’s standardized 40-foot container. Thanks to containerized shipping, irregular goods became regularized “flows”—timetables, tonnages, coordinates, and costs—and the calculus of global trade achieved truly incomprehensible scale. This smooth logistical abstraction, by which we can forget that most goods still travel by ship, is coupled, dramatically, with the visual abstraction of the container—rack …
Martino Gamper’s “Middle Chair”
Francis McKee
The marriage of Italian designer Martino Gamper and Pollok House in Glasgow, set up by The Modern Institute, is a perfect match. Originally the ancestral home of the Stirling-Maxwell baronetcy, the house was built in 1752 and is run now by the National Trust as a public museum. Much of the furniture in the house today is not native to the site, having been imported by the Trust at various points in the history of the building.
All of this provides the ideal context for Martino Gamper’s intervention, which replaces several chairs in the house’s collection with his own unique designs (as well as providing chairs for invigilators and visitors). The unity of the house and its furniture has been disrupted over the years, and so the mongrelization of the interiors is echoed in the hybridity of chairs such as Fortezza (all works 2017) and Bobbin Ball. These draw on modernist design, but with elements collaged together from various periods and styles. Moreover, objects such as croquet mallets are absorbed into the furniture with a knowing wink towards the pastimes of mansion owners.
The surprise in this context lies in the peculiar mixture of aesthetic shock and familiarity. On one level Gamper’s …
Nick Bastis’s “Sentries”
Simone Menegoi
“Can you see anything?” Lord Carnarvon anxiously asked Howard Carter, who was peering, through a small hole by the light of a candle, into the anteroom of the tomb of Tutankhamun. “Yes, wonderful things!” was his famous answer. Viewers who access Nick Bastis’s exhibition do not see “wonderful things”; on the contrary, because of the contrast between the dazzling Roman summer light and the semi-darkness of the gallery, for the first few seconds we see almost nothing. Nevertheless we have, like the great English archeologist, the impression of being on the threshold of a recently excavated burial space. There is no neon or halogen lamp, only daylight from the entrance door and from an arched window, normally covered, which has been opened for the occasion. A few meters from the entrance the light is already dim, and darkness reigns at the furthest end of the gallery.
At first sight, the only presence in the whole vast space is an old wardrobe. Inside it we discover two cylindrical metal objects that the artist calls “flutes” (Flutes with Armoire, 2017) and two small round shapes that materialize the volume drawn by a key turning in a lock (909, 2017). Which doors are opened …
“Letter from Istanbul”
Filipa Ramos / Morgan Quaintance
In curating “Letter from Istanbul” at Pi Artworks, London, Morgan Quaintance combined multiple approaches to examine the cultural, social, and political life of Istanbul. He expanded the format of the exhibition to open a direct dialogue between artworks and diverse materials and documents, while also including radio broadcasts and a documentary film. In this conversation with Filipa Ramos, Quaintance reflects on his intentions, interests, and methodologies while also considering the limits of grasping, displacing, and presenting the socio-cultural context of a city in the form of an “informal dispatch.”
Filipa Ramos: When I first visited “Letter from Istanbul,” a group of students were using the public space of the show to reflect upon it. I was particularly interested by one overheard comment, in which a woman maintained that “it’s difficult to know where the curator ends and the art begins due to the combination of documentation and artworks.” So maybe we could address this first: what was your intention in presenting journalistic materials—music pamphlets, political documents, scenes from various demonstrations, books, and texts—alongside artworks?
Morgan Quaintance: I think at the root of “Letter from Istanbul” was the impulse to curate an exhibition as abstracted city report or informal dispatch. But, instead of …
Tamara Henderson’s “Seasons End: Panting Healer”
Tom Morton
A rule of thumb: hearing about other people’s trips abroad is boring. Another: hearing about their dreams is even worse. Given that the work of Tamara Henderson draws on the Canadian artist’s world-girdling nomadism (her CV is a litany of travel grants and residencies) and her own unconscious (past projects have seen her design quasi-modernist furniture while under hypnosis), then by rights it should function like a sleeping draught. In the best possible fashion, it does. To encounter the woozy, bewitching sculptures, paintings, and drawings that make up her exhibition “Seasons End: Panting Healer” at London’s Rodeo is to let slip the moorings of waking life and drift into a realm where stranger logics rule. As with dreams and drugs, or holidays and holy visions, perhaps the best advice with Henderson’s work is simply to go with it, and see where we fetch up.
First, though, some backstory. The Rodeo show is the third iteration of the artist’s “Seasons End” project, following those at the Mitchell Library (part of Glasgow International) and Los Angeles’s REDCAT in 2016 (two more are planned for 2017: a performance as part of London’s Serpentine Galleries’ “Park Nights” season on July 21 and an exhibition at …
Mandla Reuter
Ilaria Bombelli
The invitation to the third solo show by Mandla Reuter at Francesca Minini bears no title or explanation. It relies on just one image, evocative enough on its own: a moonless sea, rippled by waves. Even the press release, stripped of all syntax, is reduced to a chain of words that hint at some meaning but mostly conjure a mood. They include “water,” “island,” “forest,” “sewage,” “dusk,” “stamp,” ”chocolate,” and “remnants,” plus geographic locations, names of cities, and numerical measurements. So we visit the exhibition with this sea in our heads, so to speak, and a few inorganic clues.
At the entrance, the exotic image of a bronze cocoa pod (Cacao, 2017), along with other specimens still nestled within their plaster molds, summons all the various things associated with this fruit (prosperity, exploitation, luxury, poverty, etc.). The viewer’s gaze is immediately drawn—with the sense of the sea growing stronger—to a huge salvage airbag (its crate also exhibited nearby) whose hyperbolic bulk fills and almost seals off the gallery. This sort of obstruction is not a new device for the artist, who in the past has blocked gallery entrances with boulders so that visitors had to strain for a glimpse of the …
ARoS Triennial, “The Garden—End of Times; Beginning of Times”
Isobel Harbison
The inaugural ARoS Triennial, “The Garden—End of Times; Beginning of Times,” opened in Aarhus, 2017’s European Capital of Culture, on the morning that Donald Trump stood in the White House garden and announced his plans to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. ARoS’s director, Erlend Høyersten, promises that this exhibition “will thematize man’s coexistence with, and view on, nature … over a period of 400 years.” Such scrutiny is certainly timely.
The exhibition is installed across three thematic sections, “The Past” in the ARoS Art Museum; “The Present” in the city’s docklands; and “The Future” on its coastline and forest to the south. “The Past” includes 108 works (predominantly paintings) hung in purpose-built galleries painted dark Victorian green. First up are three of Thomas Struth’s “Paradise” series of C-prints (1999, 2005, 2006) all dense, green thickets, “unconscious places” he’s been photographing since 1998. Then appears a room with three large plinths supporting unattributed backlit images of historic Western gardens, French (Versailles), English (a park in Wiltshire), and American (New York’s Central Park). They’re unsightly and unnecessary pedagogical tools, given how regularly this exhibition strays from the leitmotif of the garden. A subsequent hang of Franz Rösel von Rosenhof’s paintings of …
"At this stage"
Travis Diehl
Where to begin? Where else but at this stage? A cotton boll embalmed in a bell jar like the Disney rose in Beauty and the Beast (1991): Aria Dean’s Dead Zone (1) (2017) gives the rose’s place to a white commodity once harvested by black people made commodities. The cotton stands there like a badly conserved museum piece that still reeks of shame. But there is a current charge, too: viewers can take their photos, but they’ll have to wait to post them. Under the bell jar’s oversized base, Dean has hidden a signal jammer modeled on the ones Beyoncé’s bodyguards use to scramble any cell phone in the star’s radius. We are at the stage where a celebrity needs military-grade technology to stage-manage their image—and meanwhile in the ongoing spree of police murdering black Americans, video evidence earns no justice, only spectacle.
Dean’s is the first piece inside gallery Chateau Shatto for this summer of 2017; this is a topical group show, and the topic is a gut check of American exceptionalism. At this stage! The phrase suggests a sequence, a disease—progression, if not progress—like the shot holding on a film of a skyscraper in Sturtevant ‘Warhol Empire State’ (1972). …
Buenos Aires Roundup
Juan Canela
“1866 - TO CULTIVATE YOUR LAND IS TO SERVE YOUR COUNTRY - 2017.”
This is the phrase that appears on a billboard above the bleachers at the central courtyard of La Rural fair and congress center, a neuralgic space of Argentine agricultural policy with deep symbolic and affective roots. On May 23, in the same space where several Argentine presidents—from Juan Domingo Perón to Mauricio Macri through Jorge Rafael Videla and Cristina Kirchner—have given impassioned speeches to the masses, several roller derby skaters circled around, while in the arena artist Osías Yanov made holes in the ground using different geometric iron structures, simulating a kind of acupuncture on the site.
The appealing and challenging performance, entitled Antena Vaginal (Vaginal Antenna) (2017), was part of “rro,” a program curated by Javier Villa and Sarah Demeuse for arteBA 2017. During the action, when Yanov showed part of his butt and laid it on the ground, one of the fairground’s security guards watching the event shouted at him to stop. This could simply be one more anecdote of the reactions that arise at this type of art event when held outside of art spaces, but I found it a clear indication of where we were, …
Anna Louise Richardson’s “On the hunt”
Claudia Arozqueta
There is no animal in this country that does that type of thing. It was the size of a giant tiger. It was about a meter long and had black, silky fur.
The belief in the existence of elusive, strange, fabulous, and extraterrestrial animals is ubiquitous and timeless. Predatory giant turtles, oversized snakes, and fantastic hybrids are abundant in both Ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology. And even today, in our technologically advanced modern society, mystical animals continue to be part of our imaginary and folklore. Among such popular figures are phantom cats or Alien Big Cats: large predatory felines that, although not native to the United States, Europe, and the Antipodes, reportedly roam in the wilderness of these regions. Some witnesses believe that these elusive felines are ghosts or evil creatures. Others suggest that they are escaped circus or zoo animals or exotic pets, or their descendants, while most consider them regular dogs, cats, and foxes, transformed by overly active imaginations. Books and articles are dedicated to the subject of these cats; amateur organizations have been founded to collect and catalogue evidence; and a pseudoscience, cryptozoology, studies their existence, as well as those of other fantastical entities, such as the chupacabra …
Russian Pavilion: "Theatrum Orbis"
Maxim Ivanov
The reign of Stella Kesaeva and the Stella Art Foundation over the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale ended in 2015. Over the course of three biennales, they showed western audiences works by the artists who secured Moscow conceptualism’s place in art history, and transformed it into an export commodity (in the good sense of the word). Moscow conceptualism is not, of course, the equal of Russia’s historical avant-garde, but it can claim second place in the canon. The 2015 Venice Biennale also marked the end of the era of grand narratives in Russian art.
The final exhibition with Kesaeva as commissioner proved that exporting conceptualism had been exhausted. It was clear the Russian Pavilion needed to look for a different way of doing things, to get away from the conservative, spotless presentation of heavyweight canonical art that everyone adores. Ilya Kabakov, after all, was shown in the Russian Pavilion way back in 1993. His friends Andrei Monastyrsky (2011), Vadim Zakharov (2013), and Irina Nakhova (2015) represented Russia at the biennale two decades later. Expectations for the 2017 pavilion were thus considerable. Organizers were faced with the sticky problem of devising a means of representing Russian art that syncs with the …
“2 or 3 Tigers”
Ana Teixeira Pinto
Though at present the concept of “media” is almost wholly equated with communication technologies, throughout the modern period this notion extended beyond the technological field, to include aesthetic and spiritual registers. In the late nineteenth century, a medium was someone with the alleged ability to act as a psychic conduit or transmitter, able to capture cosmic vibrations like a human radio frequency receiver. In the broadest sense, the term “media” introduces the concept of a coded mode of materiality—as W. J. T. Mitchell noted, the very notion of mediation “already entails some mixture of sensory, perceptual, and semiotic elements.” Marshall McLuhan’s notion of media, for instance, includes any “material in unfixed form, or even formless material, such as electricity,” and Friedrich Kittler generalized the concept of media to include all “domains of cultural exchange.” The body, or more accurately the nervous system, is the locus of interaction, the site upon which different media intersect. By emphasizing the notion of light as a medium—albeit one without any content—McLuhan underscores its power to shape the forms of human perception and interaction, socially as well as spiritually.
In the exhibition “2 or 3 Tigers,” curated by Anselm Franke and Hyunjin Kim for the Haus …
Kerry Tribe’s “the word the wall la palabra la pared”
Catalina Lozano
For her first exhibition in Mexico City, LA-based artist Kerry Tribe removed the front wall of Parque Galería and transformed it into a makeshift screening room. The crumbling architecture, with its exposed dry walls and frayed edges, introduces an exhibition in which seemingly solid physical and psychical structures are undone.
Tribe’s work addresses perception, memory, and language, as well as the technologies used to perceive, record, and describe experience. Combining video, sculpture, and photography, her latest exhibition considers how atypical circumstances—such as alterations in the mechanisms of reception and emission in the brain—create opportunities to analyze the norms by which fitness and unfitness are defined. By paying attention to the anomalous, Tribe tackles new, affective configurations of knowledge.
“the word the wall la palabra la pared” picks up and branches out from “The Loste Note,” Tribe’s 2015 show at 356 Mission, Los Angeles. Both deal with aphasia, a condition affecting the way oral and written language is processed. It is typically caused by damage to the brain, normally due to a stroke or head trauma. At Parque Galería, Tribe focuses on her collaboration with photographer Christopher Riley who, after two strokes, lives with the condition. In the video Afasia [Aphasia] (2017), both …
Jérôme Bel’s “76’38’’ + ∞”
Barbara Casavecchia
The new extension of Centro Pecci (designed by NIO Architecten Rotterdam, and inaugurated last fall) is a ring-shaped volume clad in golden aluminum, halfway between a UFO from a 1950s B-movie and the corporate headquarters of a German car brand, surrounded by an urban sprawl of office blocks, residential buildings, shopping malls, McDonald’s joints, and freeways. The industrial city of Prato is only a half hour from Florence by train, but miles away from the picture-perfect cliché of Tuscany as the holy land of the Renaissance—probably one reason why, back in 1988, it welcomed the first contemporary art museum in Italy, built here with the ambition of following the multidisciplinary example of Paris’s Centre Pompidou. Several decades (and a few industrial crises) later, the Pecci still looks like an alien trying to establish contact with humans.
“76’38’’ + ∞,” the title of Jérôme Bel’s current exhibition at the museum (curated by Antonia Alampi), fits well with the sci-fi mood. It corresponds to the minimum amount of time required to see the works on show from beginning till end, plus the possibility of extending the experience ad infinitum. I abided to it, so that Bel paced my steps to his tempo—larghissimo, adagissimo, …
John Gerrard’s "X. laevis (Spacelab)"
Laura McLean-Ferris
Where is the bright line between life and the simulation of life? And what then are the criteria for assessing aliveness? These questions are forever reconstituted and assessed anew at life’s fringes—around automata, the dead, artificial intelligence. 2017’s prestige AI television series Westworld is only the most recent thinking-through of such questions—a narrative in which robots make a leap into sentience through the injection of a “mistake” memory gesture into their programming. In 1780 Luigi Galvani ran currents of electricity through dead frogs’ legs, the force animated the limbs so that they twitched and jumped (the term “to galvanize”—to electrify into action—is named after the scientist). The repercussions of this experiment, and the question marks it placed over animation, reanimation, and the godlike ability to give life charged through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the seminal horror story which drew on Galvani’s experiments to consider the implications of electricity as the force of vitality.
Such histories and philosophical problems are embedded in John Gerrard’s new simulation, X. laevis (Spacelab) (2017), on view at Simon Preston, playing on a large screen in the center of the gallery. Like several of the artist’s previous works, this is a digital animation that renders in real …
"Ways of the Hand"
Sofia Lemos
When lost for words, hands are tools to point, wave, and otherwise indicate meaning. While much of this form of communication is intuitive, firsthand knowledge is highly performative: as hands trace airborne paths, their gestures form recognizable patterns that may relay receptiveness or fear, in a cognizant yet affective process of perceiving the world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty addresses the exchange between the hand and the object it touches as a sentient and sensible one: “If I touch with my left hand my right hand while it touches an object, the right hand object is not the right hand touching: the first is an intertwining of bones, muscles, and flesh bearing down on a point in space, the second traverses space as a rocket in order to discover the exterior object in its place.”), 92.] The result is an “ambiguous set-up” in which both hands alternate between touching and being touched, exceeding the logic of ambiguity: as one hand touches the other touching an object, neither the right nor the left hand nor the object can be unequivocally discerned.
“Ways of the Hand,” the inaugural exhibition of the Madrilenian gallery Maisterravalbuena in Lisbon, curated by the Lisbon-based curatorial duo João Mourão and Luís Silva, …
Art Basel
Daniel Horn
The air was hot and filled with din. Art Basel 2017 opened on Tuesday as a more laid-back affair than the previous two editions, but the overall mood was nonetheless upbeat. And how could it not be, given the breathtakingly vulgar fun-fair installation Now I Won (2017) by Swiss artist Claudia Comte, greeting and luring (and driving away) visitors entering the Messeplatz? Teutonic in execution and style, it offered various competitive games in which Comte’s artworks could be won while emitting a blaring mix of Schlager and hoedown techno. The proceeds from its two-franc ticket sales go to some eco non-profit, making the whole thing feel timely in its tribal tattooed populism-meets-greenwashing outlook, compared to resuscitations of 1990s virginal sharetopias like Rirkrit Tiravanija’s al fresco curry Do We Dream Under The Same Sky two summers ago, or like the kind of applied progressive “artistic research” embodied by Oscar Tuazon’s Zome Alloy architecture, underwritten by 2016 elites.
Inside, the demographic barometer had largely swung—or arguably remained—to a groomed, white Euro-set with noticeably Francophone accents to be heard nearly all around, perhaps due to some Emmanuel Macron high spiking French (or was it Belgian or in fact Swiss?) purchasing confidence and a restored …
Skulptur Projekte Münster
Tobi Maier
Now half a century old, the decennial public art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster has unquestionably grown up. The first exhibition featured only male artists while now almost half of the participants are women; a retrospective exhibition of Michael Asher’s photography at Skulptur Projekte Münster—the artist participated in every edition from its inauguration in 1977 to 2007—is taking place at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur; a series of newspapers (Out of Body, Out of Time, Out of Place) were published in the run-up to the opening; and a research publication on the history of the institution is scheduled for 2019.
The curators of this fifth edition—Britta Peters, Marianna Wagner, and co-founder Kasper König—have organized a non-thematic exhibition in 35 locations around Münster and the neighboring city of Marl. Add to that the 36 existing projects from previous editions—with works by Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, and Rosemarie Trockel among them—and it is possible to trace a 50-year history of public sculpture, beginning with the placement of static monuments into the landscape and evolving to encompass digital media alongside participatory and performance art. While the monumental works mark the physical terrain, those of an ephemeral nature are lodged in the collective …
Documenta 14
Anders Kreuger
“We all act as if we have no choice but to consume more and more” This quote, from Mongolian artist Ariuntugs Tserenpil, serves as the first of three titles for these reflections on Documenta 14 in Kassel. Its label of “the world’s most important exhibition” must still carry some weight. Otherwise, how to explain the lively debate around the calculatedly visionary and/or arrogant decision to split it into two halves—on Greek and German soil—and what might be learned from it? Any attempt to rapidly and exhaustively dissect Documenta 14 is a fool’s errand. Nowadays, any institution of this magnitude is treated as too big to fail and is therefore all the more vulnerable to failure. What used to be a museum of 100 days in a handful of buildings is now a festival lasting 163 days, with 200 authors, over more than 50 venues in two cities far apart. The near impossibility of capturing every facet of the exhibition is built into every viewer’s experience. Such are the diktats of continued growth that its organizers must try to oppose from within, while at the same time only pretending to do so. By the logic of subversion, being all the …
Brian Bress’s “In Lieu of Flowers Send Memes”
Andrew Berardini
Here’s the latest Spring menswear line worn by the hottest male models of the twenty-eighth century, those jaunty scions of cyborg overlords. Our wetwear bodies found a hardware durability after we and our machines, long flirting, finally coupled. Moodily lit with mint and hot pink, humanoid bods sport flight jackets and tennis togs and fencing uniforms with patterns like alien cryptography, their sculptural faces as interchangeable as their clothing. Once the singularity curves past us, why wouldn’t we change our faces at will? Who needs a mouth when we can communicate telepathically, plug in for nourishment? These head-sculptures angle with Bauhausian geometries and deco motifs, the curves of Incan spaceships and patterns of ancient Greek friezes. All of it soft and foamy. Even cyborgs yearn for a little pliability. The models gently revolve on screen, giving us the whole fit, a catwalk turn, even as those bods stay otherwise still in their languorous revolutions. Nearby, the heads of these on-screen models sit on plinths in all their bend and ornament, ready for a discerning consumer to find the expression that fits their fast-paced cosmic lifestyle, a new head for a new season.
