ArtReview Magazine, March 2010

Issue 39 £5.00

Issue 39 / March 2010

‘It’s easy to say that the displacement in my work reflects my personal life – but everybody has it’ – Bharti Kher

M arch 2010 The Berthe Morisot Scandal: Impressionist legend confesses – ‘ My work isn’t really that good’ Ben Vautier: Show-off, sex maniac and égoïste

T he

Cory Arcangel: Between the artworld and the Internet

F u t u re

Athens: Where Gagosian goes, we follow!

G reat s i s s u e: what ar tists are interested in

www.artreview.com

BHARTI KHER

today

it ’ s n o t ab o u t her , it ’ s ab o u t y o u

It also has the capacity for excitement. The new Mercedes-Benz E-Class Estate has up to 1,950 litres of space, the best in its class. But while it’s practical, it’s also desirable. There’s a stylish new exterior, a more luxurious interior and a range of refined engines, which includes BlueEFFICIENCY technology. Why settle for an estate car when you can own an E-Class?

Visit eclass.co.uk or text ‘excite’ to 64500

Official government fuel consumption figures in MPG (Litres per 100km ) for the E- Class Estate Range: Urban: 15.0 Model shown is a Mercedes-Benz E 350 CGI BlueEFFICIENCY Avantgarde Estate with optional metallic paint at £620.00, optional privacy glass at £350.00 and optional 18" alloy wheels at £775.00.

(18.8)– 38.2 (7.4), Extra Urban: 30.4 (9.3)–60.1 (4.7), Combined: 22.1 (12.8 )– 49.6 (5.7). CO2 emissions: 299 -150g/km. Total Price: £41,220.00 on-the-road (price includes VAT, delivery, maximum Road Fund Licence, number plates, new vehicle registration fee and fuel). Prices correct at time of going to print.

Josh Tonsfeldt 4:Cat-Cos

18 February at 19.00 until 1 May 2010 from Tuesday to Saturday, from 11.00 to 19.00

franco soffiantino

gallery

v i a R o s s i n i , 2 3 - I - 1 0 1 2 4 To r i n o T +39 011 837743 F +39 011 8134490 E [email protected] www.francosoffiantino.it

ILYA & EMILIAKABAKOV THE FLYING PAINTINGS MARCH – APRIL 2010 CATALOGUE AVAILABLE

PA R I S

FRANCE

7 RUE DEBELLEYME

TEL 331 4272 9900

FA X 3 3 1 4 2 7 2 6 1 6 6

W W W. R O PA C . N E T

Supported at BALTIC by: This exhibition is co-organised by the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Major support for the exhibition is provided by Donald and Brigitte Bren, Anne and Burt Kaplan, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Image: Purple, 2008. 33 electronic signs with red, blue, white, and green diodes. Installation: Jenny Holzer, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, 2009. Text: U.S. government documents. © 2010 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Lili Holzer-Glier BAL239

Peter COFFIN The Colors Are Bright

Daniel ARSHAM Animal Architecture

20 March - 7 May, 2010

76 rue de Turenne /10 impasse Saint-Claude PARIS

ZETA

WHILE BODIES GET MIRRORED – AN EXHIBITION ABOUT MOVEMENT, FORMALISM AND SPACE March 6 – May 30, 2010 Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová Martin Soto Climent Maya Deren William Forsythe Julian Goethe Delia Gonzalez Babette Mangolte Anna Molska Kelly Nipper Paulina Olowska Silke Otto-Knapp Mai-Thu Perret Hanna Schwarz The migros museum für gegenwartskunst is an institution of the Migros Culture Percentage. Tue/Wen/Fri 12 am-6pm, Thu 12am-8pm, Sat/Sun 11am-5pm. Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich, T+41 44 277 20 50, F+41 44 277 62 86 www.migrosmuseum.ch, [email protected]

Arshile Gorky The Artist and His Mother 1926 –36 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2010. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins

Arshile Gorky A Retrospective

Media partner

10 Feb — 3 May 2010

www.tate.org.uk

MARK MANDERS 11 March - 24 April 2010

ZENO X GALLERY Leopold De Waelplaats 16 - 2000 Antwerp [email protected] www.zeno-x.com T +32 3 216 38 88 F +32 3 216 09 92

WILLIAM MONK “WINTER CIRCUS” 13 MARCH - 1 MAY 2010

UPCOMING: CIARáN MuRpHY May 8 -jUNE 10, ALex dORdOY jUNE 12 - jUly 31

Keizersgracht 82, 1015 CT Amsterdam, The Netherlands , www.grimmfineart.com, Tel +31 (0) 20 4227 227, Fax +31 (0) 20 3301 965.

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curated by

pawel althamer galerie dana charkasi

martin arnold galerie martin janda

julien bismuth

marko lulic

layr wuestenhagen

gabriele senn galerie

pierre bismuth

ursula mayer

christine könig galerie

krobath wien

blue noses

albert oehlen

knoll galerie wien

galerie mezzanin

josef dabernig

tony oursler

galerie andreas huber

galerie steinek

valie expOrt

fabrizio plessi

charim galerie wien

mario mauroner

sanja ivekovic

mathias poledna

galerie ernst hilger

galerie meyer kainer

anna jermolaewa

stephan reusse

engholm galerie

lukas feichtner galerie

laleh khorramian

nadim vardag

galerie krinzinger

galerie georg kargl

clemens von wedemeyer galerie nächst st. stephan

amy yoes galerie grita insam

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curated by vienna 2O1O coincides with VIENNAFAIR, may 6—9, 2O1O www.viennafair.at

Rosebud, Inc.

_

presents: curated by 2O artists curating exhibitions in 2O galleries may 6—june 5, 2O1O, opening may 6, 6—1O pm www.curatedby.at

Photo: Red Rum, courtesy Derek Holden

The Economy of the Gift 9 April –22 May 2010. Preview 8 April 2010, A Foundation Liverpool Participating Galleries: Andréhn-Schiptjenko (Stockholm) Bureau Gallery (Salford) Ceri Hand Gallery (Liverpool) Freymond-Guth & Co. Fine Arts (Zurich)

The International 3 (Manchester) Ivan Gallery (Bucharest) Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco/New York) Workplace Gallery (Newcastle)

Also showing — Saatchi Online: Northern Stars, 9 April –22 May 2010 A Foundation Liverpool, 67 Greenland Street, Liverpool L1 0BY. www.afoundation.org.uk

Funded by: Romanian Cultural Institute Embassy of Sweden Swiss Cultural Fund for Britain

SAATCHI GALLERY

Contents

on the cover: BHARTI KHER photographed by ANAY MANN

MARCH 2010

DISPATCHES 29 Snapshot: Michele Abeles Now See This: Whitney Biennial; Armory Show; Independent; Jenny Holzer; Abstract Resistance; While Bodies Get Mirrored – An Exhibition About Movement, Formalism and Space; Mary Heilmann; Jonathan Lasker; Rodney Graham; Lisette Model Columns: Paul Gravett discusses the work of Amruta Patil; lost in the whole New Museum brouhaha, says Joshua Mack, is the sheer difficulty of finding patrons for lesser-known artists; Axel Lapp sees promise in a spate of curated shows in Berlin galleries; Marie Darrieussecq marvels at MAC/VAL The Free Lance: Christian Viveros-Fauné on Modernism, the gift that keeps on giving London Calling: J.J. Charlesworth on why the ‘mixed economy’ funding model just isn’t working Top Five: The pick of shows to see this month, as selected by Martin Clark Design: Hettie Judah wonders whether we can harness the power of military design Consumed: Peter Doig bath towel; Stephen Lawlor etching; Claude Parent villa in France; Susan Collis edition; World Cup artist posters; Colter Jacobsen’s take on classic literary fiction; Ron Arad chair; Tomorrow, In a Year, the soundtrack An Oral History of Western Art: Matthew Collings sees Impressionism from the margins as he talks to Berthe Morisot On View: Anna Sansom talks art and lies with the artist known as Ben; Maarten Baas tells Christopher Mooney about designing nonsense Manifesto: BECKERHARRISON

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52

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18 ArtReview

Make the secrets productive

Joseph BeuYs March 5–april 10, 2010

© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

534 West 25th street NYc

www. pacewilde nste in.com

Contents

MARCH 2010

FEATURES Bharti Kher 72

Martin Herbert considers the hearts of whales and humans in the multifarious practice of Bharti Kher

Cory Arcangel 84

Art’s foremost ethnographer of the Internet speaks with Alan Licht about kittens, Springsteen and winging it

REAR VIEW

Now! What artists are interested in today 89

Earth: Art of a Changing World; Hyperborean Manners; Ori Gersht; Lisson Presents 7; Stephen Sutcliffe; Spasticus Artisticus; Votive; Paul Chan; Sites of Latin American Abstraction; Sean Duffy; Sharon Lockhart; Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture; Gert and Uwe Tobias; Jake and Dinos Chapman; William E. Jones; James Castle; Eric Bainbridge; Michael Samuels; Johan Creten; Marc Camille Chaimowicz

Five writers – Tyler Coburn, Laura McLean-Ferris, Neil Mulholland, Jonathan T.D. Neil and Chris Sharp – tackle five of contemporary art’s most pressing concerns

Art Pilgrimage 110

Christopher Mooney is at the mercy of gods and men on his visit to Athens

Reviews 119

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122

BOOKS 142

Birgit Jürgenssen; The Conversation Series 21: Cedric Price; Portable Document Format; Anton Vidokle: Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat

THE STRIP 146

Noah & the Ship of Fools, by Amruta Patil

142

95

ON THE TOWN 148

Matthew Barney opening at Sadie Coles, London; Adam Kimmel’s George Condoinspired Casino collection at Yvon Lambert, Paris

OFF THE RECORD 150

148

Gallery Girl dishes fashion and careers advice to her desperate readership 111 20 ArtReview

HAUSER & WIRTH LONDON

Bharti Kher 20 MARCH — 15 MAY 2010 196A PICCADILLY LONDON W1J 9DY WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

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Art

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Contributors Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, Hettie Judah, Axel Lapp, Joshua Mack, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers T.J. Carlin, Barbara Casavecchia, Luke Clancy, James Clegg, Matthew Collings, Marie Darrieussecq, Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Alan Licht, Astrid Mania, Coline Milliard, Neil Mulholland, John Quin, Anna Sansom, Ed Schad, Andrew Smaldone, Karine Tissot, Christian Viveros-Fauné

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ArtReview

ConTRIBUTORS

MARCH 2010

Oliver Basciano

This is Oliver Basciano’s first issue under the title of assistant editor. Until now he was contributing writer for ArtReview, as well as a provider of words for whomever stumped up hard cash (Modern Painters, Map, Architects’ Journal, Building Design, Wallpaper…), though he insists it was all only for the love of critical engagement.

Alan Licht

Alan Licht is a New Yorkbased guitarist, writer and curator. Recent activities include performances on the newly reconstructed Luigi Russolo intonarumori (noise instruments) with Text of Light, the group he cofounded with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, and creating On Deaf Ears (2009), a sound installation at New York’s AVA gallery. He is the author of Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (2007) and is currently editing Bonnie Prince Billy on Will Oldham, which Faber & Faber will publish in 2011.

Lucas Blalock

Lucas Blalock is a Brooklynbased photographer whose work is engaged in the ways that falseness/mechanics in pictures can bring a viewer into more intimate relation to the world. He exhibits internationally and last year published his first book of photographs, I Believe You, Liar. A second book of pictures, Towards a Warm Math, will be out later this year.

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ArtReview

Anay Mann

Anay Mann began photographing ten years ago. His first solo exhibition, Generation in Transition (2004), included portraits of young urban Indians, and since 2001 he has been photographing his wife in a series called About Neetika. About Neetika has been included in a group exhibition at the Fotografie Forum International, Frankfurt (2006), and is currently on view at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. The series has also had solo showings at the Rencontres d’Arles festival and the Ateliers de l’Image in Marseille, both in 2007. Mann lives in New Delhi.

Anna Sansom

Anna Sansom is a Parisbased journalist who writes about contemporary art, the art market, photography, architecture, design and fashion. She contributes to publications such as The Art Newspaper, Whitewall, Damn, Eyemazing, Hercules and Bon. For this issue of ArtReview, she interviewed the French artist Ben.

Neil Mulholland

Neil Mulholland is an art historian based in Scotland. He is currently concerned with how art, curating and writing are converging and acclimatising to the mise en scène of ambient culture. He is director of the Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Art, where he leads the MA Contemporary Art Theory.

DISPATCHES March

Snapshot Now See This The Free Lance / London Calling Top Five Design Consumed An Oral History of Western Art

snapshot

29 30 32/40 42 44 46 52

Michele Abeles

An ongoing series by artists whose work we admire. Black Sky, Red Ocean, 2008, was taken while the artist was shooting Caught in a Secret History, 2007–9.

ArtReview

29

now see this words

Martin herbert

94, New York, 4–7 March, www. thearmoryshow.com), about which perhaps nothing much need be said, except that it’s only the main event in the citywide synergy of Armory Arts Week. But running alongside the latter is

The last one was a smorgasbord of low expectations, a washed-out advertisement of collective anomie regarding Iraq and an indication that painting is on the skids among young artists. This one, says Francesco Bonami, is ‘a moment of celebration of the history of the Museum – of the reason why the Museum exists’. Yes, it’s wabbit season for cwitics

Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum, New York, 25 February – 30 May, www.whitney.org) once again as the

rolls around, this year cohelmed by Bonami (who assumedly has skin like cowhide following his 2003 Venice Biennale and Italics, his traduced 2008

Independent (4–7 March, former Dia Center for the Arts building, New York, www. independentnewyork.com). The latest something more noteworthy –

history of modern Italian art) and young Whitney curator Gary Carrion-Murayari. Good luck plotting a thematic using just the 55-artist list and the curatorial statements’ chirpy vagueness; but the show is emphatically multigenerational (from Babette Mangolte to George Condo to short-CV twenty-somethings), seemingly more internationalist than last time, can expect to be shot to blazes for seeking to graph the zeitgeist and – in terms of the commerce of opinion – remains fairly mandatory viewing.

satellite fair to attach itself to the Armory, this one is organised by Darren Flook (codirector of London gallery Hotel) and Elizabeth Dee, who has run project space X Initiative in Dia’s old Chelsea space. Key to this pragmatic project, Flook recently told the Financial Times, are budget transparency and ‘no booths’, with galleries being invited to make their own use of the space. Watching the dealers cooperate ought to be fascinating in itself.

The 78-year-old Whitney Biennial overlaps with the 11-year-old

Armory Show (Piers 92 and

Not least because YOU CAN’T EXPECT PEOPLE TO BE SOMETHING THEY’RE NOT. The quote comes from the

Jenny Holzer (BALTIC, Gateshead, 5 March – 16 May, www.

Twitter feed of

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ArtReview

from top: Independent, 548 W 22nd Street, New York, © 2009 Tom Powel Imaging; Ari Marcopoulos, still from Detroit, 2009. DVD, 7 min 32 sec loop, courtesy Ratio 3, San Francisco; Jenny Holzer, Monument (detail), 2008 (installation view, Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow, 2008), 22 double-sided, semicircular electronic LED signs, 13 with red and white diodes, 9 with red and blue diodes on front and blue and white diodes on back, 494 x 147 x 73 cm, installation Like Truth; Armory Show, 2009, photo: David Willems

DISPATCHES

Rachel Harrison, Al Gore, 2007, wood, chicken wire, polystyrene, Parex, cement, acrylic, Honeywell T87 thermostat, 216 x 86 x 43 cm. Courtesy the artist, Meyer Kainer Galerie, Vienna, and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

Amruta Patil “People love easy synopses.” Amruta Patil, India’s first female writer-graphic novelist, is quick to counter the trite summary of Kari (2008) as a comic about a suicidal lesbian. Now that the graphic novel is emerging in India, notably from innovators like Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Patil wanted to send out an unusual protagonist into the literary scene. “Kari is a young, deeply introverted, asocial and queer woman, a counterpoint to the hyperfeminine prototypes you keep coming across.” Twice during the course of the story, Kari stands on the brink, literally teetering on the ledge of a building. The first time round, she chooses to jump; the second, she chooses not to. And yet, the book is not an angsty coming-out tale. Kari is dark, funny and detached, and her queerness is incidental rather than central to her journey. And before you jump to conclusions, the book is not autobiographical. For her debut, Patil chose an atypical literary crossover, more text-based than most graphic novels, the story flowing back and forth between voiceover narration and visuals. She’s the first to admit that not all her experiments worked: “The book is very raw – I was working on instinct.” Even so, Kari announces a highly individual voice, part of the growing chorus of women authors in world comics. Last January, Patil returned to New Delhi after a European residency at the Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême, France’s capital of comics, with some valuable insights: “I ought to stop apologising for my lack of exposure to ‘norms’. My lack of familiarity with storytelling traditions, my gender, my foreignness – these could all be assets. And I need to tell stories that matter.” Few stories matter more in India than the great, allencompassing mythohistorical epic the Mahabharat, which Patil immersed herself in as a child through the comic book adaptations in the ubiquitous Amar Chitra Katha series. Now, almost as a coming-of-age ritual, she has chosen to engage with these classics in her next project, Parva. “It’s a mammoth of a project that I am trying to steer by its tail. It keeps on changing me. I have gone from cocky and ambitious to far more diffident and humble. I am living differently, more pared down, austere. The way I eat has changed, and the way I conduct myself in the world. It has slowed me down, made me aware of hubris, and hopefully helped me become a little more thorough. Which is the only way you ought to work on a project like this. You don’t want to play with cosmic tales lightly.” That said, in this issue, for her new strip, she playfully rewrites a biblical story by imagining a dinosaur mutiny on Noah’s Ark. Amruta Patil takes part in PEN’s Free the Word! festival in London on 17 April words

Paul Gravett

balticmill.com);

if you’re surprised that the Ohio-born artist tweets, why? Holzer is a past master at expressing herself in less than 140 characters, or isolating the thoughts of others to do so, and she has restlessly spoken back to power by locating democratic outlets for itchy-but-lucid aphorisms (and more recently, passages from declassified military documents) since the 1970s. In 2002 she projected phrases all over buildings in Gateshead as part of the opening celebrations for BALTIC. Now she’s here again with this touring show, her largest solo in 15 years, its two floors spanning Lustmord Table (1994) – a commentary on the then-war in the former Yugoslavia: human bones arrayed on tables, some wrapped in text-covered metal bands – paintings and, of course, Holzer’s signature scrolling LED works.

Abstract Resistance (Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis, 27 February – 23 May, www.walkerart.org). Via artists ranging Another species of opposition animates

from Thomas Hirschhorn (from whose oeuvre the title is plucked) to Rachel Harrison, Robert Gober to Gedi Sibony and Andro Wekua, this intriguingly premised array considers how formal tensions

between figuration and abstraction can assume a larger sociopolitical meaning. Leaning on assemblage and montage, it proposes ‘an alternative framework for an art that is aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant’. Which sounds like all you could ever want, really – unless you’re looking to assess the allegorical capacities of choreography, in which case turn to

While Bodies Get

the free lance

revival or regifting? Insomnia offers few rewards, but one of them is late-night reading. Dog-eared books tempt like sugar cookies, and the glow of the computer screen beckons. Should sleep not come, don’t fret: the Scotch is in the cupboard, and old art magazines whisper like soporifics. Unless – horror of horrors – they should contain something worth reading. So it was, while detoured from sleep during the holidays, that I experienced a terrifying phenomenon I like to call ‘having the name of something snatched from under my nose by another writer’. This time the writer in question was Martin Herbert. Last spring he penned a genius brief for Tate Etc. windily titled (sorry, Martin) ‘Sifting Defunct Modernism in Search of Something Useful’. In honour of JC up a tree (welcome back, yourself) and wilting poinsettias, I summarily rebaptised his original concept (and my use of it) ‘regifting’. ‘Movies are not made, they’re remade’, legendary Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg crowed. But who knew that historical art movements could be churned out like hoary MGM blockbusters? Besides a boat named Narcissus, what Tugboat Annie (1933) and Modernism have in common is a bona fide template for success. For a present stuck in a global rut alternately described by the words ‘crisis’, ‘crunch’ or ‘collapse’, boilerplate happy endings – read ‘hopeful utopianism’ if you’re into art – have sprung the mother of all comebacks. And what a rally it has been! After 40 years of relentless ridicule, the tricks, tropes and inventive canniness of Picasso,

trend’s precursors (winking Rachel Harrison, antic Isa Genzken, brooding Wade Guyton). And then there’s 57th Street. In a phrase, 57th Street couldn’t tell the difference between the copy and the original article if the latter came wrapped in an ‘I’m with Stupid’ T-shirt. Even the Whitney Biennial has got in on the act, its organisers freely confessing that Modernism has ‘returned as a source of inspiration’ for the next extravaganza of glad-handing. A booming echo of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Altermodern manifesto – which used the pulpit of last year’s Tate Triennial to pimp the death of postmodernism (as if!) and the ‘emergence of a global altermodernity’ – the 2010 edition promises to convene even more cognoscenti-priests to comb the entrails of High Modernism. It turns out that haruspicy (look it up) is not sashimi words

Rodchenko, Schwitters, et al have returned in the guise of tinny reprises by twenty-something artists (once again) sporting berets and facial hair. Reportedly, pluck and nostalgia drive the trend towards retread vanguardism. A psychiatrist might easily term this bipolar syndrome. For those who prefer their metaphors less head-shrinky, I give you the following: if art history were a Narcotics Anonymous programme, this is what you’d call a relapse. A walk through any of New York’s art neighbourhoods easily proves my (or Martin’s) point. The Bowery’s New Museum regularly holds surveys of jejeune stuff that cribs old constructivist and Dada formulas; Lower East Side galleries are stuffed with homages to minor modernists like Chagall and Albers (at the time of writing, Volker Hueller at Eleven Rivington and Salon 94, and Josh Faught at Lisa Cooley Fine Art); Chelsea is periodically pockmarked with exhibitions of the 32

ArtReview

Christian viveros-faune

with jalapeño – but who knew? Consider the young artistfishies in this oracular light: having taken a dip in Modernism’s prelapsarian pool, it’s teeth-grindingly annoying to see them so comfortable just splashing around in the shallow end. Utopianism or archaeology? The question is key re: regifted Modernism, as the craze flip-flops between novel idea and sheer novelty. To quote from the magazine article that had me counting sheep: ‘The new modernism’s ethos would frequently seem to involve being a believer and an agnostic simultaneously.’ Meaning – at least for this sceptic – that the newfangled trend eschews the beating heart of an ethos and, likely, even a protomodern will to cultural impact. Look away, and reprised Modernism shape-shifts into the Vampire Weekend of art movements. Imagine you asked Santa for the new White Stripes album and he sticks you with retread Paul Simon instead. That’s no gift, Virginia, that’s a booby prize.