Brian Bress has long been casting characters and creatures …
Mel Bochner’s “Voices”
Kim Levin
At a moment when all kinds of anxieties can be tweaked by a tweeting president, Mel Bochner—a highly respected first-generation Conceptualist—has found his voice. Or perhaps I should say, these uneasy times have caught up with Bochner’s word-based art of language and ideas.
Other founding Conceptualists of the late 1960s— Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner—formulated their immaterial ideas and the stenciled or neon words to articulate them early, and stuck with them, developing and refining them. In those days, Bochner’s dematerialized works questioned the measurement of space. When his early “Theory of Sculpture” series (1968-73)—made with numbers, lines, circles, white stones, and walnuts arrayed on the floor—was re-shown at Peter Freeman in 2013, Roberta Smith in the New York Times called the pieces “elegant thought puzzles.”
But shortly after the turn of our century, Bochner went backwards to move forward. He embraced the old material-based act of painting on canvas. He began making enigmatic, hotly expressionistic, and sometimes illegible words with brushy, runny, dripping oil paint. At the time, some of us were puzzled by this apparently retrograde move by a highly theoretical artist who had studied philosophy. Was he still making Conceptual art? Or was he turning to …
"We Come Bearing Gifts"—iLiana Fokianaki and Yanis Varoufakis on Documenta 14 Athens
iLiana Fokianaki / Yanis Varoufakis
Created in 1955 by artist and curator Arnold Bode, Documenta sought to advance the cultural reconstruction of Germany within the postwar European order. Recurring every five years, it has since unfolded into a periodic forum for contemporary art. When Adam Szymczyk was appointed artistic director of Documenta 14 in November 2013, he proposed calling the exhibition “Learning From Athens,” opening it first in the Greek capital and then in its traditional home in Kassel. Four years later, with the Greek exhibition now underway and the German edition about to open, iLiana Fokianaki and Yanis Varoufakis share their views on the show, its development, and its implications.
iLiana Fokianaki: In the beginning, when it was first announced that Documenta 14 would be held in Athens, I believed there was a purpose to the experiment. How would a rigid institution be transformed by its curatorial team living and operating in a city of crisis? I thought that the moment one performs such a “move” there must be a particular reasoning behind the relocation, as well as the selection of the location. Two years later, and with the exhibition now open, I am still unable to answer the question of “why Athens?” At the …
Dara Birnbaum’s “Psalm 29(30)”
Leo Goldsmith
Six years in, Syria’s Civil War has been the subject of a vast quantity of information—in the form of user-generated video, reportage, news analysis, social media updates—and yet we seem no nearer to an adequate means of representing it. Representation and resolution are often intertwined: the clarity of a representation, the point at which visual material resolves into an image, is a question of the way in which content is subjected to form. We are still seeking a form with which to organize the barrage of information from Syria into a coherent image that will make the conflict materially sensible for those only able to apprehend it from afar.
Documentary media have historically been the privileged modes through which to process such crises. News reportage now constitutes the most prolific of these, if also the noisiest. But contemporary art, with its recently intensifying interest in strategies of documentary, has been quick to respond as well: through photography and reenactment—such as Ai Weiwei’s restaging of the shocking photograph of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who drowned off the coast of Turkey, with the artist himself as the dead child—as well as more “archival,” object-based exhibitions of work made by Syrian artists or …
"Quiet"
Aoife Rosenmeyer
According to the exhibition’s introductory text, “Quiet,” curated by SALTS director and Art Basel Parcours curator Samuel Leuenberger, is inspired by Susan Cain’s 2012 book of the same title, which champions introverts in a world skewed in favor of the ebullient extrovert. It is an odd premise for an exhibition, given that artworks are generally left to speak for themselves and their mediation is delegated from the artist to the curator or the gallerist. Yet now that connections and networks are so strategically fostered, have we lost faith in art’s own inherent power? If the art world is utterly deaf to the potential of a silent or slight gesture, we are doomed. What this show achieves, however, is an exploration of different kinds of quietness and distance between artist, media, and artwork. At its center, a city lies in a crescent at our feet. It is a ruined city, abandoned, the bones of buildings, highways, and civil engineering bared, dirt and sand gathering around it. Houses are missing roofs and sides, though a few bare lightbulbs still burn brightly. Youssef Limoud’s Geometry of the Passing (2017) is made from found detritus, brownish torn waste materials and lost objects such as …
Eva Kot’átková’s “Diary of a stomach”
Ana Ofak
“What have you eaten today?” a metallic voiceover inquires. The reply, uttered by a child, hesitantly, is “nothing.” Yet in the course of the transitory interrogation that unfolds in the middle of Eva Kot’átková’s most recent film Stomach of the world (2017), currently being shown by the Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative at the Benaki Museum in Athens, and related to an exhibition currently on view at Berlin’s Meyer Riegger, nothing becomes plenty of something. We listen to the child catalog thoughts and lost objects as if filling the void of sustenance. The empty stomach is repurposed into a container for the spam of life. Crammed with information, it becomes capable of expelling appetite and even anxiety from the system. Hunger, it seems to convey, is hunger for fabrication, not food.
Kot’átková’s installations tend to submerge the observer in such morbid enterologies of infant worlds. And infant worlds, we quickly gather, are no democratic assemblies. Working with collage, drawing, sculpture, film, and, lately, gallery walls, the artist has forged an idiosyncratic totality of these worlds over the years, which almost emulates an organism that sustains invariable aesthetics, yet generates ever-new contingencies connected to childhood. Kot’áková thereby characterizes childhood as a battery of …
New York City Roundup
Orit Gat
As I missed out on international art events this season because New York is so far away, all I could think of was how unlucky their curators are. You work on Venice or Documenta for a year or two or four. You start out researching when there’s a somewhat liberal president in the US and some island off the coast of Europe still considers itself part of the union. Though the war in Syria, the refugee crisis, and economic instability in the EU were already present, there’s still a feeling that this past year has served too many blows. And those large-scale exhibitions, years in the making, all opened to a great unknown.
On Instagram, almost all the photos I see from Venice are of the same works, and I wonder how and if they respond to the current situation, whether there is a way for art not to seem detached. In New York, few of the exhibitions currently on view in commercial galleries and museums focus directly on contemporary politics. At Metro Pictures, Robert Longo’s show, “The Destroyer Cycle,” does just that. It’s comprised of large-scale charcoal-and-graphite drawings of riot cops in full gear, prisoners being led to a CIA …
Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s “Un Arte A Realizar [An Art In Becoming]”
Gustavo Grandal Montero
“Un Arte A Realizar [An Art In Becoming]” is the first solo exhibition in the UK dedicated to the Argentinian artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo, who died in 1997. Relatively unknown in Europe, his name has until recently been associated with mail art, that most underrated of avant-garde movements. The exhibition presents a small selection of around 30 works, mostly on paper, from the late 1950s to the ’90s, part of a much larger collection recently acquired by the gallery from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami.
Vigo’s early work comprises concrete poetry, represented here by two 1958 prints (R and Composición mecánico-estética), and neo-dada objects, which he defined as useless and impossible machines. (Photographs documenting two of these are on display.) He edited the artists’ magazine Diagonal Cero, which featured visual and concrete poetry from Argentina and beyond, and in 1969 organized the international exhibition of concrete poetry “Expo Internacional Novísima Poesía/69” in Buenos Aires. Between 1971 and 1975 he published Hexágono ’71, a magazine that included contributions from a wide range of international artists. Although these publications are poorly represented in the exhibition—with just two issues of Diagonal Cero—they are central to Vigo’s practice, and their …
Maria Taniguchi
Cameron Allan McKean
Earth-stuff goes through myriad transformations on its path to usefulness in our world. Soil, stone, water, oil, plants, animals, and the rest all pass through processes of cleaning, smoothing, separating, reconstituting. And at the end of that violence is an exquisite, terrifying flatness: one that expresses itself through identical buildings, garments, and foods; through the identical spaces conveyed by this screen and the identical blackness inside it.
From her Manila studio, Maria Taniguchi makes work about the extraction of Earth-stuff—about its flattening and the entanglement of humans and nonhumans this transformation is contingent on. Born in the Philippines in 1981, Taniguchi works in installation, sculpture, and video, but she is best known for her nearly decade-long series of untitled paintings depicting a pattern of identical black bricks. Perhaps the plural is unnecessary: it’s really a single brick, roughly two by six centimeters, outlined in graphite on canvas or linen, and filled with black and gray acrylic. This brick repeats itself through her paintings, which seem to vary only by the size of their frame (from centimeters to meters) and the position they occupy in a gallery or studio. Her grid is uniform and endlessly scalable.
This brick helped win Taniguchi the Hugo …
Christina Mackie’s “Drift Rust”
Patrick Langley
Christina Mackie’s installations have an instinctive and provisional feel about them. They present the viewer with arrays of disparate objects, arranged on trestle tables, walls, and shelves, assembled according to a spontaneous logic of correspondence and juxtaposition. Mackie refers to this aspect of her work as “trestle art.” Wolfgang Tillmans’ tables and vitrines (such as truth study centre, Tate, 2017), Camille Henrot’s The Pale Fox (2014), and Portia Munson’s Pink Project: Table (1994) are a few notable examples of the genre. Recalling the Surrealist tradition of assemblage and the more recent trend of “archive art,” in which artists collect and compile existing imagery and information, “trestle art” positions the artist as curator or analyst. Filtration and distillation take precedence over production. Objects, selected according to fixed and often idiosyncratic criteria, are brought into conversation with one another.
As Hal Foster has observed, “archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.” One obvious difference between Mackie’s works and those of other “trestle” and “archive” artists is that she makes almost all of the objects herself. A notable example in “Drift Rust,” Mackie’s solo exhibition at London’s Herald Street (the show is described as an installation in the …
57th Venice Biennale, “Viva Arte Viva”
Kevin McGarry
There was widespread suspicion about “Viva Arte Viva” even before Christine Macel’s 57th Venice Biennale opened last week. This year’s edition fell short of gender parity with almost two-thirds of the participants male, fomenting heated critiques on social media upon release of the artist list. Racial metrics were worse; case in point, five of the 120 artists are black. These are normal problems for the Biennale (even if the upheavals of the past two years have shone a spotlight on them), though they remain audacious statements for an institution meant to be representative and contemporary. Even more audacious, some might say, is the absence of a thesis engaged with anything more than the nominal boosterism of art itself as a proxy for humanism.
The morning of the press preview, I checked Instagram and saw that perennial truth-keeper Frances Stark (@therealstarkiller) had shared a still from a video concocted for the Biennale’s website, noting in the caption that it was “made under duress to contribute promotional material” to the show. In the same post the artist wrote she was “uncomfortably in the dark about this year’s Venice Biennale,” unaware of where or how her work (on loan) would be shown. This echoed …
57th Venice Biennale, "Viva Arte Viva"
Barbara Casavecchia
“Viva Arte Viva” is a tautological title. Since a tautological statement is one that is necessarily true on the basis of its circular syntactical structure, it’s logical to assume that Christine Macel, the curator of the 57th Venice Biennale, is asking us to believe that art is alive, and/or that we should all celebrate the celebration of art. Viva (hail) relates also to ovation (as in “Hail to the Chief”) and liturgical acclamation (like hooray or amen). So “Viva Arte Viva” begs for fervor and leaps of faith. After all, the descent of the biennale upon Venice is a 122-year-old cult, celebrated every two years in the same temples (pavilions and palazzos, but also yachts, vaporetti, and bars), with growing numbers of followers and replicas around the world. “The processions, circumambulations, singing, dancing, storytelling, food-sharing, fire-burning, incensing, drumming, and bell-ringing along with the body heat and active participation of the crowd create an overwhelming synesthetic environment and experience. At the same time, rituals embody values that instruct and mobilize participants.”
The brief for the 2017 festivities seems as basic as it is infantilizing: keep it simple. “At a time of global disorder,” Macel writes, “the role, the voice and the responsibility …
Jörg Immendorff’s “LIDL Works and Performances from the 60s”
Andrew Stefan Weiner
At the time of his death in 2007, Jörg Immendorff was celebrated in his homeland as one of postwar Germany’s most famous artists, and also as one of its most infamous. Earlier that year the terminally ill, functionally incapacitated painter had directed a team of assistants to produce an official portrait of the former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The commission from Schröder, a friend of the artist, offered him a chance to redeem himself after a spectacularly louche scandal in which police found the wheelchair-bound Immendorff enjoying the company of seven prostitutes in a posh hotel suite, accompanied by some eleven grams of cocaine (on a Versace tray, no less). Whether because this rehabilitation was in fact successful, or more probably because Immendorff’s improbable escapade only enhanced his rakish reputation, a decade later the artist’s status in his homeland looks to be secure.
However, outside Germany matters are less clear. While Immendorff’s name is widely recognized, he has failed to attain the sort of superstardom associated with peers like Isa Genzken, Sigmar Polke, or Gerhard Richter, or even with younger artists like Martin Kippenberger. Although his work is in the collections of MoMA and Tate Modern, along with many other prominent museums, …
Dan Coopey’s “Dry”
Matthew McLean
One origin myth of ceramics: that far back in prehistory, basket makers packed their containers with clay to form a lining, and one day dropped one of these vessels into a fire, finding, when the ashes cooled, that the clay had hardened and remained where the woven structure was destroyed.
Ceramics, in this narrative, supersedes basketry: and yet the practice of weaving continues, even, as the makers move from gathering to hunting to farming. Was this a practical decision, or an aesthetic preference? Some early ceramics are decorated in indented crisscross patterns, as though aspiring to resemble the earlier form.
The themes inherent in this story—about the relation between craft and art, between utility and decoration, and of the development of forms, their chronological succession—are probed via the six basketwork forms included in Dan Coopey’s “Dry.” Each one—all Untitled (all works 2017), with enigmatic, geographic subtitles: Indus, Gansu, Tuxá, etc.—is roughly cylindrical and narrows and expands along its length, as if gently squeezed, as clay is on a potter’s wheel. Made from unpainted rattan, they look somehow ritualistic, like urns, and vaguely echo the undulations of Indian stupas, but they belong to no identifiable formal tradition, as intact and sui generis …
Frieze New York
Rachel Wetzler
The first thing I saw upon entering the tent at Frieze New York was Elmgreen and Dragset’s Rite of Passage (2014) at Massimo De Carlo, a tattered sign bearing the word “MIRACLE” with a white vulture perched on top, flanked by lengths of torn chain link fence. This dismal tableau fitted the mood: when I left my apartment for the preview on Thursday morning, Congress was, for the second time in as many months, debating a bill that would return millions of Americans—including most of the artists and writers I know—to the ranks of the perpetually uninsured.
This unreal quality of the fair, literally ensconced on an island, was the subject of Dora Budor’s Frieze Projects commission, MANICOMIO! (2017), for which she hired several Leonardo DiCaprio impersonators to meander around in the guise of the actor-collector’s notable characters. Details were left intentionally murky in the advance press materials, presumably to enable moments like the one I experienced upon seeing a man with a scraggly beard and fur cape walk by: I jotted down in my notebook “is the man dressed like he belongs in The Revenant a performance artist, or just weird?”
Still, I was pleased by the distraction. Though the overall …
“Placed Someplace with Intent”
Keren Goldberg
The number of Tel Avivan galleries mounting consecutive group shows is a symptom of the Israeli art market’s gloomy state. While you might assume that Dvir’s latest group exhibition—its second in a row—is another driven by commercial imperatives, it does draw concrete formal and contextual ties between works by major artists including Lawrence Weiner, Miroslaw Balka, Douglas Gordon, Shilpa Gupta, and Jonathan Monk.
Weiner’s Placed Someplace with Intent (2014), which gives the show its title, seems the most fitting of several text-based works in the show. The sentence might humorously describe Mircea Cantor’s sculpture Supposing I could hear that sound. Now (2015), a huge concrete coulisse adorned with thick concrete ropes, resting on two readymade shofars (ancient Jewish horns). The shofars peek out like two feet of a crushed, helpless creature. Cantor’s at times austere, at times whimsical use of readymades is also present in two works by Barak Ravitz, a promising young Israeli artist. In one, a black rubber cast of a raven is laying on the floor as if dead, its head resting on a black cotton thread ball that runs through its body (Knitter, 2016). It lies next to Cantor’s photograph Hiatus (2008), depicting a strange geometric wooden …
Gallery Weekend Berlin
Sofia Lemos
In the wake of the events of May 1968, German Minimalist Charlotte Posenenske wrote in Art International that “it is difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to solving urgent social problems.”,” Art International no. 5 (May 1968), n.p.] Posenenske’s “‘Statement’ [Manifesto],” which initially meant to examine ownership and the reproducibility of her artworks, publicly announced the artist’s dismissal of the art world. Having retrained as a sociologist, Posenenske dedicated herself to working with labor unions and refused to show her work or visit any exhibitions until her death in 1985.
While gallery-goers shuttled through Berlin to the rhythm of scattered attention and market consumption, Posenenske’s show at Mehdi Chouakri set the tone for this year’s edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin. Selected galleries of all scales and scopes made a concerted effort to take up the conflated legacies of modernism, rationalized systems of language, and the critique of whiplash-paced figurations of the modern subject.
Mehdi Chouakri presents a series of abstract sculptures by Posenenske from 1967, as well as a selection of works on paper from the 1950s in their second space, also in Charlottenburg. Displayed in glass vitrines and hanging on the wall, …
Mounir Fatmi’s “Inside the Fire Circle”
Kevin Jones
“I don’t know what it’s like to be black in America,” wrote the artist Dana Schutz in her protracted defense against calls for the removal and destruction of her painting Open Casket (2016). She was responding to mounting fervor over her rendition, included in the Whitney Biennial, of the mangled face of African-American teen Emmett Till, savagely murdered in 1955 at the hands of white racists in Mississippi. Arguments on both sides of the divide hovered around the impossible “knowability” of the “other,” with Schutz (clumsily) claiming art as a space of empathy, and her detractors foregrounding the artist’s blithe appropriation of a charged episode in American visual politics, resulting in the trivialization of black suffering. As the debates raged on, this thorny question of knowing the other quietly surfaced in French-Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi’s show “Inside the Fire Circle” at Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai.
Continuing his fascination with the archive (a mainstay of which is the cogent 2006-2009 project “Out of History” examining the Black Panthers Party), Fatmi has unearthed a moment in late 1950s American race-relations history through the exploits of Texan journalist John Howard Griffin (1920–80). Determined to “experience discrimination” as did a black man in the harshly …
Donna Huanca’s “LENGUA DE BARTOLINA SISA”
Juan Canela
September 5, 1782. Bartolina Sisa, Aymara leader of the indigenous uprising against the Spanish in Bolivia, is brutally tortured, publicly humiliated, and killed by hanging. Her body is dismembered and, to prevent further rebellion, her head and extremities are exhibited at several locations known for their resilience. Bartolina Sisa has subsequently become a symbol for the struggle of indigenous populations throughout Latin America, and, since 1983, September 5 has been celebrated as International Day of Indigenous Women.
The title of the first exhibition by Bolivian-American artist Donna Huanca at Travesía Cuatro in Madrid refers to these facts, setting up a very precise symbolic framework. In recent years, Huanca’s work has stood out for its understanding of the body, and of the skin in particular, as a territory where surface and matter converse with architecture, space, and the world. Through paintings, sculptures, and performances, the artist creates disturbing futuristic-prehistoric scenarios where identity shatters into a sort of schizodynamic production of knowledge. In these performances, a set of actions is carried out by regular collaborators, producing slow-paced choreographies that conjure private rituals and meditations in the gallery space, confronting the viewer with a scenario equal parts uncomfortable and suggestive.
Last autumn, Huanca developed a …
“Concrete Island”
Travis Diehl
Word on the street is they got the Crenshaw Cowboy. Into a gallery, that is. Anyone who has turned onto the westbound I-10 at Crenshaw Boulevard has likely noticed him, an itinerant junk-assemblage artist who shows his sculptures at the top of the onramp. He also gives advice on fame and creativity, by way of hand-painted signs—for example, on a curling particle board: “Go into Your Own Creative Mind You are The Master Of Your Thoughts And Behavior. If Anyone Stress’s [sic] You Out… You Allowed it… You’re not a Robot Okay : ) Smile.” Five of these signs appear in “Concrete Island” at Venus, Los Angeles, a show that, by way of J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name, romances the aesthetic of those who eke out a living in the city’s gaps.
Of the 31 artists and collectives included, only the Crenshaw Cowboy is homeless. Indeed, a wide gulf separates the rush-hour panhandler from the gallery artist. Add to this the fact that Venus’s polished square footage is part of an archipelago of new galleries gentrifying the warehouse district of LA’s Boyle Heights. The homeless there have been pushed out; nearby homeowners may soon join them. Perhaps the inclusion …
Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s “American Mystic”
Brian Karl
Capturing the unseen has been a taking-off point for photographic ambition since the medium’s inception. Ephemeral moments, underlying truths, and the supernatural have all been teased out through choices around opening and closing shutters. Featuring small-format photographs produced from the mid-1950s through the early ’70s, this exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, posits Ralph Eugene Meatyard as an eccentric visionary who pursued and even contrived to generate signs of humans’ unseen and uncanny relationships.
The black-and-white tones in Meatyard’s photographs hold forth something immanent that is not quite real, lived life. The choreography for his images—almost all of which deny clear viewing, by one means or another—play on the voyeuristic aspect of photography. The obscured and recumbent human figure is one recurring posture that Meatyard set up and captured, often with the suggestion of other figures above or nearby (at the very least, the implied viewer/photographer). This is the case with the buckskin-dressed boy half-sprawled in tall weeds below a hulking water tower in Untitled (ca. 1955); in Untitled (1960), sunlit graffiti carved on a slab of wood confronts the viewer as if from the fever dream of the boy over whom it hangs, immediately above the dark shade in which …
Malick Sidibé’s “Chemises”
Jennifer Piejko
Only someone with a lying mouth, according to Yoruba oral tradition, would speak first and look for visual confirmation second. Untold centuries later, the expression retains its value: photography’s maneuvers depend on the fact that truth is determined by the eye.
The complete history of photography is inextricable from colonialism in Africa—its establishment, rule, and dismemberment. The practice was introduced on the continent almost immediately after its invention, disseminating quickly. Some of the very first silvery daguerreotypes captured Egypt’s grand wonders in the 1840s; by 1853, African-American Augustus Washington had opened Liberia’s first studio in the capital Monrovia, and Senegal’s by 1860. The medium was slower to spread into Yorubaland, taking up until Britain’s drawing of modern-day Nigerian and Beninese borders at the turn of the twentieth century, but the photograph was folded into both ancient custom and contemporary society so neatly that it expanded beyond document and into identity architecture. The staged portrait was a highly orchestrated image, a manifestation of oriki, the Yorubian ritual of lauding someone’s character by making them a subject of praise poetry: a man during odo (midlife) sits alone in traditional dress at the very center of the frame, facing the lens, with a vertical …
Josh Smith’s “You Walk on Ahead, Go as Fast as You Want. I’ll Follow Along Slowly. I Know the Road Well.”
Kjetil Røed
The visitor to Josh Smith’s show at STANDARD (OSLO) is faced with 11 Grim Reapers painted in oil on canvas, all of them equipped with the customary black robe and scythe. Smith’s angels of death are not solitary, otherworldly figures, but a motley crew rendered in a seemingly slapdash manner, like the paintings you come across in flea-markets and thrift shops. The kitschy feel of these paintings recalls one reviewer’s description of Smith’s recent work as “Edvard-Munch-goes-to-the-Bahamas,” but here the cardboard sunsets are relocated to the Northern Hemisphere. The most Munch-like of these works—including Time for Yourself and Easy on the Being (all works 2017)—are grouped together, but the majority are presented in relative isolation on the gallery’s white walls.
Gone are the artist’s “signature paintings” with the words “Josh Smith” scrawled all over them. Has the artist forgotten his former conceptual strictness? The wilful amateurism here anchors the paintings in the world of post-expressionistic outsider art, but Smith’s eccentricities seem more focused than most. He played with our expectations when using his own name as a motive and template—emptying the canvas of painterly authenticity and authority. In these paintings he achieves something similar with the presentation of death. The result …
“Sputterances”
Tim Gentles
In artist Sanya Kantarovsky’s latest curatorial venture, an exhibition at Metro Pictures organized around the underappreciated Dutch painter René Daniëls, he continues to examine the mechanics of artistic positioning. Similarly, in his previous curated exhibition, “No Joke” at Tanya Leighton (Berlin, 2015), he grouped together work that, through humor and self-deprecation, cast a self-reflexive eye on the mythologization of the artist.
Daniëls, who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1987 at the age of 37, and has only made work sporadically since, was initially received as a Neo-Expressionist, a movement known more for the expulsion of sweat and blood onto canvas than critique of the broader art field. Yet Daniëls’s work—and the present exhibition, whose title “Sputterances,” a portmanteau of sputter and utterance, derived from a poem written by the artist—suggests that this is hardly a neither/nor proposition, and that, rather, expression is tied to the mutual dependence of sense and nonsense, central to which is the question of the frame.
For “Sputterances,” Kantarovsky has assembled 22 artists, ranging from his peers, elder statespeople of figurative painting’s seemingly perpetual renewal, and historical figures both vaunted and obscure, alongside three works by Daniëls. It’s not immediately clear what unites these artists, much less around …
Documenta 14, “Learning from Athens”
Ben Eastham
The fourteenth edition of Documenta takes place, for the first time in the institution’s history, across two locations. By staging it in Germany and Greece, and expressing the hope that an exhibition bankrolled by the former might effectively critique the infrastructures of power that have immiserated the latter, curator Adam Szymczyk signalled that this would be a Documenta defined by its internal contradictions. The embrace of paradox continued in the press conference for the Athens opening, during which Szymczyk spoke about the possibility of “learning from Athens” through a process of “unlearning what we know.”
That revealing “we” encapsulates some of the concerns surrounding the decision to splay Documenta 14 across a fragmenting Europe. Not the least of these is that the southern city might be expected to play the role of exotic other to the visiting northern institution, with whose western European sensibilities the visitor is assumed to identify. These and other conflicts between the manifest aims of Documenta 14 and its underlying structures are never entirely resolved, but the same might be said of any exhibition of contemporary art on a comparable scale. Indeed, Szymczyk’s statement to the press suggested a strategy predicated on acknowledging and then exploring the …
Contour Biennale 8, “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium”
Colin Perry
What could be more pertinent to today’s helter-skelter mudslide into the political abyss than a reflection on the idea of justice? The eighth edition of the Contour Biennial is dedicated to this most noble of themes. Both thrilling and frustrating, the biennial offers vertiginous perspectives by artists and theorists, as well as the inevitable art-world speculation and textual flak. Hosted in the small, historic town of Mechelen, just outside Brussels, the biennial is installed in numerous venues ranging from a thirteenth-century courthouse to a post-industrial warehouse. Contour 8’s awkward subtitle, “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium,” alludes to Mechelen’s historic role as a seat of juridical power in the region, as well as to the city’s importance in the development of Renaissance polyphonic music. The biennial entwines the themes, with polyphonic music acting as a metaphor for the multiple voices of pluralistic societies, which in turn becomes the grounds for renewed thinking about the stakes of justice in a globalized world.
Curated by Natasha Ginwala, who is also a curatorial advisor on this year’s documenta 14, Contour includes works from diverse geographies, from Northern Europe to the Australian Northern Territories. At the biennial’s main site, The Garage, a number of works document …
“Film Programme Selected by Beatrice Gibson”
Herb Shellenberger
From the darkness, a bright, circular spotlight illuminates a theater curtain. Searching intermittently along its folds, the light traces paths which uncover crimson underneath deep black. The curtain finally pulls upward revealing a moon of bright white.
The opening images of Mary Helena Clark’s By foot-candle light (2011) present viewers with a prototypical symbol of cinema-going, a moment of anticipation not typically found in a venue like London’s Laura Bartlett Gallery, with its white walls and light-leaking windows. Clark’s video is shown in an exhibition consisting of a single daily projection of five moving image works selected by British artist-filmmaker Beatrice Gibson. Though not a curator, like many artists working with moving images, Gibson has occasionally been put into the role of selecting films to show alongside her works. Previous instances of this have comprised combinations of the work of artist peers (like Clark and Laida Lertxundi) and important influences (Tony Conrad and William Greaves). This exhibition, under the framework of research-in-progress for upcoming films, functions in much the same way, and displays an understated yet impressive curatorial cohesion while at the same time being beholden to the peculiarities of transposing a cinematic presentation to a commercial gallery.
“Go on, …
The Historical Gallery
Leigh Markopoulos
Leigh Markopoulos’s Spaces feature, dedicated to “The Historical Gallery,” appears here in its original draft. The editorial process was interrupted by Leigh’s sudden death, which left her words, alongside all her future projects, forever suspended. Those who had the privilege of knowing Leigh will recognize the tone of her voice along these lines; those who weren’t personally acquainted with her will have the opportunity to encounter her sharp mind directly.
It still seems impossible to write about Leigh using the past tense. This text, alongside her previous contributions to art-agenda and other publications, will ensure that her ideas remain alive. Through it she exists in a continuous present, having an impact on all those who shared her passion for art.
Leigh was a beloved educator, an intelligent writer, a curator’s curator. In memorial to her, this feature is preceded by tributes from some of her closest colleagues, co-workers, and friends.
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Leigh was a passionate scholar, writer, teacher, and curator who was dearly loved by her students and colleagues. She first came to California College of the Arts in 2002 to serve as deputy director of the CCA Wattis Institute, a job she quickly mastered and performed with diligence, grace, and enthusiasm. But it …
“Myths of the Marble”
Ben Eastham
The phrase “make-believe media” was coined by Michael Parenti in 1991 to describe how the United States’ entertainment industries reproduce myths that justify the unequal distribution of power. The racism, militarism, and misogyny coded into pop cultural forms like the television drama, he proposed, do not reflect social realities so much as prefabricate them. The term is useful in the context of “Myths of the Marble,” an ambitious group show exploring ideas of the virtual, because it implies that “make-believe” does not merely connote “fictional” or “unreal” but also describes a function of uncritical culture: to make its audience believe in the grand narratives, from American exceptionalism to white supremacy, by which social differences are legitimated. Curated by Henie Onstad’s Milena Høgsberg and Alex Klein of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (where it runs April 28–August 2), the exhibition suggests that prior to changing the world, it is necessary to “make-believe” new versions of it.
In the literary tradition, alternative realities are typically accessed via a portal and navigated with the help of a guide. Screened on a monitor in the exhibition’s second room, Chris Marker’s digital animation Ouvroir, the Movie (2010) consists of a tour through the “virtual …
Sophia Al-Maria’s “EVERYTHING MUST GO”
Anna Wallace-Thompson
Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria has long examined the architecture, urban planning, and customs of what she calls “Gulf Futurism,” including the phenomenon of mall culture. Her solo show in Dubai presents a new iteration of works exhibited last year at the Whitney Museum, New York, which further that investigation.
The room-sized installation The Litany (2016) features supermarket trolleys (some upright, some overturned) huddled around the main gallery’s central column like a rugby scrum comprised of brightly colored metallic potato chip packets, cheap mobile phones, and mini jello snack pots. The brands presented here are iconic for those who grew up in the Gulf. Labels such as Mr Krisp and Ali Baba evoke a kitsch nostalgic throwback to 1990s childhoods, and their jewel wrapper colors give the installation the appearance of a candy pile. This cluster is surrounded by a hundred or so digital prints of stills from the digital videos playing on the phones, with phrases including “Panic,” “Teargas Toner,” “Methane Gel,” and “Post-Truth Plumper” emblazoned on garish backgrounds.
A dark cavern, semi-hidden in the corner of the space, houses the 16-minute video Black Friday (2016). Filmed amidst expanses of gleaming marble in one of Doha’s yet-to-open mega malls, Black Friday is …
Art Basel Hong Kong
Daniel Szehin Ho
Twenty years after the handover of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China, Hong Kong stands at a crossroads. The generation to come of age in the intervening decades has become restless, frustrated by the rejection of demands for universal suffrage (the election for the next Chief Executive takes places tomorrow, March 26, but only 1194 people have a ballot[1]). That, along with sky-high property prices and low social mobility, has fueled a cycle of disenchantment that has set the territory on a collision course with Beijing. Feelings are running high.
Art Basel Hong Kong stands at some remove from all this, but is nonetheless pervaded by a sense of urgency. Presented by 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong and P.P.O.W., New York, in the Encounters section, which hosts large-scale sculpture and installation, Dinh Q. Lê’s The Deep Blue Sea (2017) distorts news images of migrants crossing the Mediterranean to seek asylum onto 150-foot-long stretches of photo paper. Transforming photography into sculpture and creating an alluring installation redolent of streams and waves, the work digs into media (mis)representations of the refugee (the figure of which, as Giorgio Agamben has famously argued in his 1995 book Homo Sacer, removes the fig leaves of …
78th Whitney Biennial
Chris Sharp
The stakes surrounding this Whitney Biennial are, to say the least, high. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a biennial being under more pressure to signify, to mean, to produce meaning, to attempt to offer some special and tangible insight into our current moment. Instead, what the curators Christopher Lew and Mia Locks offer is art. This is not to say, of course, that the art presented here is divorced from our current harrowing reality, by any means, but that it does not forfeit its unique transformative power in the face of it. Lew’s and Locks’s love of and faith in art is refreshingly unequivocal. Nor is this to say that the biennial they have curated is devoid of the political, insofar as one of the capacities of the political is to seek to imagine alternatives to the status quo. In the alternative imagined here, an ideal diversity and gender balance reigns. Of the agreeably modest and negotiable number of 63 artists and artist collectives, this biennial possesses more artists of color than any other in its past. That diversity is not limited to ethnicity, gender, and geography (artists hail from as far afield here as Puerto Rico and Seattle, although …
Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj
Melissa Gronlund
Bottles of seawater sit among makeshift red flags on charred concrete breezeblocks. “It’s like a fire,” says the artist, Dineo Seshee Bopape, of her installation, +/– 1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791) (2017), which is scattered about the courtyard of one of Sharjah Art Foundation’s warren of spaces. Small black lumps, formed by molding wet clay in the artist’s fist, are arranged in neat rows; piles of herbs are scattered about. The centerpiece of the courtyard—the fire-like construction—refers to the idea that the Haitian Revolution was brought on by the curse of a Voodoo priestess; the water, herbs, circles and votives elsewhere call on other faith systems of Africa and the African diaspora. Seawater is often said to have healing properties, while fuel can “release the spirit from bondage,” as Bopape puts it. The work is a depiction, and perhaps a performance, of spiritual opposition.
Indigenous belief systems, cybernetics, herbal remedies, Sufi meditations, and proto-monetary methods of exchange abound in Christine Tohmé’s Sharjah Biennial 13, titled “Tamawuj,” an Arabic word meaning a swelling or a rise. The exhibition is laid out across the Sharjah Art Foundation spaces in the center of Sharjah, in a few locations refurbished by the foundation …
Judith Bernstein’s “Cock in the Box”
Sabrina Tarasoff
There is no image more prescient of modern displays of masculinity and status than Judith Bernstein’s drawing COCK IN THE BOX (1966), inspired by a history of Vietnam-era bathroom-stall graffiti. Whether those lewd sketches were made to parody politics in wartime, as comic relief for those on the john, for camaraderie, or to alleviate boredom, the big boy’s room provided a space to think patriotism through masculinity. Perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson’s characterization of the penis as a tool to leverage force was an influence: one anecdote has the president, plagued by reporters asking why the United States was in Vietnam, unzipping his pants, pulling out his flaccid cock and saying: “This is why!” No more poignant example of power mislaid.
Such sentiments surely lingered on the mind of Judith Bernstein as she drew COCK IN THE BOX midway through Johnson’s six years in power as US president. The charcoal and pastel drawing opens her exhibition at Los Angeles’s appropriately named The Box, setting a tone of equivocation between politics and entertainment—a timely commentary considering the farcical climate of the United States’s incipient despotism. The sketch is a smudged pastel of a sweetly pink dick sprung from a star-spangled jack-in-the-box. Beneath a …
“Neon Paradise: Shamanism from Central Asia”
Ilaria Bombelli
One clean cut and—snip!—the plait of hair flops to the floor. Then comes the next braid—snip!—and the next—snip-snip! Strand by strand, all the remaining black hair of this Asian woman, dressed in traditional Kyrgyz garb, is sheared off by her own hand. It falls around her feet, leaving her neck bare. A black screen. The video starts over. We see the same woman again, now plucking the strings of an ancient instrument called the kyl kyyak, while a man braids the same long hair that will soon fall prey to her scissors. Around them, a swarm of people—random visitors to a museum in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan—gape at the scene.
“This video/performance from 2001, titled Farewell Song, was inspired by an age-old custom in Kyrgyzstan, where women are supposed to let their hair grow until it is plaited into very thin braids for their wedding,” the gallery assistant tells me. “And so the scissors are symbolically severing all ties with a past that is felt to be stifling, in order to bid it farewell.” The artist seen here is Gulnara Kasmalieva, who along with with Muratbek Djumaliev (both live in Bishkek) seems to use the act of cutting (a leave-taking, a departure) as …
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “Remote Controls”
Alan Gilbert
One day the interface between humans and computers will be seamless. For now, it involves necks bent over smartphones, hours sitting hunched in front of a monitor, fingers and arms that still need to extend toward their devices. Despite all the talk about disembodied experiences and virtual worlds, computer technology hasn’t superseded the physical body; instead, it’s subtly reshaping it, including neurochemistry. Nevertheless, some new media and digital art treats computers as if they’re mostly tools for creating shiny images and scrolling animations, especially when abstraction is added to the mix. Many of these works can feel like painting and video simply updated for the electronic age.