Volker Hueller, Happy Dog, 2009, etching with watercolour and shellac, 30 x 24 cm. Courtesy Eleven Rivington, New York. Work by Hueller was on view at Eleven Rivington and Salon 94, also in New York, in January

What to make of Modernism’s many (un)happy returns

VOLTA NY No Guts, No Glory. A Solo Project Art Fair March 4 – March 7 2010 New York 7w: 7 weSt 34 St – 11t h FLoor oPPoSi t e t he eM Pir e StAt e BuiLdiNg Be t weeN FiF t h AN d Si x t h Av eNueS wi t h Mu t uA LLY Ack NowLedged v iP AcceSS AN d Sh A red Shu t t LeS wit h t he A rMorY Show t hurSdAY M Arch 4: Pr e v ie wS 11 AM – 2 PM geNer A L oPeNiNg 2 PM – 8 PM Fr idAY M Arch 5 – SuNdAY M Arch 7: 11 A M – 7 PM

55 G a llery/ S h a n G h a i : x i e cAo M i N acb G a léri a / buda peSt: Pé t er tA M áS h A L áSz a d n G a leri a ba rcelo n a : Feder ico So L M i a ero pl aSticS contemporary/bruSSelS: SAMueL rouSSeAu amt torri & Geminian/milan: MicheLe LoMBArdeLLi danielle arnaud contemporary art/london: kAthLeeN herBert barbarian art Gallery/Zürich: vLAdiMir ArkhiPov Galerie anita beckerS/FrankFurt: MAriA JoSé ArJoNA Galerie StaniSlaS bourGain/pariS: vLAdiMir Logutov callicoon Fine artS/callicoon, ny: NichoLAS BuFFoN camara oScura/madrid: NANNA häNNiNeN chareSt-WeinberG Gallery/miami: richArd duPoNt chunG kinG projectS/loS anGeleS: MAriuS BerceA Galerie colletpark/pariS: toNY BrowN the cynthia corbett Gallery/london: ghoSt oF A dreAM ana criStea Gallery/neW york: ALexANder tiNei croWn Gallery/bruSSelS: chAriF BeNheLiMA Galleria tiZiana di caro/Salerno: MeriS ANgioLetti Gallery diet/miami: chArLeY FriedMAN dorSch Gallery/miami: richArd hAdeN Galleri chriStoFFer eGelund/copenhaGen: ANderS BriNch eleven/london: BeN turNBuLL thomaS erben Gallery/neW york: doNA NeLSoN extra joker/pariS: rAFAeL rozeNdAAL Faría FábreGaS Galería/caracaS: ALeSSANdro BALteo YAzBeck with MediA FArziN FaS/london: Steve goddArd/PeNNY LAMB jonathan Ferrara Gallery/neW orleanS: SkYLAr FeiN FineSilver/San antonio: dAwoLu JABAri ANderSoN Fruit and FloWer deli/brändStröm/neW york & Stockholm: JAN håFStröM Furini arte contemporanea/rome: ANdreA BiANcoNi ceri hand Gallery/liverpool: JeN Liu heliumcoWboy artSpace/hamburG: BoriS hoPPek pippy houldSWorth/london: NeiL FArBer inda Gallery/budapeSt: ádáM SzABó the international 3/ mancheSter: ALiSoN erikA Forde imperFect articleS/chicaGo: MichAeL ANdrewS inviSible exportS/neW york: MickeY SMith jarmuSchek + partner/berlin: MArkuS Putze/JAN vorMANN johanSSon projectS/San FranciSco: JeNNie ottiNger priSka c. juSchka Fine art/neW york: dANNieLLe tegeder Galleri k/oSlo: Sverre BJertNeS kaSia kay art projectS Gallery/chicaGo: SANdrA BerMudez kim liGht/liGhtbox/loS anGeleS: YuvAL Pudik kinkead contemporary/culver city: heAther cANtreLL koraalberG/antWerp: Nick erviNck Galería leme/São paulo: MArceLo MoSchetA Galerie chriStian lethert/coloGne: JiLL BAroFF Galeria leyendecker/Santa cruZ de teneriFe: ShizukA YokoMizo ma2Gallery/tokyo: NoBuAki oNiShi madder139/ london: gL BrierLeY man&eve/london: heNriettA SiMSoN Galerie mario maZZoli/berlin: dougL AS heNderSoN andrea meiSlin Gallery/neW york: AMY SiMoN moniquemeloche/chicaGo: cArrie SchNeider Galerie metro/berlin: MArkuS LeitSch mito/barcelona: chAMBLiSS gioBBi hamiSh morriSon Galerie/ berlin: PAuL Pretzer katharine mulherin/toronto: oScAr de LAS FLoreS nordin Gallery/Stockholm: kArL tuikkANeN number 35 Gallery/neW york: chriStoPher dANieLS pierre-FrançoiS ouellette/montreal: roBerto PeLLegriNuzzi pariSian laundry/montreal: vALérie BL ASS pdx contemporary art/ portland: NANcY LoreNz pentimenti Gallery/philadelphia: MAtthew cox prometeoGallery di ida piSani/milan: giuSePPe StAMPoNe Galerie vaneSSa quanG/pariS: NikoLAJ BeNdix S. LArSeN judi rotenberG Gallery/boSton: reBeccA chAMBerLAiN SamSøn/boSton: todd PAvLiSko Scaramouche/neW york: eiNAt AMir/ArLeN AuStiN Schuebbe projectS/düSSeldorF: FrANz BurkhArdt poppy Sebire/london: dANNY roLPh Skl Gallery/palma de mallorca:SoYeoN cho Stene projectS/Stockholm: Per wizéN Galerie heike StreloW/FrankFurt: MAthiAS keSSLer Frederieke taylor Gallery/neW york: oLive AYheNS teapot/coloGne: thoMAS PALMe v1 Gallery/copenhaGen: JohN coPeLANd Galería valle ortí/valencia: MáxiMo goNzáLez videoSpace/budapeSt: gigi ScAriA Galería viSor/valencia: LuiS goNzáLez PALMA voGeS Gallery/FrankFurt: ALexANder tiNei alejandra von hartZ Gallery/miami: kAriNA PeiSAJovich emmanuel WalderdorFF Galerie/coloGne: SvätoPLuk MikYtA WhatiFtheWorld/Gallery/cape toWn: cAMeroN PLAtter WohnmaSchine/berlin: hoLLY zAuSNer y Gallery/ neW york: tAMArA koStiANovSkY Steven ZevitaS Gallery/boSton: Jered SPrecher

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RAMIN HAERIZADEH

15 15MARCH MARCH––16 16APRIL APRIL I’llI’ll Huff Huff and and I’llI’ll Puff Puff

‘The Lunch on the Grass’ (detail), mixed-media on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, 2010

GALLERY ISABELLE FORMERLY KNOWN AS VAN DEN WWW.B21GALLERY.COM EYNDE WWW.B21GALLERY.COM ‘The Lunch on the Grass’ (detail), mixed-media on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, 2010

DISPATCHES

On 3 March the New York public will be able to judge for itself whether Jeff Koons’s selection of work from the Dakis Joannou collection brings something new to the New Museum. Given reports of the horde’s richness, the potential is there; but then the exhibition might prove the exception underlining the rule. For those who need reminding, a flurry of articles and handwringing in the fall noted that Joannou, who is a trustee of the museum, happens to own 40 or so works by Koons and that Massimiliano Gioni, the curator responsible for the New Museum’s recent Urs Fischer show, was, of late, part of the curatorial team for an exhibition at Joannou’s Athens-based Deste Foundation. A subsequent post on the New York Times’s Arts Beat outlined a ‘web of connections’ centring on gallery owner Gavin Brown, who represents Fischer and Elizabeth Peyton, the latter also the subject of a New Museum retrospective, this organised by curator Laura Hoptman, who is married to Verne Dawson, a member of Brown’s stable. The head spins, but any underlying implication of a quid pro quo is unsound. As Hoptman explains in the Peyton catalogue, she began championing Peyton’s work in 1990 or 91, before she was involved with Dawson and before Brown even had a gallery. Not mentioned is that in the mid1990s members of an advisory committee scoffed when she asked them to purchase drawings by Peyton for MoMA. Equally laughable given today’s market and their prominence is the idea that either Joannou or Koons might benefit from the show. It is the New Museum whose star will rise. What gets lost in the brouhaha over the appearance, if not the existence of, ethical lapses is a broader problem facing curators and museums. Exhibitions are often funded by supporters of an artist, that is by those who collect the work, and boardmembers aiming to increase their institutions’ (if not their own) importance tend to underwrite shows by highly touted artists. It is, consequently, far easier to mount a show of a popular figure – moneywise – than a worthy but underknown one. To wit, only one private donor, with holdings of the artists’ work (and one foundation at a much lower level) supported the Walker Art Center’s 2008 retrospective of Tetsmi Kudo. The exhibition did not travel. The result is a cultural echo chamber in which conventional wisdom is reinforced, and innovative thinking takes a back seat to repetition of the obvious.

Babette Mangolte materialises again alongside Maya Deren, William Forsythe, Mai-Thu Perret and more.

Although she may not do resistance overmuch,

Mary Heilmann (Museum Ludwig, Cologne, to 11 April, www.museumludwig.de) essays abstraction superlatively.

The California-born painter’s work, estimable enough as a purely optical-cognitive experience of formal problem-solving, encodes personal experience in amped-up colour and soft geometry. Consequently, it inquires reflexively into how far the language of abstract art can stand for and/or translate biographic events. This show, the first focusing on Heilmann’s works on paper, leans emphatically on that question, juxtaposing paintings with photographs and inviting the viewer to uncover exchanges between the real and the ethereal. One

words JOSHUA MACK

Jonathan Lasker (LA Louver, Venice, to 3 April, www.lalouver.com). Lasker’s compositions

might usefully pair Heilmann with

treat abstraction with a pointed lightness; his knotty but clean forms raise phone-pad doodling to

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ArtReview

from top: Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkácová, Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Let’s Conclude), 2008, single-channel video (colour, sound), 11 min 13 sec; Mary Heilmann, Thief of Baghdad, 2007, woodcut, linocut, archival pigment inkjet, 73 x 98 cm, courtesy Museum Ludwig, Cologne

New York

Mirrored – An Exhibition About Movement, Formalism and Space (Migros Museum, Zurich, 6 March – 30 May, www.migrosmuseum.ch), where

DISPATCHES

Berlin

words alex lapp

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ArtReview

unlikely levels of poise, while the interplay of large scale, loud colour and a mixture of flatness and drastic impasto (Scenes and Signs, 2009, looks like several half-melted packs of crayons wobbling on top of a graphic squiggle) recodes epic gestural abstraction for a speedier, more superficial era that’s unsure if it has a use for it.

Rodney Graham (MACBA, Barcelona, to 18 May, www.macba.es), too. As emphasised by The burden of history weighs on

the hundred or so works – cross-sectioning the Canadian’s explorations in video, photography, sculpture, books, music and more – in this midcareer survey, Through the Forest, Graham has repeatedly engaged the past by actively inhabiting it, upending the anxiety of influence. Fictional addenda to narratives proliferate, disparate

practitioners are hitched together and spiralling involutions bedevil familiar history. Sigmund Freud, Donald Judd, Jeff Wall and Edgar Allan Poe become unknown quantities or creative seedbeds – as does Picasso, whose ghost orbits a comically deadpan suite of paintings from 2005 that walk hesitantly in the Spanish master’s footsteps.

from top: Jonathan Lasker, Hidden Identity, 2009, oil on linen, 41 x 31 cm, courtesy LA Louver, Venice; Rodney Graham, Lenz Reading Machine for Lenz, 1993, MACBA, Barcelona, © the artist, 2009

The news that Jeffrey Deitch is to head LA MOCA doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the art scene in Berlin, but it is a further sign that the artworld’s sectors are intertwining – that the commercial and the not-for-profit might actually enjoy a common ground, and not just an interface that trades art for money and value. Nobody here has crossed over to an institution yet; it is still the collectors who are courted by the museums and who aim to perpetuate their glory by establishing their own. There are, though, some aspirations. For example, Matthias Arndt, who, as ARNDT, will open a new space this spring on Potsdamer Straße, next to a glitzy variety theatre, plans to present ‘thematic exhibitions’, and will also ‘design and develop curatorial projects in the commercial and institutional sector and at other less conventional venues’. Overall, there seems to be a growing tendency towards curated, themed shows in galleries, the commercial gallery functioning as an exhibition space rather than a saleroom. What made CREAM’s recent small group show of work by Joe Biel, Scott Hunt and Cornelia Renz exciting was that it did not simply juxtapose works by three artists, but that they created a central body of work together – Exquisite Corpse, drawn in the surrealist tradition – that also offered a new perspective on their individual drawing practices. Meanwhile, the ambitious threepart show Antirepresentationalism that opened KOW – Koch Oberhuber Wolff – would have done any museum proud, and set the tone for a more theory-minded engagement with the works of art in that gallery. Johnen Galerie is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary, also with a group show, also in three parts. For Conversation Pieces: A Chamber Play, Jörg Johnen signed on Jens Hoffmann from San Francisco’s CCA Wattis as curator – or perhaps more accurately, as director. The carefully staged exhibition draws on a variety of layered histories involving the gallery’s location – a bourgeois flat in what was the theatre district of Berlin before the Second World War – and Hoffmann’s training in theatre. Each scene of Act 1: Exposition juxtaposes two artists, their works complemented by documentary material from the Deutsches Theater archive. The first three scenes take in an object-filled cabinet by Hans-Peter Feldman and a slide projection in which Tim Lee reenacts the opening moment of a Neil Young concert; a Rodney Graham double self-portrait as a pianist and three metronomes at various speeds by Martin Creed; and a looped film of Andre Agassi by Anri Sala and black-andwhite portraits by Roger Ballen (his Woman Sitting in Front of Bamboo Fence, 1996, an ersatz tennis referee). Hoffmann’s use of the objects is sometimes quite literal, yet overall he creates a tantalising dramaturgy that portends interesting consecutive acts. Indeed, setting up ambitious exhibitions like these might be the mark of distinction for galleries in the future; it certainly lifts them out of the current monotony.

Lisette Model (Jeu de Paume, Paris, to 6 June, www.jeudepaume.org) was

Lisette Model, Valeska Gert, c. 1940, silver gelatin print, 35 x 28 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, © Lisette Model Foundation, Inc (1983)

free of such apprehensions about the historical modern age: she lived through it, studying music with Arnold Schoenberg and planning to be a painter before becoming – as this 120-work recap ought to demonstrate – a photographer with an acute eye for social stratification and its shaping of the human physiognomy. (See her coolly incisive images of well-heeled locals on the Promenade des Anglais, Nice, published in the 1930s in the left-wing

journal Regards.) Model, as the fact that Berenice Abbott produced a book about her might imply, was also a great metropolitan photographer and an acute observer of human relationships as they played out on the stage of the city. From an antic, onstage Louis Armstrong to lonely dowagers, all human life – that is, in the less tumultuous corners of midcentury Europe and America – is here.

Paris MAC/VAL is a model museum located in the Paris suburbs. From Paris to Vitry, the road is straight and flat. Along the N305 you see carpet warehouses, Asian supermarkets, old factories and overgrown car parks. Once in Vitry, there’s the Seine, pretty little houses from the 1930s and large blocks of housing. On a building in the Cité Balzac estate, there’s a commemorative plaque for Sohane Benziane, seventeen, burnt to death by her rejected boyfriend. This national trauma set off the feminist movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Sluts Nor Submissives). The Communists have been in charge in Vitry since 1925, and a hundred contemporary art sculptures are spread throughout the city. Vitry strives to believe that democracy and culture can work together against ghettos and unemployment. I like going to Vitry, close in distance to my Left Bank flat, but miles away in terms of social class. If I end up going there, it’s because of MAC/VAL, with my three children in my bourgeois car. The museum plays its role well, and draws me in. I break through the Paris ring road and am teleported into the suburbs… Turn left once you get to Dubuffet’s sculpture Boiler with Chimney (1970–1996): you’ve arrived. The museum, designed by Jacques Ripaut, plays with horizontality. Glass and light. Nothing ostentatious. The sky is enormous, pale greyyellow. It’s two o’clock on a winter’s afternoon. The entrance fee is cheap, €5 full price. The restaurant, started in 2006 by the young Basque cook Iñaki Aizpitarte, also keeps the prices low. You see only Parisians. They’ve come this Sunday to visit Boltanski’s exhibition, in response to his enormous Monumenta (2010) at the Grand Palais in Paris, where France’s most famous living artist has installed a crane that lifts piles of clothes. Here at MAC/VAL he shows a black maze with ghosts. The material is very Arte Povera, plastic canvas, Sellotape and neon lights. The children are enthralled as they listen to the voices of the dead: “What was your coma like?” “Did you leave any friends behind?” We walk around the permanent exhibition: Valérie Jouve, Tatiana Trouvé, Nathalie Talec, Bernard Moninot, Melik Ohanian… Then the children run about in the large modern garden. It’s four o’clock. We go back home for tea. In Paris. Enormous social fracture, urban monstrosity. The breach between the two worlds, in a ten-minute drive, is almost as disturbing as what lies between the living and the dead. words marie darrieussecq

London calling

Running on Empty

And should we carry on bothering to fill up the artworld’s greedy, wasteful cash tank anyway?

One evening in late january I find myself at the Royal College of Art, attending a panel discussion titled ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’, organised by some students from the college’s curating MA. The audience has gathered to find out how the economic downturn might affect the production and presentation of contemporary art, and they’re expecting answers from a varied cross-section of the London art scene: among them the Serpentine’s Sally Tallant, Zoo Art Fair’s Soraya Rodriguez, the organisers of Hackney’s FormContent space, Stephen McCoubrey, a London-based curator at UBS bank, Lina Dzuverovic, director of the commissioning agency Electra, and Lizzie Neilson of collector Anita Zabludowicz’s 176. It’s a good-tempered, well-meaning bunch, all of them strongly committed to that active middle-ground that makes the London scene tick – curators, commissioners, public galleries, corporates, artist-runs. And yet for all their talents, the discussion is nothing if not gloomy. The talk is of surviving, of developing strategies to cope with a harsher economic climate. No one believes that there will be much more funding coming from the government, and everybody has had enough of the Arts

But what is instructive about the ICA’s precarious case is how dependent the organisation had become on massive sponsorship deals, to the tune of £650,000 in 2008, out of annual income of £4.5m. As we’ve seen all last year, nothing has shrunk back faster than the marketing and sponsorship budgets of companies that have themselves become badly exposed to the recession. Other substantial UK arts organisations are rumoured to be similarly exposed. Arts Council England, which had effectively pushed the policy that its funded organisations needed to seek a greater share of their income from private sources, should bear some responsibility for this situation. Yet faced with internal cuts of its own and a more general crisis of purpose, it has only managed to come up with a few halfhearted ‘bail-out’ style emergency policies: an emergency fund for struggling organisations, and a weird idea about funding exhibitions held in empty retail premises – cash for kunstlers, if you like. So where do we go from here? Little of any seriousness has come out of the Conservatives. Earlier in January, Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt had mouthed a few fine words at the Royal Society of Arts’s ‘State of the Arts’ conference; one of Hunt’s big ideas (not very big) is that he wanted to encourage an ‘American-style philanthropy culture’, while encouraging organisations to build up endowments to support them. This is putting the best spin on the fact that a future Tory government wouldn’t have much cash to spare, effectively formalising the policy approach that the current regime finds itself forced into by necessity. Hunt glossed over the vast mess that the recession has created for many endowment-dependent American institutions. While running out of money is a pressing concern for publicly funded institutions, there is a more serious emptiness at the heart of the British discussion than the looming reality of empty coffers. For, after a decade of New Labour, whose instrumentalist cultural policy saw arts funding as a way of fixing society’s problems, it’s becoming clear that no one really has a convincing sense of why the state should fund the arts at words

Council. And a recurring term in the discussion is the ‘mixed economy’ – that combination of public funding, commercial dealing and private patronage – which for so many years seems to have provided the ideal British alternative to the US-style combination of hard-nosed commerce and private philanthropy or the woollier European style of strong state subsidies for culture. It’s not surprising that the fate of the mixed economy is such a preoccupation, because it is precisely the mixed economy model which has come seriously unstuck during the recession. Everyone at the discussion is aware of the stories that have started to appear in the press regarding the predicament of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), which has just forecast a potential deficit of £1.2 million. Ekow Eshun, the ICA’s director for five heady, boomtime years, has declared that the ICA’s woes are the result of a ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances to do with the recession.

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J.J. Charlesworth

all; for sure, public funding will always come to the rescue of those institutions which are ‘too big to fail’, but it is the middleand small-scale organisations and activities – the middle ground where independent mixes with commercial – that public art funding has lost its raison d’être. We need a new debate about why public funding should support activity that isn’t already commercially viable (what would be the point of funding that?), but which isn’t simply a reiteration of the big-museum model or a tool for social engineering. Without that, the role of public funding for art will remain bankrupt, regardless of how much money we pour in.

ANDY DENZLER Distorted Fragments FROM FEBRUARY 11, 2010

CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER WINZAVOD4-TH SYROMYATNICHESKIY LANE, 1, BLD. 6, MOSCOW, RUSSIA +7 926 586 90 68 [email protected] WWW.ARTPLUSART.ORG

What to see this month by

Martin Clark Artistic director of Tate St Ives

2 Eileen Quinlan Miguel Abreu, New York 21 March - 28 April miguelabreugallery.com Of several artists working thoughtfully with abstract photography at the moment, Eileen Quinlan particularly interests me. Her geometric images are rooted in studio constructions made using card, fabric, mirrors, smoke and light. The results are beautiful and sensual, but for all their seductiveness, there’s something tough about them which I find equally appealing. I look forward to finding out what she is showing at Miguel Abreu’s always-interesting Lower East Side space.

3 Tris Vonna-Michell Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea until 20 March www.focalpoint.org.uk

1 Felix Gonzalez-Torres Wiels, Brussels until 25 April www.wiels.org Any Felix Gonzalez-Torres show is an exciting proposition, but this exhibition, titled Specific Objects Without Specific Form, also has a really unusual and appropriate structure. It’s been curated by Elena Filipovic, and travels to two further venues: Fondation Beyeler, Basel, and MMK Frankfurt am Main. Halfway through each of the shows, an artist – first Danh Vo, then Carol Bove, then Tino Sehgal – will come in and rehang the entire exhibition. It’s an intelligent and beautiful response to Gonzalez-Torres’s work, and to the challenge of its presentation after his death. The choice of rearrangers is also excellent. I’d like to see each of the shows, twice!

42 ArtReview

There’s been a lot of buzz around Vonna-Michell over the last two years, but what I’ve seen, from a handful of works thus far, has justified it to some extent. It’s notable that the exhibition is in Southendon-Sea, the town where the artist grew up (and where, incidentally, I held most of my birthday parties between the ages of eight and thirteen!). Vonna-Michell’s work is very autobiographical, so this should be the perfect place to see him. It comes out of a residency he’s done at Focal Point, a council-funded gallery based in the local library which has, of late, had a fantastic series of shows under current director Andrew Hunt.

4 Anna Barham International Project Space, Birmingham until 14 March www.internationalprojectspace. org IPS is another regional venue with a really ambitious programme. Anna Barham studied philosophy and mathematics before her time at the Slade, which makes perfect sense of a practice that explores the poetic potential inherent in systems. Her works are often based around language, most recently anagrams. A performance last year at Arcade, London, involved a tap dancer, projection, geometric modular structures and spoken text. This exhibition features a text projection made especially for the show.

5 Lee Lozano Moderna Museet, Stockholm until 25 April www.modernamuseet.se I knew Lee Lozano’s hard, graphic paintings of tools, cones and waveforms, but not her extraordinary drawings. Then I saw a bunch of them at Documenta 12 and became fascinated with her work: the text pieces, the instruction pieces, her ‘boycotting of women’. It’s those drawings, though, that get to the heart of her practice for me. They’re tough, lyrical, rude, crude, funny, sexy and very visceral. The sort of art that feels so raw and dynamic it’s almost making itself in front of your eyes.

from left: Untitled (Golden), 1995 (installation view, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, 1996), strands of beads, hanging device, dimensions variable, photo: Thorsten Monschein © the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Tris Vonna-Michell, No more racing in circles – just pacing within lines of a rectangle, 2010, mixed media, photographic transparency from installation at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, 2010; Anna Barham, A Splintered Game, 2009, steel, fluorescent light, random switching unit, 150 x 110 x 85 cm, photo: the artist

top five

art forum berlin

The International Art Show

07.10.– 10.10. 2010 Berlin Exhibition Grounds, Entrance Masurenallee Messedamm 22, 14055 Berlin, Germany T. +49 / 30 / 30 38 20 76, F. +49 / 30 / 30 38 20 60 [email protected], www.art-forum-berlin.de

Target Markets

Military design: it’s in your shoes, your swimsuit, your golf clubs, your car…

What do Stride Rite shoes share with a battle tank? Not the no-nonsense rugged styling, nor even a playground-capable camouflage. It’s the 3D camera gizmo they introduced two years ago to measure children’s feet, which uses a 360° imaging system that had just been developed for use on the battlefield. Created by the UK’s QinetiQ, based in Farnborough, the footmeasuring machine was apparently the most lucrative way to bring a niche military technology to the British high street. QinetiQ are the UK’s prime exponents of what are often referred to as dual-use technologies (DUT): they conduct research for military clients and bolster their revenue and research funding by commercialising the results for civilian applications. Back in the 1970s, when they were still a Ministry

that kept defence spending clear of external influences. The payoff to civilians has included everything from GPS to titanium golf clubs to low-friction swimsuits to computer graphics. When I first started poking around in the area of military design about six months ago, I found it hard to escape the radioactive glow of J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project and ‘father’ of the atomic bomb. I had just read Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (2008), a book that attempts to rehabilitate the image of man-the-maker-of-things from the damage done by Oppenheimer and his uncontrollably human urge to open the Pandora’s box of knowledge. To anyone engrossed in research and development, Oppenheimer is the ultimate cautionary figure – a reminder to keep an eye on the larger picture. Military hardware often makes those of us from a liberal arts background feel rather uncomfortable. We’ve tended to protest war rather than study its technical specifications, and the result is an astonishing disjunction between military technology (including DUT) and civilian designers. Despite the growing imperative for (often newly) independent military R&D facilities to fund themselves via products for the civilian market, the links they forge tend to be with departments of science rather than design. Design bookshops are full of data on right-on feel-good projects, but I couldn’t find a single publication on military design on their shelves. The blogs, too, were silent on the subject. After a few months talking assets, payloads and antipersonnel blasts with military engineers and technology departments, I politely told the looming ghost of Oppenheimer to bugger off, and developed a kind of childlike wonder at all the things to which I was being given access. In civilian product design, rigorous testing means perfecting a plastic bottle that Coca-Cola can churn out by the millions-per-day; in the merry old land of (military) Oz, it means exposing body armour for chemical and biological warfare to supertoxic agents while being worn by live, moving humans. Sexy activities with carbon fibre on the civilian side tend to translate as ultrathin tables or very long cantilevers, and solar power is still a disappointment; meanwhile, over in the world of DUTs, QinetiQ are producing an unmanned aircraft called the Zephyr that is solar-powered, weighs 30 kilograms and can fly at altitudes of 18 kilometres for up to three months at a time. Jordi Molas-Gallart, research professor at Spain’s CSIC, has pointed out that the encouragement of an independent, words

of Defence research facility, they were asked to develop a lightweight alternative to the cathode ray tube for the cockpit of a helicopter – the result was the first LCD screen. While warfare has arguably pushed technological advancements from the moment our ancestors chose to hit one another over the head with rocks rather than fists, the concept of officially designated DUT came into vogue in the early 1990s. An increasingly devolved and self-funding defence industry was touted as the solution to military spending cuts following the end of the Cold War, and a way to break through the unsavoury iron triangle of industrialists, defence departments and politicians 44

ArtReview

Hettie Judah

more entrepreneurial defence industry has had a slower effect on the civilian market than anticipated. Companies have only gradually realised that rather than searching for a wider consumer base for their scientific and technological services, they would do better to produce profitable consumer products alongside the military ones. Perhaps if art school design departments start to swallow their squeamishness about the military connections and begin paying attention to what is going on, somebody will come up with a better use for all this stuff than titanium golf clubs and a way to measure children’s feet.

3D Visualisation dome at BAE Systems’s Leicester R&D facility (during the development of the FRES Scout Vehicle)

design

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BISCHOFF/WEISS

Curated by Niru Ratnam

Exhibition 10 February – 27 March Open Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm

Alicja Kwade Matthew Smith Raphael Zarka

04.02.2010

14:44 Uhr

Diamonds on the soles of her shoes

Please note that we are now located in Mayfair

BiSChOFF/WEiSS 14A hay hill London W1J 8NR bischoffweiss.com

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Changing Channels Art and Television 1963–1987

5.3.–6.6.2010 MUMOK MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien www.mumok.at Mo–So 10.00–18.00 Do 10.00–21.00

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The pick of this month’s offerings from shops, galleries and museums. Words Oliver Basciano

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01 In 2002 the Scottish painter Peter Doig moved back to Trinidad, where he’d spent several early, formative years. The country’s temperate climate may explain the production of this new bath towel by the artist. The faux-tropical theme traditionally mined in such an item is refreshed here with Doig’s darkly coloured neoimpressionistic brushstrokes. Certainly a strangely unsettling landscape to dry oneself with, but one that is also likely to be the envy of the whole beach.

02 A recent exhibition by Stephen Lawlor at Fred London’s gallery saw the Irish painter take two abandoned copper mines as his subject matter, creating 14 heavily worked small oil on canvas works. The mines, in Ireland’s County Wicklow and across the Irish Sea in Anglesey, Wales, created the kind of landscape and turbulent surface that Caspar David Friedrich would die for. The gallery have put together a catalogue of the show, a hundred copies of which include this limitededition etching.

03 It’s all Hollywood’s fault, but any modernist villa set in an exotic location makes us think villainy is afoot. With the sale of this 1961 design by Claude Parent, one of France’s preeminent Modernists, here’s your chance to purchase the perfect base from which to mastermind world domination. The fourbedroom property, overlooking the Bay of Antibes, features an architecture of raw concrete, glass and external formal landscaping, earning it a listed status in France.