The first audio track encountered upon entering Lynn Hershman Leeson’s exhibition “Remote Controls” at Bridget Donahue is the phrase “touch me.” It emanates from Deep Contact (1984–89), described on the exhibition checklist as the “earliest touchscreen”—i.e., the first artwork to utilize an operational touchscreen. Hershman Leeson has always been at the forefront of incorporating new technologies into her work (checklist descriptions also mention “earliest digital editing software” [Seduction of a Cyborg, 1994], “earliest emotional engine to reflect stock market data” [Synthia Stock Ticker, 2000–2], and “earliest interactive LaserDisc” [Lorna, 1979–84]), but accompanying this exploration …
Will Benedict’s “The Social Democrat” and “Fiction Is a Terrible Enemy”
Barbara Casavecchia
It was only a couple of days after the opening, while sitting in the audience of a lecture by Italian playwright Romeo Castellucci at Teatro dell’Arte in Milan, that Will Benedict’s “The Social Democrat” at Giò Marconi really clicked in my head. Call it synchronicity. Castellucci delivered his speech, titled “Seeing Ourselves Seeing” and focused on the role of audiences in generating meaning within the realm of spectacle, with a quiet voice, while standing in an otherwise dim theatre, stripped of all backdrops, so that brick walls were uncharacteristically visible—the σκηνή (stage, scene, fiction) laid bare. Built under Mussolini in 1933 as part of the new rationalist Palazzo dell’Arte, the building testifies to the Fascist exploitation of visual arts as means of mass communication and, obviously, propaganda. Castellucci’s company, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, is currently on tour with a new play, titled Democracy in America after the 1835 book by Alexis de Tocqueville, where “performance is not so much a reflection on politics, as—if anything—on its end,” Castellucci writes. “De Tocqueville observed the potential of a young democracy, even while pointing out its dangers and limits, such as the tyranny of the majority, a weakening of intellectual freedom when faced with …
The Armory Show and Independent Art Fair
Brian Karl
If the art auction is the ultimate hunger games of ostentatious display for your taste and bank account, the art fair is the auction’s suburban or exurban cousin: the mega shopping mall, where everything is under one roof. Whether or not you went in knowing what you wanted to get and what your individual sensibility might consist of, there is a tidal flow of people and things that overwhelms and cross-wires your brain toward shutdown.
Any individual piece of art, of course, has its competitors for attention at the fair, including not only a swirling mass of people (most decked out in lively garb) but the mass of art itself, an ongoing assault not just to the eye but to the mind demanding response to an endless stream of questions, starting with “What is that?” and often ending with not only “Is it good or bad?” but “Why?” or “What is it good for?”
The Armory Show, having established itself after a mere 22 years as the go-to art fair of scale in New York, is attempting this year to buck off a sense of staidness, of predictability and unmaneuverability. Filling two of the giant piers on the Hudson River (appropriately enough, …
"Harvest"
Claudia Arozqueta
The name “The Commercial” is unusually explicit for a gallery, but the title of the group exhibition currently on view in this one-room gallery in Sydney’s Redfern/Chippendale precinct is not to be taken so literally. While “Harvest” brings to mind food, crops, and still lifes, the exhibition also plays with the meaning of collecting for a future use. It’s an activity that is at the core of the working process of the three exhibiting Australian artists—Diena Georgetti, Patrick Hartigan, and Robert Pulie—who re-interpret or re-use carefully selected images and objects, transforming them into new artworks.
Take Hartigan’s subtle and playful studies of still life painting, full of amateur roughness and recycled supports. Late Harvest (2016) is an apparently quickly executed oil painting of a jug, which juts out from and overlaps its secondhand wooden frame. By placing one image over another, Hartigan strips the frame from its conventional function of protecting a canvas, transforming it into an essential part of the piece. Thus the frame is the painting, which is also a sculpture. Something similar occurs in Window (2016), a delicate and textured panel where three squares create a collaged painting that affirms the artist’s sculptural tendencies. In the upper central …
Kader Attia’s “Reason’s Oxymorons”
Andrew Stefan Weiner
Despite their enigmatic, aloof character, most of the works in Kader Attia’s current exhibition at Lehmann Maupin are relatively easy to make sense of. Whether in their medium (neoconceptual sculpture), their mode of facture (readymade assemblage), or their topic (cultural hybridization), they exemplify what we now expect of “global contemporary art.” This isn’t meant pejoratively; the sculptures are poetic, spare, and subtle, compelling attention while frustrating reductive interpretation. They show why the artist is receiving ever-broader acclamation, and they make clear that he deserves it. Attia’s inventiveness and spatial intelligence are evident from the show’s outset, most memorably in an arrangement of Styrofoam packing materials upon a wooden table (Untitled, 2017), a piece that looks like it might have taken minutes to assemble but that reads as a mordant update of Constant’s designs for New Babylon (1959-74).
By and large, the other sculptures in the show successfully achieve the objectives they seem to set for themselves, reworking established tropes of the Western neo-avant-gardes by interrogating their assumed universality; the precedent of artists like Jimmie Durham and David Hammons is clear. With that said, the piece that stands out is the one that doesn’t really work, at least not in the way …
Robin Rhode’s “Paths and Fields”
Sean O’Toole
Berlin-based Robin Rhode’s third solo exhibition with Stevenson is an accomplished recapitulation of ideas and gestures that have featured in his mature practice since leaving South Africa in the mid-2000s. Rhode’s work is grounded in repetition, notably his Eadweard Muybridge-like photo animations, which here include Paradise (2016) and Inverted Cycle (2016). These sequentially choreographed still performances incrementally explore a concise narrative, here to do with color theory. But when does formal repetition become empty rehearsal? The question lingers in the interstices of this polished show, which is composed of drawings, sculpture, photographs, and films. The loose choreography of the works allows for an episodic encounter, or, to improvise on the show’s title, suggests various paths and routes to an answer.
The atomized form of “Paths and Fields” also offers a flashback to curator Stephanie Rosenthal’s layout of the artist’s 2008 London debut, “Robin Rhode: Who Saw Who” at the Hayward Gallery, a heterogeneous showcase grounded in Rhode’s evolving interests in street culture—notably skateboarding and graffiti—and various postwar avant-gardes. The Hayward show was notable for including early examples of the artist’s abstract paintings and drawings, which here retain their hesitant, gee-whiz quality. Works on White Paper IV (2008), an oil stick drawing …
Dore Ashton, “Response to Crisis in American Art” (1969)
Leigh Markopoulos
The American art historian and critic Dore Ashton, who recently died at the age of 88, began her lifelong career as an art writer in the years after World War II. From 1955, as the New York Times associate art critic, she made her mark as a proponent of Abstract Expressionism and an opponent of mediocrity in any form. Her unashamedly left-leaning politics and modernist stance garnered both allies and enemies—most notably the senior art critic of the Times, John Canaday, who fired her in 1960.
Reflecting a more enlightened editorial policy, the first 1969 issue of Art in America positions Ashton as the lead contributor while Canaday’s successor, the equally conservative Hilton Kramer, appears a good deal later in the magazine. His review is preceded by Charlotte Willard’s “Violence and Art,” which asks whether “art in the seventies [can] help channel aggression into achievement instead of destruction,” and Jane Holtz Kay’s “regional case study” of urban Bostonian, and in this case predominantly black, artists who have “committed much of their (…) creative effort to community causes” (“Artists as Social Reformers”). Together with Ashton’s “Response to Crisis in American Art,” these three powerful texts—notably all by women—paint a picture of “crisis, …
Terence Koh’s “sleeping in a beam of sunlight”
Jonathan Griffin
Over the decade and a half of his career to date, Terence Koh has generated so many myths that it is now nearly impossible to begin thinking about his work without first acknowledging the tales of his personal and professional decadence in New York during the pre-crash mid-aughts, or the story of his apparent atonement when he faded from hypervisibility following his 2011 show “nothingtoodoo” at Mary Boone, New York, retreating with his partner to a mountaintop in the Catskills. The legend is threadbare from retelling; you’re at a computer—if you don’t already know it, Google him. Better, instead, to start with some facts about Terence Koh in 2017.
On the roof of Moran Bondaroff gallery in West Hollywood, Koh has built a beehive with a door big enough for humans to crawl inside. Above a mesh screen, teeming live bees build honeycomb between wooden slats. The hive—titled bee chapel (2017), the third he has made after a prototype in the Catskills and a version for his 2016 exhibition at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York—stands on a rustic wooden platform perhaps six feet high, beside a temporary rooftop garden. Lavenders, sages, yarrow, fruit trees, leaf vegetables, and herbs grow in pots, …
“Where do we go from here?”
Vivian Ziherl
As 2017 opens there is a sense that all bets are off—that it is time to roll the dice and keep a hand open to all possibilities. Perhaps this is all the more so in the Netherlands—in many ways the closest of the EU countries to Britain and perhaps facing its own democractic crisis with a fractious election ahead in mid-March. In a sense this is both the mood and the motive behind a new joint venture by six Amsterdam art galleries and their opening project, titled “Where do we go from here?” As far as gallery experiments go, the basic premise of trading in the art commodity remains unaffected. Nevertheless, within these limits something quite bold is taking place. This joint venture tries out a new, collectivized form of trading, possibly marking a turn towards locality within the art market and the cultural climate more broadly.
The project takes the form of a synchronized exhibition, with works selected from the galleries’ represented artists and arranged by invited curator Alessandro Vincentelli (Curator of Exhibitions and Research, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead). Hot on the heels of the evermore successful Amsterdam Art Weekend in November, “Where do we go from here?” …
Marcus Steinweg’s “For the Love of Philosophy”
William Kherbek
Descartes, Deleuze, Lacan, Nancy, Rilke, Weil, Heidegger (!) (just to name a few)—the gang’s all here at Marcus Steinweg’s new show at BQ, whose title, “For the Love of Philosophy,” certainly seems to ring true. “The self is the placeholder and performer of chaos. Descartes already knew this, that is why he wasn’t a Cartesian.” So reads one of the more gnomic assertions on Steinweg’s canvases. These works are positively overflowing with passion for his subject matter, and even if his references aren’t very geographically or culturally diverse, they are at least honestly engaged with, and speak of a deep and abiding commitment to the discipline and practice of philosophy. Steinweg’s canvas-as-parchment approach to the material, however, feels like a somewhat suboptimal marriage of form and content.
Steinweg presents 13 paintings from the series from which the exhibition takes its name. Cleaner and tighter than some of his earlier works on canvas, they feature sleek white digital letters printed on dark backgrounds, or a hide-and-seek of grey and yellow hues. Each presents a section of text, sometimes simply words, other times diagrams, or what might be regarded as a new sub-species of aesthetic literature, concrete philosophy: text arranged into layouts that …
Geoffrey Farmer’s “The Big Kitchen”
Rob Stone
Geoffrey Farmer’s lyricism of control is on show at Catriona Jeffries Gallery, although this time with a new suggestion of malignity. Farmer is an exponent of the artistic practice of finding a part of a derelict, languishing image, or two, or more, and through juxtapositions translating these elements into novel, revealing modern utterances. In his 2013 installation “The Surgeon and the Photographer” at London’s Barbican Centre, for instance, he assembled garlands of excised fragments—a part of a statue here, a leaf, a limb, or garment there—to fashion a community of hundreds of tiny, miscegenous personages in whom you sensed love for themselves and each other.
For this new show, he has discovered and rescued an enormous, painted canvas theatrical backdrop. Made by the set design company R.L. Grosh and Sons on Sunset Boulevard in 1939, it depicts a hellish red kitchen. Farmer takes care to make sure that we know its provenance, and also shares in his notes on the exhibition that kitchens have been significant for him: a source of mystery, worry, and danger, of cold coffee and hard crusts, but also consolation. He seems concerned that the momentousness of these things is now receding in his memory. Cut-out elements …
Halil Altindere’s “Space Refugee”
Orit Gat
Muhammed Ahmed Faris is the only Syrian who has traveled to outer space. A colonel in the Syrian Air Force, Faris—the subject of Turkish artist Halil Altindere’s video Space Refugee (2016)—joined the Soviet cosmonaut program in 1985 and was part of a mission to the Mir Space Station in 1987. “Those seven days 23 hours and five minutes changed my life,” Faris told The Guardian. He saw this experience as a privilege that he could share with other Syrians through education in science and astronomy, but that was not on the agenda of President Hafez al-Assad, who controlled Syria following a coup in 1970.
When in 2000 al-Assad died and his son Bashar succeeded him, Faris was the head of the Syrian Air Force Academy and a military advisor. To The Guardian, Faris describes both father and son as enemies of the people, who ruled by maintaining their population as uneducated and divided as possible. In 2011, when the revolution in Syria broke out, he marched in Damascus, calling for reform; the next year he defected to Turkey, becoming one of the five million Syrian refugees to leave the country.
Faris and Altindere met in Istanbul, and the cosmonaut became the subject …
Michael Snow’s “Powers of Two”
Jacob Korczynski
Throughout an expansive practice that spans more than half a century, Michael Snow has questioned the conditions of perception and pushed against the material properties of multiple mediums. Snow’s work has remained relevant to successive generations of artists because of the generosity it can extend to viewers. In encountering his best work, bodies become a primary site of meaning, a tether between the intellectual and the visceral, the psychological and the physical.
However, there are two sides to every story, and as much as Snow’s work invites it can also exclude, with many of his most iconic pieces fetishizing the bodies of women, creating a space for the viewer determined by a male gaze that is at worst lecherous and at best limiting, reinforcing the boundaries of a gender binary—a power of two. Two Sides to Every Story is also the title of one of Snow’s most visionary works, a 16mm film installation from 1974 that explores the tension between the recto and verso of an image, and while it does not appear in this exhibition, its formal conceit is directly connected to Powers of Two (2003), a large-scale photo installation from which the title of this exhibition is derived.
In the …
Martine Syms’s “The Easy Demands”
Morgan Quaintance
What’s to be gained from aestheticizing resistance, from reducing political protest and its violent and repressive fallout to a highly stylized image? This is the final question raised by Martine Syms’s second solo show in London, a tastefully oblique, risk-free display that simultaneously draws on and hollows out the recent history of African American-led demonstrations against police brutality and institutional racism.
Installed in a modest gallery accessible through the main expanse of Sadie Coles HQ, temporary host to New York’s Bridget Donahue during Condo, “The Easy Demands” brings together three works: a structural intervention, a single-channel video loop, and a collection of photographic prints. Although superficially unified by being presented in the same space, they remain conceptually and aesthetically disconnected; in fact, the exhibition operates on and fosters an attitude of detachment. It is a dynamic that surfaces in relation to the works on show, in the relationship between the artist and host institution, and in the spectatorial mode produced by the gallery’s oppressive air of exclusivity, which Syms frustratingly does not disrupt.
Belief Strategy XIII (2016) is a dappled color filter applied to the oval window covering one end of the gallery. To create it Syms has appropriated a tool from …
Rodney Graham’s “Media Studies”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Rodney Graham’s large-format light-box tableaux have been a mainstay of his oeuvre since 2006, and are consistently sophisticated and detailed. The artist’s current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich includes seven new light-box works that do not disappoint, but, I wondered, why produce these works now?
Graham has been active as a musician and artist for several decades, playing a key protagonist in his own pieces from the 1990s onwards. His looping film works, such as Photokinetoscope (2001) or Vexation Island (1997) have long been in the contemporary canon. His light-boxes, meanwhile, show chromogenic prints charged with color sandwiched between transparent surfaces, all the better to view images stuffed with detail. The exhibition’s title image, Media Studies ’77 (2016), is a diptych more than two meters tall and nearly four wide showing Graham posing as professor perched on a bent sheet steel desk in front of a blackboard, media trolley at the ready, a cigarette in the hand with which he emphasizes his point while looking right into the middle distance. His russet cords have a slight flare, a suede jacket drapes over his shoulders, and his glasses are tinted. The setting—painted breeze block walls, the clunky television remote, plug …
Mai-Thu Perret’s “Zone”
Jeremy Millar
Sometimes an artwork responds to the world outside; sometimes the world outside responds to an artwork; and sometimes neither knows of the other, yet each is enhanced by it all the same. Such a moment occurred recently when one could march down Piccadilly, in protest with and in the presence of tens of thousands of women, and turn into a side street, past cars, jammed, Porsches, Bentleys, and Rolls, in each a man tapping agitated fingers upon a leather steering wheel, enter the glass door of a gallery and there find a mannequin, female, with long crimped hair and army fatigues, an assault rifle at rest by her side.
The work is by the Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret, and takes its name—Les guérillères XII (all works 2016)—from the influential (one can scarcely say “seminal”) 1969 novel by Monique Wittig, which imagines a new society established and run by lesbian warriors. In the original French, they are described as “elles,” not “women” but a differently universal “they,” a simple inversion of the masculine collective pronoun “ils” one usually finds in French; Perret’s own narrative of a female commune, The Crystal Frontier, which she has been writing—and making artwork from—since the late 1990s, …
Sherrie Levine’s “15 White Moonlight Paintings”
Stefan Heidenreich
A church, before being appropriated for something beyond its original purpose, needs to undergo a ritual called “profanation.” The procedure is a sort of reverse engineering of the initial consecration. What once belonged to a god is handed back to human life. “And if ‘to consecrate’ (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the human law, ‘to profane’ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men,” writes Giorgio Agamben.
In the early 1950s, architect Dominikus Böhm was asked to build a church in the village of Kalscheuren, on the outskirts of Cologne. He let his son, Gottfried Böhm, actualize his preliminary design. (The younger Böhm would later become famous for his sculptural, crystal-shaped churches, and would be the first German architect to receive the Pritzker prize.) In Kalscheuren, slim pillars around the outside of a circular hall hold a flat, mushroom-shaped roof that makes the building look like a concrete model of a Mongolian yurt. Some consider it one of the most important postwar churches in the Rhineland. Yet, the fame of the monument did not prevent Catholicism’s decline, and in 2006, on May 25, 50 years after its consecration, the last service took …
Von Calhau!’s “Rotornariz”
Sofia Lemos
A nose—the lead character in Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Nose” from 1836—fashions itself as a decorated civil servant, so esteemed one can hardly question its privileged stature, as such cachet ought to be unquestionably deserved. No two noses are the same, Gogol notes. Some straddle along Nevsky Prospect without raising an eyebrow, or hide inconspicuously inside freshly baked rolls, whereas some, like Pinocchio’s, increase in size with their forgeries. Regardless, all noses have one commonality: they extrude fluids at different cadences. These inflections are the focus of “Rotornariz,” by Von Calhau!, an artist duo from Portugal founded in 2006 by Marta Ângela and João Alves. Von Calhau, !Von Calhau!, or simply Calhau, adapt their name to the singularities of each project, fluctuating within the disciplinary spaces they traverse while reflecting their own interests. Known mostly for their idiosyncratic concerts and performances that combine music and silent 16mm film, presented either autonomously or alongside graphic design and writing, in “Rotornariz” Von Calhau! entangle this varied approach in one bizarre sniffer.
Writing about Gogol’s own nose, Vladimir Nabokov describes how sharp and notoriously delicate it was. Gogol’s morbid attraction towards noses was apparent: vivid descriptions of smells, sneezes, and snorting appear repeatedly …
Musa paradisiaca’s "Masters of Velocity"
Ana Teixeira Pinto
When writing the now-famous entry for the word informe (formless) in the surrealist journal Documents, Georges Bataille started by saying that “a dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meanings of words, but their tasks.” “Formless” is a word tasked with declassifying (déclasser), which in French also connotes degrading or debasing. Whatever gets called formless “has no rights of whatever kind and can get squashed at any moment, like a spider or an earthworm.”
Though Bataille had philosophical forms in mind—philosophy’s sole goal, he continued, is to dress in a formal frock coat everything that is—obsession with formal discipline extends beyond the philosophical register, to fields as diverse as visual art or biology. So much so that even formlessness has become a formal category. Amazon.com, for instance, presents Formless: A User’s Guide (1997) by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss—in which Bataille’s dictionary entry appears as an epigraph—as a “rich and compelling panorama of the formless”: a taxonomy of forms of formlessness, so to speak.
The work of Portuguese artist duo Musa paradisiaca (Eduardo Guerra and Miguel Ferrão) is closer to what Bataille originally intended by his definition. Formlessness, in their approach, is not category but a task—one could say form follows …
Luis Camnitzer’s “Dibujos”
Helena Tatay
The first paradox one encounters in Luis Camnitzer’s exhibition at Parra & Romero in Madrid is the apparent contradiction between its title, “Dibujos” [Drawings], and its content, two installations titled El Cuaderno Rayado [The lined notebook] and Dibujos en el Agua [Drawings on water]. Exhibited in separate gallery spaces, each installation is centered on a single object around which, through stories presented in printed texts, Camnitzer sketches out different realities.