04 Subversion of surface is central to British artist Susan Collis’s practice, typified by mundane objects recreated in coveted materials. Commissioned by the Armory Show to produce three limited-edition works in aid of charity, the artist has created a linen work, a screw made of diamond and silver, and a print. This last, titled The Devil You Know, depicts a suggestive splatter, but closer inspection reveals a meticulously drawn background and a subject which is just gaping negative space.

www.artwareeditions.com

www.fred-london.com

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www.seventeengallery.com www.thearmoryshow.com

ArtReview

DURAT Huhdantie 4, 21140 Rimito, Finland Tel +358 20 787 1880 Fax +358 20 787 1899 E-mail [email protected] www.durat.com

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05 Football World Cups normally throw up all kinds of dodgy merchandise – it’s a time when every TV ad or bit of packaging seems to boast a ‘brand partnership’. This official limited-edition set of art posters celebrating June’s jamboree are an interesting interlude to all that tat, then. As befits 2010 host country South Africa, football’s global governing body, FIFA, have commissioned 17 artists with some kind of connection to the African continent, from Marlene Dumas to William Kentridge (his poster shown).

06 Innovative small publisher Four Corners Books continues its Familiars series, in which artists design and illustrate reprints of classic fiction, with Colter Jacobsen’s response to four short stories by troubled gay writers Jane Bowles and Denton Welch. A Stick of Green Candy takes a traditional hardback format but is augmented with Jacobsen’s detailed, halcyon graphite, pencil and watercolour portraits and landscapes – new verve in the texts of two very much underrated writers.

www.fifa.com/artposters

www.fourcornersbooks.co.uk

ArtReview

07 To coincide with his survey currently at London’s Barbican, Ron Arad has reimagined his 1986 furniture-design classic The Well Tempered Chair. The original, four tempered steel sheets bolted to style an archetypal club chair, has been recreated as The Well Transparent Chair, with transparent polycarbonate in the place of metal. The resulting aesthetic character in this limited signed edition of 100 is dramatically altered, lightness reigning where once there was oily hardness. www.timothytaylorgallery. com

08 Danish performance company Hotel Pro Forma have always blurred the lines between opera, art and theatre; and for their new operatic performance work Tomorrow, In a Year they brought in lauded Swedish electro band the Knife to write and perform the music in collaboration with Mt Sims and Planningtorock. The life and work of Charles Darwin inspires the ongoing touring project, of which a studio recording is now out. Expect electro fusing with field recordings of birdcalls and an ode to evolutionist’s daughter Anne. www.theknife.net

Sara SaraRahbar Rahbar “Whatever we had to lose we “Whatever we had to lose we lost, and in a moonless sky we lost, and in a moonless sky we marched “ marched “ March March25th 25th- -April April20th 20th

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2010

The Armory Show New Art by Living Artists

The Armory Show–Modern Art of the 20th Century

March 4–7, 2010 Piers 92 and 94

New York City thearmoryshow.com armoryartsweek.com SUSAN COLLIS As good As it gets (detail), 2008, 18-carat white gold (hallmarked), white sapphire, turquoise, onyx. Courtesy of seVeNteeN, London

AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART In this ongoing series, the real people who created the historic styles give their eyewitness testimony

NO 15:

Berthe Morisot (1841–95) was a member of the Impressionist group, which formed in reaction to the repressive academicism of the officially sanctioned art scene in Paris in the period of the Second Empire. Morisot’s style was open, loose and free, based on capturing fleeting effects of sunlight and atmosphere. Art history now accords her a prominent place in the French avant-garde tradition, though for a long time she was considered an Impressionist also-ran. interview by matthew collings 52 ArtReview

Berthe Morisot, Girl on a Divan, c. 1885, oil on canvas, 610 x 502 cm. © Tate, London 2010

BERTHE MORISOT

ARTREVIEW Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. It’s a talk about Impressionism. I wonder if I could start by showing you a reproduction of one of your pictures. It’s called Reading, and you did it in 1873, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition. Maybe it was even in that show, I don’t know; I’ll look it up later. But I’d like to ask, what’s good about it? BERTHE MORISOT It’s got good shapes that play off each other by repeating, but with slight variations. The repeated triangles of the fan, the dress, the line of the parasol handle – and then the book is done in an interesting way, the colour change is nice, that lilac-grey when everything else is in a different register. And the things going on in the background are good, the space and the cart going by. AR What’s bad about it? BM There’s nothing taut about it. It never gets past being the beginning of a painting. It’s an embodiment of most people’s misunderstanding of what Impressionism is – something formless – whereas successful Impressionism is very toughly formed. Manet is tough, too. He’s the big forerunner, but he tends to be grouped with the rest of us. Actually, he has an occasional wishy-washy side. There was an article by Clement Greenberg about him once in the 1960s. He says Manet is sometimes the great inventor of radical modern art and sometimes this painter of wispy, flabby things that look like they ought to be illustrations in fashion magazines. Greenberg is amazed that the same painter can be both. And I’m afraid that when I look back on my stuff now, it all falls into that second category. It’s been dignified by revisionist art history, by feminism, but there’s no escaping the visual feebleness of the work. AR What do you think about that feminist reading? BM It’s right, of course, that’s how society progresses, but that’s the complication of feminism – it can’t be formalism at the same time. Form doesn’t care about social justice in that obvious way. You can always relate formal impact, or formal ideas, to goodness in a social context eventually, with a bit of thoughtful working out, but the direct links (like rough brushstrokes equalling everyone wanting more authenticity in interpersonal relationships, for example) are not very profound. Is rawness in Impressionism really about authenticity? In any case, a feminist reading of art history is where you go back and revisit the overlooked, and you positive-ise what was previously negative. But there are complications. A weak revisionism is where you simply state that a painting is good when it’s not, and a strong one is where you look for other frameworks of virtue. And you can’t necessarily rely on all these revisions being equally sound or thought through on a high level. AR How did Impressionism start? BM We got together in Monet’s house in the suburbs and decided to make ourselves into an association. It had a

name – not ‘Impressionism’, something boring, I can’t remember now – and we hired an exhibition space and sent out cards so people would come to our show. The first one got a lot of publicity, so we kept it going in various venues, and it went on for a long time, a show every couple of years. I remember the beginning more than what happened later. Manet wouldn’t be in it because Cézanne was in it. He couldn’t stand Cézanne. He thought he was an idiot. Cézanne worshipped him and Monet did too, but Manet couldn’t stand Monet either at first, but then he started liking him and being influenced by him – and Monet was always trying to borrow money off Manet. But that was later. The exhibitions started up, and a review in a satirical magazine, a little bit like Private Eye, called Le Charivari, thought it was hilarious to call us ‘impressionists’, and the name stuck. There were many more artists involved than the main ones that history recognises, which is only a dozen or so figures, Renoir and Monet and Degas and everybody – I’m always glad to be acknowledged, but I know really I was never much cop. AR What was the reason for starting the group? BM Power – we didn’t have any. To be an artist, you had to show in a thing called the ‘Salon’ every year, and be recognised by the power structure that the Salon exhibitions represented. The first part was relatively easy, but not the recognition: the work the Impressionists did was considered either inept or foolishly provocative. It had open marks and a rough surface, and figurative representation was broad, not finely detailed. But that broadness was refined, I must say. Monet would come back again and again to the same spot and at the same time of day, and work fast for half an hour, so the picture eventually had all these layers of flurry in a precise balance. It’s just that what he was being precise about was still new to the audience for art. And the association we started up was a way of providing a focus for the public so they could see what we were actually doing. Not having an exhibition where there’s an impossible clash of pictures but hanging like with like. But Manet didn’t think he was like Cézanne – he wanted to be accepted by the Salon, and he couldn’t understand why he never was. Public taste only warmed up towards Impressionism in the 1880s, after Manet died, and ironically it was Monet, who Manet hated at first because the critics always got their names mixed up, who personified the change: the US millionaires really got the idea that Monet was good. And Monet was good in other ways than just doing his paintings amazingly well. He painted in series, so the collectors could get the message of a show – he learned from our early struggles what you had to do. And he controlled the publicity around his shows much better than anyone had ever done before. He gave newspaper interviews, he had himself driven around in a Rolls-Royce and he generally made sure that the words ‘Impressionism’ and ‘Monet’ were synonyms. He created a whole new culture of promotion and production, which was the model for what was to come later with modern art and then the thing that replaced modern art – what Adorno calls the culture industry.

AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART AR How did you know Manet? BM He was my brother-in-law. AR What was he like? BM Manet? A great man. AR What was good about him? BM He did really good paintings. The social codes of the late nineteenth century are obscure to many people now, so some of the meaning of his pictures is missed. But they’re about society, politics, behaviour, fashion, the way people interact, sexuality, leisure. All this at play – but also tone, colour, organisation, surface, structure. It’s an amazing interweaving of look and meaning that he stands for. I’m a wraith now, but I float down to the Courtauld Institute in London regularly and check out Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), and I never fail to find something new. I love the things everyone is told to look out for, the mismatch between the place where the bottles are really supposed to be and the way they’re reflected in the mirror behind the bar, for example – why does he do that? He creates and he deconstructs. He gets you lost in something and he draws your attention to the construction of the thing that you’re enjoying getting lost in. So there’s always this restless energy. He makes your mind work. Actually, that’s what decoration in art is always for. When Duchamp says ‘the mind’ has got to be returned to, he’s rejecting a tendency of the time, a shallow cult of the merely visual or merely ‘retinal’, as he calls it. Duchamp could advocate ‘the mind’ in a high-art context because he knew the visual or the decorative was well taken care of – but that isn’t the case in the age of the Turner Prize. But to return to Manet (whose exalted reputation Duchamp totally agreed with) – I like other things in his Folies-Bergère too. They don’t seem like anything at first, and art fans don’t usually talk about them. But they’re vital. For example, you see a patch of completely unpainted, merely primed, canvas on the area of the woman’s neck, and then next to it very stokedup, heavy paintwork. Nothing versus something: but the overall structure is so sturdy – it’s the eye and the mind at the absolute heights. How does he create this picture that is simultaneously falling apart with its built-in anti-illusions and patches of bare canvas, and architecturally as ordered,

I’m afraid that when I look back on my stuff now, it all falls into the category of wispy, flabby things that look like they ought to be illustrations in fashion magazines. It’s been dignified by revisionist art history, by feminism, but there’s no escaping the visual feebleness of the work complex and resolved as anything fantastic in any period of art history that you can possibly think of: the Pyramids, cathedrals, the Taj Mahal, the Renaissance, the whole lineup – and he’s doing it all out of flickering smudges? AR Do you think everyone should paint like Manet? BM No, it’s like saying everyone should be an Impressionist, you’d just be a Sunday painter. If you’re an artist, you can’t obsess over a style that’s frozen in time, you have to do something new. Not because art is defined by novelty, but because the known in art is always connected to a bigger social picture that doesn’t exist any more. You can’t just bring favourite types of art back again by willpower, like Prince Charles doing his sterile little villages in the countryside made of old-fashioned design principles. You have to get yourself into some kind of fruitful relationship between revering the old and accepting the new. AR It’s great talking to you. You seem resigned to your marginal status, even though it’s been falsely elevated. Are you just happy all that patriarchy is on the way out now? BM Ha, ha, yes. At least I’m not as bad as Frida Kahlo. Next month: Van Gogh on Van Gogh mania

54 ArtReview

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On view

nothing to hide

Ben Vautier is a show-off and a sex maniac who says that all art is a lie. But, he explains, he’s just trying to be himself… “I once wrote, ‘Je suis un menteur’ – I am a liar”, says the artist Ben Vautier. “And [American conceptual, Fluxus artist] George Brecht said to me, ‘That’s your best painting.’ I asked why, and he replied, ‘Because if it’s the truth, you can’t be a liar, and if you’re a liar, you can’t tell the truth.’” Ben (as he is commonly known, having signed his work with his first name alone since the start of his career) has built his reputation on being

Based in Nice since 1949, Ben was inspired by the Nouveau Réalisme group created by Pierre Restany and Yves Klein before joining the Fluxus movement following an encounter with George Maciunas, the Lithuanian-born American artist who founded Fluxus, in London in 1962. The following year Ben invited Maciunas to Nice to produce the Fluxus festival. And with some of his friends, he founded a theatre troupe, the Théâtre Total, where Nam June Paik’s One for Violin Solo (1962) and Ben Patterson’s Paper Piece (1960) were performed in 1964. Ben was instrumental in giving actions and happenings a higher profile, particularly in the form of his celebrated Gestes (Gestures, 1958– 72): in 1962, he occupied the window of the One Gallery in London for a fortnight; two years later he shouted until he lost his voice for his piece Hurler; in 1969 he banged his head against the wall until he could no longer stand it. Other Gestes included nose-picking, urinating against a wall, vomiting into a jar and watching the sky. Preoccupied with the idea of “what to do after Duchamp”, Ben launched what he called “the first world festival [of] nonart, antiart, the truth is art” in 1969, which involved him eating words Anna Sansom

facing page: On Est Tous Ego…, 1998, 162 x 130 cm, acrylic on canvas. © ADAGP, Paris, 2010

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a provocateur: making statements that can seem philosophical, bold or banal. His retrospective at Lyon’s Musée d’Art Contemporain is titled Total Striptease because, he says, he doesn’t want to hide anything. And because, at the age of seventy-five, he risks nothing. “I would say art is a lie”, he continues in fluent English, “because art is showing off. It’s only a pretext or an excuse or an appendix to something you want to show. If I had to say what art is hiding, I would say sex. We have to fuck to have a child; if not, humanity will disappear. So to fuck, I have to seduce you. To seduce you, I have to look as if I have something to show you that the others haven’t got. ‘Look, I’m an artist! I’m Ben Vautier! Do you want to fuck tonight?’ So I come back to showing off – that is the truth. And I wouldn’t say anything else.” In person, Ben can ramble endlessly. Yet, when it comes to his art, he is best known for his Ecritures (Writings, 1958–) – succinctly written painted statements on themes such as ‘the ego’, ‘the truth’ and ‘Ben Sex Maniac’. These familiar themes keep cropping up during our meeting in Paris, during which Ben writes continuously with a black marker pen on countless sheets of A4 paper. He has defined his art as one of “appropriation”, believing that “art is in the intention” and that it suffices merely “to sign in order to create”.

black pudding (a food he detested) and walking five kilometres from Nice to Cros-de-Cagnes (an activity he hated). Today Ben still advocates abolishing the distinction between artistic activity and daily life. The best example of this is the facade of his home, Chez Malabar et Cunégonde, which he has been covering with his writings and a vast assortment of found objects, ranging from clocks to abandoned refrigerators and cookers, since 1975. “My house is a work-in-progress”, affirms the artist. “If I have a painting that comes back from a gallery with a small hole in it and the restoration would cost too much, I put it aside. And when my assistant comes, I say, ‘OK, take a ladder and put it up there.’ If the rain comes and spoils it, it comes down.” Le Bizart Baz’art (2003), an ‘improbable shop’ filled with 351 accumulated random objects and covered with Ben’s signature scripts, was developed in a similar spirit and recalls the secondhand record shop, later turned into an exhibition space, which Ben opened in 1958. After being dismantled in 1974, the record shop was acquired by the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, while Le Bizart Baz’art is on long-term loan to the MAC Lyon. However, Ben’s Ecritures, characterised by white writing on a black background, have been so prolific that he is sometimes associated more with

On view

“ You’re putting me in front of a mirror and asking me questions. I’m a bit depressed, because I can’t change so easily and I don’t know what to do”

Bizart Baz’art, 2003, installation. Photo: Blaise Adilon. © ADAGP, Paris, 2010

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his marketable style than the message behind his work. “When you say that people recognise my handwriting, it is already something that pleases me, even though it should upset me”, he says. “In a way, I’ve made a brand and I exist.” Yet Ben, who has always placed the utmost importance on novelty – his theories on the new, written between 1960 and 74, were published in Flash Art in 1975 – is worried about appearing “rechauffé” (reheated) in Total Striptease, which takes place nine years after a large-scale exhibition of his work in Nice. “I had a list of new works that I wanted to present to show that I’m alive and still kicking”, he explains, “but I don’t like them so much because they don’t look so new and as if I am rechauffé. […] I’m getting a bit depressed, because you’re putting me in front of a mirror and asking me questions. I’m a bit depressed because I can’t change so easily and I don’t know what to do. But I tell the truth! And what should I do? Should I continue? Should I repeat myself ? This show worries me, but maybe tomorrow it will be better.” Self-doubt is another often-expressed facet of Ben’s oeuvre. In a review in Art Press in April 1980 of Ben’s exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, which featured a painting that read ‘essayer d’être moi même’ (‘to try to be myself’), Catherine Millet wrote: ‘For years, Ben has been banging his

head against the wall (in the real sense) to find out how to get past Duchamp, without noticing that, in a certain way, he realised this obsession a long time ago. Duchamp was sure of himself, he said, “This is art.” Ben, himself, doubts: “he tries to be himself.” That can be considered as a progress.’ Today, Ben continues to use art, including his poetry, to communicate his political views – he defends the rights of ethnic minorities on his extensive website, www.ben-vautier.com – and goes to all of Nice’s gallery openings. “But I go there for the drinks and the girls”, he says, chuckling. He is dismissive of the current market for street art, but paradoxically, he used to leave messages for people on the walls outside their homes and is widely known for public commissions that included calligraphies on Nice’s tramway stops. “If it [the market for street art] is important, it should have happened when everybody started working in this way”, he says. “I don’t find these artists so personal [in style]. Keith Haring was personal, Basquiat was personal because you recognised things. But many of them I don’t recognise.” Despite its recognisability, there’s a contentious aspect to Ben’s street works, some of which are regarded by his critics as a kind of state-sponsored graffiti. But Ben maintains that he only writes when he has something to say. His work also still extends into the commercial gallery setting. Most recently, his series Ils Se Sont Tous Suicidés (They All Committed Suicide, 2009), on artists who have killed themselves, was exhibited at Daniel Templon last year. Significantly, Ben admits to feeling detached from the mechanisms of the art market. “There is an image of a professional artist and what he must do”, he laments. “He must go and see the dealer, go and sell… And I don’t do it. I teach in a school and sometimes I see them [the students] painting in terms of ‘this will go on this wall; this will go to this gallery; this size and this colour’, all according to what the market will want. That’s not my position. My position is the ego, because I cannot hide it, and trying to be myself. Be myself – that’s a good one.” Total Striptease is on view at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, from 3 March to 11 July

PA B LO P I C AS S O, UNTITLED / photo: Audia

PRIVATE PREVIEW FIRST FOCUS APRIL 29 For Tickets: mcachicago.org/firstfocus

WITH

T H E I N V I TAT I O N A L E X H I B I T I O N O F E M ER G I N G A R T

While visiting The Mart, also enjoy The Merchandise Mart International Antiques Fair™

P R O U D T O B E A PA R T O F

C H I CAG O’S C E LE B R ATI O N O F A RT, A NTI Q U E S & CU LTU R E

Benefiting the

On view

All the (Design) world’s a stage ArtReview last met Dutch designer Maarten Baas a year-and-a-half ago. He was having an Edward Lear moment, and told us that the fact that designing a new chair was ‘nonsense’ (because the world has so many already) provided the rationale for doing just that. Last December he launched the Melting collection of champagne paraphernalia (ice buckets and champagne flutes that appear to be melting into nothing) for Dom Ruinart’s 50th anniversary and was hailed as Design Miami’s Designer of the Year. Meanwhile, people stopped buying things they didn’t need, and all of ArtReview’s friends started telling it that design was in some sort of a crisis about what it was supposed to be for. Intrigued, we decided to track Baas down to see if his ideas have changed over the past 18 months.

ArtReview What are you working on now? MaArten BaAs What interests me right now is theatre. I’d like to cross some borders and pull a kind of theatrical atmosphere into the design world. I don’t know yet how, but I’m attracted to the idea. People are always asking me, ‘What are you doing, art or design?’ I’m tired of that question, so I hope it wasn’t on your list. For me, design is not about making the most efficient piece of furniture. It’s totally fine if somebody believes that and is working that way; wonderful things can come from this. But I’m much more interested in a kind of a theatre of furniture, you know? You buy a piece of furniture; it’s almost a part of you, and your living room becomes a theatre. I’d like to research what I can do there, make almost a play out of it or something. I don’t know if you know this recent project of mine, the Real Time clocks? They’re a form of this research, but with film and theatre, 60

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and actors. People who like to categorise things are totally confused by this – they’re like, ‘What is it? Art, design, film, theatre, choreography?’ As a designer, I’m not interested in answering this, but I want to fully explore it, and get more elements going, rather than just thinking about material and efficiency. AR You like being hands-on throughout design and manufacture, but you’ve reduced the size of your studio and are working more conceptually. MB It just depends on what I want to do. Often I have a picture of what I want to make, and I just search for the best way to make it. Usually this involves a lot of craftsmanship, so it’s easier to make it in my studio. But I don’t want to be a factory. Every piece of furniture I make demands my personal attention. Obviously, if 20 people are working on products, I can’t devote my personal attention to everything. Often, I make the prototype and the first piece, and the people I make it for take care of the rest. For the clay chairs, well, we do them all, but we’re only talking about a hundred or so a year. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s serious work, and it’s not really what we should be doing. I mean, for the chairs it’s OK, but I shouldn’t expand that. We do special commissions in-studio, but I don’t want to launch a new collection every year, which we have to produce ourselves. We don’t have the capacity. AR So your work rhythm doesn’t follow the dictates of the usual design studio, or a fashion studio, where you need to come up with a new concept once a year?

MB I want to present at Milan [Salone del Mobile] every year, but I think, ‘Oh man, all that hassle, it’s fine as it is’, you know? Business is good and I’m totally fine, but then in October, November, it starts. Like, ‘I can’t wait another year, let’s go for it.’ Then I regret it. It’s a kind of logical cycle, that’s the funny thing. In the autumn, ideas come in, and when it’s spring, they come out, and then I present them in April in Milan. It’s a natural cycle, and there’s never pressure from outside. Only from ourselves. AR The idea of morphing or modifying materials through a destructive process, like burning or melting, is that something you see continuing? MB No, not necessarily. If it would fit into my ideas, like I just said, like in a theatrical kind of atmosphere, then yes. Sometimes it’s nice to take something old and do something with it as a starting point, because you can say a lot, especially with a

interview by

kind of typical art shape, a shape that everybody knows. It’s nice to work around that. I’m curious about a lot of things, like what would it be like if you didn’t refer to any known shape, and didn’t have to think about materials and costs, what would you do with that freedom? That’s how the Chankley Bore came about [a line of furniture for Established & Sons; see ArtReview, October 2008]. Or what if you made a 12-hour movie for a clock? I really wanted to explore that, so I made five of them. I’m always just very curious, but the more those kinds of things happen, the more difficult it is to find a kind of a style. AR Where does the name Chankley Bore come from?

Melting collection, 2009, designed by Maarten Baas for Dom Ruinart. Photo: Thomas Duval

MB It’s from one of Edward Lear’s nonsense poems. Nonsense was exactly what I wanted to achieve.

Christopher mooney

AR Those antenna shapes that come off the top of the Chankley Bore, do they have a function? MB No. I mean, they have lights in them, which go on and off slowly, but that’s it. I wanted to make a kind of limitless explosion of shapes that don’t relate to what we know already. I guess I’m a bit traumatised by the Smoke collection [which featured baroque furniture made of charred wood], because for my first two years that’s basically all I did. And already, just two months after my graduation, people were saying, ‘Are you still burning furniture?’ So I guess I’m totally traumatised by that and I think, ‘No way are you going to ever identify me with a style’. Maarten Baas’s latest production is the Melting collection for Dom Ruinart

Below the waterline © Edmund de Waal

water-shed New work by Edmund de Waal 22 January – 11 April 2010

Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

Opening times:

Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday 10.30am - 5pm Thursday 1.30pm - 8pm, Sunday 11am - 4pm Royal Pump Rooms, The Parade, Monday closed (except Bank Holidays) Leamington Spa, CV32 4AA. Tel: 01926 742700 Admission Free www.warwickdc.gov.uk/royalpumprooms

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The Gifts Alinah Azadeh Still Living Rosa Nguyen

New work for the shape of things national programme of exhibitions

4/2/10 13:55:23

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery Queen’s Road / Bristol BS8 1RL 6 February –18 April 2010 Open daily 10am–5pm Free entry www.bristol.gov.uk/museums www.theshapeofthings.org.uk

Photographer www.xavieryoung.co.uk

Rosa Nguyen

The shape of things provides bursaries to artists to make new craftwork. It explores the distinctive contribution artists make to influence or reflect national identity, the intercultural nature of British society and its connection with global cultures through a series of exhibitions, installations and events from 2010 to 2011.

technology for art

i sendyou this

artists websites what's on cultural exchange art hub gallery

isendyouthis [email protected] 01803 722220

www.isendyouthis.com

Ghada Amer Suzan Batu Ramazan Bayrako€lu Thomas Bayrle Sab›ne Boehl Ergin Çavuflo€lu Peter Kogler

Armory Show March 3-7, 2010 Pier 94 Booth 1215 New York

Bjorn Melhus Hermann N›tsch Bahar Oganer Ali Emir Tapan Ebru Uygun Halil Vurucuo€lu Ekrem Yalç›nda€ Necmi Zeka O Zhang Peter Z›mmermann

Abdi İpekçi Caddesi 7/4 Nişantaşı 34367 İstanbul TR Tel: +90 212 291 34 34 Fax: +90 212 219 64 00 www.dirimart.org

Art Duba› March 16-20, 2010 Arena Gallery Hall Booth A25 Dubai

Manifesto

by BECKERHARRISON

Carolin Becker and Simon Harrison are Londonbased artists who have worked together as BECKERHARRISON since 2007, when they first collaborated on a project in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and the Sahara. Since then they have worked on developing a ‘paint on print’ concept in further projects in India, Latin America and the UK. The artists travel together, Carolin taking photographs and Simon sketching, and then they merge their work into unique pieces by adding Simon’s unconventional graffiti work to Carolin’s photographic prints. The techniques blend into images that extend the photographic realism with elements seen, perceived or projected by the artists. BECKERHARRISON have exhibited in London and, most recently, at the AiM Biennale, in Marrakech.