El Cuaderno Rayado consists of a school notebook in a display case and 12 framed texts hung on the wall. The story narrated in the texts is always the same: in 1972, the artist “remade” a school notebook by drawing over the existing lines. The notebook was lost, and 40 years later he recreated it. The story is told 12 times from different angles, as performance; in relation to conceptual art and tautology; within the frame of realistic art; as cartography; in terms of the relationship between art and craft; and so on. After reading the texts, the viewer becomes aware of the second paradox, the second stimulus to reflection. By offering these differing accounts of the same event, Camnitzer sets up the issue without naming it: the nature of the …
Arthur Jafa’s “Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death”
Genevieve Yue
The art world is overstuffed with collages of YouTube clips and Internet artifacts, with most of these trafficking in an ironic glibness that is overly praised either for its affect or lack of it. Though cut from the same digital cloth, the compilation video Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016) comes from a radically different place. Appropriately situated in Gavin Brown Enterprise’s new location in the historic black (and rapidly gentrifying) neighborhood of Harlem, this monumental piece is the sole work on view in the cavernous, converted brewery. Jafa doesn’t allow his materials—a collection of black athletes, musicians, dancers, civil rights leaders, victims of police violence, and sci-fi creatures—to overwhelm him; instead he moves with them, feeling a pulse in and through each fleet and purposeful cut.
This makes the work emphatically cinematic. Jafa, a long-time cinematographer whose career includes Julie Dash’s newly restored Daughters of the Dust (1991) and two recent music videos for Solange Knowles (“Don’t Touch My Hair” and “Cranes In The Sky,” both 2016), has developed a complex system of continuity that goes far beyond classical Hollywood cinema norms. Instead, he adapts a musical structure of harmony, rhythm, and variation, as when a shot …
Stefan Tcherepnin’s “Stefan ‘Jackson’ Tcherepnin, 2014-17: The Missing Years”
Daniel Horn
At a recent film screening in Zurich, an artist whose work was about to be premiered half-joked about the emergent trend of updating exhibition press releases with references to the recent US presidential election and the theme of imminent universal doom left behind by November’s stunning outcome. Suddenly, there’s a sense not so much of urgency but rather of creeping sickness and apathy, spreading from Chelsea to South Beach, a pandemic making its way to Europe’s art hubs.
It’s actually been quite some time—not since the aftermath of 9/11, broadly speaking—since any event in US history has had so dramatic an effect on artistic high-end manufacturing and its discourse, not to mention the economic repercussions yet to be determined (by, on the one hand, headlines such as “Ivanka Trump Loves Contemporary Art, Does It Love Her Back?” which recently appeared on artmarketmonitor.com, and the pick of a scion of the founder one of Manhattan’s most exclusive blue-chips for Secretary of the Treasury on the other). It remains to be seen to what extent and by what means the contemporary art world is prepared to address and defy long-term (i.e., a minimum of four years) systemic impoverishment in light of new economic …
Gordon Matta-Clark
Mara Hoberman
“If anything emerges to cut up, I’ll go anywhere, anytime” wrote Gordon Matta-Clark in 1975. Earlier that year, Paris had come calling, and, at the invitation of the ninth edition of the Paris Biennale curated by Georges Boudaille, the artist realized Conical Intersect (1975). Photographs, photomontages, and film footage of Matta-Clark’s highest profile project in Paris (where he spent considerable time during his short lifetime) are now on view as part of the artist’s first solo show in France since 2000.
Conical Intersect, an enormous oculus that Matta-Clark carved through two abutting seventeenth-century apartment buildings on rue Beaubourg, is a spectacular example of what Matta-Clark described as his practice of “anarchitecture” as well as a case study of how the artist engaged with physical and sociopolitical structures. Overlooking the construction site where the Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano-designed Pompidou Center would open two years later, Conical Intersect created a giant peephole onto gentrification in-progress. Matta-Clark cited Anthony McCall’s seminal light and fog installation Line Describing a Cone (1973) as inspiration, but Conical Intersect’s corkscrew form also evoked the tornado of controversy surrounding its neighbor. Though the Pompidou Center is now an architectural icon and top tourist attraction, it was initially much …
3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale, “Forming in the pupil of an eye”
Emma Sumner
Guest curated by artist Sudarshan Shetty, the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), titled “Forming in the pupil of an eye,” is an assembly of artist-created realities. Shetty outlines his curatorial concept with the story of a young traveler who went on a long journey to meet a sage. When he reaches her, “the Sage assimilates the entire universe. In that single moment and one vision, she grasps its enormous multiplicity—internal and external—and reflects those multiple images back onto the boy and back into the space between them both. Through the generation and layering of visions, the Sage creates multiple understandings of the world, speaking those to the young traveller in front of her.” Like the sage’s vision, Shetty’s exhibition layers various worldly positions in a single space.
As visitors navigate across the Biennale’s 12 venues in Fort Kochi, they are likely to encounter a number of auto rickshaws proudly displaying a KMB-branded “It’s My Biennale” sticker. Latvian artist Voldemārs Johansons’s intervention, Convocation (2016), also makes use of the city’s autos, replacing the horns of hundreds of local rickshaws with a variety of unusual sounds, including bird songs, whistles, and sirens, which will fill Kochi’s streets for the duration of …
J.B. Blunk
Cameron Allan McKean
Pottery is place, folded and fired. It is soil, stone, flora, topography, and climate, massaged by human tradition and technique. In Japan, the placeness of ceramics has been taken to an extreme with local variations in style proliferating across the island nation. This sensitivity to place and materials echoes in the work of the late Californian craftsman and artist James Blain Blunk (1926–2002), whose pottery is on display for the first time in Japan since the 1950s.
Though best known for the semi-functional redwood sculptures he carved with a chainsaw in the 1960s and ’70s, Blunk was also a painter, weaver, jeweler, woodworker, and, briefly, part-time sheep wrangler in the course of a restless career. But before all this, Blunk was among the first westerners to study under Japan’s master potters. On furlough from the Korean War, to which Blunk had been drafted in 1949, he met the artist Isamu Noguchi by chance in a Mingei (folk art) store in Tokyo, an encounter which would lead him to some of Japan’s most revered craftsmen. When Blunk was discharged from service in 1952 he became an apprentice in Rosanjin Kitaoji’s Kamakura studio, south of Tokyo, before leaving to study for eighteen months …
Wael Shawky
Ilaria Bombelli
Craggy peaks of stone, desolate plains, parched and rasping arctic coasts—still caught perhaps in some distant geologic era—provide a home to stray beasts of all kinds: the spindly heads of snakes rise like pinnacles from the summits of crumbling towers. The sagging legs of pachyderms prop up arcades redolent of Byzantium. The hooked beaks of hawks frown from the prows of merchant vessels. Prehistoric herbivores with dorsal crests like minarets spring from the ground, breaking its crust as if they had just awoken from centuries of hibernation. The salt spume curls into the outline of a feather, of a scale. Stone turns to visage, snout, and sneer.
Pinned down by tremulous lines of ink and graphite, and filled with the pale colors of a sorbet—blush, ocher, powder blue—the drawings of surreal vistas (about 20 in all, with the collective title Al Araba Al Madfuna Drawings, 2015) that underpin Wael Shawky’s first show at Lisson Gallery’s Milan venue tell of a world straddling past and present, East and West, with the penchant for zoomorphism found in ancient civilizations, first and foremost that of Egypt, the artist’s home country. Docile creatures parade through them, alarming no one. The doubtful perspective skews planes and …
Paul Thek
Jennifer Piejko
There is no more poetic organ than the human heart: a blood-soaked snarl of muscle tissue whose constriction is our literal life force, its cadence—its pulse—has been held accountable for not only bodily function but as the instrument of conscience, intention, love, and courage; a spiritual and corporal engine. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore grasped its virtue on both planes when he mused, “That I want thee, only thee—let my heart repeat without end;”(1) W.H. Auden composed a number of verses over his concern of the amiss desires and capacity of a crooked one. Pre-Columbian Aztecs extracted it, still beating, as a sacrifice to the Sun God; for Roman Catholics, divine love radiates from the Sacred Heart of Jesus—and may it set ablaze all of ours with His love and mercy.(2)
Paul Thek—supermarket attendant, artist, occasional expatriate, diver—was raised Catholic. The work he made in his shortened lifetime, before dying of AIDS-related illness in his mid-fifties in 1988, often displayed a carnal sympathy toward entropy and (its) beauty, intimately embellished, longingly ritualistic—catholic in the comprehensive sense, and anything but devout. Visiting the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo with his lover Peter Hujar, Thek fell into a macabre exhilaration, wandering through the 8,000 …
Maria Lind in conversation with Goldin+Senneby: An Opera
Maria Lind
(Libretto Adapted by Pamela Carter)
Cast
Maria Lind — Mezzo-Soprano Goldin — Tenor Senneby — Baritone Security Manager — Soprano Staff and Visitors — Chorus Elephant — Non-singing
Scene
The lobby of the Financial Supervisory Authority, Stockholm. 3 p.m., November 23, 2016.
Artists Goldin and Senneby are waiting for curator Maria Lind, with whom they have agreed to record a conversation for art-agenda. Earlier in the year, Lind curated “Standard Length of a Miracle,” a retrospective of their work staged in different locations across Stockholm.
Goldin holds a large package. Senneby sets up recording equipment.
Visitors and staff come and go.
Elephant sits alone by the street entrance.
Lind enters.
Lind/Goldin/Senneby
Hej hej Hej hej hej Hej hej hej hej hej
Lind
So. Shall we start with a question?
Goldin/Senneby
Let’s start with the bribe.
Lind
Ha. And what do you want in return?
Goldin/Senneby
Maria, It’s not a simple balance of payments In the gift economy.
Lind
Is it long-term emotional debt?
(Lind unwraps her gift)
Chorus
This is the Financial Supervisory Authority. It’s a state agency Promoting stability, efficiency Ensuring our financial protection.
Goldin/Senneby
It’s a map
Lind
Beautiful.
Goldin/Senneby
Of the retrospective we produced together. It was your idea to stage all of our older works In outside locations.
Lind
I wanted to activate your older works Have them resonate in relation To …
Spiros Hadjidjanos
Elvia Wilk
Spiros Hadjidjanos’s third solo show at Future Gallery is both technically and conceptually complex—it’s up to the viewer to decide how far down the rabbit hole to go. Yet each work functions on multiple levels, and is rewarding in equal proportion to how much time one dedicates to figuring it out. For instance, one could appreciate Hadjidjanos’s Network/ed Pillars (Taraxacum Officinale Arrangement) (2016) (part of the ongoing project “Network Time,” 2010–2016) installed in a new configuration in this untitled exhibition, solely on the level of aesthetic experience: in a darkened room of the gallery, a group of ten routers is arranged on the floor, each one with a fiber optic cable attached to a blinking LED light on its surface. The cables extend the lights up to the ceiling in long, bright vertical lines, creating a poetic visualization of their fluctuating signals.
Aesthetically seductive, this setup also illustrates several technical processes at work: each router generates an open wireless network and any device within range can automatically connect to one at random. So if someone in the room is connected to a network, the blinking of the respective router will change slightly, hinting at the action. This activity may be (barely) …
Ai Weiwei’s “Laundromat” and “Roots and Branches”
Andrew Stefan Weiner
Whatever one might think of Ai Weiwei, he has made it impossible to simply not think about him. Ai’s will-to-notoriety has led to him to become all but ubiquitous, with much of this publicity deriving from his transformation into the world’s most prominent artist-activist. Critical reactions to this development have been mixed. While some have hailed Ai’s bravery, taking this reinvention as a convincingly artistic act of self-fashioning, many have criticized him as a sloppy artist, an opportunistic activist, or an impresario who forces both art and politics into the service of his own self-promotion. Still others have sought to split the difference: “wonderful dissident, terrible artist,” as Jed Perl put it in the New Republic.
It is difficult to find adequate precedents or analogies for the position of Global Artist-Activist that Ai has created for himself. Andy Warhol shunned politics, whereas Joseph Beuys wanted little to do with pop culture; in some ways Ai’s aesthetic and commitments resemble those of Thomas Hirschhorn and Tania Bruguera, but neither enjoy anything like his degree of international exposure. It would seem that the best parallel is the celebrity humanitarianism of Angelina Jolie or Bono: the artist has made publicized visits to refugee camps; …
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s “QM.15” and “Costumes & Wishes for the 21st Century”
Antje Stahl
I was sent into darkness. I couldn’t see a single thing. There was a fuzzy light right behind the gallery door illuminating press releases laid out on a small table, and a gallery staffer equipped with a small flashlight. But she simply pointed into the dark: “That way.” That way was Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibition “QM.15” at Esther Schipper in Berlin. That way felt like a ghost hall.
I heard a female voice singing an aria, but I had to pass by a life-sized moving image of a woman in a white uniform, fumbling my way along, before I fell over a rope that prevented me from reaching its source: an apparition of Maria Callas. A holographic illusion, to be more precise, of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster playing Maria Callas: Opera (QM.15) (2016).
I don’t have a particular passion for being blindfolded. I hate ghosts, and I also hate costumes. A day before Halloween, Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon organized an event for people who are, I guess, excited about these things: a costume party as part of an exhibition. Produced by the artist in collaboration with the Berlin fashion designers BLESS and design studio Manuel Raeder, “Costumes & Wishes for the 21st Century” could be considered …
David Noonan’s “Lead Light” and Renee So’s “Vessel Man”
Claudia Arozqueta
David Noonan and Renee So, whose work is shown in concurrent solo exhibitions at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, share an interest in the research, appropriation, and reconfiguration of traditional iconography. Hung on the walls of the main gallery, hidden down a terraced street in the suburb of Paddington, David Noonan’s “Lead Light” consists of twelve silk-screened collages on linen (all works untitled, 2016), their monochrome tones drawn out by the charcoal sisal carpet with which the artist has covered the walnut flooring of the gallery.
Noonan’s theatrical, enigmatic pieces are composed of layered photographic portraits of performers applying makeup. They are overwritten with abstract designs derived from leadlights, decorative windows made of cut sections of glass joined by lead strips. These superimposed images meld tempos, traditions, and styles, blurring arts and crafts, painting and photography, abstraction and figuration, breaking down hierarchies of subject and style. By interweaving figuration and abstraction, creating obscure and strange atmospheres, they bring to mind Man Ray’s mysterious photographs—Barbette Making up (1926), for instance, in which the face of a vaudeville performer applying makeup is reflected in two mirrors—as well as Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus costumes.
One of the most intriguing works is a portrait of an actor who …
“Every Future has a Price: 30 Years after Infotainment”
Wendy Vogel
The 1980s was inaugurated with the 24-hour news cycle: CNN transmitted its first broadcast on January 1, 1980. Five years later, independent curator Anne Livet—in collaboration with Nature Morte gallery founders Alan Belcher and Peter Nagy—organized an exhibition called “Infotainment.” Traveling to several U.S. cities, it featured the work of East Village artists interested in media critique and Conceptual strategies. “Every Future Has a Price: 30 Years After Infotainment” at Elizabeth Dee features 40 artists from the “Infotainment” generation, including 18 from the original traveling exhibition. Opening in late October, the show was positioned as a timely response to the news barrage of the election cycle.
In today’s post-truth hellscape, infotainment seems like a charming anachronism. With the election of Donald Trump, 1985 feels simultaneously far away and very near. The “Infotainment” artists, working under the administration of the U.S.’s first celebrity-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan, were united in their attention to authorship critiques and media theory. They eschewed the East Village tropes of Neoexpressionism and graffiti-inspired work, as well as a dogmatic approach to appropriation. But the biggest revelation in this show is the sheer variety of practices they employed, from painting and sculpture to video and printmaking.
Still, photography is a cornerstone …
Huma Bhabha
Patrick Langley
Huma Bhabha’s humanoid sculpture In the Shadow of the Sun (2016), displayed on a low white plinth in a brightly lit room in London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, stares at the viewer with inscrutable, smudged black eyes. The figure is female. She wears a hood. Her torso, cut from Styrofoam embellished with spray paint and oil stick, is colored a metallic blue-grey. The jagged breasts and pincer-like labia suggest this might be a fearsome goddess, worshiped millennia ago by an ancient civilization. Seen another way, this otherworldly presence could be an alien representative of a troubling future—a civilization yet to come.
That such sharply opposed interpretations are possible demonstrates the breadth and ambition of Bhabha’s work. In her sculptures, drawings, and collages, she incorporates elements of Greek kouroi, African tribal masks, and the sculptures of the Gandhara culture of northern Pakistan, which she mashes together with references to modernist sculpture. The artist cites Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” as a key influence, alongside the brittle figuration of Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso’s assemblages, while more contemporary comparisons might be drawn to the rough-hewn figures of Georg Baselitz or Thomas Houseago’s iron rebar titans. That all these artists are male suggests that Bhabha is working …
Experimental Education Protocol
Tess Edmonson
The latest feature of Spaces considers the Experimental Education Protocol on the Greek island of Nisyros as a mode to consider an alternative pedagogical case study.
A manifesto published on the occasion of the Experimental Education Protocol, a meeting of artists and sympathizers on a volcanic Dodecanese island in the Aegean sea this past July, maintains that “sometimes education and therapy are difficult to distinguish.” Under the aegis of Sterna Art Project, artist Angelo Plessas organized a twelve-day retreat devoted to nonhierarchical pedagogy and “communal learning.” By the time I arrived to the island as an invited observer of the Protocol, halfway through its course, fellow guests had taken to using the nomenclature of formal education to organize undivided time, but in a way that didn’t especially seem to change the tone or direction of casual being-togetherness. A second-floor room of a century-old thermal bathhouse on the island’s north shore, windows facing the sea, became a makeshift classroom, while other, more exploratory learning was scheduled to take place in a variety of wilder locations. What isn’t pedagogy?
The Protocol’s guests were continuously participating in workshops. There was a relaxation workshop, where Plessas fitted residents with a headpiece that measured their brain …
Isa Genzken’s “I Love Michael Asher”
Travis Diehl
In a shallow bay window facing 2nd St., a ledge overflows with studio clutter: a couple dozen euros in coins between a few dying plants; a bowl filled with loose earrings and studs; a keycard from the Waldorf Astoria; a castle of used tea candles, Red Bull cans, and tiny uniformed figurines (cops, or Luftwaffe), all iced with white paint. One only wants the empty blue ashtray to overflow with butts to complete the quintessential image of an artist at work. The setup doesn’t just mimic; nearly every object has been shipped from Genzken’s studio in Berlin, down to the ledge itself. The extant window has been remodeled and a radiator sourced to match the original. (Genzken’s actual desk is here, too. So is a reproduction of a studio wall.) Her process has seemingly been frozen, portioned into discrete pieces, and mailed to L.A.
The collages and assemblages, accordingly, are laced with the leftovers of art handling, packing and unpacking; one trio of works is laid out on their boxes; several pieces include tape marked with the D’ART® logo of a transatlantic shipping company. (All works are from 2016 and, except where noted, untitled.) Other sculptures feature German shopping bags. An …
Art Basel Miami Beach
Monica Uszerowicz
It has been hard, lately, to think about art. I don’t mean to imply that art isn’t powerful, transformative, or even a necessary distraction. The problem, really, is that it’s been hard to think about anything besides the new president-elect, or how every check I deposit helps fund the poisoning of the sole water supply at Standing Rock. I live in Miami, whose intellectual capacity gets chewed over in yearly think-pieces, whose image is brushed clean and sold to people buying the high-rises that raise my neighbors’ rents, whose roadways become clogged with VIP BMWs each December. Yesterday, on the way to the Convention Center that houses Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), my Uber driver says she lived in Wynwood long before it—or ABMB—became “a thing.” “I watched my baby grow up,” she tells me, personifying both her neighborhood and maybe all of Miami. “She’s an adolescent now, changing fast. She’s wild.”
But the show must go on, even if pre-existing economic and racial disparities feel nails-on-a-chalkboard loud, even if the shiny lacquer of a trade show seems unusually ostentatious. There’s no real panacean balm to the problem, if it’s fair to call it a problem at all. We should care …
Carolee Schneemann’s “Further Evidence - Exhibit A & B”
Leo Goldsmith
Exploded canvases, split screens and multiple channels, mixed-, multi-, and inter-media: Carolee Schneemann has been clear in her rejection of medium specificity in favor of what one might call medium promiscuity. Since the early 1960s, she has consistently incorporated images (both moving and still) into multimedia environments that include elements of performance, painting, sculpture, installation, Happening. This has always made her difficult to categorize and, despite her centrality to the history of the last half-century of American art, easy to marginalize. The intense hybridity of form and medium is, in this sense, partly bound up with her feminism, her explicit engagement with sexuality, and the exploration of her own body through her work.
While her contribution to experimental cinema is fairly well known, her reputation rests almost entirely on the four films she made between the mid-1960s and late 1970s. Relatively little has been written about her practice since then, leaving a lacuna which is only now being filled by a two-part solo exhibition, divided between P•P•O•W Gallery (“Further Evidence – Exhibit A”) and Galerie Lelong (“Further Evidence – Exhibit B”), which focuses on work that the artist made in a number of mediums—video installation, collage, sculpture, performance, drawing, painting—from the …
Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement
Barbara Casavecchia
“Dear President, / Your profile is vague, / You have no arms, no hair, no legs, and no sex / Your enemy is your lover. / I need make-up, underwear and hormones! / Dear visitor, / Are you optimistic, / When our country is at war? / Is freedom more masculine than genocide? / Is a lie more feminine than allies? / What is the difference between terror, horror, and war? / What is the difference between museum, artwork, and enemy? / It sounds all the same to me!” The HD video Silent (2016) by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz felt painfully timely on the opening night of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (BIM) in Geneva, in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency. Zoe Leonard’s text piece I want a president (1992) was still circulating manically across social media and its comforting echo chambers, as if to compensate IRL wrongs by means of poetic justice—and there I was, upset, enraged, speechless.
Silent acts as a reminder of the relation between mutism and trauma, between the deceptive multiplication of information and the actual escalation in shutting up freedom of expression and non-conforming positions, identities, agencies, bodies. …
Lima Gallery Roundup
Kim Córdova
I’ve often found myself wondering whether it would really be such a radical gesture to show a majority of work by women without bracketing it as women’s work. What would it be like to experience a city filled with exhibitions that weren’t reinforcing the patriarchal tendencies of the art world?
In Lima this possibility came true.
It’s unclear if these exhibitions were coordinated to coincide with the #NiUnaMenos (NotOneLess) demonstration that drew more than 200,000 people to march on Lima to protest violence against women on August 13. Despite being an international movement, Ni Una Menos’s “cry against impunity” seems to have struck a particularly resonant chord in Peru where, according to Ana María Romero-Lozada, the country’s Minister for Women and Vulnerable Persons, ten women are murdered every month and twenty more are victims of attempted femicide, amounting to “about one [attack] per day.”
For a city of ten million people, Lima’s art scene is small, with few progressive contemporary art galleries. As often happens elsewhere, Lima’s most experimental exhibition programs are found either in alternative spaces or galleries that started as alternative spaces, and curiously all of them were showing solo exhibitions by women.
“Body Moves,” at Garúa, is named after Pamela Arce’s …
Gallery Weekend Korea
Ben Eastham
Where the phrase “gallery weekend” might once have euphemized a romantic indiscretion, or announced a Happening, it now connotes a program of events coordinated to attract a small but influential international audience to a city with aspirations to the status of a cultural hub. Korea’s contribution to this increasingly popular model—adopted in recent years in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Dublin, Vienna, and Warsaw, among others—was composed of three strands: a “showcase exhibition,” a series of talks and guided tours of an art fair, two concurrent biennials, and a selection of local galleries.
The “showcase exhibition” brought together work from 20 South Korean galleries—from such established venues as Seoul’s Hakgojae and Kukje to younger ventures located in the chic Gangnam and Jongno districts—in an awkwardly proportioned exhibition space created by stacking several shipping containers one upon the other. It would have been too much under the circumstances to ask for the exhibition to cohere in aesthetic or conceptual terms, but it did succeed in highlighting some shared preoccupations.
The most striking was a fixation on identity, whether individual, national, or the intersection of the two. Running along the three walls of a recess, Mari Kim’s quasi-psychedelic anime-style portraits insert kawaii female personae—her “Eyedolls”—into …
Jacky Connolly’s “Shadows on the Hudson”
Tim Gentles
A source of artistic fascination since the nineteenth century, when it became the subject of the Hudson River School of landscape painters, the grandeur of Upstate New York’s Hudson Valley also figures in Jacky Connolly’s first solo exhibition, at Kimberly-Klark in Queens, New York. The exhibition’s centerpiece is a video projected against the wall of the darkened gallery—for the duration of the show, the gallery is only open during the evening. Entitled Hudson Valley Ruins (2016), the video, as with all of the artist’s, has been constructed entirely within the computer game The Sims 3 (2009). Named after a website that chronicles the region’s abandoned architectural landmarks, it is set in a virtualized Hudson Valley with an ambience that might best be described as rural-suburban Halloween macabre circa 2004. Hudson Valley Ruins’s opening sequence clearly situates its aesthetic coordinates—cartoonishly gothic red lettering displays the title over a shot, at dawn, of rolling hills, fall foliage and, in the foreground, a weather vane on the roof of a lone house. The wind whistles threateningly, a motif that persists throughout the video’s half hour. Then, it begins to rain.
Like The Sims, Hudson Valley Ruins contains no dialogue, but is accompanied by in-game …
11th Shanghai Biennale, “Why Not Ask Again”
Xin Wang
At the 11th Shanghai Biennale, it isn’t possible to take a photograph without capturing people; the vast Power Station of Art—an electric plant turned kunsthalle since 2012—is busy throughout the preview day and public opening. The curators, Raqs Media Collective, have titled this edition of the biennale “Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories,” but the presence of swarming crowds prompts its own questions, the first of which is: who are these biennales for, and what does their audience want from them?
The previous edition, Anselm Franke’s “Social Factory,” was a biennale Shanghai deserved but did not necessarily want. The exhibition illustrated a particular danger in interrogating the social through frameworks structured by the debt of colonial modernity in a country that never had an internalized colonial experience. This isn’t to deny that the long shadow of troubled histories fall over the biennale: curators have always taken that into account, and a reminder for this edition came when, as the exhibition was being installed, a progressive bubble burst with the United States’ election of its next president. In times like this, what power can art hope to harness and generate?
The Delhi-based trio Raqs Media Collective, comprising Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, …
5th Singapore Biennale, “An Atlas of Mirrors”
Qinyi Lim
Under the artistic direction of Susie Lingham, Director of the Singapore Art Museum, and nine other curators, the fifth edition of the Singapore Biennale, “An Atlas of Mirrors,” showcases sixty artists and three artist collectives from nineteen countries and territories around South, East, and Southeast Asia.
Spanning eight venues in close proximity to one another within Singapore’s art district and old Jewish quarter, the exhibition, with its clear signage and omnipresent air conditioning, provides a respite from the otherwise natural, sweltering, and mosquito-bite-inducing equatorial humidity. Despite this, a certain discomfort pervades the exhibition space. With its title and nine subthemes, the biennale would be confounding to any viewer, even without the mediation necessary for presenting contemporary art to a lay audience. Dominating wall captions fail to elucidate any ideological or social impulses behind the artworks presented, pointing to the exhibition’s slow passivity and abject apolitical nature. While some in the field have criticized previous iterations of the Singapore Biennale for being safe and leaving little room for critique, this edition’s passivity poses the question of how one deals with a decade-old biennial born of a capitalist development agenda. The Singapore government originally launched the biennale as the anchor cultural event of …
“Frieze Film”; “Experimenta”; Philippe Parreno’s “Anywhen”
Herb Shellenberger
“A repetitive moment becomes eternity.” This fragment of speech, ringing through Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in Philippe Parreno’s installation Anywhen (2016), might equally describe the frustration or elation of viewers’ experiences of moving image artworks. This season’s blockbuster exhibitions of film and video—Frieze Film (October 6–9, 2016), BFI London Film Festival’s Experimenta (October 6–16), and Parreno’s commission for Tate Modern (October 4–April 7, 2017)—showcased new works in these media through a variety of structures, some more effective than others.
When considered against the relative paucity of moving image works in the booths of Frieze Art Fair this year, the Frieze Film project—which commissioned work by Samson Kambalu, Rachel Maclean, Shana Moulton, and Ming Wong—seemed like an effort to redress the balance. The works were shown at scheduled times in the Frieze auditorium and also on national television as part of Channel 4’s Random Acts strand, which inserts three-minute shorts between programs. But to those already familiar with the oeuvres of the featured artists, this year’s commissions felt too brief; introductions to their style and ideas, rather than fully formed works.
When it is installed in an exhibition space, as at the 2015 Venice Biennale and now at London’s Whitechapel Gallery (23 August, …
Ana Jotta’s “Abans que me n’oblidi (Before I forget)”
Mariana Cánepa Luna
While it has been widely exhibited in her native Portugal, Ana Jotta’s work hasn’t been presented in depth to the Barcelona public since the early 1990s. So this mini-survey of her production from 1980 to the present, framed as part of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, is overdue. “Abans que me n’oblidi (Before I forget)” begins (or ends) at the intermediary patio space that one crosses before entering the main exhibition space at ProjecteSD. Part of a curved wall is covered with irregular patches of light gray and pale pink paint, as if emulating swatch tests for a redecoration. This playful gesture sets the tone for the exhibition inside, a somber and subtle palette of delicate intonations and provisional arrangements.
A dozen pieces are sparingly hung around the perimeter of the exhibition space. A large aquatint depicts a delicate wire fence (Untitled, 2002) and a portable projection screen is covered with a torrent of black-and-white strokes (Un Printemps 2008, 2008). This is the only work in the exhibition that appears to confirm Jotta’s own reductive description of herself as a painter, despite having tackled all manner of craft, from embroidery to writing. The sleek finish of the blue steel wall piece Cloud …
Haseeb Ahmed’s “Wird”
Mihnea Mircan
The inauguration of the European Parliament building in Brussels was marred by a defect of architectural planning: visitors approaching it were blown over by currents of air inexpertly funneled around the construction. One imagines stacks of European bureaucracy sent into elegant airborne swirls by the gusts of wind. The front of the building was fitted in 2008 with a “comfort ring” that alleviated the wind nuisance, a solution designed and tested at the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, a NATO research facility near Brussels.
This was one of the many narrative threads woven by artist Haseeb Ahmed into a performance presented earlier this year at the institute. Ahmed’s exhibition at Harlan Levey Projects realigns the documents, artifacts, and intuitions of that event, with the film The Wind Egg (2016) the most explicit link between these chapters in his research. Footage of the performance is edited into the fictional survey of a regular day’s work at the institute. The audience that followed the performative procession through wind tunnels, the auscultation of their inhuman breath, is now out of sight, and the scientists attend to arcane contraptions, moving between what seem to be an aviary and heavily equipped chambers of impregnation, mythopoeic …
“Homo Ludens”
Daniela Castro
The first sentences of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1944) read: “A happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens. In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable after all.” Actually, the sentence goes on but I cheated and decided to end here for dramatic purposes. Cheating is the doppelgänger of fair play anyway. For instance: in Brazil, a president democratically elected with 54 percent of the popular vote, who doesn’t face any criminal charges, gets impeached by the Congress and the Senate, two thirds of whose members do. In the municipal elections of São Paulo, a highly botoxed but completely unknown face in the political sphere, aligned with the former center-right, now super-conservative Social Democrat Party, wins over 53 percent of votes in the largest city in Latin America. The rules of the game are distorted while the game is still in course: politics get in the way of politicians, democracy gets in the way of liberal capitalism.
At this unstable time, when culture and all its players are marked by uncertainties, Ricardo Sardenberg curates “Homo Ludens” …
Marnie Weber’s “Chapel of the Moon”
Andrew Berardini
During the day, Halloween masks look pretty cheesy. Hanging from the drugstore rack’s seasonal aisle under the terrible clarity of fluorescents and the afternoon sun, it’s hard to image these killer clowns and fat-cheeked Frankensteins frightening anyone. Their warped faces and weeping pustules, yellowed horns and sharpened teeth, all a static, cartoonish fakeness crinkling in the soft latex.
But they do frighten, only in the right place. Or better yet, they let fright happen.
Night shadows make those masks less costume and more possibility, the cheap details worn away with the darkness. The contrivances of Halloween allow for the playacting of fear and violence, a space and costume to exorcise one’s inner demons by becoming them. And besides all that, the freaks come out at night. Who makes a monster? The feared, the outcast, the othered. Most of us find easier affinity with the monsters than with the pitchforked mob that sometimes chases them.
In the darkened gallery at Gavlak, Marnie Weber gathers a coterie of monsters with stacked Halloween masks under a weeping willow dangling shards of stained glass. Along the walls hang a suite of pagan collages and through a dark doorway church pews face a screening of the artist’s first …
Bruce Nauman’s “Contrapposto Studies, i through vii”
Kim Levin
He was considered a lightweight in the early days of post-minimalism but for decades Bruce Nauman has been praised as one of the most wildly influential artists of our time. His video performances with the sounds of their own making hover between tedium and enthrallment, banality and profundity, repetition and distortion. Nauman’s art probes the failure of language and the betrayals of the body and what used to be known as “the eternal verities.” One Hundred Live and Die (1984), his huge flashing neon wall piece at the Benesse House Museum on the Japanese island of Naoshima, proclaims a litany of one hundred oxymoronic alternatives: “LIVE AND DIE, LOVE AND DIE, SHIT AND DIE, PISS AND DIE, EAT AND DIE, SLEEP AND DIE, HATE AND DIE,” and their opposites, “EAT AND LIVE, SLEEP AND LIVE, LOVE AND LIVE, HATE AND LIVE.” His Clown Torture video installation (1987) is as excruciating to listen to as it is to watch. Nauman’s art goes straight to the crux of the human condition.
One of his best-known early video performances is Walk with Contrapposto (1968), in which the young Nauman sashayed back and forth along a narrow corridor, swinging his hips from side to side.(1) …
Suzanne Blank Redstone’s “1960s Portal Paintings”
Leigh Markopoulos
Fifty years after painting the earliest work in this exhibition, Suzanne Blank Redstone has her first solo show. The name may be unfamiliar, but her work at first glance appears to participate in a recognizably twentieth-century art-historical dialogue. Featuring primary-colored geometric forms and grids, her compositions instantly evoke Piet Mondrian, at the same time hinting at a venerable tradition of European pre-war geometric abstraction of the sort practiced by Jean Hélion. While her experiments with illusion and perspective take part in an even older lineage, there’s also a nod to Surrealism evoked by incongruous René Magritte-like clouds occasionally softening the otherwise hard-edge constructions.
Despite these superficial resemblances, the works in this show reflect less about art history than the artist’s own triangulation of space and color. Seven of the ten paintings and all of the drawings on display at Jessica Silverman Gallery derive from “Portal,” a series of 38 paintings made between 1966 and 1969, each accompanied by between three and ten preparatory drawings. In addition to the intentionally restricted red, blue, and yellow palette—relieved by black, white, and a grey mixed from the other pigments—Redstone’s formal vocabulary encompasses rectilinear shapes and grids aligned exclusively along 45 and 90 degree axes.
Setting …
La Biennale de Montréal, “Le Grand Balcon/The Grand Balcony”
Jacob Korczynski
“So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our own fantasies. But once having exposed them, having named them, having proclaimed them, we’re now tied up with human beings, tied to you, and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility.” When a confrontation with consequence reaches your door do you cloister yourself in safety, cower in fear, enter the fray, or resist that reality altogether? These are among the options presented to the characters of Jean Genet’s play The Balcony, an incendiary critique of power that has lost none of its urgency since its premiere in 1957. The name of the besieged brothel at the center of Genet’s play doubles as the title of the current edition of La Biennale de Montréal. More than just the title, The Balcony lends its ethics of eroticism to the proposition of biennale curator Philippe Pirotte and his team of advisers (Corey McCorkle, Aseman Sabet, and Kitty Scott): an emphasis upon the materiality artists engage with and in turn invite us to encounter, as well as a resistance to the kind of singular political proclamations that biennials often attempt to make. These …
Simon Denny’s "Blockchain Future States"
Andrew Stefan Weiner
Few major exhibitions in recent memory have generated anything like the sort of intensely polarized response that greeted the recently concluded 9th Berlin Biennale, curated by the New York-based DIS, an increasingly notorious group of Gen X and Y “creatives” with close ties to the fashion and advertising industries. A recent publicity email from the Biennale explicitly highlighted this split, inviting readers to peruse the show’s “accolades” alongside its “viral backlash.” Yet despite this blithely mediaphilic rhetoric of all-press-is-good-press, the statement barely concealed a more defiant, even petulant message, evident in its illustration—a smugly confrontational photograph of a man and a woman wearing Yngve Holen’s Hater Blockers contact lenses (2016)—and its advertisement for a “soundtrack” mix by Isa Genzken and Total Freedom called FUCK THEM ALL (2016).
In presuming that any negative responses could be dismissed as mere hateration, the message positioned the Biennale as standing somehow beyond critique. This maneuver formed part of a more concerted defensive strategy in which the exhibition’s curators framed their product as immune to conventional forms of postmodern criticality, while simultaneously deploying their own bespoke, branded form of critical discourse, for example in a guest-edited issue of DIS magazine that attempted to theorize the “post-contemporary.”
So …
Hanne Darboven
Jonathan Griffin
Rows of numbers instill in me a sickening panic. I got that feeling, familiar from childhood mathematics lessons and annual tax returns, in Hanne Darboven’s current exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles.
Perhaps there was no need for such histrionics. In 1973, the West German Darboven told the writer Lucy Lippard that her art has “nothing to do with mathematics. Nothing!” For Darboven, numbers were a means of marking out time and space, “writing without describing.” For the most part, her work is not as concerned with calculation as with counting. Numbers, written sequentially, are akin to seconds ticking on a clock, days counted on a calendar or beats in a piece of music. (Indeed, in 1979 Darboven developed a system of musical notation which she used until the end of her life, in 2009, to write compositions for chamber orchestras and string quartets.)
Darboven’s work generally consists of gridded pages of annotations and numerical inscriptions, sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed or printed; in 1978 she began including collaged elements such as her photographs and cuttings from books. In a single work, these pages can number in the hundreds or thousands. On the ground floor of the gallery, the staggering Erdkunde I, II, …
FIAC and Paris Internationale
Sabrina Tarasoff
Adam Curtis’s new film HyperNormalisation (2016) is about the diffusion of power through the manipulation of the media. It posits that politicians adopted the basic tenets of techno-utopianism to create an oversimplified worldview of a global economic and political landscape which had become overwhelmingly complex. The creation of mass-mediated, caricatured villains, alongside the triumph of algorithms that create an echo chamber of opinion, reify the sense of felt anxiety and support new forms of power. Participation reinforces these structures, maintaining the fantasy of status quo in society even as we feel assaulted by the unpredictable.
Art fairs seem to operate in similar ways, spreading states of disconcert and powerlessness which reify comparable anxieties about the demands of the market whilst providing the grounds on which to idly fantasize about structures which could undercut the existing order. While the critique of fairs—writers pointing fingers at excesses, entanglements, or trends—only exacerbates the problem, we all fall into the trap of assuming that power lies in some displaced “other,” ignoring how our collusion enables the structures we seek to oppose. Display, discourse, commerce, and criticism all consolidate the fair’s encompassing power by refusing to acknowledge how normalized its ebbs and flows have become.