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There’s no easy harmony to

Bharti Kher

’s work –

collapsed elephants, colourful bindis and giant whale hearts – but therein lies a complicated, contradictor y portrait of any human heart wo rds : M a rti n H er b ert

© Anay Mann/Photoink

po rtr ait: a n ay m a n n

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feature: bharti kher

several years ago, Bharti Kher became fascinated by a four-by three-inch newspaper photograph of a collapsed elephant being loaded into a truck, and a sculpture was born – albeit slowly. The image was a rear view: to make the front, the artist needed a model. Kher’s studio is in Gurgaon, a thriving satellite city of New Delhi, and she knew where the latter’s colony of elephants is kept. She discovered that she could get one walked to her studio – it’d take a day – but the logistics were forbidding (and involved lots of bananas). Next, she went out alone and came across a beautiful female elephant en route to a wedding, but photographing it meant getting the animal into an untenably painful position. So Kher backed off, consulted, photographed surrogates (cows, for example), calculated how body weight would fall, improvised and – don’t tell – made the rest up. And, lengthily, after three attempts at realisation, voilà: The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own (2006), a 1:1 fibreglass replica cum imagining. Or nearly voilà, because at this point the artwork still wasn’t finished. An Indian elephant that might be expiring (or only sleeping) would be allusive in its own right, a female one perhaps more so, but Kher isn’t a straightforwardly narrative artist. She deals in amassed oppositions and narrative delays, which is why her counterfeit elephant is covered from trunk to tail with whirling arrays of spermatozoa-shaped bindis: a distinctly masculine example of the female forehead decoration widely worn in South Asia, and associated (albeit diminishingly) with marital status and religion. Kher has repeatedly used this particular ‘serpent’ bindi, an almost oxymoronic glyph condensing sexuality and morality, to animate and unbalance sculptures. Since the 1990s she’s also deployed it, alongside other examples of the form, to make stingingly chromatic and structurally diverse abstract ‘paintings’ that swallow the languages of twentieth-century Western art and mingle them freely with tantric aesthetics: The Nemesis of Nations (2008), her popgun spray of oversize overlapping circular bindis shown in the Serpentine’s 2008 exhibition Indian Highway, in London, is effervescently Op-via-Pop; the foreboding red and blue Peacock (2009) looks like a cross between a depressive Polke and a colourblindness test. Polychrome nebulae and dancing grids proliferate elsewhere. If Kher’s two-dimensional work doesn’t harmonise comfortably with her sculptures (of animals, modified humans and sometimes abject arrangements of genteel furniture and crockery), in a sense that’s apt. Her art as a whole articulates its angular cultural commentaries through parts not fitting together. Arione (2004), for example, is a case study in the unbalancing power of simultaneously percolating binary oppositions. A six-foot-one-inch-tall fibreglass sculpture, she’s an Amazonian black female figure in hotpants who might be serving the plate of muffins she holds, or just as easily be claiming them. Her bared chest might appear demeaning, yet she wears a shoulder holster and her left hand assertively rests on her hip. Her left leg turns equine and culminates in a hoof, which in turn stands on a silver circle, rooting her to the ground. She’s beautiful from some angles, ugly from others, ancient and futuristic. Black sperm-bindis writhe over her skull in place of hair. Arione emblematises the act of being at once forced into a role and of escaping from that role, in miscellaneous ways. Stacking contradictions related to gender, race, species, role, even temporality, the sculpture is vitalised by a constant crisscross of assumptions. Some kind of stochastic theory underlies it. (This is also evidently the work of a sculptor who trained as a painter, being

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“Feelings of neither being from here or there don’t just apply to those who move from dif ferent countries”

feature: bharti kher

a buildup of intensities – the hoof a sealing detail analogous to a final spot of colour on a canvas, though Kher herself clarifies that the holster played that role.) Not surprisingly, commentators have taken polymorphous works like this and, perhaps simply in order to accommodate them, unpacked them using Kher’s biography. Born in London in 1969 of Indian descent, she moved to Delhi in 1993; formerly an Indian in Britain and now a Briton in India, she’s assumedly a connoisseur of displacement, disconnection. QED, case closed. Sipping tea in the three-storey building she uses as a studio, where work is in preparation for her first London solo show, at Hauser & Wirth, the loquacious Kher isn’t having it. “It’s easy to say that the displacement in my work reflects my personal life, that the misunderstanding is about myself – but everybody has it, even the people who live here. People ask where these women [like Arione] come from. They say, ‘They’re you’; I say, ‘No, they’re you’. Those feelings of neither being from here or there don’t just apply to those who move from different countries.” In some of Kher’s latest works, such as a sizeable Christian confessional box bedizened with bindis, the sense of disjunction operates on a mystifying level: the parts won’t meld in the mind. In Solarum Series (2007, a counterfeit tree festooned with what at first appear to be fruits, then tiny waxen animal heads) and its tipped-over sequel, The Waq Tree (2009), the emphasis morphs and slides. “You’re not sure if the heads are funny or macabre”, says Kher, “and the material has this very human feeling: it’s like skin and flesh, the faux wax, so you get this sense of it being of us but not necessarily from us; it’s almost immediately something alien”. There’s a mythological undertow here – the tree of life – but also a legendary narrative invoked, wherein Alexander the Great was warned not to go to Iran (“I suppose I see this piece as a shaman, but for contemporary times”, Kher has previously said.) At the same time, works like this are spacious enough to allow for plenty of projection, suggesting that the artist – having established a comprehensible dynamic using the bindis – is moving towards a polyvalence that can’t be dismantled in formal terms, yet furthers her thematic purposes. An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007), a lifesize bindiflecked sculptural envisioning of a sperm whale’s heart, began with an image and became a quest: “The whale’s heart is the size of a small car, and that’s such an amazing visual connection. I started to

research, I got my stepmother and kids involved – ‘who can find me a picture of the blue sperm whale’s heart?’ I was reading strange maritime journals, obscure webpages; I got very excited when I heard there was a picture, from 1956; you pay $9 to see it, and it’s Professor Friedman or someone with their hands in grey slush. Back to square one. Eventually, after calling museums in Australia and posing as a student, I got a drawing of what they think it looks like, comparative to human and animal hearts. So, based on the drawing, the fact that I knew it’s a two-chamber heart… but the whole thing’s speculative, a hunt for a chimera.” The relevant allegory here is, assumedly, with the unknowable, quixotic human heart. And yet the slipperiness of this project chimes, in an oddly rational way, with Kher’s overarching sense of what she’s doing in stacking up episodes of incommensurability. “If there’s a more appropriate way of looking at my work than saying I’m from one place and in another, it’s through the idea of the self as multiple”, she says. “We play many roles. In my studio I’m the artist. When I go home, I’m someone else. When I go somewhere else, I’m somebody else again. Some of those roles are contradictory. Some of them are chosen, others put upon us. The figures I make always resist all classifications of class, race, time – they could be anybody, at any time. But what they do implies, in most cases, an internal wish to do something other than what they’re doing. I made Arione’s Sister” – a pale green nude figure from 2006, again with one hoof, a fan of upscale shopping bags fanning around her like the conch behind Botticelli’s Venus – “and it was almost like she was an angel. The bags weigh her down, but they’re wings, and she’s going to fly.” This is, then, another portrait of the heart, or of the inner self and its potentials for otherness: one that glidingly encompasses the politics of race, gender, cultural difference; indeed, any external pressure. Yet it is a cubist portrait, compressing linear time. While we may all contain multitudes, our various selves reveal in rotational sequence. Kher’s animals, women, even furniture – stand-ins for people, for her, for us – tend to fan out and overlay their sundry selves in simultaneity, displaying what they might want to be alongside what they have to be, each appearing to counterweight the other. The glass isn’t half-empty, or half-full: it’s both at once. Work by Bharti Kher is on view at Hauser & Wirth, London (Piccadilly), from 20 March to 15 May works (In order of appearance) Arione’s Sister, 2006 (installation view, Project 88 / Gallery Ske, Mumbai, 2006), mixed media, 186 x 127 x 76 cm The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, 2006, bindis on fibreglass, lifesize. © Bartholomew / Netphotograph.com. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, Zurich and New York Peacock (detail), 2009, bindis on painted board, 152 x 152 cm. Photo: A. Burger. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, Zurich and New York Arione, 2004, mixed media, 180 cm (h). Collection Amrita Jhaveri. Photo: Shankar Natarajan. © the artist The Waq Tree (detail and installation views, Art Unlimited, Basel, 2009), 2009, fibreglass, iron, copper, 450 x 300 x 550 cm. Photo: A. Burger. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, Zurich and New York An Absence of Assignable Cause, 2007, bindis on fibreglass, 173 x 300 x 116 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, Zurich and New York

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From cute pi playing cats Mario’, from Springsteen Schoenberg,

Arcangel

anoto ‘ Super Bruce to Arnold

Cor y

’s multimedia works of fer an ontology of the present. Ultimately, in a world ruled by communit y sites and videogames, they seem to ask : what space does the artist occupy today? wo rds : A l a n l i ch t

po rtr ait: LU C A S B L A LOCK

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feature: Cory Arcangel

“ the site is normally bunnies and kittens”, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Cory Arcangel tells me as he scrolls through cuteoverload.com, a website on which people post photographs of their pets, to show me his recent video Drei Klavierstrücke op. 11 (2009). The work recreates Arnold Schoenberg’s titular 1909 piano pieces by painstakingly editing amateur videos, culled from YouTube, of cats ‘playing’ piano. “Just to get a site like that [cuteoverload.com] to even mention Schoenberg I felt was a positive contribution to the ‘trash’ – and I say this because I love it all – that circulates on the Internet”, Arcangel explains. “It feels like anything that technology can amplify is kind of interesting, whether it’s bad or good.” Nevertheless, I note that the choice of Schoenberg for this video is apt, since atonal music has long been attacked by its detractors as sounding like, well, a cat walking down a piano keyboard. Arcangel agrees: “I like that it gets posted on sites where people are not aware of the controversy [surrounding atonal music], or they’re baffled by it, and that’s one of the other things that the Internet is good at: it’s always these portals into these worlds that you’re not necessarily involved in – which is unhealthy, but interesting. I like the idea that some random kid, somebody random, will stumble across the work, either on my website or embedded in some context that has nothing to do with it. And often, if my game is really on, the artwork will reference the possibility of that situation without diminishing it.” Arcangel goes on to point out that the work “was conceived for a ‘multitiered rollout’, meaning I knew that it was going to be a piece that I would show in a gallery and online”. (It’s previously appeared at New York’s Team Gallery, last summer, at Kunsthaus Graz, as part of the Diedrich Diederichsen-curated Rock–Paper– Scissors (2009), on YouTube and on Arcangel’s own website). The ongoing question of where to present his work and ideas is reflected in the title of his 2005 solo show at Team, Welcome 2 My Homepage Artshow!!!!!!!!! If the world was a museum to Robert Smithson, Arcangel’s museum is the WorldWideWeb: “The Internet is the place where I do actually feel comfortable. I kind of understand it, in a weird way. The gallery can be anything now: you can put a film in a gallery, you can play music in a gallery, and the question of where in that everything you want to make your work is difficult.” The artist’s background may shed some light on the ambiguities he sees between the gallery space and the Internet homepage: at college he studied music before switching to computer science; and although Arcangel had been making video for some time in Buffalo, where he grew up, it was only after going to New York, and showing his work at the New York Underground Film Festival, that he considered presenting it in a gallery context. “And of course, once I saw what galleries were up to, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this seems like it would be cool… why don’t they show one of my videos?’” he says, laughing. “It was pretty simple and not premeditated.” His subsequent navigation of the artworld was central to his 2008 lecture-performance Continuous Partial Awareness, at New York’s New Museum, in which, half-joking, he listed a series of ideas he has for future work (eg, ‘make “spray tan” monochromes’, ‘make a video of toast burning’) rather than recounting and explaining his past accomplishments. “I had, in the last couple of years”, he recalls, “done a bunch of artist’s lectures, just ’cause people would ask and I’d say yes, and then I found I could go to a place and give a lecture that makes my work seem like it’s Institutional Critique, and then I 94 86

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could do another lecture and make it seem like it’s just a bunch of jokes. When I started doing it, of course, I did what everyone does – you construct the narrative of ‘this is who I am, this is what I’m proud of’… It was more interesting to let people in on the process a little bit, of what it means to be an artist, and to filter through all this trash. And at that time I was having trouble censoring myself, and I’m still having trouble censoring myself, which gets us back to the Internet, you know, ’cause in the Internet you don’t have to censor, and the artworld is all about censoring.” A 2008 live performance at Brooklyn’s experimental film venue Light Industry, of his The Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum (2006), in which he wrote and performed glockenspiel parts for songs on Springsteen’s 1975 album that didn’t already feature glockenspiel (and left silences for those that did), succinctly wove together different aspects of Arcangel – the conservatory-trained composer-performer, the YouTubetrawling cyber-obsessive, the structuralist who focuses on normally overlooked components of pop-cultural artefacts (he first gained notice with videos like Super Mario Clouds (2002), which eliminated everything from a Super Mario Bros. game but the sky). The Springsteen piece has also appeared as an artist’s LP, and he’s even performed it at comedy clubs (“it comes off as very Andy Kaufmanesque, because the piece does reference Andy Kaufman”). While Arcangel’s own attempt at stand-up comedy – attempting to redo scenes from Seinfeld from memory, an idea included on the Continuous Partial Awareness list – was an admitted disaster, he’s going to wing it once more in a performance in conjunction with a solo exhibition opening at Ann Arbor’s University of Michigan

Museum of Art in January. Arcangel asked music technology students at the school to make new instruments or interfaces, and he will get onstage and attempt to use them without any advance preparation. “I’ll be straight with the audience”, he cautions. “It won’t be a big put-on; I’ll say, look, here’s the situation, let’s try to get through this together.” Doing things himself would seem to be an extension of his computer programming and musicianship, but he also seems undaunted by the risk of looking foolish. Not exactly a performance artist, Arcangel points out that in these personal appearances “I’m an artist actually doing something, which is kind of a twirl on what people would expect, ’cause artists aren’t expected to appear at all any more. People don’t expect artists to be honest, or to say anything that isn’t highly constructed.”

works (In order of appearance) Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, 2009, still Working on My Novel, 2009, screen capture of work for social network and ‘search’ Self Playing Sony Playstation 1 Bowling, 2008, still The Strangest Dream, 2009, performance at Kunsthaus Graz. Photo: Matthias Wilmer Video Painting, 2008, still Illustration from essay ‘On C’, in the book A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould, 2008 Video Painting, 2008, still all works courtesy the artist

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For the last five years ArtReview has published an annual index of ‘future greats’ – emerging artists, selected by more established artists as well as critics and curators, who we believe will be the stars of an artworld to come. This year, rather than picking out individual talents, we asked five critics to try to make sense of changes and developments in art today. Why? The ways in which art responds to the world is an invaluable tool for locating ourselves in an evershifting now, and the trouble with peering through a telescope in search of new stars is that it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on where it matters most. For us, nothing is more urgent than what’s happening right now. ArtReview

Mise en Scène The Pedagogical Imperative The Dark Knight Returns Architectures of Community Reclaim the Street (Theatre) with words by: Chris Sharp Jonathan T.D. Neil Neil Mul hol land L aura McL ean-Ferris Tyler Coburn ArtReview 89

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Mise en Scène words: Chris Sharp

In his provocative and trenchant (if awkwardly titled) essay ‘On the Curatorship’ (2008), art theorist Boris Groys speaks about the sickness and helplessness of artworks and images in general: ‘It is in fact no coincidence that the word “curator” is etymologically related to “cure”. Curating is curing. The process of curating cures the image’s powerlessness, its incapacity to present itself. The artwork needs external help, it needs an exhibition and curator to become visible. The medicine that makes the image appear healthy – makes the image literally appear, and do so in the best light – is the exhibition.’ If initially this seems like a difficult or even disagreeable way to characterise the practice of curating (especially from the point of view of artists), it is nonetheless highly serviceable when considering the practice of a handful of emerging artists, and a couple of their immediate if tangential forebears. I’m thinking of the New York-based American Marlo Pascual; the Berlin-based German Kathrin Sonntag; and the Paris-based Frenchman Mark Geffriaud, as well as the London-based Englishman Ian Kiaer and the New York-based American Barbara Bloom. At the risk of egregiously simplifying their respective practices, perhaps all you have to do is definitively substitute the word ‘image’ for ‘artwork’, and ‘mise en scène’ for ‘curating’ to come up with a plausible description of these artists’ modus operandi. Despite their ever-increasing abundance, it could be argued that images have never been sicker, more helpless and impotent. Of course, that sickness and impotence is due in large part to the incalculable numbers in which they daily circulate and proliferate, and the frequency with which we are exposed to them. Never mind our deep-rooted distrust of them – of their ability to convey the truth or any kind of objective verity; so perpetual is this deluge of images, we barely even notice the rain. Indeed, it is thanks to this almost torrential flood that one can now start to indulge in the stentorian rhetoric of ‘the death of photography’. Following a diabolical, if depressing, Borgesian logic, one could say that all images have already been created, that the Internet is to images what the Argentine author’s 90

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Library of Babel was to books, and any new additions to the archive are merely superfluous variations on those already extant. What is more, the so-called death of photography is also abetted by the obsolescence of the photograph as an object and its passage from printed paper to disembodied, digital file. In such a state of affairs, the disembodied image not only needs ‘help’, to be ‘cured’ (resurrected?) by being contextualised, but also needs quite simply to be embodied on a support or in space in order to be reinvested with any kind of visibility. A good example of this process can be found in the work of Marlo Pascual. Pascual first started to gain attention thanks to a solo show in the Swiss Institute’s project space, in New York, in 2009, and more recently in the artist’s first commercial solo exhibition, at Casey Kaplan, also in New York. Working with vintage, pseudo-iconic images found on the Internet and in thrift stores, the artist transforms them into objects by enlarging and laminating them in thick Plexiglas, often presenting them in theatrical mise en scènes featuring domestic paraphernalia – tables, chairs, houseplants, etc. For instance, one piece from the Kaplan show, Untitled (2009), consisted of a photograph of a generic, topless blonde pinup, presumably from the 1950s, wearing a black garter belt and striking a so-called erotic pose, blown up to 1:1 scale and placed on a black table vis-à-vis an empty chair, the ensemble completed by theatrical lighting. Apparently about voyeurism and spectacle, this odd, disturbingly asexual (by virtue of being so erotically trite) mise en scène actually did little more than pull back the curtain on the image’s impotence, its incapacity to arouse anything but erotic indifference (hence the absence of the voyeur in the empty chair?). Paradoxically, by ‘curing’ this image, Pascual merely shows the extent to which it is sick. While Pascual’s work cites numerous conceptual, minimalist and postminimalist sources, it is clearly indebted to the work of American artist Barbara Bloom. Of the same generation as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince, Bloom came of age as an artist during the late

Ma rk Gef friaud Born:Vitry-sur-Seine, lives and works: Paris Polka Dot, 2008 (installation view, Le Plateau, Frac Ile-de-France, 2009), slide projection on motorised rotating plinth, slides, book, mirror, wallpaper, dimensions variable. Photo: Martin Argyroglo. Courtesy the artist and GB Agency, Paris

Ma rlo Pascual

Born: Nashville, lives and works: New York Untitled, 2009, digital c-print, wood, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

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Kathrin Sonnta g Born, lives and works: Berlin

Mittnacht (detail), 2008, 81 slides. Courtesy Galerie Kamm, Berlin

Ian Kiaer Born, lives and works: London

Endless House Project: Cement Garden, 2009, cardboard, sponge elements, styrofoam, perspex with overhead projector and space-hopper toy, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ba rba ra Bloom Born: LA, lives and works: New York

Envy, from The Seven Deadly Sins, 1987, installation, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan

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1980s and early 90s. Her practice is predicated upon a kind of museological (albeit idiosyncratic insofar as it is personal) approach to collecting and presentation, incorporating photography, design, installation and bookmaking. Bloom often presents images in conjunction with objects in theatrical and sometimes elegiac mise en scènes, which inevitably contextualise and lend a certain pathos to those same images: for instance, her indexical meditation on absence, Girls’ Footprints (2007), consists of a colour photo of a flurry of girls’ legs running in a concrete schoolyard and a nearby carpetful of footprints. Thanks to a 2008 retrospective at New York’s International Center of Photography, which was fictionally posthumous (curating her own death?), and interest in her curatorial/ collector mode of artmaking by younger generation of artists and curators, notably in France, Bloom has been enjoying something of a revival. The elegant, motif-driven mise en scènes of Kathrin Sonntag cannot claim immunity to Bloom’s sway. Working with sculpture, photography, film and drawing, Sonntag has been known spatially to conjoin images, motifs and sculptures with domestic objects in works such as her installation White Light (2007) – which includes furniture, sculpture, photography and video – while, akin to Bloom, also taking photos herself. Her blackand-white series Mittnacht (2008) consists of 81 slide projections of elaborate, carefully composed mise en scènes of ‘paranormal’ activity in her studio. Full of sharp, geometric angles, a number of these slides feature generic cinematic appropriations of images of women with their mouths agape, as if shocked by pseudo-paranormal phenomena, such as a cloud of ink floating in a glass of water. Far from affirming the power of

photography, Sonntag’s interest in the ‘supernatural’ and illusion in these images gestures theatrically towards an impotence at the very heart of photography and, by extension, of the image. If Sonntag’s use of the photograph reflexively dwells upon its own anachronistic status, in the work of Mark Geffriaud, the appropriated image tends towards prop, all but dissolving into a visual, syntactical cipher. Working with sculpture, installation and light, Geffriaud has a penchant for the mise en scène, but of a more sculptural and constructed, particleboard order, in which the slide projector occasionally plays a crucial, nonnarrative role. The artist’s first solo show, at Paris’s gb agency in 2009, consisted of an elementarily crafted mise en scene, comprising, in part, three separate particleboard dividers; each of these respectively framed an image or image scenario, such that the formal presentation of the image and its moveable context became more significant than the image itself. More recent works, such as the sculptural installation Herbarium (2009), presented at the Prix Ricard (awarded at Paris’s FIAC art fair to an artist under forty), consisted of a large particleboard rectangle in a wall, with magazine pages hung in a random Aby Warburg/Wolfgang Tillmans style, the images of which were periodically illuminated by small rectangles of light. Once on the other side of the wall, the jeu revealed itself: one encountered a mounted constellation of slide projectors placed in front of each magazine page, projecting the small, shifting rectangles of light onto the backside of the pages. Faced with such a formal bravura, one often gets the feeling in Geffriaud’s work that the image has an almost spectral quality, as if it were indeed speaking to us from the other side, and that whether it is ‘cured’, or curated, it can never truly come back to life. Although he might seem like a bit of a wild card among this group, especially because there is no photography in his work, Ian Kiaer’s practice predates many of the curatorial, mise en scène approaches in circulation today and is engaged with the problems of representation: it’s saturated with a deliberate impotence and sickness. In connection with his eclectic forms of ongoing research regarding failed utopian ideologies, modernist architecture, art history, exile and illness (incidentally, it is no accident that a common motif in Kiaer’s work is the sickbed), among other things, Kiaer ‘curates’ various often detrital elements, objects and fragments, such as foam, canvases, rubbish bins, swathes of fabric, sheets of plastic, old pieces of furniture, cardboard maquettes, etc into spatial configurations, which permit the viewer to inhabit an image as attenuated as it is evocative – which is to say, as incapable of directly communicating the fruit of his research as it is capable of firing the imagination. Kiaer is aware that the story he is trying to tell cannot really be told, that the image he is trying to form can be but imperfect and, as a consequence, is better left adumbrated through the objects he selects, and above all, the relationship he organises between them. Of course a closing disclaimer about the essential disunity of these artists is wanted here, not to mention a nod to the skipped-over complexity of the rest of their individual practices (it goes without saying that my treatment of their work has been necessarily limited). It’s almost as if there is something strange, even unethical about curating them together into one article. Having absorbed the role of the curator into their very practices, their work inevitably resists such (classical?) measures, suggesting that these artists are in fact nobody’s patients. Whatever the case may be, each one of them has a great deal to offer regarding our evolving and endangered relationship to images (themselves endangered), and the methods and strategies that may render them visible, or finally, visualise their invisibility.