Alternatives do …
Okayama Art Summit 2016 – “Development”
Nick Currie
It’s a sunny autumn day in the small Japanese city of Okayama, and two British men born in the 1960s are conversing about cameras. Liam Gillick and I both own the retro-looking Fujifilm X-Pro1, which we’ve chosen for its impressive price-to-performance ratio. “I’ve used it a lot in my work,” a ruddy-faced, relaxed, and sunglass-wearing Gillick tells me. I show him how I’ve retrofitted mine with Wi-Fi. Gillick—perhaps sensing that we’ll also share an interest in the reassuring Brutalist architecture of our youth—tells me that the Okayama Art Summit I’ve come to review, which he’s spent two years curating, takes place in some very distinguished concrete buildings, several of them designed by local architects and now threatened with redevelopment.
This turns out to be the case: the pleasure of my two days in Okayama, map in hand, comes just as much from the exploration of four or five fabulous late modernist buildings as from the art inside them, although that’s very much to my taste. There are also traditional sites: Angela Bulloch’s posters proclaiming the principles of the 2012 UN Rio Earth Summit adorn the walls of an old soy sauce factory, and Jorge Pardo’s miniaturized, simplified Neutra house stands in …
Matthew Barney’s "Facility of DECLINE"
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
“Facility of DECLINE” at Gladstone Gallery, New York, “mirrors but does not reproduce” Matthew Barney’s iconic 1991 exhibition of the same name at the gallery’s SoHo space. Immediately upon entering, one is immersed in Barney’s now familiar yet ever fantastic world of petroleum jelly, mythic characters, seductive hermeticism, and ever-revelatory aesthetic invention: the signature hermetic conceptual drawings in self-lubricating plastic frames and petroleum jelly (rendered in graphite with that gorgeous, light, sinuous, even awkward Old Master hand); Caucasian flesh and bright yellow wrestling mats; football and weightlifting paraphernalia; speculums; cast sucrose capsules and barbells; saltwater pearls; an NFL jersey numbered “00”; thermal retractors, red skeets, binding belts, a hydraulic jack with glucose syrup; a “hubris pill”; various electronic freezing devices; numerous references to Oakland Raiders football star Jim Otto; Harry Houdini, dubbed “the Character of Positive Restraint”; and the melancholy intersex diva TRANSEXUALIS (1991), a weightlifting bench cast in petroleum jelly and enclosed in a walk-in-cooler.
Twenty-five years after its first exhibition this critical early work—which transformed Barney from a recently graduated pre-medical student into one of the most astonishing and influential artists of the 1990s—is not only alive and well, but finally has its moment. What was ungraspable, eccentric, and …
Hayv Kahraman’s “Audible Inaudible”
Melissa Gronlund
I passed a group of women wearing hijab on the beach the other day, talking in Arabic and English. They had pulled their chairs into the water and were sitting with the bottom of their skirts in the sea. “It’s hard for our sex to find happiness,” I heard one remark as I walked by. It was a comment so profound it almost felt scripted: this scene of women, draped in emblems of their gender, idly dropping historical truths.
Homosociality always makes the outsider covetous of insider knowledge. “What do women talk about,” I imagine men asking, “when we are not there?” Women alone together become not a group but a clique, a coven, a harem. In the Western imaginary of the Middle East, this assumption of difference is amplified by the Orientalization of Arabs, and the popular portrayal of Western–Middle Eastern relations as fundamentally adversarial. For US soldiers during the Iraq War, for example, curiosity about the other turned into paranoia and fear, when any Iraqi or group of Iraqi men could be a threat. In her current show at The Third Line, Hayv Kahraman explores these layers of cultural exclusion, desire, and apprehension, drawing a line between the representation …
The Storefront Gallery
Mike Cooter
Spaces is a feature of art-agenda that proposes a thematic examination of galleries based on the analysis of their physical and spatial configurations. Every two months, art-agenda publishes a new reflection on the spatial characteristics of galleries, their architecture, identity, and relation to their historical and geographical context. The sixth iteration of Spaces explores the storefront gallery.
Let us presume that there is a substantive difference between a “store” and a “gallery,” and that one might occupy the other (either parasitically or symbiotically) in a manner somehow distinctive, and see if this holds up as a hypothesis. As defining characteristics of the store-as-gallery, I suggest the following: an architectural space with street-level, pedestrian access, existing in the context of other commercial retail outlets, and conspicuously deploying plate-glass picture windows that theatricalize the goods, or artifacts, contained within.
Let’s start with some background to this apparently familiar form, in 1851 at the “Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations” held at the newly erected Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park, a useful coincidence of a number of the political, technical, and commercial concerns that will have great ramifications for the design of both stores and exhibitions as we recognize them …
Frieze Art Fair
Filipa Ramos
Art fair reviews serve for many as a guide on what to see (and what to avoid); for some as a memorandum on trends, institutions, and artists to follow; and for a few as the starting point for a wish list, supporting acquisition and investment decisions. These texts frequently respond to the intrinsic bipolarity of the fair—an instance that is at once affected by political, economical, and social events while also existing in its own, detached microcosm. It’s not surprising that critics’ attempts to acknowledge contexts and structures often end up entangled in their response to the presentation of artworks as commodities within an enclosed environment, and decline towards impressionistic accounts that mirror the combination of awe, frustration, and exhaustion which is so familiar to fair visitors and workers alike.
Constituted as a playlist, this text is articulated around four music tracks whose spirit and lyrics evoke certain tropes of art fair writing—the identification of highlights and trends, anthropological impressions, considerations on the broader political conjuncture—while proposing an aural experience with which to traverse or imagine the environment of this year’s edition of Frieze London.
Highlights—Brian Eno, “Golden Hours”
The passage of time / is flicking dimly upon the screen, / I …
Heike-Karin Föll
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Heike-Karin Föll’s exhibition nests within Rochelle Feinstein’s concurrent, longer-running show at Galerie Francesca Pia. The pragmatic arrangement suits, because modesty is Föll’s camouflage, starting with the conditions of the exhibition. At the gallery entrance are 4 notebooks in a vitrine, while the remainder of the works are in a side gallery: 2 works from 2014 made with pressed plants; 5 larger paintings; and a grid of 27 works on paper, each sheet A4.
Taking the paintings to be top of the hierarchical tree by the standards of the traditional canon, the first encounter is with refresh (2016), roughly a square meter and a half of calm black scrubbing, pulling color across the canvas, with occasional moments of relief in scratches and uncovered areas where delicate blue, yellow, or violet can be made out. A copy of British Vogue collaged to the right of the canvas is obscured but for the headline “refresh,” which can be read vertically. Magazine clippings and the imprint of an N floating towards the top of the canvas are the kind of text that circulates throughout Föll’s works, sometimes typed on a computer, sometimes written, often in transfer letters. This text is portable and inconclusive; letters toy …
Andrea Zittel
Alan Gilbert
While driving through the Mojave Desert two hours east of Los Angeles in the area surrounding Joshua Tree National Monument, among the most striking aspects of the scrub-and-bleached landscape are abandoned wooden shacks that regularly punctuate the view. The majority are nothing more than weather-blasted frames with doors and windows gone. Most are the products of a Small Tract Act that lasted from 1938–1976, whereby the federal government sold small parcels of land for cheap to those who built structures on the property and made an effort to inhabit it. As the current vacancy rate shows, most denizens couldn’t maintain a viable existence in the unforgiving desert environs.
It’s to this area that Andrea Zittel moved from Brooklyn in 2000 to make an attempt at total living, which involves designing and building domestic and work spaces, producing clothes, growing food, and having greater agency over one’s social and cultural experiences—all of it done on a relatively small and sustainable level. Although since expanded to 50 acres, Zittel’s experiment is still dwarfed in comparison with, for instance, Donald Judd’s related project for the art of living in Marfa, Texas. (Of course, he initially had many more resources at his disposal.) A one-person …
Warsaw Gallery Weekend
Orit Gat
In a city where most galleries are located in apartments, the experience of visiting exhibitions goes against the art-tourist impulse to catch as catch can. Stand outside buildings, buzz in, climb stairs, see the neighbors in the hallway—it’s an experience of proximity that is different from viewing art at a fair or a biennial, or even a Chelsea gallery (where the inverse happens, and the glass buildings lining the streets post signs at the entrance to their lobbies reading “this is not an art gallery”), and it allows for an appreciation of the gallery show, that basic structure of presentation that viewers often neglect in the midst of other international festivals.
At times, the domesticity of the galleries inspires nontraditional presentations. At Asymetria there is an unilluminating group exhibition—black-and-white images of urban landscapes and portraits framed and hung horizontally, to echo a filmreel—about the influence of neorealist cinema on Polish photography in the 1950s and ’60s, featuring the works of Zdzisław Beksiński, Jerzy Lewczyński, and Marek Piasecki. But upstairs a project by a younger photographer, Błażej Pindor, is presented as though within a bedroom: there’s a single metal bed in the corner, a couple of clothes hangers on hooks. In the …
Madrid Roundup
Arielle Bier
In 2015, Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy declared that the financial crisis, which began when global markets collapsed in 2008, was over, but that its legacy still endured. When recession hits, luxury goods dealers are among the first to panic, and the art market is no exception; luckily for Spain, government funding has kept cultural initiatives afloat. Even ARCOmadrid, the country’s main fair, which is one of the best attended in the world and comparatively hosts the most expensive VIP program, only managed to sidestep the recession because it is heavily subsidized. But beyond the temporary glamour and inflated sales reports, net profits on the global fair circuit are often meager, especially for small or mid-size galleries. This model is proving hard to sustain and puts the squeeze on gallerists to look for alternatives. This year, the seventh annual edition of Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend, organized by the Art Galleries Association Arte_Madrid, substantially expanded its program in an effort to put Madrid’s gallery scene on the international map, bringing in for the first time collectors, curators, residency organizers, and journalists to visit over 43 solo and group exhibitions across the city.
Conversation about local versus global art networks arose multiple times …
Bergen Assembly
Kjetil Røed
This year’s Bergen Triennial is a mix of carnival, dry reflection, and the reshuffling of archives. The first Bergen Assembly, held in 2013, was preceded by several years of seminars and panels aimed at thoroughly understanding and researching its format. The highlight of this research period was The Biennial Reader (2010), which remains a bible of sorts for the topic. Yet the triennial was, in a sense, too well researched, because “Monday Begins on Saturday” addressed a professional art crowd rather than the local scene. Curated by Ekaterina Degot and David Riff, it was based on a Russian science fiction novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and attempted to render the book’s ideas about science and research into the triennial’s different venues, which had such titles as “Institute of Love and the Lack Thereof” or “Institute of Lyrical Sociology,” with the artists figured as researchers. It was intriguing and the eccentricity of the curatorial blueprint deserved more credit than it received.
This time the public research side of the Triennial consists of talks and panel discussions, most of them arranged by the curatorial collective freethought—the consequence being that it often felt less like a triennial than a …
Berlin Roundup
Matthew Evans
Berlin affluence is an oxymoron that might describe something in the big gap between pilsner and champagne, or pork schnitzel and sous-vide. Events like Berlin Art Week and its commercial fair abc art berlin contemporary have been pushing the German capital onto the national and international buyers’ tour for nine years now. It remains an odd positioning, as Berlin isn’t an obviously digestible city for many collectors; it lacks their creature comforts: the ubiquity of restricted access and unaffordable prices with enough locals who can afford to keep them that way. And art fairs (not to be confused with life) are most successful—and most distracting—when the rich feel hungry and foot the bill for the entertainment. But it’s an important exercise to distinguish between wealth and security (not to be confused with fear). The former is an uncertain orgasm of contrasts, which has become aesthetic cliché, while the latter is more interesting and maybe even radical today. Without the pressure (and pleasure) of fast and fat capital in recent history, Berlin has profited from this advantage, and although events like abc might be experimenting to revise that, the city still remains at one remove, which is a privilege, because the …
“Live Uncertainty,” 32nd Bienal de São Paulo
Kiki Mazzucchelli
Almost a year ago, when chief curator Jochen Volz announced his proposal for the 32nd edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil was already undergoing a severe political crisis, with the country split between those who supported the democratically elected coalition government and those who called for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Titled “Incerteza Viva” [Live Uncertainty], the exhibition opened to the public only a few days after Rousseff was permanently ousted from office in a controversial trial based on corruption charges that paradoxically ensured that political sectors known to be corrupt remain in power. In his inauguration speech, unelected president Michel Temer stated that uncertainty had finally ended, but the demonstrations that have been taking place almost daily across the country since Rousseff’s impeachment seem to point to the contrary. During the biennial’s preview, a group of artists wearing black t-shirts with slogans from the late dictatorship days— such as Eu quero votar pra presidente [I want to vote for president] from the Diretas Já [Elections Now] campaign, and the more up-to-date Fora Temer [Out Temer]—took to the Oscar Niemeyer pavilion that hosts the exhibition. Apart from a few scuffles with members of the public, the protest …
“Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future: A New Lexicon for the Biennial,” Taipei Biennial 2016
Wendy Vogel
The title of the tenth Taipei Biennial, “Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future,” includes everything but the term hammered throughout the exhibition: history. Curated by Corinne Diserens, this biennial departs from the 2014 edition helmed by Nicolas Bourriaud on the theme of accelerationism. Where Bourriaud’s apocalyptic-yet-seductive exhibition meditated on humanity’s impact on the environment, with a large contingent of rising-star artists utilizing high-tech processes, this year’s largely monochromatic show returns to such concerns as documentary, spirituality, and the legacy of colonialism. Though not explicitly stated, this biennial engages dialogues about identity currently taking place in the institutional art world.
Diserens, in her curator’s statement, describes her methodologies as “performing the architecture, performing the archive, performing the retrospective.” The second point is most salient: artists’ creative use of archives is the exhibition’s through line. But the architecture of the museum itself isn’t performed so much as left bare: a stage for other gestures to accumulate. The third phrase nods to Retrospective (2012–ongoing), a work by choreographer Xavier Le Roy re-presenting his past dances, that will only take place in the galleries this December and January. The exhibition, occupying two of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s three floors, represents …
“Endless Circulation,” TarraWarra Biennial 2016
Tessa Laird
Contemporary biennials are never simply showcases for new work: they bear the weight of meta-commentary. As they struggle to articulate the conditions of their own production and reception, they become lightning rods for debates, not least those concerning art world complicity with, or resistance to, globalization. The networks and flows of art world capital, particularly in relation to sponsorship, have been subject to critique and protest: witness the Sydney and São Paulo biennials of 2014. Meanwhile, artists and commentators continue to police issues of representation: numbers of local artists versus national and international, and continuing gender and racial biases.
The TarraWarra Biennial, founded in 2006, circumvents some of these debates by committing itself to Australian content. The TarraWarra Museum of Art, nestled into Yarra Valley wine country an hour and a half outside of Melbourne, is humble in scale, which means that the works talk to each other and energy isn’t dissipated between venues. It also means, unfortunately, that the show is inaccessible to many Melbournians. For an exhibition proposing circulation as its central motif, it sits far outside the circulatory system of the city.
Nevertheless, the biennial makes clear links back to Melbourne with its selection of artists, which cynics might …
“Idiosyncrasy: Anchovies Dream of an Olive Mausoleum”
Javier Montes
“Anchovies Dream of an Olive Mausoleum” is the subtitle Chus Martínez has given to “Idiosyncrasy,” her new arrangement of the Helga de Alvear Foundation’s collection of work from the second half of the twentieth century, assembled over 50 years by the Madrid-based German-Spanish gallerist. By locating the foundation in the historic city of Cáceres and annually inviting external curators to propose new displays and hangings of the collection, Helga de Alvear is also offering it up as a laboratory, an experimental field where new ideas can be tried and tested.
Martínez takes full advantage of the occasion, starting with the show’s subtitle, which bears a clear statement. For there are two things fans of tapas (and Spanish art) should know: one, that in Spain popular refinement demands that olives, since time immemorial, be filled with anchovies at aperitivo time; and two, that this quote comes from Ramón Gómez de la Serna, or simply “Ramón,” the spiritual leader of Iberian surrealism, and a kind of Breton of the Spanish avant-garde. This is one of his “greguerías,” an untranslatable phrase coined by Ramón himself to describe the utterances which extract new meanings from unexpectedly juxtaposed words and ideas. And it’s precisely this game …
11th Gwangju Biennale, “The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?)”
Hanlu Zhang
Hanging right inside the main entrance in Gallery 1, facing incoming visitors, Agnieszka Polska’s Glass of Petrol (2015) is the one work that cannot be missed at the 11th Gwangju Biennale. Depicting a champagne flute filled with shiny gasoline, the colorfulness of which resembles that of Planet Earth, Polska’s digital print hints at humanity’s dependence on oil and opens the Biennale with the image of a world in crisis. The work provides a visual and socio-political backdrop for the question imposed by the curatorial team: “What Does Art Do?”
The other half of the title, “The Eighth Climate,” refers to a concept originating in twelfth-century Persian philosophy: a zone between the material and immaterial, it is both real and imaginal (as distinct from imaginary), resembling the realm of contemporary art. Under this all-encompassing curatorial concept, GB11 features work by 101 artists, including 28 new commissions.
At the center of Gallery 1 is Dora García’s reconstruction of Gwangju’s historic Nokdu Bookstore, said to have fostered the May 18 Democratic Uprising in 1980. Nokdu bookstore for the living and the dead (2016) functions as a real bookstore co-operated by Seoul’s The Book Society. Relevant publications and civilian objects are sold or displayed in and …
Fouad Elkoury’s “Blues for the Orient”
Colin Perry
Fouad Elkoury’s photographic installations produce in me a swell of desire and mourning for places that I have never directly observed. Since the 1970s, Elkoury has photographed his home country of Lebanon and the surrounding areas of North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, tracing a geography of places through images of everyday life: scattered café chairs, empty swimming pools, the swell of waves on the Marmara or the Gulf of Aden. They are at once documentary records and ripe metaphors of transience, modernity, empire, and war—a century of cultural cross-fertilization between East and West. These tensions are neatly contained in the show’s title, “Blues for the Orient,” which is borrowed from a 1961 track by the American saxophonist Yusef Lateef. Elkoury toys here with the Orient as both real and imaginary, as a mood in minor scale.
At London’s Rodeo gallery, Elkoury has papered one whole wall in a black-and-white image of an apparently abandoned swimming pool in a densely forested park (Yarze, 1974). Elkoury has set out to generate a feeling, a mood of elegy and luxuriance given by the dense foliage, which the visitor to the gallery can almost step into—but crucially cannot ever fully access. Elkoury’s images …
8th Ljubljana Triennial, “Beyond the Globe,”
Jela Krečič
In his introduction to the exhibition’s catalog, Boris Groys, the curator of this year’s edition of Ljubljana’s triennial, titled “Beyond the Globe,” refers to catastrophe movies. This pop culture allusion should come as no surprise: the destruction of the Earth by various means is mass culture’s response to the anxieties of today’s globalized world, and the goal of “Beyond the Globe” is precisely to examine how contemporary art answers to these anxieties in this world and beyond.
Connecting the exhibition’s more than 30 works, displayed mostly in Ljubljana’s Moderna Galerija, is the leitmotif of Earth and space as it manifests itself in different contexts, from Slovenia to Russia and China. The topic of outer space is surprisingly alive in the Slovenian cultural scene. The Cultural Center for European Space Technology (KSEVT) in Vitanje, for example, deals with the intersections of art, space, and science. Aktuator::MG (2016), perhaps the work most emblematic of the exhibition’s premise, was created by artists Miha Turšič, Dragan Živadinov, and Dunja Zupančič, the center’s co-founders. A tribute to the deceased actress Martina Grm, Aktuator::MG is an “art satellite” on tracks which projects abstract visuals onto surrounding walls while in motion. It’s also part of a wider project: …
The Sexual Potential of the Gallery
Amanda Lee Koe
They had been to an opening.
Now they were driving around the island with no aim, he had a fast car. He put the roof down and her hair whipped about her face and neck and shoulders, she was curious to see how long it would take for him to put the roof back up if she said nothing. But he did not put it back up, so her hair was in her mouth when he asked how she found the show.
She took her hair out of her mouth and held it back from her face with one hand and said, I did not like the space. He said that wasn’t his question, she said it affected her answer so it seemed fair enough to say so. He put a hand on her knee and she looked at his hand as first it related in concentric circles his thumb, her kneecap, his index finger, then, perhaps under her stare, it fell quite still, but remained there all the same.
You want to walk in and say yes, she said. You want to walk in and be able to smell it.
Smell what?
The sexual potential of the gallery space, she said. Looking at his …
Michael Rakowitz’s “The invisible enemy should not exist”
Ana Teixeira Pinto
The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (Aj-ibur-shapu), from which Michael Rakowitz’s exhibition at Barbara Wien in Berlin borrows its name, was how the street which ran through the gate of Ishtar, in ancient Babylon, was known. Built around 575 BC under King Nebuchadnezzar II and dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, the gate was made of glazed brick covered in lapis lazuli and decorated with alternating rows of dragons and aurochs. Unearthed in 1899, the site where the gate originally stood was greedily excavated by German self-taught archaeologist Robert Koldewey, who lifted up the entire tower and shipped it to Berlin, where it still stands as the main attraction of the Pergamon Museum. Though Iraq repeatedly protested this heritage seizure, the gate—much like the ancient Greek Pergamon Altar, taken from present-day Turkey—was never returned.
In the nineteenth century, archaeology was a discipline mainly deployed in countries where its practitioners had no cultural relation to the population whose history they unearthed. When Europe elected Babylonia as the origin of (its) civilization, it did not simply appropriate its archaeological treasures, it also appropriated its history. Implicated in foundational myths and nation-building, archaeology became tied to colonial history: everyone has a claim to Babylon, except …
Mark Leckey’s “UniAddDumThs”
Valerio Mannucci
Mark Leckey’s exhibition at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, the Roman location of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, is the latest iteration of a series running back to the 2013 Hayward Touring show “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things.” The original display took inspiration from digital images collected on Leckey’s hard drive, physical instantiations of which were assembled into an eccentric taxonomy. At Kunsthalle Basel, Leckey presented an “ersatz” version of the concept titled “UniAddDumThs” (2015), featuring replicas of the original objects. Considering these previous presentations, in what way does this new project add to the previous ones from which it takes its cue? And to what extent does it need everything that precedes it in order to be understood? Can we individuate a fissure, a difference that makes it unique and independent from its predecessors?
To address these questions, let’s imagine we don’t know anything of Leckey’s previous shows. We walk through the main door of this deconsecrated church to find an orderly arrangement of things. We might ask ourselves, “Is there an order that defines this set of objects? Why are they all together in one room? Why these and not others?” A number of 3D printed objects, two-dimensional prints, and videos are …
John Akomfrah
Andrew Stefan Weiner
It is lamentable and somewhat curious that John Akomfrah is just now receiving his first major exhibition in the US. Despite the critical acclaim Akomfrah has received in the UK and Europe, both for his recent solo output and his earlier work with the Black Audio Film Collective, he remains relatively unknown to Americans outside the experimental film community. One hopes that the current show at Lisson Gallery’s new Chelsea outpost will begin to address this oversight, thereby bringing more attention to the pivotal, underexposed history of Black British cultural production in the Thatcher era and to its continuing relevance in the present.
Responding to the precedent of Third Cinema, as well as the thinking of figures including Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, groups like BAFC and Sankofa Film and Video Collective (which included Isaac Julien) used broadcast media to advance a nuanced critique of the intersections between race, neoliberalism, and postcoloniality. Rethinking the politics of the African diaspora through the idiom of emergent artistic, musical, and mediatic forms, these cooperatives laid the foundation for what would later be called Afrofuturism, establishing a crucial precedent for contemporary practices like those of the Otolith Group and Chimurenga. Perhaps the most outstanding example …
“a, the, though, only,” Made in L.A. 2016
Andrew Berardini
I’ve lost all my pride
I’ve been to paradise
And out the other side.
With no one to guide me,
Torn apart by a fiery wheel
Inside me.
—The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s “I won’t hurt you” (1966), heard in Laida Lertxundi’s Vivir para Vivir / Live to Live (2015)
In LA, everyone’s Marlon Brando’s gardener. Cruising through a city sold and resold as a promised land, we’ve nothing to guide us but our passions for prosperity, for fame, for space, for spirit. All of us here somehow find a place in the end, even if it’s only as workers in others’ gardens, Edens owned by those that cast our dreams in moving pictures and the developers that sell or rent us our own smallest bite of paradise.
Made in L.A. 2016 is almost explicitly not about Los Angeles, though the city’s still the set.
Everyone likes to look in the mirror sometimes, and a localist biennial has some vanity for sure, but the city’s self-regard (Los Angeles again playing itself, to riff on gay porn auteur Fred Halsted through cine-essay maker Thom Andersen) has been finally outpaced by others’ regard for it. Such biennials can easily be read as a trend report for …
Sam Lewitt and Lucy Raven’s “Wild Sync & Weak Locals”
Isobel Harbison
I walked straight past the entrance to Pilar Corrias’s gallery. The lights are off and inside it’s dark and quiet. The only work on the ground floor is Sam Lewitt’s A Weak Local Lexicon (MHTL) (2016), an unlit installation which converts the charge from the light source, powered from a distribution board in the wall, into heat emitted through four custom-made copper-plated panels lying on insulation blankets on the floor. Wires lead out from the mains in the wall to connect each panel, regulating the room’s moderately high temperature, altered slightly by my entrance. Little digital meters sit atop the panels, giving numeric readings of the oscillating flow. Their red blinking is the only visual noise of this otherwise ascetic piece.
The work began life among others in Lewitt’s solo exhibition “More Heat Than Light” at San Francisco’s CCA Wattis (2015) and Kunsthalle Basel (2016). Its copper patterning is custom designed to reflect the fretwork on the exterior of a Basel bank vault. This Ancient Greek motif, of a continuous line meandering towards infinity, symbolizes Lewitt’s long-term interest in technology’s deployment by capital, the process of circulation similar to that David Harvey describes in which “money is perpetually sent out in …
KwieKulik’s "The Monument Without a Passport"
Stefan Heidenreich
Resistance is a two-sided relation. It may also include more players, as we will discuss shortly. But losing its counterpart puts it in a difficult place. All political art has to deal with this dialectic entanglement.
In 1976, artists Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek were summoned to the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art in Warsaw. They were told that they were no longer allowed to represent Polish culture abroad. Their passports were withdrawn.
From 1971 onwards, both worked under the name KwieKulik. Until 1987, they produced what was considered one the most important bodies of political performances in Europe. In 2007, Documenta 12 showed Activities with Dobromierz (1972–74), a tableau of 48 black-and-white photographs documenting their newborn son surrounded by household objects, to be understood as a general reference to social relations and artistic practice. Then, in 2009, they were invited to the 11th Istanbul Biennial, and their work was rediscovered by a wider public.
The timing of their rediscovery—as much as the timing of the passport affair—is no coincidence. To understand the political aspects of KwieKulik’s work it is necessary to take a look at their resistance’s counterpart. In the mid-1970s, the Polish government (under First Secretary Edward Gierek, whose policy …
Liverpool Biennial
Jeremy Millar
Things happen, and then they happen again, but not the same way, not quite; such is the logic of the biennial. And then there are things which have never happened before, and which happen now and in a time that seems somehow out of time, or takes our “now” out with it. This is how it feels to be in Britain, to be visiting this unashamedly international event exactly two weeks after the country—but not Liverpool—voted to leave the European Union. While at the launch event there was much talk of this internationalism, and of confidence in the future, a confidence which the city has not always possessed, there persists a more widely held anxiety at what might occur. If the tide has turned, it has done so quickly, receding at a rate which more usually foretells a tsunami to come.
The Liverpool Biennial has neither a single title nor a theme, but rather six “episodes,” although the same work might appear in more than one episode, and more than one episode might appear in the same venue. It is difficult to see how these can operate as discrete Aristotelian elements, “coming in besides” the story when they constitute the story …
Rosalind Nashashibi’s “Two Tribes”
Rachael Rakes
Ever-regenerating discussions in mainstream documentary discourse pit form in opposition to function. It is still commonly understood that utility and representable actuality risk becoming diluted or confused by formal invention or experimentation with narrative structure. This reasoning foregrounds a perpetuating valuation in the inherent power of the documentary as a pedagogical and propaganda tool, above all else, and suggests that a kind of ideal documentary purity is always just out of reach. Consequently, this has also produced infertile grounds from which to begin discussing documentary works that sit outside of documentary convention, even after a particularly fruitful past decade of aesthetic development in the discipline.
In some sense, the documentary’s entrance into the art world as an aesthetic and as a research mode has helped to lessen this specific pressure on the form (whether that pressure is justified is another matter). The expanded material exhibition practices of contemporary art help to constellate a more coherent message—of evidence, explanation, context—that would otherwise need to emanate solely from the single work, thereby leaving it more often than not suffused in and defined by didacticism. At the same time, contemporary art does not typically require such a rigorous self-justification in terms of its usefulness. …
Michael Stevenson’s “Signs & Wonders”
Pedro Neves Marques
There is a subplot in Harmony Korine’s movie Mister Lonely (2007) that would make a fitting companion to Michael Stevenson’s exhibition “Signs & Wonders.” It tells the story of a nun who survives her fall from a missionary aid plane flying over the forests of Panama. The miracle inspires her sisters, who take to jumping from planes to demonstrate their faith and the power of God to protect them. The nuns pray in mid-air, react in ecstasy to the miracle, and prepare diligently for every flight and fall. But how does one compute a miracle? And how does one prepare for it?
Stevenson’s installation at Carl Freedman Gallery comprises four hand-built 1980s flight simulators, all of them facing screens onto which digital renderings of a flight over a forest in Papua New Guinea are projected. Visitors are unable to enter into the unmanned cockpits, and the simulators appear to fly themselves, heading back and forth across a real route between villages hidden in the mountains. Although there are no nuns in sight, each cockpit carries its own collection of evangelical and millenarian books, dating from the 1960s onwards, by authors involved with the School of World Missions at Fuller Seminary in …
Sadie Benning’s "Green God"
Alan Gilbert
The internet and its social media spawn have made modes of communication increasingly seamless, with displays of personhood now embedded in a post or link. And while the democratic polyphony of voices has perhaps never been greater, so too is its expression through corporate-owned technologies. Ever since Sadie Benning was a teenager making short videos with a Fisher-Price toy movie camera in a working-class Milwaukee bedroom in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the artist has foregrounded the seams, the fractures, the not quite fitting in.
Those early videos brought Benning much-deserved acclaim before the artist turned 20, and they still feel groundbreaking in their fragmentary reveal of a queer identity that tentatively—yet joyfully—coalesces into a whole. In an age of unabashed selfies, it’s curious to see these works frame small slivers of the body (an eye, a hand) in a slow exposure of self over multiple videos and years. Along with making video, film, and, later, digital animation, the artist also participated in Riot grrrl zine culture (and was an original member of the band Le Tigre), and it’s possible to connect that format’s literal cut-and-paste technique and aesthetic with much of Benning’s output up to the present.
This includes the …
Lea Porsager’s “E(AR)THERIC SLIME ~ PRE-OP”
Milena Hoegsberg
Lea Porsager’s solo show at Nils Stærk pulls viewers into a universe “packed with astonishing unheard-of facts, helix patterns and fermionic seeds” through the eyes of #ET. In #ET (all works 2016), a text authored by the artist, Porsager’s extraterrestrial alter ego of sorts takes viewers at full speed through a dense set of references ranging from Rudolf Steiner’s idiosyncratic theories of the ear; a dream by quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli as told to Carl Jung; and the polar energies of Kundalini yoga. By way of these leads, some footnoted, readers weave in and out of the esoteric and the scientific, of personal and artistic experiences, and a thought-flow carried through the multi-dimensional inquiries that Porsager often considers: the entanglement of temporalities, spaces, bodies, and experience in both past and present.
Carefully scripted and edited to encompass the synergies and contradictions of myriad research sources, Porsager’s text—a work in its own right, custom-printed on paper—yields its power from a logic that exists outside the rational. Her words unfold as poems coursing with an internal rhythm, igniting an encounter with the other more minimalist components that make up the exhibition. In Twenty-two Ground Protection Mats ~ ET, #ET’s initials are cut out …
Loop Barcelona
Lucy Reynolds
Barcelona’s Loop art fair, which started in 2003, is the oldest and most established initiative to assert the commercial potential of film and video. The medium’s ephemeral nature, and its associations with the very different market values of cinema, have contributed to a continued reluctance from collectors, attracted by the aura of more traditional art forms. Paradoxically, these tricky market credentials have recently endowed the moving image with a critical cachet in institutional art spaces and museums. As the institutional assimilation of practices traditionally seen as marginal, and oppositional, to the art market continues—from experimental film to the documentary—the instrumental role of film and video takes on a significant historical resonance in art discourse. In order to assign value to this wayward and ambiguous media within the context of an art fair, Loop has to negotiate a conflicted territory. How to maintain its more market-driven function without appearing to dismiss these historic discourses of disavowal, which will themselves provide validation for the sale of moving image works?
I received the answer at my hotel desk, where I received the exhibition catalogue for “Empathy,” Harun Farocki’s show at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. The enclosed compliment slip asserts Farocki’s role as a “close …
Jordan Wolfson
Kevin McGarry
At the apex of art and money, the air is thin and the atmosphere is replaced with rarified pain. Rather than terrestrial life, only blood fortunes are endemic here, whose constituent lifestyles are at least as abstract as the most totemic artworks that give this place meaning. All the vectors involved in Jordan Wolfson’s show at David Zwirner point to such a place of supremacy.
The gallery has accrued spectacular gains during this long boom of the art market, which has endured through a period in which the working and unworking people of the world have seen most of what remains to them siphoned away. The artist has been given the codes to launch his vision without compromise, in an ideal demonstration of what one and the other—artist and gallery—can do for each other within the reigning system of production.
That vision is an inanimate Colored sculpture (2016) of a lacquered, wincing boy, cut up and marionetted by a brutal contraption of chain pulleys in such a way that he is popularly referred to as a robot. This is likely because Wolfson’s breakthrough work, Female Figure (2014)—exhibited at his first solo show with David Zwirner—more conventionally resembles a robot. Two years ago, …
Tate Modern’s Switch House
Ben Eastham
“When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable,” the Guerilla Girls asked in 1989, “what will your art collection be worth?” Predicting that “the art market won’t bestow mega-buck prices on the work of a few white males forever,” their printed notice listed 67 female artists (several of whom are now on show in the refurbished Tate Modern), at least one work by each of whom could be acquired for the price of a single Jasper Johns painting. Once fly-posted around SoHo in a grassroots campaign by the anonymous collective to protest against institutional discrimination in the art world, the poster is now prominently displayed in the world’s most visited museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art. The framed portfolio of which it is a part, Guerrilla Girls Talk Back (1985–90)—a scathing critique of the role and representation of women and ethnic minorities in twentieth-century Western culture—hangs opposite Marilyn Diptych (1962), Andy Warhol’s paean to American sex, money, and cultural imperialism.
The new Tate Modern brings forward the future envisaged by the Guerrilla Girls at the expense of a past embodied in Marilyn. The opening of a vast new wing—a coiled, ten-storey ziggurat designed by Herzog & de Meuron—is the occasion …
Art Basel and Liste
Jennifer Piejko
When word got out that Hervé Falciani, a dapper systems engineer at HSBC’s hushed private bank in Geneva, had lifted the identities and details of 130,000 account holders in 2008, the Swiss government was put in the unfortunate position of having to ask its neighbors to extradite this thief or Robin Hood, depending on one’s perspective. These were the same countries whose own citizens had evaded paying taxes on the cash (often wrapped into bricks, sometimes in faraway, foreign currencies) by storing it with HSBC’s Swiss branches. France sheltered the whistleblower and his “Lagarde list,” even sharing the embezzled data with other state governments to help them further their own pursuits of missing tax income, often from its wealthiest citizens.
The centuries-old Swiss banking tradition of total discretion, even at its highest stakes, was finally broken. Falciani was not only a highly skilled technician, he was also an astute witness of both formal and informal office protocol. This was vital, since there was often no official documentation to refer to, or dispute: the majority of the private bank’s clients opted out of receiving monthly bank statements, a process detailed in a recent New Yorker profile that reads like a Hollywood script. …
15th Venice Architecture Biennale, “Reporting from the Front"
Nick Currie
During the first decade of neoliberalism, not long after Live Aid, Sandy Nairne made a series of six films called “State of the Art” for the UK’s Channel 4. They provide a fascinating glimpse into a 1980s contemporary art world both condemning and colluding with international capital. In the fifth film we see once-radical artists like Terry Atkinson recanting their former “left-wing heavy booting” in the name of a new “complexity,” and in the sixth we visit the 1986 Sydney Biennale, where 1980s politicians in 1980s suits are making a big deal of the show’s inclusiveness—somewhat to the consternation of Aboriginal artist Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, who feels that a decontextualizing tokenism may be at work.
Thirty years have passed, but very little has changed. On the one hand, art fairs like the Basel franchise operate like a greedy id, offering the super-rich primal visual pleasure and investment opportunities. On the other (oppositional or complementary according to your perspective), biennials stand as a sort of guilty superego, with loftily humanist curators—often from poorer nations—asking us to consider the plight of refugees, immigrants, and the poor (the victims, one might say, of the very people the big art fairs are aimed at). The …
“What People Do For Money,” Manifesta 11
Ingo Niermann
Contemporary artists are great at being dilettantes. Some make a point of how liberating it is to lack skill, others of how liberating it is to delegate to those who know better. Meanwhile, machines continue to outdo humans in more and more skills. More and more humans work in some sort of managerial position, in which their job profile resembles that of a contemporary artist: a bit of research, a bit of creativity, a bit of giving orders, a bit of receiving orders, and lots of micro-communication. More and more jobs are short-term and poorly paid—like most commissions for artists. Those professionals who don’t work like artists act like artists in their spare time, whether by creating artifacts or by remodeling their personas.
Today, being an artist is the norm; specialists are the exotic birds that artists once were. To work with a specialist has become an exquisite experience that can easily be turned into a piece of art. This must have been the starting point for German artist Christian Jankowski when curating the 11th edition of the “European biennial” Manifesta, hosted this time by Zurich. Jankowski—who made himself known for works created with the help of fortune tellers, speechwriters, or …
Nicholas Mangan’s "Ancient Lights"
Claudia Arozqueta
As the central body in our planetary system, the sun has been revered through history as the source of our energy and the basis of our calendars. “Ancient Lights,” Nicholas Mangan’s first solo exhibition in Mexico City, is a sun worshipper’s investigation into the myriad conceptions of our star, from the theological to the technological. It features an installation of two new films (both Ancient Lights, 2016), projected one in front of each other at different angles in this L-shaped gallery, which explore the unstable relationship between humanity and nature as well as different kinds of energies: motion, sound, electricity, and magnetism.
Scientists have long considered how solar variations—like sunspots—might relate to changes in climate and associated human activities. Mangan’s first film—displayed close to the gallery entrance on a suspended wall, at 90-degree angle to the room’s right wall—charts and compiles these investigations. The 13-minute loop presents a montage of different footage: the sun reflecting off the heliostats at the Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant in Andalucía; the air contamination visible in the skyline of Mexico City; audiovisual data from NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory project, which tracks the relationship between sunspots and weather changes; oranges covered in frost during an unseasonable cold …