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The Pedagogical Impulse words: Jonathan T.D. Neil

“This sounds like such a bad idea. As if requiring everyone to get an advanced degree were not enough, now we are supposed to go to school in our free time, voluntarily…” So said the artist Christopher K. Ho in response to a comment of mine in which I claimed that “school is the new lobster”, and perhaps that needs an explanation. Ho has an uncanny ability to tag artworld fashion trends. Years ago it was ‘antlers are hot’, and sure enough, antlers, game trophies, flannel and rough wood siding were soon to be seen in galleries everywhere (none put there by Ho himself); ‘Goth woodsman’ is how he later summed up this ‘aesthetic’. What would be next? ‘Watch out for lobster’; and then there they were, washing up in white boxes and on the pages of glossies everywhere. Ho’s name for this trend? ‘Lesbian lobsterman’ – incongruity intended, no doubt. But what I’m calling ‘the pedagogical impulse’ is something other than a fashion, which Ho’s response should more than indicate. The aestheticisation of the academic sphere is simply the logical next stage in contemporary art’s primitive accumulation, its colonising of new cultural landscapes and social territories. This trajectory has been in place since the 1960s at least – likely beginning when figures such as Michael Heizer replayed Manifest Destiny’s westward expansion, progressing through a whole range of site-, context- and community-specific, institution-critical and ‘public’ art projects during the 1970s and 80s (at the head of much of which stand both Joseph Beuys and Marcel Broodthaers, though likely back-to-back, with pistols raised), and then venturing ‘indoors’ into dining rooms, coffee shops, lobbies and other so-called relational spaces in the 1990s. At the end of the noughties, with no new territory coming into view on the horizon, well, ‘school is the new lobster’. I should clarify at this point that the pedagogical impulse is not some ‘future trend’ but rather a sensibility that is here now and has been building for some time. Its latest major manifestation, however, would have to be unitednationsplaza, a ‘project’ begun by Anton Vidokle after the cancellation of Manifesta 6 in 2006. Modelled on the European Open University, unitednationsplaza brought together luminaries such as Martha Rosler, Boris Groys and Walid Raad to head up a year (2007–8) of seminars on issues and topics of concern to anyone intellectually minded enough to get excited by session titles like ‘Redundancy Following the Lure of Infinite Flexibility’ (credit goes to Liam Gillick for that one). unitednationsplaza amounted to a kind of seizure of the means of academic production, which is to say of certain academic institutional 94

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forms, by practitioners with an ambivalent relationship to the academy from the beginning. That the academy today is at once the source of artistic and intellectual training and often the object of its scorn, that it provides a living when (or while) other projects (those paintings, this novel, that cycle of philosophical essays) don’t pan out and so serves as a reminder of one’s failures while also offering the ultimate platform for one’s recognition (the last true gauge of success that does not equate, at least not immediately so, to dollars), should not be forgotten. Students, faculty (full-time, visiting and adjunct) and the public pass in and out of (and between) ivory towers with a speed and facility that was once anathema to the very idea of higher, let alone ‘elite’, education. And these porous borders have left the academy visible in a way that it had not been before, a visibility to which Rainer Ganahl’s ongoing S/L (Seminars/Lectures) (1995–) series of photographs of the artworld’s favourite academics – Fredric Jameson, Douglas Crimp, Thierry de Duve, etc – and their audiences serves as both symptom and testament. It was only a matter of time before this visibility was seized upon by smart people such as Vidokle. Likewise, it is only fitting that the other institution that has experienced increased porosity in past decades, the art museum, would become the site of Night School, the second iteration of Vidokle’s pedagogical project, which took up residence at the New Museum between 2008 and 09. Other museums have been quick to follow suit: SFMOMA appropriated the endeavour last fall with its own Pickpocket Almanack (‘curated’ by Joseph del Pesco), a free ‘school without walls’ convened largely online and which takes its cue from various Bay Area cultural events. ‘School’ as opposed to ‘education’ is the key distinction here, I think: the former implies institutional weight, the latter only an open and inquisitive mind. ‘Class’ is the other term of art at the moment, and it is one that is being taken on by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, two artists whose work spends a good deal of time picking through the less savoury parts of the artworld’s carcass in order to serve up to view its fatty tissue and gristle. Their collaborative project, appropriately titled #class, is billed as a ‘think tank’ that will be open to public participation – as well as question – through ‘performances, discussions, and uncategorisable art-like events’, all that goes into the conception, production and sale of works of art. The artists’ aim is to teach something about how the art market works by ‘challenging’ its operational assumptions, which Dalton and Powhida

Jim m y Raskin Born, lives and works: Los Angeles Inseparability vs. Simultaneity (3 Renderings, #1), 2008, mixed media, 122 x 108 x 72 cm. Courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York

Anton Vidok le Born: Moscow, lives and works: New York Night School, 2008. Courtesy New Museum, New York

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Pab lo Helguera Born: Mexico City, lives and works: New York Parallel Lives, 2003, still from performance at MoMA, Gramercy Theater, 8 December 2003. Courtesy the artist and Galería Enrique Guerrero, Mexico City

Jennifer Dal ton & Wil l iam Powhida Live and work: New York

#class Purchase Application, 2010, pencil and coloured pencil on paper. Courtesy Schroeder Romero + Shredder, New York, and Winkleman Gallery, New York

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BHQFU Courtesy Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York

claim are ‘(1) that most art is produced in private by individual artists and (2) [most art] is presented as a finished product ready for consumption’. Whether the public that goes to #class will be anything other than the one already familiar with such challenges seems doubtful, but setting the table with the problem of how social class relates to education would seem worthwhile, though one would have to admit that this dish has been well prepared by certain prominent academics, such as Walter Benn Michaels in his searing The Trouble with Diversity (2006). Ganahl’s photographic project is doubly important because it represents for us the two poles that generally govern the pedagogical impulse: the seminar and the lecture. Vidokle’s projects tend towards the seminar side, as does the ‘university’ begun last year by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the BHQFU, a more tongue-in-cheek but somehow equally earnest attempt to seize the academic means of production. In practice it offers a series of courses derived from its own ‘core course’, the ‘BYOU’ or ‘Build Your Own University’, described as ‘the throbbing administrative heart of BHQFU’, where ‘new courses are proposed, conflicts are resolved, new ones are thought up, and whatever else needs to get done gets done’. A better example of the inmates running the asylum would be hard to find, and perhaps that is exactly the point of the BHQFU and the collaborative ethos of the Bruces themselves. But somewhat like nature, authority abhors a vacuum, and it is ultimately authority upon which pedagogy depends. The BHQFU was established in response to a ‘crisis’ in arts education: the questioning of its authority as a means of educating artists, when that education, cast as training and credentialling, only served as a thinly veiled but often very expensive commercial brand (this is of course the crisis of higher education in general). The test of the Bruces’s university will be if it can establish its authority in place of the industry that administers advanced degrees (which would make it revolutionary) rather than simply existing alongside it as a salve to the bruised artistic conscience (which would remainder it to the growing inventory of collaborative pedagogical ‘projects’), or as simply the next cool thing to do (which would make it fashion). Pablo Helguera is perhaps the artist most self-consciously engaged with these questions, and he has even proposed a new concept, ‘transpedagogy’, through which to understand what artists are up to when

they submit to pedagogy as a medium for creating art. As the director of adult and academic programmes in MoMA’s Department of Education and perhaps the most sustained practitioner of the ‘performance lecture’, which he has been executing for more than a decade (the texts of which have been compiled in his book Theatrum Anatomicum, 2009), Helguera is unique in having tarried with pedagogical problems as both artist and administrator. (One supposes Mark Leckey deserves mention at this point too; but really, what else are works such as Cinema-in-the-Round, 2008, and Mark Leckey in the Long Tail, 2009, than vehicles meant to spotlight the artist, and his ego, on center stage?) Helguera’s projects have ranged from duelling lectures (Theatrum Anatomicum, 2003) to faux panel discussions (The First Imaginary Forum of Mental Sculpture, 2004) to very sincere enquiries into ways of learning (Parallel Lives, 2003). It is in Parallel Lives that we find this gem of a line: “Perhaps it means that imprinting an indelible message in the minds of others is a high task and may be the product of a very strong belief, but it is always an endeavour of love.” One would be hard pressed to find a better definition of what (one would hope) animates the pedagogical impulse. Central to Helguera’s work is that it turns on the exchanges of authority between institutional formats (panels, lectures, seminars); the ‘subjects supposed to know’ that inhabit them (artists, critics, curators, scholars); and importantly, what the pieces themselves have to say – that is, their content. Content is often the key to deciphering just what it is that the artist is up to in pieces like these. The settings may be familiar and the bios of the participants apparently legitimate, but when someone begins speaking in tongues or rattling on about neophallogoepistemicentrism, we know who the joke is on (or at least we think we do). Though these subjects and settings are crucial to Helguera’s idea of transpedagogy, the latter rises or falls with the legitimacy and efficacy of the knowledge that is being put on display. By dint of their complex content and the inventiveness of their delivery, such performances serve as a reminder as to just what it is that is meant to underpin academic authority, and that is expertise. But what in the end constitutes the artist’s expertise? It’s a scary question, and one not very well served by clichés of ‘creativity’ and ‘nonlinear thinking’, or by the ironising gestures of the self-satisfied ‘nonexpert’ (which is not the same thing as an ‘amateur’). Of all the artists labouring under the pedagogical impulse at the moment, perhaps only Jimmy Raskin has fearlessly taken on this question, and even he must come at it on what one might call a ‘Nietzschean oblique’. For two decades now, in drawings, sculptures, diagrams, cartoons, installations, videos and performances (many of which adopt the lecture form), Raskin has returned again and again – most recently in The Annunciation and The Disciple’s Premature Nostalgia (both 2009) – to various figures (the poet, the philosopher, the disciple, the tightrope walker, the eagle, the serpent, the ass) from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5). These are an attempt not just to uncoil the mystery of the poetic act but, importantly, to venture it anew, because, for Raskin, there is no art without analysis (of the self, of the world; of the two in concert), just as there is no analysis without the genuine act of artistic creation. This is more than just knowledge on display; and whether Raskin is successful in uncoiling the nature of art is somewhat beside the point. What is unquestionable is that, as a participant to his researches, one always walks away having learned something.

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The Dark Knight Returns words: Neil Mul hol land

The past few years have seen a notable resurgence of what Umberto Eco once called ‘Dreaming the Middle Ages’ (1973), in the form of ‘a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination’. Tate Britain’s Altermodern (2009) flirted with this, featuring a range of works that related to conspiracy theories (Mike Nelson), neo-paganism and theosophy (Olivia Plender), and shamanism (Marcus Coates). Today’s future sailors tend to fantasise about historical pressure points before and after science – fusions of science and spiritualism. In particular, they might be involved in a reassessment of pseudo-spiritual movements, of Romanticism or of early mystical Modernism. Rosicrucianism, neo-paganism and theosophy in particular offer the kind of curious, conspiratorial early-modernist aesthetic of faith and redemption that attracts the contemporary neomedieval mind. This signals a global tendency to question the logic and presumptions of Western Enlightenment, bookending early Modernism’s similar concern regarding its limits. Spartacus Chetwynd’s embrace of neomedieval forms of carnival is particularly evident in her use of troupes of mummers in seminal performances such as Debt, A Medieval Play (2005). It would be wrong to castigate Chetwynd’s self-sufficient folkmote as a manifestation of the ‘new irrationalism’. Her art is allusive and analogous. Although they may be informed by history and anthropology in equal measure, the acts performed by her troupe aren’t consumed by the past; they are about the present. They are a proxy battle between today’s homogenising technocracy and its discontents (represented by the radical characters of darker ages). All of history speaks of this struggle. While ‘medieval’ is often a byword for negative clichés associated with the Middle Ages – creationism, paleoconservatism, torture, ganglords – neomedievalism could equally provide a focus on more progressive associations with the present, such as lack of institutional state regulation, Latin transnationalism, community and sensuality. The ‘liveness’ or performative aspect of Chetwynd’s enactments allows this version of the folktale to be both liberated and retold repeatedly. Its emphasis on social participation, on a creative commons, is a key sign that it’s part of our WorldWideWeb 2.0. The connection between the Californian Ideology’s digital utopia of the collective conscious and the prelapsarian pastoral commons was made explicitly in Disclosures II: The Middle Ages, Laxton (part of Histories of the Present, a series of exhibitions and events in historically significant places in and around Nottingham, produced by Nottingham Contemporary during 2008), a theme related to Plender’s contemporaneous exhibition of her video Bring Back Robin Hood (2007) at Nottingham Castle Museum. Plender’s use of Kibbo Kift costumes is more archaeological than, say, Luke Collins’s embalming performances with Eucharistic surrogates and props or Plastique Fantastique Ribbon Dance Ritual to Call Forth the PreIndustrial Modern (2007, part of that year’s The Event, in Birmingham). However, these carnivals of costume stem from a similar desire to give a face to what otherwise is an amorphous, suffocating plenum, the aesthetic of disappearance that is the ambient culture of today.

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This aspect of neomedievalism may seem like a naive primitivism, fuelled by nostalgie de la boue. As in previous neo-Gothics, the search for a golden age of anarcho-communism based on classless social kinship can camouflage an underlying retreatism. Even so, we need to recognise that roleplay is crucial to how we overcome the limitations of more readily received ideas. Roleplay, as a form of escapism, has the potential to suppress the habitual response, which in turn allows space for a playful creative approach, a different way of visualising or a genuine synthesis to emerge. It’s this aspect of neomedievalism that reintroduces the principle of subsidiary that the artworld sorely lacks. Altermodern represented a concern with the neomedieval evident in other gallery-based exhibitions in the UK during the past year that have featured strong doses of sculpture, drawing and painting: Heavy Metal Mouth (2009, curated by Hyperground and Polarcap for the Edinburgh Annuale), The Long Dark (2009, curated by Michelle Cotton at International 3, Manchester and Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne), The Dark Monarch (2009, Tate St Ives) and Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson’s Four Fatrasies (2010, Pump House Gallery, London). Is this a sign of the times? There are many ways in which the early twenty-first century mirrors medieval Europe – which suffered from global warming and economic meltdown as well as a pandemic that killed around half its population. But these are not explicit philological points of reference for contemporary dark-age fantasists more familiar with shoegazing and MMORPG than with Beowulf (eighth to eleventh century). Pollard and Stephenson’s Four Fatrasies lords over this fiefdom. Taking its lead from medieval nonsense poetry, this collaborative installation filters the Dark Ages through a Victorian neoromantic sensibility. Stephenson’s medieval sculptural guardians form a tableau to Pollard’s bespoke Italian sports shoes and his afforested paintings (many of which have featured Robin Hood-style vagabonds). This textural brogueing of the preindustrial, pre-Enlightenment and early modern is one that always remains selfconsciously contemporary in perspective. Among artists schooled in the histories of Modernisms, there’s a high degree of self-awareness that a retreat into irrationalism and fantasy is expected to emerge at points of crisis in modernity. The Long Dark explicitly relates this to John Ruskin and the neo-Gothic of late-nineteenth-century industrial England, The Dark Monarch to its neoromantic progeny, Heavy Metal Mouth to the new wave of British heavy metal’s Fighting Fantasy power chords, Four Fatrasies to a bricolage of neomedieval argots. Neomedievalism therefore is as much an invention of modernity as it is a response to it. Torsten Lauschmann’s mixed medievalism is one that trades more unequivocally on contemporary practices of knowledge. His art rises from the folksonomy, the Peasants’ Revolt as a smart mob. This energy is often channelled from the micro to the macro, as a successful campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to the UK Christmas number one attests. Lauschmann shows us that it can be redirected. He is a master of slivercasting, the use of such emerging mass media to reach tiny audiences. Lauschmann’s solo show The Darker Ages (2009, Mary Mary, Glasgow)

L uke Col l ins Born: London, lives and works: Glasgow

DW, 2009, courtesy Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow

Cla re Stephenson Born: Newcastle upon Tyne, lives and works: Glasgow She-Who-Presents, 2009, installation view. Photo: Nathan Wald. Courtesy Spike Island, Bristol

Torsten L auschm ann Born: Bad Soden, lives and works: Glasgow

Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly, 2009, slide projection, multimedia slide projector, dimensions variable. Courtesy Mary Mary, Glasgow

Alex Pol la rd Born: Brighton, lives and works: Glasgow

Spa rtacus Chetwy nd Chat, 2009, oil on canvas, 170 x 165 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow

Born, lives and works: London

Hermitos Children, 2008 (installation view), video installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Tate Photography. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London

gives this invisible culture form. He is a charmer, assigning things a talismanic energy and placing them within a wider web of consciousness. The Darker Ages is a séance; one disposed to the hauntological tendencies within neomedievalism, to invocations of ambient or unseen relics and hidden phantasmagorical layers within the present. The Darker Ages is a reliquary, with Lauschmann playing ham media archaeologist – he experiments in reverse, conjuring a mashup of digitally remastered vintage visuals to summon their ancestral boxes of tricks. The screen of a laptop is punctured by a biro, a Luddite stylus in the digital works. The liquid crystal has blotted and congealed to form a sprite – a ghost in the machine that chants harmonically. He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand (2009) is the digital semantic object as a new form of a miraculous artefact. Thanks to ambient intelligence, objects now answer us back. Things can contextualise themselves, allow us to question their very presence, then provide us with feedback on how we respond to them. Our environment is mutating, not mute. Our surroundings can’t play dumb, everything’s smart now. This encourages a neomedieval form of animism. Like many of the devotional objects venerated in the medieval period, this notebook remains very ordinary, oscillating between the sacred and the prosaic. Such work reminds us that neomedievalism is structural rather than stylistic – a field rather than a form. As the artworld globalises, it is becoming increasingly balkanised into fiefs, city-states and overlapping territories. In this it resembles what, back in 1977, Hedley Bull prophesied as a new medievalism: a ‘system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty’. Bull’s ideas are helpful when considering the infrastructure of the artworld – which as a highly opaque unregulated economy is remarkably similar to the disconnected, ungoverned space of medieval Europe. As in the high-medieval period, artisans in the 2000s have been participating in a reinvigorated preindustrial economy wherein objects are valued more highly than experiences. As more wealth concentrated in the hands of fewer people during the first decade of the twenty-first century, vassaldom has been responsible for the circulation of new holy relics and for the widespread retreat into cultural monasticism (the dealer–collector system). Curatorial celebrations of cultural supranationalism not only serve to mask the centrifugal forces of vassaldom that have dominated the artworld in the past ten years, they are a product of vassaldom. Neomedievalism is particularly important now given the crisis in technologically advanced postindustrialism – artists are thus ordained to lose their rational minds in challenging the diluted positivism that is the experience economy. The neofeudalism generated in this contemporary narrative is one – with its emphasis on a complex mixture of individual autonomy and multiple loyalties – that fuses neatly with current Western geopolitical analyses of globalisation. Neomedievalism, then, is a lens through which we identify and justify the present in the past and through which we narrate this past in terms of how we imagine our future. It has no logical conclusion.

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Architectures of Community words: L aura McL ean-Ferris Despite frequent attempts to exorcise it once and for all, the walking ghost of Modernism has stalked art production for much of the last 70 years or so. More specifically, art has been almost pathologically obsessed with articulating a response to the utopian idealism perceived in an ill-defined and frequently-changing understanding of Modernism, viewed from the position of a postmodern, postcapitalist age. Recently artists appear to be working with communities in ways that manage to encompass both positions at once. Katerina Sedá and Pawel Althamer create ambitious work involving many participants who are neighbours to one another (rather than those who come together through a common interest, such as art) and who themselves become part of a display; meanwhile collectives and projects such as Mirza/Butler and CAMP build their work on the more ambivalent or compromised conditions that come with already belonging to a community or locale, in order to strengthen it. What links these artists is that they all attempt to use their practice to effect real change in communities, rather than simply to draw attention to an impossible ideal. And if there is an aesthetic, as well as a thematic, link between them, it lies in considerations of architecture and infrastructure, and the ways in which they can reinforce the connections between individuals, if only for discrete, fragile pockets of time. This set of communitarian projects has emerged, on the one hand, from the so-called new institutionalism in curating, which has attempted to rethink the museum from the outside in and centralise participatory practice; and on the other from a reaction to the demands placed on art museums and galleries in countries such as the UK to ‘outreach’ and make art into something that serves a ‘purpose’. The result of the latter, of course, is often work that is simply an unsatisfactory secondary servicing model to art exhibitions. That said, the Serpentine Gallery’s project the Centre for Possible Studies, on London’s Edgware Road, will this year find itself a hub for projects that are primary rather than secondary, with a number of artists

working within the local context on a two-year basis (rather than the more common ‘holiday romance’ approach that sees artists breezing in and out again in a matter of months). Mumbai-based CAMP (Shaina Anand, Nida Ghouse, Hakimuddin Lilyawala and Ashok Sukumaran), a group who describe themselves not as a collective but as a ‘workshop for gathering ideas’, are among them. CAMP’s Wharfage, at the 2009 Sharjah Biennial (where it was awarded a jury prize), examined trade between Sharjah and Somalia by printing ship manifests and texts based on interviews with sailors on the dhows that use the historic Sharjah Creek trade route. With an understanding of the creek as a Foucauldian heterotopia (an ‘other place’, of space and time, by which a particular civilisation understands itself), they created a radio station in the port for those who work on the waters, which resulted in music, dancing and conversation, but left the biennial audience to listen via headphones on the faraway rooftops of museums, taking the position of outsider. As well as being a project with benefits for a group bound by geography, it transformed Sharjah Creek into a synecdoche for multinational trade, taking into account the simultaneous existence of Somali pirates, free-trade economies and the exchange of Western goods from UAE (macaroni, cars, slippers) for charcoal from Somalia. In Edgware Road CAMP are investigating the history of a building that has housed (among other things) a newsreel cinema, an adult cinema and an Arabic nightclub, and then creating systems (such as newspapers and placemats) for distributing this knowledge. At the nearby Showroom, Hiwa K., born in Iraq and based in Berlin, takes part next month in Estrangement, a collaboration (initiated by himself and Aneta Szylak) between the London not-for profit space and the Wyspa Institute in Gdansk, which seeks to explore the tensions between European culture and various iterations of the ‘Orient’. In northwest London Hiwa K. will be bringing together an orchestra of musicians who practice on Edgware Road ­– an area in which many people from the Middle East live and work – to play the themes from classic

Katerina Sed á Born: Brno, lives and works: Brno and Prague Over and Over, 2008, installation at Skulpturenpark, 5th Berlin Biennial for Contermporary Art, 2008. Photo: Werner Linster. Courtesy the artist and Franco Soffiantino Gallery, Turin

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Mirz a /Butler Live and work: London Tape Drawing, Karachi, The Museum of Non Participation, 2009, commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction, London

Pawel Al tham er Born, lives and works: Warsaw Common Task, Brasília, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Open Art Projects, Warsaw

Western movies, restaging a form of Wild West conflict, while Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska will be bringing rickshaws to the area, playing on the multileveled boundaries by which we distinguish East from West. Also investigating the relationship of visual cultures in Britain and the Middle East, Mirza/Butler (Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, who also run artist space no.w.here) instigated an Artangel project, The Museum of Non Participation, last year. Based in London and Karachi, it sought to explore the relationship of artists to the societies they investigate, outside the ivory towers of galleries. In Karachi this nonparticipation took the form of a museum without walls: signs, shapes and images grafted onto the city as accompaniment to a series of popup events using alternative forms of distribution: for example, giving newspapers away as wrapping for takeaway food, so that people might participate without first realising that they are entering an art space. In London, Urdu lessons and talks were held in the back room of a Bethnal Green barbershop. That these projects manage to function as art (as opposed to other well-meaning public projects such as community gardens or language lessons) is due to the strong visual identity of the project in Karachi – which appears to stage all nearby events, art and nonart alike, as part of a predetermined narrative – but also stems from the breakdown in disciplines between art and other modes of cultural activity effected by a postmodern interdisciplinarity. If art can now encompass schools, communities, everything, then why not actual social change? But is it the artist’s job to do such things? What, in essence, is art’s work? For several years Pawel Althamer has been examining precisely how the artist works in relation to society and to institutions, whether camping outside London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2003 or working with a group of young artists to create a joint project at the Pompidou Centre, in Paris, demonstrating the ways in which they must subsume their individual identities and art practices for the sake of collective endeavour. Recently, 102 ArtReview

Althamer’s focus has fallen on his own home – a large, brutal, concrete modernist structure in Bródno, Warsaw – and the community that lives there. Althamer’s Common Task project, the most recent incarnation of which was displayed at Modern Art Oxford last year, involves a group of the block’s residents dressing up in golden spacesuits and making visits to other communities, drawing attention to their alienness, and alienation, while paradoxically creating the impression of a tight community (of gold-laméd otherness). In a film of the group’s trip to Mali, they explain where they come from to a local tribe by pointing to a concrete brick and explaining that this is a model of their home. When Althamer takes his neighbours to Brussels, Mali, Oxford and modernist Brasília, among other places, on a golden plane, their movement documents the transition of Poland since the fall of the Berlin Wall, where a previous era spent dreaming of technological and social progress meets a reality that lacks the fantasy of that dream. The ‘dreamland’ that this work inhabits is something of a compromise. It might come as no surprise that some of the most successful work focusing on community is made by artists who trace their origins to Eastern Europe, due to the fact that many countries which have experienced both communism and capitalism in recent years now have a physical and mental landscape that has traces of both. This clash between group and individual, ideals and practicalities, is ever-present in the work of Katerina Sedá, whose approach encapsulates some of the more ambivalent elements of working with groups, particularly small towns and villages. Sedá’s bestknown works are the ongoing ones that she has created with small Czech villages. In There’s Nothing There (2003), for example, Sedá persuaded most of the inhabitants of Ponetovice to perform their everyday tasks – shopping, cleaning, eating – in coordinated sequence, bringing a sense of choreography and enchantment to the repetitive and humdrum. For Over and Over, seen at the 2008 Berlin Biennial, the artist travelled

Joanna Ra jkowska Born: Bydgoszcz, lives and works: Warsaw Oxygenator, 2007. Photo: Marek Szczepanski

CAMP Formed: Mumbai, 2007

Shishawa, 2009, Edgware Road, London. © Serpentine Gallery

with 40 residents from Líšeň to Berlin, only to confront them with a wall structure constructed from exact replicas of their own garden fences at home – which, since the influx of private capital, had been increasing in size and number. Encouraging them to scale this fence structure, erected on the site of the fallen Berlin Wall, she forced them to greet and help one another, but also to appraise how these new private fences had sprung up in relation to the fall of this larger ‘fence’. In a more recent project, The Spirit of Uhyst (2009), shown at the Lyon Biennial in 2009, Sedá worked with inhabitants of the German town of Uhyst, getting them to collaborate on a drawing that would represent the ‘spirit/ghost’ of the town. Each resident was to add an element composed of a single line to the drawing. While proceedings began well, the inhabitants were soon defacing one another’s work – a church door, for example, was struck through to convey a structure unwelcome to homosexuals. The scribbled, tangled, colourful mess that the townspeople ended up with, the ‘ghost’ of Uhyst, was both an expression of unity and one of conflict – a place viewed by many eyes at once. This drawing expresses a form of utopia that is not hegemonic or ‘ideal’ in the traditional sense, that allows for a space of conflict and multiple perspectives. This manages to partially reclaim a modernist dream alongside a difficult reality, of community and common tasks undertaken with conflicting ideas. A ghost/spirit still walks because it is still occasionally within grasp – echoing Jacques Rancière’s take on equality, as a power of ‘inconsistent, disintegrative and ever-replayed division’ which is unstable and fleeting (a point made by Bettina Funcke in Pop or Populous, 2009). For the moment this can only take place in elusive moments of enchantment, outside the mainstream, in villages, boats and barbershops, and, for now, just outside of the reaches of a more accessible concrete reality. But it may provide a model of messy, tangled potential for the future to come.

feature: NOW!

Reclaim the Street (Theatre) words: Tyler Coburn Try as I will to avoid the buzzy terms that turn articles like this into soft targets, I would like to prepare the reader with some broad generalisations about Emily Roysdon, My Barbarian, Vishal Jugdeo, Emily Wardill and Emily Mast. Young testaments to the enduring popularity of certain first names; predominantly schooled in Los Angeles under the likes of luminaries Mary Kelly, Andrea Fraser and Frances Stark; American, Canadian, English: these upstarts all share a semiotic approach to the liminal spaces of theatre, performance and the moving image, positing language as a primary determinant of the frames encompassing stage, set and the people and characters contained therein. A debt to the critical work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler is evident, particularly considering the emphasis many of these artists place on processes of (and gaps in) subject formation – between who one is normalised to become, in a given society, and that which exceeds or resists these conditions. Good students of history, they masquerade tropes of satire, deadpan, verfremdungseffekt and camp with a speed and levity that marks their distance from the first wave of postmodern reflexivity and with a focus on class, sexuality and gender less reductively wrought than in comparably topical work of the preceding generation. The crux of the difference may lie in a growing suspicion about ‘identity’ as a plausible political rallying point, in the fear that such reification risks delimiting alterity within normative bounds, curtailing what Roysdon describes as the realm of the unspeakable, of the imaginary. ‘In order to develop this new imaginary, we must be willing to disrupt our knowledge of self, and to risk unrecognisability’, Roysdon writes in the essay accompanying Ecstatic Resistance (2009), a group exhibition she curated at X-Initiative, in New York. That willingness is a responsibility these five artists assume. Over the past several years, Emily Roysdon has contributed to significant reformulations of the terms of political protest, with, in her 104 ArtReview

own words, ‘one foot in the queer and feminist archives, and another in my lived experience of collectivity’. Most notable among these contributions are arguments forcefully issued on the pages of LTTR, a journal run by an eponymous New York collective comprising Roysdon, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, K8 Hardy and Ulrike Müller. For Work, Why, Why Not (2008), a live component of a related series of sculpture, film and video, Roysdon reinvests performance as a platform for social organisation: over the course of 20 minutes, performers variably assemble in groupings (a circle of chairs, a dancing line, a family-portrait-like configuration) and wheel around four oversize semitransparent mesh screens suspended in wood frames and airbrushed with images of a lone dildo, a ladder strewn with cut letters and two hands opening the mouth of a supine person, as if in an attempt to dislodge an obstruction. Offsetting this silent choreography are phrases Roysdon asks audience members to deliver, via two microphones, in response to written prompts (for example, ‘When you sense someone is taking a risk say, “I have been her”’). As voices intervene and overlap, a traditionally unilateral axis of theatrical engagement gives way to a reactive model inclusive of audience testimony. Los Angeles collective My Barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT) (2008) evinces a similar concern with the political dimension of audience participation, though by rehashing tactics (from levitating a spectator to soliciting viewers to shed their clothes) of 1960s performance collectives the Living Theatre and the Action Theater, it humorously but critically comments on our distance from the optimistic spirit of past radicalism. In place of the eight rungs structuring the Living Theatre’s 1968 Paradise Now, which included such events as the ‘rite of universal intercourse’ and the ‘rite of guerrilla theater’ – and which culminated in the performers drawing people into the streets to begin the ‘beautiful non-violent anarchist revolution’ – My Barbarian offers its

Em ily Mast Lives and works: New York Everything, Nothing, Something, Always (Walla!), 2009, performance still, 11 November at X-Initiative, New York, for Performa 09. Photo: Karl Haendel

Em ily Roy sdon Born: Easton (Maryland), lives and works: New York and Stockholm Work, Why, Why, Not, 2008, live performance at Weld, Stockholm. Photo: the artist

Em ily Wa rd il l Born: Rugby, lives and works: London Game Keepers Without Game, 2009, production still, video (colour, sound), 76 min, 2009. Photo: Polly Braden. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Fortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner, London, Standard (Oslo), and Altman Siegel, San Francisco

My Ba rba rian Formed: Los Angeles, 2000 Death Panel Discussion, 2009, performance still, performance, Participant Inc, New York. Courtesy the artist and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles

feature: NOW!

Vishal Jugd eo Born: Regina (Saskatchewan), lives and works: Los Angeles Square Configuration (Decorum) Study, 2009, production still, HD video. Courtesy the artist

event as a ‘performance lab’ to teach the audience five techniques, such as ‘estrangement’ and ‘inspirational critique’, delivered in the warm, musical tones of a vintage children’s educational programme. At a moment when several other artists are raising concerns about arts pedagogy by parroting authoritative speech, My Barbarian partly makes good on the instructional imperative of radical theatre by offering seemingly innocuous fun that belies cutting social commentary. Elaborating on this potential of deadpan, Vishal Jugdeo’s video installations offer a critique of language voiced from within genre-based conventions, revealing the habituation and transmission of power that can occur through clichéd types of conversation and address. Square Configuration (Decorum) Study (2009) finds a white man and black woman shuffling roles at a table and lectern: greeting the viewer as panellists would an audience; assuming the airs of the hosts of a cooking show called Harmony & Abstraction; reassuring a caller like phone-centre operators; and in a salient scene, placing the leg of a bed beneath the table so that “language can flow between [them] without consequence” and proceeding to speak with an unrestrained severity that would be

tempting to take as candour in any but this most stylised context. Set in an arbitrary sequence conducive to looping projection, each of these scenes readily bares its structures, from occasional intertitles such as ‘Later than Night’ that have no seeming purpose except to highlight the units of linear narration Jugdeo’s video only flouts, to critical points delivered in canned tones, as when one of the cooking show’s hosts reads a letter condemning her condensation of “all of the darkest aspects of human experience… into something like a dressed-up chessboard”, concluding, “abstraction is a process conceived of, by, and for a subject that probably doesn’t have to question his relationship to power”. In point of fact, Jugdeo’s characters symptomise the risk of abstraction as well as the converse potentiality of resistance, channelling the stereotypically docile, masochistic qualities of the marginal subject into heavy-handed (and heavily ironised) performances of society’s dominant scripts. As in many of his other works, objects such as the bed leg operate as ciphers that Jugdeo’s characters invest with particular significance. In her latest near-feature-length film, Game Keepers Without Game (2009), Emily Wardill presents a narrative similarly articulated by the monetary, cultural and connotative value of material possessions. After coincidentally moving across the street from the care home of Stay, the daughter he put up for adoption at the age of eight, Wardill’s protagonist ‘Dad’ decides to “take her back into the fold”, insinuating himself into her life in a quasistalker fashion. Stay professes to suffer from what sounds like multiplepersonality disorder, and in the midst of dinner at Dad’s nauseatingly tasteful pad, she mercilessly runs amok, tracking borscht with her trainers over his modernist furniture and destroying the specialty honeycomb vases and imported flowers that Wardill’s camera fetishistically captures. Echoing Wardill’s Ben (2007), which was organised around psychological case studies of paranoia and ‘negative hallucinations’, the film’s focus on Stay’s disorders carries a metaphorical potency also manifest in the tinny drumbeat illogically spliced as soundtrack throughout the narrative, as well as the sizeable cast of voiceover actors that qualifies the singular authority conventionally vested in the role. In an elegant document accompanying Everything, Nothing, Something, Always (Walla!) (2009), Emily Mast describes the concerns of her performance as ‘a distinct distrust of both certainty and the ideal of truth [and] the imprecision of language by means of the myriad ways it can be delivered and understood’. To illustrate the generative potential of such a relativistic framework, Mast mines difference within formal systems, demarcating a space, at the centre of a gallery, in which a cast of actors – playing characters and audience – perform a single script nine times over three hours. Conceived in the tradition of commedia dell’arte, the piece is performed by stage actors who appear all but subsumed by their characters, each contributing to a metadiscourse on the nature of the dramatic arts from an entrenched mindset: Articulator, Wonderer, Enthusiast and Doubter. ‘Right now you are you because you were written that way’, the Enthusiast tells the Wonderer at one point, an acknowledgement of one of Mast’s parameters that upon reiteration seems ever-less determinate – particularly as the stage actors play it loud (in one version); have a picnic (another); get increasingly drunk (throughout); and even (in still another) let an audience-actor do perfect voiceover for their lines, as they run around miming. While many of its elements contain nuanced allusions to stage history, Mast’s performance also adds to an ongoing conversation – shared by the aforementioned artists, among the many – about the theatricality of the exhibition space. Her minimalist redo, however, is the discrete, quasi-sculptural field of an actual theatre, and within it a group of actor-viewers who are neither ‘ideal’ nor ‘relational’ but rather elements of a performance that leaves no remainder except what we casual viewers may take. ArtReview 107

Art Pilgrimage:

From Plato to Go-Go While Athens may be the fabled cradle of Western civilisation, it’s been less legendar y as a centre of contemporar y ar t. With an increasingly energetic galler y scene, adventurous collectors and the Gagosian seal of approval, however, that’s all changing.

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© Anay Mann/Photoink.

wo rds : ch r i s to p h er m oo n e y

110 ArtReview

beware of greeks bearing gifts. Any journalist with a shred of integrity left, even a paid hack of the art pack like myself, knows better than to accept freebies from a potential subject, but here was an offer too good to pass up – Athens, Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits among the gilded icons of the Byzantine and Christian Museum, a top-floor suite at the St George hotel, lunch under the olive trees in the garden courtyard of the Potnia Thiron gallery, a who’s who dinner under the olive trees at the museum, side visits to the Athens Biennale and its edgy parallel fair, ReMap, a quick whirl through Bernard Tschumi’s new Acropolis Museum and, the syrup on this karithopita cake, a Cy Twombly show of Ancient Greece-inspired paintings at the newest outpost of the Gagosian empire. A Gagosian gallery in Athens? The city has history, sure, the birthplace of Western classical art and all that, but the population is roughly that of Columbus, Ohio. What was Larry doing down there? As usual, a quick call to the Power 100 number one, Serpentine Gallery’s Hans Ulrich Obrist, the most dialled-in man in the artworld, was instructive: “In the last few years, Athens has become an incredibly dynamic centre of contemporary art. Strong curators, big collectors, a great biennale,

fantastic galleries and artist-run spaces, an amazing transgenerational range of artists and proximity to other important new art hubs like Istanbul, Thessaloniki and Cyprus. Right now, in this fantastic new polyphony of art centres, we’re seeing what [historian] Fernand Braudel called a ‘seismic shift’. The focus is turning to the East, and Athens’s in-betweeness makes it a very important gateway.” Clearly I had to see and experience this, no matter the cost to my so-called personal values. After all, ‘in this economy’, ethics, journalistic or otherwise, are luxuries few can afford, and those who can, get to pay on instalment, at super-low rates. So I booked the trip. Instantly, Chaos was summoned, the Gorgons reared and Hydra launched the fullness of her fury upon my hubristic head. First, my editor emailed a reminder of a general rule of this magazine: ‘No dead artists.’ As an artist, Andy Warhol is many things to many people, but dead is almost always at or near the top of the list. Second, the four-month-long run of the biennale and ReMap ended the day of my late-night flight. Third, the next day was Monday, meaning that every art institution in Athens was shuttered. Fourth, Tuesday was my son’s birthday, meaning I couldn’t

wait around for the art scene to reopen but had to hightail back home. Fifth, Sunday, the night I arrived, was also election night: after two scandal-ridden terms of an inept conservative government, and less than a year after violent student riots swept and burned through Athens, all of Hades was set to break loose. Some jolly junket: one day on the ground and nothing to see but torched cars and riot cops. Cancelling, though, was not an option. Promises had been made, and I am, if nothing else, a man who makes promises. Thank the Gods, the socialist victory at the polls was met with revelry, not riots (those would come a month later). Thankfully, too, xenia kicked in, the famous Greek concept of hospitality: doors were opened, bread broken, bottles of wine uncorked. For 36 hours, the cradle of Western civilisation was my playpen, and its collectors, gallerists, artists, curators and biennale directors my educational toys. Only two refused to play. The typical Greek generosity and courtesy shown to those far from home was not extended to me by Gagosian Gallery, which didn’t open its doors for me – or respond to my emails. Nor was I able to penetrate the new Acropolis Museum, so I cannot say

whether it deserves to fulfil the purpose for which it was built: the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum. I did, however, manage an early morning walk around its concrete, metal and glass exterior, and thus can report that it looks like a cross between a skewed pile of High Modern shoeboxes and the headquarters of a large corporation in Columbus. As for the Athens Gagosian, apparently it is not endowed with the stadiumlike proportions one expects of a Go-Go joint. “A small, frugal and personal space”, said a courteous art critic. “Puny and cramped”, said a less diplomatic curator. Decidedly uncramped is the Deste Foundation. A former sock factory on the edge of the posh suburb of Nea Ionia, just north of Athens, the foundation’s spacious three floors house rotating exhibitions culled from the 1,500-plus works in Dakis Joannou’s private collection. A trustee of Tate, MoMA, the Guggenheim and the New Museum in New York, Dakis, as everyone in town calls him, has been an aggressive collector of contemporary art

since purchasing a tankful of basketballs at Jeff Koons’s Equilibrium show in 1985. His fortune is not in shipping, the traditional income source of important Greek collectors, but in construction, designer hotels and the Coca-Cola franchises of a couple dozen countries. There are other important collectors in Greece, including Dimitris Daskalopoulos (dairy and frozen foods), a Guggenheim and Tate trustee whose 400-strong collection will be showcased at London’s Whitechapel Gallery this summer, and Dinos Martinos (shipping), whose nephew Andreas, also a big collector, is married to Maria Livanos, the shipping-heiress director of the new Gagosian. However, Dakis is by far the dominant force. His tastes and ties to art luminaries and institutions abroad shape and shore up the local scene. The Deste contains the country’s largest archive of contemporary Greek art, and the foundation gives out an annual prize to a Greek artist of promise and buys the winning work. The nonprofit’s emphasis, however, judging by the works on

preceding pages, from left: Steven Shearer, Poem for Athens, 2009, © the artist, courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, and AMP, Athens; Andy Warhol, Untitled, 1957, ink and gold leaf on paper, 51 x 38 cm, private collection, Athens, © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London 2009, courtesy Sonnabend Collection, New York; Andy Warhol, Alexander the Great, 1982, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 102 x 102 cm, private collection, Athens, © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London 2009

display, is international. “The serious Greek collectors no longer distinguish between the international and the local”, said Dakis. “In the past, some would only collect Greek, or only international, and now they just collect what’s good, no matter where it comes from.” Dakis’s idea of what’s good seems principally focused on the brashest bad-boy works of Robert Gober, Urs Fischer, Chris Ofili, Paul Chan, Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan, Kiki Smith and, especially, Jeff Koons. In all, his collection includes some 36 Koons works – 37 if you include Guilty, the 114-foot luxury yacht Koons customised for him in 2008. Koons is curating the New Museum’s exhibition of Dakis’s collection that opens in New York this month, and the Deste exhibit I wandered through (A Guest + A Host = A Ghost, 2009) was curated by the New Museum’s Massimiliano Gioni, a longtime Dakis advisor and collaborator. Most previous shows at the Deste were organised by New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch (recently appointed director of

above: A Guest + A Host = A Ghost, 2009 (installation view). Photo: Stefan Altenburger. Courtesy Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens facing page: Gert & Uwe Tobias, 2009 (installation view). Photo: Vivianna Athanasopoulou. Courtesy the Breeder, Athens

Art Pilgrimage: athens

the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA), whose connection to the city’s most significant collector spans decades. Deitch’s influence is apparent elsewhere in Athens, but nowhere more so than at Andreas Melas Presents (AMP), a full-building gallery in the up-and-coming KM district. Here an edgy downtown youth vibe prevails, announced by Steven Shearer’s giant Poem for Athens (2009) on the gallery’s outside wall and amplified by the gallery’s owner, Melas, the young scion of a well-known Greek family and a former gallery assistant at Deitch Projects in New York. Only a couple of years old, AMP boasts a strong roster (half Greek, half international) and is a key player in a growing effort by the art community to inflict trendy gentrification upon KM, a perennial zone of the down-and-out. The KM renaissance is in part the brainchild of Iasson Tsakonas, a young developer who invites local and international galleries and art groups to install shows and site-specific works in the KM properties he owns, and has talked other property

owners into doing likewise. Called ReMap, the event overlaps the biennale’s dates and has attracted foreign galleries like Eva Presenhuber, Parisa Kind, Johann König, and Peres Projects. Restaurants and bars have followed, as have some of Athens’s most dynamic galleries – the Breeder and Rebecca Camhi Gallery among them, both now permanently relocated to the zone. ReMap is typical of the Greek cultural scene, where private initiatives supersede those of the state. This will be even more the case now, after the country’s recent credit-rating downgrade and subsequent scramble to cut budgets. In the past, the country’s shipping magnates have stepped up, but with industrial production down and the economy circling the drain, shipping – and Dakis’s industries, construction and tourism – have been hit like most others. Yet Athenians remain optimistic. “Big spenders are now cautious and are not spending as much any more”, said AMP’s Melas, who states that his sales were down about 60 percent in 2009. “But things are

falling into place around here. Athenians are getting a little more receptive and interested by the day. There’s obviously a long way to go, but I find potential and change very intriguing, and I’m confident.” “Sure, the market is smaller”, said Dakis, “but that’s fine, because our artists are still creating great work, and young people are coming back to the city, and for the first time they have something to do – there’s a scene here, and they can find a role in it, and that’s very healthy”. Next time, more time. The next Athens Biennale and ReMap are scheduled for autumn 2011 (as are those of Thessaloniki and Istanbul). I’ve cleared my calendar of other obligations. It’s the least I can do. I owe it to Athens. And to myself. Strangers and beggars are from Zeus, said Homer, and a gift, though small, is precious.

ArtReview 113

Listings Museums and Galleries United States, New York ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES 18 East 79th Street New York, NY 10075 T +1 (212) 734 6300 Open Mon–Sat 10–5 [email protected] acquavellagalleries.com James Rosenquist: The Hole in the Center of Time and the Hole in the Wallpaper to 19 Mar DOOSAN Gallery 533 West 25th Street NewYork, NY 10001 [email protected] Open Tue–Sat 10–6 Taewon Jang to 24 Apr PaceWildenstein 32 East 57th Street New York T +1 (212) 421 3292 Tue–Sat 9:30–6 pacewildenstein.com Robert Ryman: Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing to 27 March

Alison Jacques Gallery 16–18 Berners Street London W1T 3LN T +44 (0)20 7631 4720 Open Tue–Sat, 10–6 alisonjacquesgallery.com Ana Mendieta: Silueta and Silence to 20 Mar

UNITED KINGDOM

Artspace Westbourne Grove Church Westbourne Grove London W11 2RW Open Mon–Fri, 9–5 T +44 (0)20 7034 0500 sophiemolins.com Sophie Molins: The Impossibility of Escapism to 30 Mar

AXIS Round Foundry Media Centre Foundry Street, Leeds T +44 (0)8453 628 230 axisweb.org The online resource for contemporary art

Barbican Art GAllery Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS Ron Arad: Restless to 16 May Cubit 8 Angel Mews London N1 9HH T +44 (0)20 7278 8226 Open Wed–Sun 12–6 cubittartists.org.uk Henning Bohl: Corner of a Cornfield to 25 Apr

PACEWILDENSTEIN 545 West 22nd Street New York T +1 (212) 989 4258 pacewildenstein.com Sterling Ruby: 2TRAPS to 20 Mar

Hauser & Wirth London 196A Piccadilly London, W1J 9DY T +44 (0)20 7287 2300 [email protected] A Display of Subodh Gupta’s School to 27 Mar

PACEWILDENSTEIN 534 West 25th Street T +1 (212) 929 7000 open Tue–Sat 10–6 pacewildenstein.com Joseph Beuys: Make the Secrets Productive to 10 Apr

Spruth Magers 7A Grafton Street London, W1S 4EJ Open Tue–Sat, 10–6pm T +44 (0)20 7408 1613 [email protected] spruethmagers.com Kenneth Anger to 27 Mar

UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON A Foundation London Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, London, E2 7ES afoundation.org.uk Journeys with No Return 18 Feb – 14 Mar Alice Anderson Rifle Maker 79 Beak Street London, W1F 9SU T +44 (0)20 7439 0000 Alice Anderson: Time Reversal to 24 Apr

TATE Modern Millbank, London SW1 T +44 (0)20 7887 8888 tate.org.uk Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective to 3 May Whitechapel Gallery 77–82 Whitechapel High Street London, E1 7QX T +44 (0)20 7522 7888 [email protected] Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to 11 Apr

A Foundation liverpool 67 Greenland Street, Liverpool, L1 0BY afoundation.org.uk The Economy of the Gift 9 Apr – 22 May

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art Gateshead Quays South Shore Road Gateshead, NE8 3BA T +44 (0)191 478 1810 [email protected] Jenny Holzer to 16 May Bristol’s City Museum & Art Gallery Queen’s Road Bristol BS8 1RL Open daily 10–5 bristol.gov.uk/museums The Shape of Things to 18 Apr INGLEBY GALLERY 15 Calton Road Edinburgh, EH8 8DL T +44 (0)131 556 4441 inglebygallery.com Peter Liversidge: The Thrill of It All to 10 Apr ISENDYOUTHIS.COM Lamper Head, Conworthy, Totnes T +44 (0)1364 653 208 Art slideshow, artist portfolio gallery guide, exhibition guide & artist directory Lemington spa art gallery & museum Royal Pump Rooms, The Parade, Lemington Spa, CV32 4AA T +44 (0)1926 742 700 Edmund de Waal: Water-Shed to 11 Apr Lisson gallery 29 Bell Street, NW1 5BY T +44 (0) 20 7724 2739 [email protected] lissongallery.com Open Mon–Fri 10–6, Sat 11–5 Tony Cragg to 20 Apr

TATE LIVERPOOL Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4BB T +44 (0)1517 027 400 tate.org.uk/liverpool AUSTRIA CHRISTINE KOENIG GALERIE Schleifmuehlgasse 1A A-1040 Wien christinekoeniggalerie.com Galerie Krinzinger Seilerstaette 16 1010 Wien Kader Attia: Po(l)etical galerie-krinzinger.at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Mirabellplatz 2 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 881 393 ropac.net Elger Esser/Rona Pondick to 20 Mar Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna Viale delle Belle Arti, 131 00196 Roma, Italia Mumok Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien mumok.at Changing Channels Kunst und Fernsehen to 6 Jun Kunsthaus Graz Space02 Lendkai 1, 8020 Graz museum-joanneum.at Tatiana Trouvé Il Grande Ritratto to 16 May SAMMLUNG VERBUND Am Hof 6a, 1010 Wien sammlung.verbund.at DONNA: Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s to 16 May Galerie Hubert Winter Breite Gasse 17 A-1070 Wien T +43 (0)1524 09 76 galeriewinter.at Richard Nonas to 24 Apr

Belgium

GERMANY

Galerie Almine Rech 20 Rue de l’Abbaye B-1050 Brussels T +32 26 485 684 alminerech.com Franz West 25 Mar – 22 May Sophie Von Hellermann: Project Space 23 Apr – 22 May

DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin T +49 (0)30 20 2093 deutsche-guggenheim.de Utopia Matters to 11 Apr

Galerie BaronianFrancey 2 rue Isidore Verheyden 1050 Brussels T +32 25 12 9295 baronianfrancey.com Joseph Marioni to 17 Apr Tim Van Laere Gallery Verlatstraat 23-25 2000 Antwerp T +32 (0)3 257 14 17 timvanlaeregallery.com Peter Rogiers to 6 Mar Xavier Hufkens Rue Saint-Georges 6–8 1050 Brussels T +32 2 6396730 xavierhufkens.com Hans Op de Beeck/ Malcom Morley to 10 Apr ZENO X GALLERY Leopold De Waelplaats 16 B-2000 Antwerp T +32 32 161 626 zeno-x.com Mark Manders to 24 Apr NETHERLANDS GRIMM FINE ART Keizersgracht 82 1015 CT Amsterdam T +31 (0)20 422 7227 grimmfineart.com William Monk to 1 May VAN ABBE MUSEUM Bilderdijklaan 10 , Eindhoven T +31 (0)40 238 1000 vanabbemuseum.nl Lissitzky+ to 2 Sep 2012

SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE Römerberg D-60311 Frankfurt T +49 69 29 98 820 [email protected] schirn-kunsthalle.de LUMAS Berlin Hackesche Höfe Rosenthaler Straße 40/41 10178 Berlin T +49 (0)30 2804 0373 lumas.com SWITZERLAND Galerie Bertrand & Gruner 16, rue du Simplon 1207 Geneva T +41 227 005 151 bertrand-gruner.com Something Left Undone 15 Apr – 5 Jun MIGROSMUSEUM für gegenwartskunst Limmatstrasse 270 Postfach 1766 CH-8005 Zürich migrosmuseum.ch While Bodies Get Mirrored to 30 May Greece ART ATHINA art-athina.gr 13–16 May ITALy Galleria dello Scudo Via Scudo di Francia 2 37121 Verona T +39 045 59 01 44 galleriadelloscudo.com Gianni Dessì to 27 May Galleria Franco Noero Via Giolitti 52A 10123 Turin T +39 011 882 208 franconoero.com Rob Pruitt to 24 Apr Gianni Dessì to 27 May

Galleria Franco soffiantino Via Rossini 23 10124 Turin T +39 01183 7743 francosoffiantino.it Josh Tonsfeldt: 4:Cat-Cos to 1 May Galleria Massimo de carlo via Giovanni Ventura 5 20135 Milan T+39 02 70 00 39 87 massimodecarlo.it Sol Lewitt to 13 Mar Galleria Lorcan O’Neill Via Orti d’Alibert 1e 00165 Rome T +39 06 68 892 980 lorcanoneill.com Tracey Emin to 30 Mar GALLERIA PACK Foro Bonaparte, 60 20121 Milan T +39 (0)286 996 395 galleriapack.com Oleg Kulik: Deep into Russia to 17 Apr MiArt International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair miart.it 26–29 March Monica De Cardenas Via Francesco Vigano’ 4 20124 Milan T+39 02 29010068 monicadecardenas.com Stephan Balkenhol to 3 Apr Prometeogallery Via Giovanni Ventura 3 20134 Milan T+39 02 2692 4450 prometeogallery.com Giuseppe Stampone Riccardo Crespi via Mellerio n° 1 20123 Milano T +39 02 89072491 riccardocrespi.com Shin Il Kim to 2 Apr

Villa Giulia Verbania Corso Zanitello 8 Verbania T +39 0323 557691 craavillagiulia.com Masbedo to 30 May FRANCE Fondation Cartier 261 Boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris T +33 1 42 18 56 50 fondation.cartier.com Beat Takeshi Kitano to 12 Sep Fondation TUCK Chateau de Vert-Mont, Fondation Tuck Avenue Tuck Stell, Rueil-Malmaison T +33 681 42 24 78 Lionel Estève to 18 April Galerie Almine Rech 19, rue de Saintonge 75003 Paris Tel +33 1 45 83 71 90 galeriealminerech.com Tsuruko Yamazaki to 30 Apr Galleria Continua Le Moulin (Paris) 46, rue de la Ferté Gaucher 77169 Boissy-le-Châtel Seine-et-Marne T +33 1 64 20 39 50 galleriacontinua.com Sphères 2009 to 30 May Galerie Laurent Godin 5, rue du Grenier St Lazare 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 71 10 66 laurentgodin.com Rajak Ohanian to 27 Mar Galerie Lelong Paris 13, rue de Téhéran 75008 Paris T +33 1 45 63 13 19 Open Tues–Fri 10:30–6 Sat 2–6:30 galerie-lelong.com Konrad Klapheck to 27 Mar

listings: museums and galleries

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin 76, rue de Turenne 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 16 79 79 galerieperrotin.com Peter Coffin: The Colours Are Bright, Daniel Arsham: Animal Architecture to 7 May Galerie ThaddAeus Ropac 7, rue de Saintonge 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 72 99 00 ropac.net Ali Banisadr/Infinite Fold (Group Show) to 13 Mar Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: The Flying Paintings to 17 Apr MYRVOLD > MYWORLD PIA MYRVOLD 15 rue Sambre et Meuse 75010 Paris T +33607968552 by appointment pia-myrvold.com galleri-a.no Galeri A Oslo to 6 Apr SPAIN CAC Malaga C/ Alemania, s/n 29001-Málaga T +34 952 12 00 55 cacmalaga.org Galeria Elba Benitez San Lorenzo 11 28004 Madrid T +34 91 308 0468 elbabenitez.com GALERIA HELGA de ALVEAR c/ Doctor Fourquet 12 28012 Madrid T +34 91 468 0506 helgadealvear.com Ettore Spalletti/Marcel Dzama to 13 Mar Jane &Louise Wilson/ Callum Innes to 22 May Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial Los Prados, 121 33394 Gijón T +34 985 133 431 Open Wed–Mon 12–8 laboralcentrodearte.org

MUSAC – Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Castilla y Leon Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 24008 León T +34 987 09 00 00 musac.es Yorgos Sapountzis to 28 Mar MALTA Jason Lu Portobello Court St. Teresa Square Marsascala T +356 7933 3338 jasonlu.com PORTUGAL Cristina Guerra Rua Santo Antonio à Estrela 1350-291 Lisbon T +351 (0)21 395 95 59 cristinaguerra.com Turkey DIRIMART Abdi İpekçi Cad. 7/4 34367,Nişantaşı, Istanbul Open Mon–Sat 10–7 T +90 212 291 34 34 Dirmart.org Exhibit at The Armory Show 4–7 Mar Exhibit at Art Dubai 17–20 Mar Japan KAIKAI KIKI GALLERY Motoazabu Crest Bldg. B1F 2-3-30 Motoazabu Minato-ku Tokyo 106-0046 T +816 823 6038 Open Tues–Sat 11–19 kaikaikiki.co.jp Scai the Bathhouse Kashiwayu-Ato 6-1-23 Yanaka, Taito-ku Tokyo 110-0001 T +813 3821 1144 scaithebathhouse.com

Saudi arabia athr gallery Fifth floor business center wing B, Serafi mega mall Prince Mohammed Abdul Aziz, Tahlia T +966 2 2845009 athrart.com Exhibit at Art Dubai to 20 Mar United Arab Emirates Carbon 12 Dubai A1 Quoz 1, Street 8 Alserkal Avenue, Warehouse d37 Dubai T +971 50 464 4 392 carbon12dubai.com info@ carbon12dubai.com Open Sun–Thu 12–7 Sara Rahbar: Recent works Whatever we had to lose we lost, and in the moonless sky we marched to 20 Apr b21 Gallery Al Serkal Avenue 17, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE Po Box 18217 T +97 (0) 4 340 3965 Open Sun – Sat 10 - 7 [email protected] b21gallery.com Ramin Haerizadeh, ‘Shahr-EGhesseh’ to 16 Apr Traffic Saratoga Bldg, Al Barsha, Dubai UAE 6716 T: +9714 3418494 viatraffic.org James Clar TOURISM DEVELOPMENT & INVESTMENT COMPANY P.O. Box 126888, ABU DHABI T +971 2 4061501 Sun–Thur 4–10, Fri–Sat 12–10 artsabudhabi.ae Disorientation II to 20 Mar

SHARJAH FOUNDATION P.O. Box 19989, Sharjah United Arab Emirates Open Sat–Thu 8–8, Fri 4–8 T +971 6 568 5050 sharjahart.org Disorientation II Arts Abu Dhabi Gallery, Manarat al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (in collaboration with TDIC) daily 2–8 to 20 Mar Tarek Al Ghoussein: A Retrospective Works from 2001–2010 to 16 May March Meeting: An annual networking meeting of arts professionals and artists Multaqa Al Qasba, Al Qasba, Sharjah (in collaboration with ArteEast) 13–15 Mar KOREA GAAIN GALLERY 512-2 Pyungchang-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-848 T +82 2 394 3631 gaainart.com China Ov gallery 19C Shaoxing lu Shanghai 20002 T +862 15 465 7768 ovgallery.com indonesia Galeri Canna Jalan Boulevard Barat Raya, Blok LC 6 No. 33-34 Kelapa Gading Permai, 14240 Jakarta Utara T+ 862 15 465 7768 ovgallery.com The Grass looks greener where you water it Art Paris; Grand Palais 18–22 Mar

SINGAPORE GALERIE EVE No 5 Tank Road Nagarathar Building #04-03, 238061 T +65 9099 3965 Open Thu–Sun 12–6 galerieeve.com

ArtReview 117

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Rear View March

Reviews Books The Strip On the Town Off the Record

ArtReview 119

REVIEWS:

UK Earth: Art of a Changing World Art isn’t supposed to mix too well with ideological programmes and political orthodoxies. And yet if any orthodox consensus-politics dominates contemporary Western society, it’s the politics of climate change. So orthodox, in fact, that those who question whether it’s quite as bad as everyone thinks are labelled deniers. Now, I’m no scientist, so like most people I tend to go along with whatever the general opinion is on whether or how manmade climate change is happening. What the hell do I know, after all? I’m just some dumb art critic. But I do know a thing about how cultural narratives are shaped, and what is dispiriting about a show like Earth is how slavishly it should reflect the prevailing narrative regarding climate change and humanity’s part in it. Because climate change isn’t just a scientific problem to be solved by rational technological or social intervention; it has instead morphed into a bigger, entirely cultural set of anxieties and prejudices about how out-of-control, destructive, arrogant, unthinking and ecologically unsustainable modern humanity has become. So while the curators argue that the artist’s role involves ‘holding up a mirror to mankind’, the agenda is actually clearly spelled out: our development of hydrocarbon fuels has led to ‘runaway population growth and activity’, resulting in ‘6.5 billion human beings leading a generally polluting lifestyle’, with ‘the capability to inflict serious damage to our seas, land and atmosphere’. So now you know you’re to blame, go gawp at the art, yes? Walking through this show, then, is like being shown flashcards bearing simpleminded people-are-bad/ nature-is-good cues to how we’re supposed to respond. So we’re initially confronted with Mona Hatoum’s glowing globe-cage, Hot Spot (2006), the landmasses of the world delineated in angry orange neon. The whole world’s a hotspot, see? Everywhere’s an emergency. We can’t escape. Then there’s Yael Bartana’s Kings of the Hill (2003), a video of Israeli men indulging in the pastime of driving their 4x4 pickups up and down dirt obstacles. Look at those stupid macho men, in their stupid gas-guzzling motor cars, driving up and down and stupidly going nowhere, says the curatorial voice in your head. Not far away is a room filled with Antony Gormley’s Amazonian Field (1992), one of his Fields of little handmade clay figures, all staring back at you. I always thought Gormley’s Field pieces were something to do with a vaguely positive sense of working with others to make art, to make something that directly signified our presence as makers and collaborators. Here the piece is just telling us off for being too many. And so it grinds on, each work tortured into yielding up a one-line lecture on something we should feel bad about. Look, there’s Darren Almond’s Tide (2008), a huge wall of digital flip clocks, all sitting there silently until, with a big collective schlk!, they count off another minute – time is running out, get it? Some works nevertheless manage to resist this aggressive narrowing of their more complicated meanings. Tracey Moffatt’s brilliant 2007 video Doomed, a relentless cutup of disaster sequences culled from Hollywood films (earthquakes, floods, exploding buildings, alien invasions) is the fly in the ointment here. By condensing the abundant imagery of disaster residing in popular culture, Moffatt’s video seems to suggest that our fascination with disaster represents modernity’s nagging self-doubt over its right to exist – why else do we so love to see ourselves blown up, drowned, crushed, annihilated? If early Hollywood borrowed its cinematic disasters from the Old Testament, of God punishing mankind, then the cultural narrative of climate change merely continues it: we are to blame, we shall be punished – unless we repent. But in case we go too far off-message, a video-poem by Lemn Sissay hectors us back onto the path of correct thinking: “What if our wanting more was making less/What if all this wasn’t progress?”, demands Sissay, starey-eyed, with all the commitment to free and open debate as, say, Torquemada. The answer we’re given is that this, modern civilisation, isn’t progress. Rather, as Ian McEwan’s poetic contribution asks, ‘How can we begin to restrain ourselves?’ This cavalier dismissal of the advances of modernity is ironic, given that Earth’s lead supporter is GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical producers. If modern humanity is such a ‘runaway’ species of eco-destroyers, Glaxo’s business of curing disease and making people better might surely be a waste of time. But art, when in the service of orthodoxy, is a depressing spectacle. No wonder so many visitors seemed relieved to leave… J.J. Charlesworth

Tracey Moffatt, Doomed, 2007 (edited by Gary Hillberg), DVD, colour, sound, 10 min, continuous loop. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

120 ArtReview

GSK Contemporary, Royal Academy of Arts, London 3 December – 31 January

ArtReview 121

REVIEWS: uk

Hyperborean Manners

Rob Tufnell, London 28 November – 30 January

What, exactly, are ‘hyperborean manners’? Judging from the exhibition curated by Rob Tufnell in the space that he currently shares with the gallery Sutton Lane, I’d guess they have more than a hint of impropriety about them. Among the mass of framed works hanging on one wall of the gallery are a poster from 1969 by the anarchists King Mob, a biro drawing by outsider artist Jack Bilbo of a bespectacled woman spanking someone’s bottom with a paddle and a small sticker by Jamie Reid announcing ‘Last days – closing down sale’. Fortunately, I don’t have to guess at the phrase’s meaning. The press release confirms that I’m not far off, though the actual definition is far more complex. In Greek mythology, Hyperborea was a land of perpetual daylight amid the frozen wastes of northern Europe; ‘hyperborean’ has, confusingly, since been applied both to icy savages and to politically enlightened cliques. The exhibition takes its title from a line in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907), whose opening scene – a Soho stationer selling, among other clutter, pornography and anarchist literature – also inspired the selection of material for this exhibition. Hyperborean Manners is, therefore, at once a shop, a mission statement and, perhaps, a portrait of its proprietor, as befits the first exhibition from Tufnell’s new commercial venture. While three walls are given over to, respectively, faux-agitprop posters by Art & Language, screenprints from Eduardo Paolozzi’s portfolio Moonstrips Empire News (1967) and an alphabet designed by Anton Beecke formed of contorting nude women, the most interesting corners of the show contain curios both surprising and paradoxical. In a central vitrine sit books such as Anarchy and Order (1954) and To Hell with Culture (1963), written by Sir Herbert Read – who saw no contradiction between his knighthood and his anarchist convictions. Cartoon strips by John Kent (Varoomshka and the Story of Doctor Doolittle, 1977) and by Conrad Frost and Josep Gual (George and Lynne from the Sun newspaper, c. 1995) both delegate political satire (with radically different aims) to caricatures of busty and barely clothed young women. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s détournement of the cover of housewives’ weekly The People’s Friend translates the title to French, incongruously recalling Jean-Paul Marat’s revolutionary newspaper L’Ami du Peuple. Incongruity, however, is what one expects from a bric-abrac shop. Younger British artists Ruth Ewan and Mike Cooter rub shoulders with more established figures such as David Musgrave and John Stezaker. Elsewhere, a FedExed and smashed mirror sculpture by Los Angeles-based Walead Beshty (a genuinely uncomfortable inclusion) is placed close to work by master potter Bernard Leach. The lithograph of Leach’s Fish Vase (1974) apparently stood in for ‘a dingy blue china bowl’ in Conrad’s shop window, and demonstrates that when surrounded by framed and for-sale icons of dissent, such a conservative gesture can be equally defiant. Jonathan Griffin

King Mob, untitled poster, 1969, silkscreen print on paper

122 ArtReview

reviews: UK

Ori Gersht

Places That Were Not

Evaders, Far Off Mountains and Rivers, 2009, lightjet print on aluminium, 152 x 230 cm, edition of 6 + 2AP

Mummery + Schnelle, London 13 January – 27 February

The sector of the Pyrenees known as the Lister Route has seen some history, but the history can’t be seen. Once there were marked borders here dividing France and Spain, and this is where, in 1940, Walter Benjamin failed to cross into unoccupied territory and soon after – in the border town of Portbou – took a suicidal dose of morphine. Ori Gersht’s photographic series Evaders (2009) surveys this dramatic mountain landscape, pondering its literal fogginess and allegorical lack of purchase on historical truth. In Evaders, Far Off Mountains and Rivers, massive blue-toned stone outcrops dominate the foreground, such that it takes a while to notice a leather holdall abandoned on a path. The latter, particularly in the context of the legendary missing manuscript that Benjamin had supposedly been carrying in his suitcase while he fled, is a wholly overdetermined insert, a MacGuffin of sorts; but the image has been drifting into the speculative and fantastical from the start. Its frosty blue colour scheme (assumedly computer-tweaked) is too redolent of Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate meditation on death The Sea of Ice (1823–4) to be accidental, and the small image Evaders, with its single figure amid snowy pines, makes the hitching-to-history overt. And so these photographs are, strangely, refutations of the visual and of themselves. We can’t see the significant landscapes they place before us and thus, it’s suggested, can’t see the past: not really, because our understanding of landscape is cultural. In this case, it’s filtered through both geopolitical history and the history of art. A man alone under the sky can no longer be just that, to an educated audience: Friedrich, and the history of German Romanticism, get in the way. (Other images here contain strong shades of the German’s English equivalent in grandiose emotion, John Martin.) For Gersht, this dovetails with the argument that Germanic heritage got in the way for Benjamin too, and that his fidelity to the country’s culture meant that he failed to grasp the nature of the Nazi threat in time. The erasure rubs two ways, because arguably we can’t apprehend Romantic art correctly either, since we don’t live in that time; distance erases, and fictions create more fictions. The figures in these narratives might not have gotten away, but their afterimages can’t be caught. Three photographs from a second series, Hide and Seek (2008–9), approach another site of disappearance and of fearful flight. In hushed images of marshes in Poland and Belarus, which sit among the remains of the giant forests that used to cover much of Europe, Gersht was apparently seeking places where those fleeing political upheaval would hide. This notion ghosts images that scurry away from it: a lone figure in a boat on a lake (Hide and Seek, Boatman, 2008); skinny reeds rising from water (Hide and Seek, Swamp no. 01, 2009). Performing a dumb tracing of the plane of the visual in the face of what’s known to be vanished, mingling itself helplessly with a continuum of dreamy representations – for there is much refracted Impressionism in these spectral, light-filled images – this is photography as failure, but knowingly so. And paradoxically, in underlining the dense visual perplex that attends the landscape of memory, it is not failure at all. Martin Herbert ArtReview 123

reviews: UK

Lisson Presents 7

Lisson Gallery, London 25 November – 16 January

The now-fashionable artist-curated exhibition format has always been a thinly disguised exchange of courtesies, especially when the ‘curatist’ includes some of his/her own works in the show. The young or the midcareer bask in the glow of their illustrious predecessors, inscribing themselves in passing in the great narrative of art history (see for example Mark Wallinger’s The Russian Linesman at London’s Hayward last year), while the elders (think Richard Wentworth’s Boule to Braid at the Lisson Gallery last summer) reaffirm their ‘edge’ by endorsing the up-and-coming. In a commercial context, the format also allows the gallery to introduce a potential stable of artists to collectors without the financial risk of granting solo shows. So good is the system, in fact, that it is now considered enough to justify an exhibition; it seems to magically guarantee any show – at least in the organisers’ eyes – some sort of coherence. The works in Lisson Presents 7 have been selected from the Lisson’s exhibition history by Brooklyn-based artist Cory Arcangel, and the press release waffles about ‘a system of loose associations’, making not even the pretence of a curatorial strategy. What’s left, then, is a string of artworks doing no more together than celebrating, with a disconcerting lack of self-awareness, the gallery’s greats, from Jenny Holzer to Daniel Buren through Rodney Graham and Art & Language (the Lisson’s next show). Thankfully, Arcangel’s deft dissection of the codes of art reception manages to shine through the Lisson’s hall of fame. His Personal Film (2008) – a tongue-in-cheek take on experimental moviemaking, realised with snippets of damaged film stock – catches the viewer red-handed in a nonsensical exercise of ‘reflex interpretation’, desperately trying to ‘make sense’ when there’s no sense to be made. Likewise, a brash abstract polychrome created using Photoshop’s gradient tool, Photoshop CS: 84 by 66 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y=3200 x=10200, mouse up y=22600 x=6200, 2009, potently stresses the limits of the system-based artwork à la Buren, whose Zigzag for Two Colours (Paprika & Violet) (2007, also on display) feels in comparison like the unnerving stutters of an artist who has long ago reached the limits of his self-imposed conceptual logic. Photoshop CS divulges in its title the data used for the creation of the piece, somehow updating Blinky Palermo’s Blaues Dreieck (1969), a blue triangle monochrome to be painted by the buyer, who purchased nothing more than a set of tools and instructions. Yet instead of encouraging collectors to take ownership of the work through hands-on fabrication, Photoshop CS gently mocks the with-a-computer-everyone-is-an-artist mentality. Few have tackled the challenges of working on and with the digital as successfully as Arcangel. Since his Super Mario Clouds (2002) – a Nintendo video cartridge manipulated to erase everything but the clouds floating on a sea-green sky – the artist has developed a fun and potent critique of the countless programs crowding our daily life. It would have been well worth giving it free rein. A Cory Arcangel solo show, anyone? Coline Milliard

Dan Graham, Model of Pavilion Influenced by Moon, 1988, two-way mirror and glass, aluminium. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London

124 ArtReview

reviews: UK

Stephen Sutcliffe’s films seem to purposely obscure and obstruct any search for meaning. Yet the collaged videos, overlaying visuals and sound from a personally amassed multimedia archive, catalyse disparate but numerous strands in a nonhierarchical melting pot of British cultural heritage. The result being that the viewer is left inconclusively seeking – albeit in a journeying rather than floundering manner – an unknowable subtext. Three wall-mounted DVDs, playing consecutively, bound the space; these are interspersed with three large cartoon vignettes in the style of The New Yorker, in acrylic painted directly onto the gallery wall. Neither the titles nor the press release give much away with regards to the source material, but as an opening gambit, The Garden of Proserpine (2008) eases the viewer into a combined role of cultural prospector and archivist with a recognisable – albeit slowed-down – Monty Python sketch in which the comedians, in drag, ‘reenact’ the bombing of Pearl Harbor in a muddy field. The abandonment of the frenetic slapstick pace and the silencing of the Pythons’s ‘female’ screeching replaces comedic ridiculousness with the pathos of the slow-mo technique. This is multiplied with Sutcliffe’s application of a looped instrumental sample (later investigation revealing the Smiths as authors) and Judi Dench’s BBC reading of the eponymous poem by Swinburne. Marshalled in such great numbers, the multifarious cultural references strangely begin to cancel each other out, leaving mere emotional residue. The subject itself fades, and the surface – sound and colour – comes to the fore. The work operates between the realms of the emotions and the chaotic referencing one experiences while poring over the mind’s cultural memory. A similar diverting division occurs in the video Untitled (2009). The obscure film, in which groups of men and women are kept incarcerated by a mysterious master and his matron for the purposes of harvesting their faeces for food, causes revulsion and fear – the emotional element – mixed with an energetic desire to label and identify this attractively depraved cinematic excursion. As a linchpin, the 21-second Deleuze un Album (2009) is a subliminally speedy montage depicting the French philosopher’s likeness. It’s a neat directional trick to fast-track the mind to the philosopher’s writing on cinema. Sutcliffe places his collages not as self-contained instigators of memory, ascertained individually, but as a mash of iconography that is of the universe itself. There falls then a parallel between the surface of Sutcliffe’s work and the Deleuzian assertion that all images are mere light-movement of themselves, the body included. The debasement of these barriers between self and image is similar to the barrier being blown apart in the wall cartoons. The New Yorker cartoons are supposed to be short, punctual laughs, drawn aphorisms. Famously, however, the weekly title’s skits often end up being difficult to decipher, leading not to laughs, but an intellectual workout. Both Sutcliffe’s films and the cartoons destroy the signage that their media is set up to deploy, instead expertly – and as sadistically as the unknown shit-eating overlord of the untitled film – throwing us into a spiralling vortex of infinite meanings from which only the (unachievable) calm of sensual isolation can save us. Oliver Basciano

Stephen Sutcliffe

Cubitt, London 21 November – 10 January

Deleuze un Album, 2009, DVD. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin

ArtReview 125

reviews: UK

Curated by artist Jota Castro and critic Christian Viveros-Fauné (yes, attentive readers, him – more on that later), Spasticus Artisticus takes its title from a mishearing of Ian Dury’s song Spasticus Autisticus (1981). Of particular interest seems to have been the following line: ‘Hello to you out there in Normal Land/You may not comprehend my tale or understand’. And consequently, you’re programmed to enter this exhibition with an eye out for exclusion, uselessness and some sort of (socially) unwanted lack of inhibition (the last being on show most obviously during an opening-night performance by French all-girl band the Furious Golden Shower – ‘experimental punk music in an artistic milieu’ – and more particularly their dancing pom-pom boys). In a catalogue essay accompanying the show, Viveros-Fauné opts for kinder terminology, describing the international group of artists he and Castro have selected as occupying a societal space that is ‘fortunate, if impractical’. What that means is hard to say: on the one hand there’s Charlie Woolley’s radio station, which is totally addictive listening and, while solipsistic, as good as (if not better than) any ‘real’ community radio station you could imagine (after all, it was via this that Viveros-Fauné was originally introduced to the Dury song); on the other there’s a video of Ciprian Homorodean making vodka from human excrement, which leaves you in mind of another line from Dury’s song: ‘And thank the Creator you’re not in the state I’m in’. Whereas Dury’s cry came from the fact that he suffered from cerebral palsy, the artists at Ceri Hand are being socially ‘spasticated’ by choice. Let’s dismiss the (truly lame) romantic argument about these artists being unable to do other than what they do, and in any case this is a curated show, just as much a product of artifice as the works it contains. Perhaps Guy Richards Smit’s brilliant The Jonathan Grossmalerman Comedy Series (1996–9) sums this up best. It’s a series of narrative video shorts documenting a coke-addled, chain-smoking painter turned stand-up and his story of Casino-esque meltdown (a fixation with making it big – from paintings to lifestyle – followed by money, drugs, jail and total collapse) that seem by turns comic and tragic (and reflecting the cliché of the artistic life), but ultimately not altogether implausible and thus not designed to elicit much sympathy or fellowfeeling for the artistic condition. That said, I’d certainly like to think that that paradox is what’s behind Rebecca Lennon’s bright-red Double Happiness T-shirts, required dress for everyone at the opening. Which leads us to one of cocurator Castro’s contributions, a beautifully carved and eminently kickable marble football, just the kind of thing a self-respecting southern art critic might imagine adorning the gateposts of a self-respecting footballer’s Merseyside mansion, leaving the critic feeling guilty about his prejudices, but more importantly (because the world has had enough of critics and their burdens of guilt), wondering whether it’s the artists who are in the spasticated condition or the rest of the world that’s being spasticated by the artists. Spasticus Artisticus At the heart of this show lies the question: must the true artist be an outsider? Reviled rather than respected? Does the former generate the ‘fortunate’ state of artistic production? Or is it simply a statement of the obvious: in the ‘real’ world (that belonging to a normative majority – the one in which certain national UK newspapers still operate a policy of not covering art unless it’s in a negative context), no one wants their child to be an artist, just as much as no one wants their child to be a spaz. So ultimately I find it hard not to say: ‘More shows like this!’ At this point I’m going to bow out, however, because a magazine editor writing about a show curated by one of his regular columnists is about as autisticus as a spasticated artworld can get. Mark Rappolt

S Mark Gubb, …Saves From Hell (detail), 2009, wall posters, dimensions variable, 42 x 69 cm (38 posters in total), edition of 3. Courtesy the artist

126 ArtReview

Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool 15 January – 27 February

reviews: UK

Fluxus artist George Brecht once tried sitting on the ‘chair’ attached to the surface of Robert Rauschenberg’s Pilgrim (1960) combine, only to be reproved by the gallery. This left Brecht feeling frustrated, and so, in unassuming Fluxus fashion, he devised Three Chair Events (1961) as a critical response to the strict policies of galleries that separate art and everyday objects: two of his three chairs being largely undifferentiated from, well, chairs. The later Chair Event (1969) might have varied somewhat in intent, but this analogy points to the inevitable tension that would arise should Brecht’s work be labelled ‘sculpture’ and made the frontispiece for an exhibition. Votive is such an exhibition, an eclectic range of artworks and ethnographic artefacts that are ostensibly there to conjure up the transmutative synergy of performance and object. And in fact, as a concept with which to draw together an interesting collection of works, Votive is a beautiful one. With growing interest in material culture and increasing understanding of the performative aspects of cognition, ‘things given as an offering for ritual purposes’ seems wonderfully resonant. But to display the static results of performance, the objects, and to have the ethnographic artefacts lumped together under vitrines is to cast a stifling aesthetic web over things. And this is the frustrating side-effect of exhibition conventions that always screw up good ideas by treating ‘artworks’ as guarded possessions. Under the still, silent regime of the main space, then, it’s really the labour-intensive pieces that fare best. Thea Djordjadze’s works (2009) bring together a range of materials and intriguing forms that encourage you to imagine (illicit) tactile relationships with them, which given their unfamiliarity could only be playful. Likewise Richard Wright’s work (2009) suggests time through its intricate Votive patterning, though his work here is not as enveloping or harmonised as those made familiar during the Turner Prize. In other rooms: Torsten Lauschmann’s Dead Man’s Switch (2008), a video installation, records a lit candle on the artist’s kitchen table. At intervals the candle is blown out, whereupon the synchronised lights in the gallery switch on, obscuring the video until the candle is relit and the darkness of the space resumed. Considered alongside past works by this artist, this seems like a very sombre piece, its striking resemblance to Gerhard Richter’s painted works evincing a contemplative rather than performative engagement with time. Chris Burden’s Bed Piece (1972), a Super 8 video of his languishing performance of 22 days in bed, could seem pretentious and troubling in light of actual, unavoidable hardships. In this mix, Chair Event ends up looking quite aristocratic as it presides over the still main space. At hourly intervals, music from the opening night, by Basque singer Nerea Bello accompanied by Shane Connolly, somehow breaks the spell, and Bello’s beautiful-jarring voice brings something to the space that makes things seem, if only for a moment, votive. Heidegger could suggest that music lends to an ‘openness of being’; it’s a shame that in contrast visual art remains so predisposed, so untouchable. James Clegg

CCA, Glasgow 5 December – 30 January

Torsten Lauschmann, Dead Man’s Switch, 2008 (installation view)

ArtReview 127

REVIEWS:

USA Paul Chan

Sade for Sade’s Sake

Greene Naftali, New York 22 October – 5 December

Dense, multivalent and open-ended, Paul Chan’s installation Sade for Sade’s Sake is as close as the artist has yet come to teasing sexuality, politics and poetry, the issues which drive his work, into a morality play of Wagnerian proportions. At its core is a five hour and forty-five minute digital projection, first screened during last summer’s Venice Biennale, from which the show takes its title. Based on the Marquis de Sade’s systematic catalogue of depravity and ecstasy, The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), and on the artist’s wide-ranging study of the entwined histories of pornography and art, the piece depicts silhouettes in complex scenes of sexual and social congress. As the orgies progress, rectangles recalling paintings and shadows in the form of classical and contemporary sculptures – including Jeff Koons’s iconic Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) – float by, occasionally blotting out the action in a riot of pulsing geometries. Wires suspended from the gallery’s ceiling link the video projectors to large drawings of fonts designed by Chan, which lean against the walls of an adjacent room and whose letters and numbers are transformed into rhythmic, often sexually urgent phrases, reflecting the ‘personalities’ of, among others, St Paul, Monica Lewinsky, George W. Bush and various characters from Sade’s writing. A public computer in yet another room, and again connected by drooping wires to the video, allows viewers to experiment with these transformations (they are also available for download at Chan’s website, nationalphilistine.com/oh/). My family name, for example, became, ‘The cum being delicious, in soul’, when rendered after St Paul; and ‘For purity repeatedly rob, mutilate’ after the last president. Just as the image of Michael Jackson and his pet chimp are an obvious swipe at the continuum between eroticism, aesthetics and celebrity in contemporary society (both given Jackson’s history of perversity and Koons’s paintings depicting himself in flagrante with his then-wife, the Italian pornstar La Cicciolina), the fonts, rich in references to moral equivalency, torture and blinding lust, obviously indict the abuses of power and misuses of language perpetrated by the Clinton and Bush administrations. But the poetically urgent transformations the fonts achieve, and the abstract, shadow-like quality of the projection, which resemble the idealised space of the sacra conversazione, suggest that Chan is pursuing other, more allegorical, equations. As indicated in a small drawing hanging near the font studies, The 120 Days of Sodom is a mirror of our own time. Dominating all is war. On one side stand the exhausted masses; on the other, those who profit from conflict and use their gains to indulge their sexual predilections on victims selected from the impoverished. A study in both sexual classification and social dysfunction, the book explores and celebrates desire, plumbing the complex relationships between the libido, class, politics, morality and personal agency. What is shocking about Sade, and engaging in Chan’s fonts, is that both works create poetry from universal, often base, desires and, in Sade’s case, push them to repugnant and often revelatory extremes. Chan has referred to art as the plenipotentiary of freedom, and given the title of his show (and its retooling of the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’), it must be taken as a challenge both to embrace art’s ability to reveal complex, and often universal, meaning and to practise the ideals implied by our constitutional commitment to freedom of expression even when, as in Sade’s case, the majority may find the results offensive. Those very familiar with the artist’s work may see a parallel between the Marquis and Lynne Stewart, the politically active lawyer convicted of passing messages from her client, the radical cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, to his followers in Egypt. Stewart and her interest in poetry are the subjects of a 2006 video by Chan, and she stands, for the political left, as an example of government abuse of the rights to free speech and confidential legal council. But where Sade’s language renders even the most vile sexual acts seductive, and Stewart’s readings shimmer with emotion, Chan’s work is often passionless and stiff. While the font studies, with their scumbled letters, cross-outs and drips of ink, have compositional rhythms which complement their poetic cadences, many of the smaller drawings included in the show, which show outlines of figures dematerialising in sexual embraces, are too evidently figural. They blunt the force of the fonts, whose strength lies in their transformation of the physical into aesthetically and sexually potent poetry. So too the video, with its shaded naked humans shaking repetitively as they pursue their pleasures, quickly becomes dull. What is most successful in the exhibition, the drooping wires uniting the gallery in an abstract skein and the word-based evocations of complex and layered content, suggest that Chan is more successful here as a poet than as a visual artist. Joshua Mack

Sade for Sade’s Sake, 2009 (installation view), digital projection, 5 hr 45 min, looped. Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

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Sites of Latin American Abstraction

Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach 8 November – 24 January

In Sites of Latin American Abstraction: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, curator Juan Ledezma stages an impressive corrective, going a good ways towards remedying the short shrift too often given to the wealth and range of innovation that characterised the development of geometric abstraction in Latin America between the 1930s and 70s. The exhibition establishes a politicised understanding of how the region’s pursuit of abstraction came out of a shared utopian project to forge a new collective cultural identity based on modernist principles that coincided with Latin America’s shift towards large-scale urbanisation, industrialisation and social reconstruction in the years following the Second World War. In other words, it elucidates this branch of modernist abstraction as the direct aesthetic and ideological offspring of Russian Constructivism. Positing a critique of public space as one of the multifaceted movement’s primary concerns, Ledezma juxtaposes formal resonances between the graphic simplicity of mid-century urban and architectural photography with the related modular and rectilinear logic of contemporaneous painting, drawing and sculpture. Put into conversation with Window (c. 1945), an abstracted black-and-white photograph by Thomaz Farkas of pleated curtains striated by window mullions, the tweaked grid that loosely structures Hélio Oiticica’s gouache painting on cardboard Metaesquema 225 (Metastructure 225) (1957) or systematises Gego’s hanging wire-matrix constructions can readily be seen to embody the lilting energy and expansive organisation of a city plan. Gregorio Vardanega’s kinetic light construction Multiplication Electronique III (1966) resembles a modernist apartment block with lights going on and off in its grid of square cells. Notions of art as social intervention within the public sphere thematise the exhibition’s display of 150 works, drawn, in a range of media, from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection. The wide selection represents more than 80 artists who pioneered various forms of regional modernism in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela. The sheer number of compelling lesser-known artists introduced here comes as a revelation. In addition to such celebrated figures as Lucio Fontana, Lygia Clark, Gego, Mira Schendel and Oiticica, there are many more unfamiliar names to be discovered and relished, such as Waldemar Cordeiro, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Carmen Herrera, Judith Lauand, Nelson Leirner, Anna Maria Maiolino and Lidy Prati, among others. It is particularly exciting to view the significant contributions of women artists featured prominently throughout, from the several small hinged aluminium Bichos (Animals) Clark constructed in 1960, to Lygia Pape’s glinting perspectival installation Ttéia (1976–2004), made up of ascending and receding rows of fine gold wire pulled parallel and taut between two corner walls. Perhaps one of the show’s strangest, and consequently strongest, paintings (and the only one to evince what could be termed feminine abstraction) is Prati’s Untitled (1945), in which six blue, green and purple yonic lozenges with central slits and dark cores float over a white ground like hovering saucers or vaginal amoeboids – and this at least 25 years before Judy Chicago helped spearhead central-core imagery in American feminist art. The striking combination of playful formal experimentation and rigorous social critique of Sites of Latin American Abstraction makes this exhibition not only relevant but important. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Sites of Latin American Abstraction, 2009 (installation view). Photo: Jon Endow. Courtesy MOLAA Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach

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reviews: Usa

Sean Duffy’s mixture of standalone sculpture and installation is the production of a pop-culture tinkerer, a hybrid mechanic shop/ record store/basement of clumsy but slightly endearing little fantasies constructed completely out of the things a tinkerer loves – mostly, in this instance, records, album covers, turntables and rock memorabilia. Duffy positions himself amid an artworld full of such things, an artworld where Dave Muller shreds album covers and charts rock history, where Dan Graham does rock documentaries, where Richard Prince worships muscle-car movies and big-breasted pinups, and where countless younger artists build little altars to David Bowie, Britpop and 1970s punk. The artworld loves music culture and its underground roots, and it especially loves the fetish properties that flow from both. Not that this is a bad thing, but the key feature of most work in this vein is its lack of irony. These artists, first and foremost, are lovers, unapologetic fans dewy with nostalgia and ready to immortalise their loves by mixing them with high-art concepts. Duffy, for instance, Can’t Stop It builds little temples to his idols, elegies to times gone by. In one room, an ad hoc record player with two needles drones on next to a rocker coffee table and two strange pods. The pods (reminiscent of Superman’s infant space vessel from Krypton), titled respectively The Tunix of My Apathy I and The Tunix of My Apathy II (2007), are made of plywood and open like two buds, revealing pillows made from worn rock T-shirts. Little paeans to boredom, they are not particularly deep statements on anything, but they are amusing and ultimately fun. Duffy’s work attempts to go into more critically charged territory with large displays of old Dusty Springfield, English Beat and many other album covers. Los Angeles (2009) is one such effort and fills an entire wall of Susanne Vielmetter’s old Culver City space. The albums are printed in off-kilter patterns on scrap wood, registering like the silkscreen fades of Warhol’s early disaster and celebrity paintings. Ultimately, this is one large record store display, a testament to something between the ongoing value of Duffy’s sentimental attachments and their ability to fade over time. It’s Warhol meets Haim Steinbach meets record-store geek. The mashup mentality, unfortunately, does not always lead to fascinating alchemy or even to an enriched playing field for meditations on popular music. Often the work fails to create a situation of encounter for the viewer, instead offering its objects as simply dedicated to parties that are now over. The party was apparently a good one, but you have to take the artist’s word for it. There is little in the show to drum up the spirit of what is missed. The Void (2009) comes closest to what Duffy is pining for: 20 fans surrounding a lamp held in place by a mechanic’s winch; it’s on-the-fly, garage-built funkiness. Its title, however, says it all – what we are dealing with is based on what is not present rather than what is. Ed Schad

Sean Duffy

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 7 November – 19 December

Small Block, 2009, oil paint on Chevy small block engine, with engine stand 102 x 76 x 119. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

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reviews: USA

For Lunch Break, a travelling exhibition most recently on view at New York’s Gladstone Gallery, Sharon Lockhart turns her sociological lens on Bath Ironworks, in Maine. Ringing the main galleries are sets of Christopher Williams-inflected studio photographs scrutinising the design, contents and ornamentation of employee lunchboxes, along with images of the independent businesses, run within the Ironworks, that peddle coffee, candy, hot dogs, eyewash and earplugs – at ever-diminishing costs. By focusing on personal and entrepreneurial initiatives, even as they sometimes fall within prescribed windows of Lunch Break rest, Lockhart avoids perpetuating an ideologically entrenched image of abstracted labour, much as her flat, disinvested mode of photography resists operating as stringent cultural commentary. The current economic climate nonetheless contributes to the reading of the work, and viewers seeking supporting evidence may wonder if the interpretive breadth afforded by Lockhart’s representational parameters excuses her from making more than finely wrought observations. The show’s eponymous centrepiece is an ambitious video/sound installation housed in a hallway-like enclosure the artist built in collaboration with architects Escher GuneWardena. At one end, an entire wall dissolves into a projection surface for a continuous dolly down an Ironworks corridor, which Lockhart and filmmaker James Benning shot on an 11-minute reel of 35mm film and have here transferred and slowed down to 83 minutes of HD video. The camera indifferently moves along its central axis, encountering employees in various lunchtime rituals, who occasionally look up with recognition or surprise, but more often remain fixed on their conversations, newspapers or meals. As if in contestation of the Bazinian realism commonly associated with single-shot depthof-field, the reduced camera pace foregrounds the mechanics of the image, linking Lunch Break to a structuralist history (Michael Snow’s Wavelength, 1967, being an obvious progenitor) inclusive of works such as Tacita Dean’s Kodak (2006), Chen Chieh-jen’s Factory (2003) and Nancy Davenport’s Workers (Leaving the Factory) (2004–) that also share a concern with the representation of contemporary and eclipsing sites of labour and production. Considering that Lockhart’s projects arise from extended engagements with given communities, her creeping, systematic dolly could seem an unlikely means to educe documentarian pathos (at least in comparison to the static compositions of her previous work, Pine Flat, 2005), threatening to dull her characters into humanistic ciphers of suffering and grace. This concern is partly attenuated by the installation, however, which elicits a textured, phenomenological experience through multiple protractions of time and space: the tableaux vivants of employees, evolving as quickly as they form before the camera’s motile eye; a series of field recordings from the Ironworks that composer Becky Allen has mixed at normal speed; and Allen’s iterative, insistent drone, which slips from contiguously suggesting the hum of engines and fluorescents to stitching a sonic seam between the temporalities of field recording and moving image. Like the narrow cinema that rearticulates the architecture of the Ironworks corridor, sound and image commingle in an affective field that intensely – if opaquely – resonates with Lockhart’s subject. Tyler Coburn

Sharon Lockhart

132 ArtReview

Gladstone Gallery, New York 11 December – 30 January

Lunch Break, 2009 (installation view). Photo: David Regen. © the artist. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

reviews: USA

Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture

The Kitchen, New York 13 November – 16 January

Painting is certainly not ‘all dead’ (see The Princess Bride). If we run with the analogy of its being mostly dead, its hope for resuscitation and direction is definitely through recontextualisation. If painters today both benefit from and struggle with the double-edged sword of historical hindsight, they are still doers (and there are plenty of them), but they are wading in a much larger and more unwieldy morass of languages than ever before. It may be that visual cross-pollination of languages is the way of the future for painting; certainly group shows hold great potential to activate this. And With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture seems to edge upon that possibility. The show certainly represents a collection of relevant galleries, such as Miguel Abreu, Greene Naftali, and Taxter & Spengemann, but it is also a very difficult exhibition to take in, both with regards to the amount of work and to the juxtaposition of conceptual and affective approaches that it represents. The many attitudes to painting in the show seem to edge each other out in their competition for the viewer’s sympathy; it’s almost impossible not to choose the readymade over colour-field painting, or vice versa, simply to block the proximity of the one in order to have some integrity of experience with the other. A viewer determined not to put on blinders might instead seek formal associations. Uneasy pairings stand out: two fabric pieces, two paintings incorporating a readymade and, bizarrely, more than one metallic painting — all compelling works but diminished in their splendour somewhat by unintentional companionship, like two girls at the prom wearing the same dress. Perhaps one solution may have been simply to show less work. Nearly all of the pieces are very good, and there are more standouts than could be listed here — the mixed media in Keltie Ferris’s Astroland (2009) renders, in its contrast of materials, a materially scintillating quality worthy of its namesake amusement park; Rebecca Quaytman’s optically sumptuous Exhibition Guide for the Kitchen: Chapter 15 (2009) provides a geometric fulcrum that anchors the back room. There are also some successful pairings that enhance the individual pieces by their associations — the aridity of, and the physical surface tension effected by, Cheyney Thomson’s split-panel Chronochome I–IV (2009) brings a low, restrained but clearly audible hum to the dashing explosion of Kerstin Bratsch’s gigantic drawing Pretrospective (2009), which exudes a dark, unfettered gush of painting, and also pennies, which lie, unstuck from the paper, on the floor. Ultimately the exhibition is a bit frustrating, as the abutting conceptual and expressionist approaches bring out what are at once the crucial factors and the vulnerabilities of each: their potential insincerity. But the organisational premise of assembling a collection of diverse approaches is achieved, and the questions it raises of how curation can best serve painting are crucial to our understanding of the medium’s future. T.J. Carlin

Keltie Ferris, Astroland, 2009, oil, acrylic, spray paint and oil pastel on canvas, 152 x 119. Photo: Mark Woods. Courtesy Horton Gallery, New York, NY

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REVIEWS:

Europe Gert and Uwe Tobias, 2009 (installation view). Photo: Alistair Overbruck. Courtesy Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia

Gert and Uwe Tobias

Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia 15 November – 12 February

The Collezione Maramotti spreads out over the top two floors of a disused MaxMara factory in the Italian town of Reggio Emilia and includes an impressive selection of Arte Povera, several neo-expressionist canvases and a variety of other work from the 1990s to today. Its strength, though, lies in its paintings and two-dimensional art, which makes the decision to put on an exhibition by Gert and Uwe Tobias – principally known for their large-scale woodcuts – somewhat logical. That said, the results aren’t predictable. Indeed, the word ‘uncanny’ best describes the Romanian-born brothers’ installation of coloured woodcuts, mixed-media paper works and ceramic sculptures (all Untitled, 2009), which takes over the entire Pattern Room, located just off the factory’s courtyard. Upon entering the gallery space, the viewer is directly confronted with a group of ceramic sculptures resembling grotesque goblins that stand upright, each on its own cylindrical black plinth. They are crudely made, but the compliant ceramic medium retains traces of the artists’ hands, and so one feels the warmth of human touch in contrast to the frightful subjects. More of these are positioned in the left and right corners of the rectangular room, and nearby one encounters the artists’ trademark woodcuts as well. While these works don’t veer too far from what the Tobias brothers are known for, familiarity with the prints doesn’t mean dissatisfaction on seeing them again. Composed in vivid colours that sit atop uniform black backgrounds, they incorporate folkish characters in frontal poses and made up of abstract geometric elements. A highlight is an exceptionally good post-painterly abstraction riff in the form of the figures’ eyes, which resemble miniature Kenneth Noland target paintings and capably hold the tension between figure and monochrome ground. The installation achieves symmetry and continuity through the linking device of an abstract, Russian Constructivisminfluenced red wall drawing which covers every wall and the floor, and literally enfolds each work in the space amid its horizontal bands and vivid floor-to-ceiling triangles. This wall drawing simultaneously acts as a framework that invites viewers to move in close and grasp a type of otherworldliness best evidenced through six small-scale mixed-media works on paper. Whereas the woodcuts are graphic in execution, these portraits offer a sort of fantasy realism: eyes, beards and funky medieval hats all come to life through thin layers of white gouache. Through its subtle application, a ghostly portrait is created that is mysteriously recognisable from peasant types in childhood fables, or even from popular culture and vampire films. Folklorish subject matter and a strong leveraging of their Romanian roots, though, have always been central to the brothers’ research, and they’re the primary reason that the exhibition works. In other words, rather than attempt to dramatically change their style due to success or overexposure, the artists have chosen to continue developing and reworking the themes that have helped make them one of the strongest artistic duos working today. Viewing their art accordingly continues to be a novel experience, especially when seen in a rejuvenated ex-fashion/industrial plant so far from the artworld’s well-trodden paths. Andrew Smaldone

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reviews: europe

Gracefully and politely displayed, looking like a parody of the handcrafted wooden animals in the upmarket toyshops nearby, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good (2007) is a bucolic menagerie of kitsch that nods knowingly to Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). It’s slyly humorous – witness the cow’s brown streak of funky dung, and the fact that these creatures great and small are supervised from above by a murder of crows, waiting to descend on the carrion. There has always been something of a grim (or Grimm) Teutonic appeal about the Chapmans. They may be antinostalgic, against pathos, but – try as they might – they cannot expunge pity here. It’s the self-pity, perhaps, of adults looking back at their own lost innocence. The childlike modelling continues upstairs, with reworkings (all 2009) of the British pair’s greatest hits, shrunken and made quickly out of any old tat lying to hand. As famed iconoclasts, they are consistent in their intent to trash the more polished dimensions of their own works. They might agree with Peter Kattenberg’s Face, 2009, card box, pasteboard, 1982 diagnosis on German New Savage painters – ‘vainglorying the collapse of teleological optimism, the Fuck newspaper, styrofoam, glue, death shriek of their art is too carefully studied’. So once again we get Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair as poster paint, 62 x 30 x 26 cm. Photo: Jochen Littkemann. Courtesy Ubermensch, the Goya-referencing Sex, troubling mannequins such as Fuck Face and the titillating Death. Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Then there is the Little Death Machine, with its simple but effective hammer-penis-and-brain equation. Sensation, too, is good – mums and dads with nippers Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin in tow upset in the Royal Academy, frightened by the conjoined dummies, the dismembered and impaled, Shitrospective 20 November – 30 January all rehashed in toilet roll. Not for Jake and Dinos the pompous excesses of diamond-encrusted skulls; the ones here are straight out of the joke shop, red noses and snakes emerging from empty sockets. This work, entitled Migraine, is as precise an illustration as any clinical description of what it feels like to have one. Kurt Schwitters wrote in 1927 that it was important for him to have incorporated ‘the acceptance of deliberately kitschy and deliberately weak parts into the work of art’. This seems to be the Chapmans’ modus operandi here. These tatty objects, made with cardboard, newspaper and model paint, are truly pitiful – they call to mind the products of art-therapy classes for stroke patients, the mentally ill or the educationally subnormal. They are abject things, occupying territory claimed previously by the likes of Mike Kelley. As with Schwitters, the brothers have seen their work go up in flames, most famously Hell (2000) in the 2004 Momart fire, here degraded to a rough maquette with billowing smoke made of brown card, Hell (Mai 2004). (Here’s Schwitters again: ‘nothing is lost, even if it was once false and lazy’.) Jake and Dinos are the artworld equivalent of Ranulph Fiennes: they take us to places we are not sure we’d want to go, and wouldn’t know why we were brought there in the first place. Enlightenment is not on their agenda. Rather, they take a position similar to that of 1970s and 80s band Devo: rubbing our noses in our own excrement. They are necessary (inglorious) bastards, constantly reminding us of our contemporary mess, the dirt behind the daydream. Sometimes accused of fascism themselves, they consciously deliver a truly degenerate art that, back in the 1930s, would have had them briskly put to sleep by Dr Karl Brandt and the T4 brigade. As with Schwitters, the role they play in our debased, disappointed world is that of good citizens and idiots. John Quin

Jake and Dinos Chapman

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reviews: europe

William E. Jones operates under the title of filmmaker, yet he is more an analyst and deconstructor of images than a creator of them. He browses cultural – and in particular, film – history, picking out innovative positions that are still significant today. This, at least, is the impression from the American’s first major European gallery show, which borrows its title from Jones’s multivideo projection Discrepancy (2008–9). This was inspired by Isidore Isou’s seminal 1951 film Traité de Bave et d’Eternité and its disjunction of sound and image. Isou (and with him, Jones) calls Discrepancies for ‘an anti-aesthetic of cinema’, comparing his love for ‘stained, gangrenous and infected’ films with the Marquis de Sade’s ultimately perverted love for the disgusting (woman). Jones’s video installation is an interpretation of Isou’s iconoclastic approach and call for radicality. The soundtrack is based on a condensed version of Isou’s manifesto of discrepant cinema, read out by a computer voice and ‘illustrated’ by six individual and simultaneously projected videos. Most of them employ found footage: propaganda films of Chinese nuclear tests from the 1960s, sequences of the Vietnam War, a North Korean mass demonstration. Only Rewind shows footage created by Jones – yet the images of rewound videos of gay porn are unrecognisable and dissolve into abstract patterns. With its aggressive, martial imagery, and its translation of Isou’s destructive impetus into scenes of hot and cold wars, Jones’s reading of the French film’s aesthetic position is rather literal. Jones has a point when he brings our attention to this exciting part of film history. However, it is hard to beat or adequately respond to an approach that has already pretty much deconstructed all of what film is essentially made from. Jones’s works seem a lot more accessible, maybe less academic, when they have a slightly personal touch – when Jones directs some of his attention to social and political realities. Youngstown/Steel Town (2008) is a two-part video projection: Youngstown edits footage from a 1944 propaganda film on the city’s steel mills, while Steel Town is a portrait of the place today. The sequences in Youngstown, showing hordes of workers and scenes from steel production, are short, sometimes looped, repetitive: the film itself is busy. In contrast, Steel Town is rather slow, with long shots of quiet streets or deserted houses, but both videos have the same duration and are synchronised. They combine into an observation of dramatic economic change in the US, without the sticky pathos or dreary documentarism of much politically engaged art. In his smaller, non-film-based works, Jones is almost playful. Take, for instance, his extract/adaptation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (1897) – titled after the French poem, with the beautiful subtitle Automatically Illustrated (2009). It is a text-cum-reproduction series in which the images form alliances with, illustrate or counteract Mallarmé’s verses. The work manages to productively transform an icon of modern art into a contemporary tableau. Altogether, this comprehensive presentation has the feel of a museum show, of a Jones retrospective almost, even though the works are recent. They may appeal to varying degrees; still, discovering this oeuvre in all its breadth is a rewarding experience. Astrid Mania

William E. Jones

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VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin 15 January – 27 February

A True Cross Section, 2008, video, black and white, sound, continuous random play, edition of 4 + 1AP. Courtesy VeneKlasen/ Werner, Berlin, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

reviews: Europe

At some point in the near future, a range of practices, including that of twentieth-century deaf artist James Castle, might be widely discussed without first rehearsing the sensitivities around terms such as ‘outsider’, ‘folk’ or ‘primitive’. This exhibition, the latest attempt to translate into the artworld the drawings and objects made by Castle during 70 productive years, until his death in 1977, in provincial Idaho, seems likely to contribute to that change. Although Castle was first ‘discovered’ in the 1960s, it seems the absence of a nuanced context for the work at that stage may have brought a relatively short period of attention to an end. Now, with a retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Art Institute of Chicago, a promised large-scale show in Europe originating at Madrid’s Reina Sofía and, indeed, this less comprehensive (there are 32 works in the show, including a suite of 16 drawings) but thoroughly fascinating show in Dublin, a firm case is again being made. This time, however, pains are being taken, both in the art press and the retrospective’s weighty, essay-filled catalogue, to distance Castle from any segregated interest in ‘outsider art’, fixing instead on an image of an artist with a substantial, demanding yet open oeuvre. It is not an easy trick to pull off, since the conditions under which the work was created are never entirely separate from the materials on the gallery walls. Profoundly deaf from birth, Castle did not learn to read or write, communicate in official sign language or lip-read, and passed his time making images from scavenged and improvised materials, favouring in particular the use of soot collected from the family grate and made into an ink with the addition of spittle. The bulk of the Douglas Hyde Gallery show features Castle’s soot-and-spit images, in which the artist’s flexible personal language is enlisted to seize a series of farmscapes of unpeopled wooden buildings and possessed trees in monochrome intensity, alongside formal, though often unsettling, family groups in which unearthly rag-doll figures smile threateningly through dense patterns of silvers, greys and blacks. The show extends also to paper and card sculptures of tiny totemic figures, along with some proto-Pop drawings, such as Untitled (Star Brand Shoes) in which the logos of consumer brands are painstakingly reproduced, repeated and worked into vexed geometrical relationship. This brief selection suggests Castle worked through prolonged observation (he generally did not date or sign his work), assimilating moods and manners from the visual clues around him, seeing even the information landscape of commercial packaging and print advertising America as a series of graphic relations. This exploration is conducted with a striking insistence, perhaps explaining the resonance achieved in even his most rudimentary picture-making. This is not simply the insistence of repetition, or style, but of a consistency of investigation. And that, perhaps, is what seems so crucial about Castle’s work: the importance given to a matrix of observation, thought and gesture, the payoffs from which would be available to all. Luke Clancy

James Castle

Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 4 December – 20 January

Untitled (Figure Group), undated, found paper, soot, colour of unknown origin, 17 x 24 cm. Courtesy J Crist Gallery, Boise

ArtReview 137

reviews: europe

Hair is a messy, uncanny, sexually loaded and pretty unpredictable shape-shifter. It can be “…straight, curly, fuzzy/Snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty/Oily, greasy, fleecy/Shining, gleaming, streaming/ Flaxen, waxen/Knotted, polka-dotted/Twisted, beaded, braided/ Powdered, flowered and confettied/Bangled, tangled, spangled and spaghettied!” And on and on, for the fun of quoting the infamous litany in the musical Hair (1967). For this exhibition’s 110 framed collages, all Untitled, 2009, and with the same dimensions: 21 x 29.5 cm (ie, the standard A4 paper size), Eric Bainbridge resorted to a large repertoire of fragmented images of hair and the various surfaces it grows naturally upon: rosy, wrinkled or goose-bumped skin and chins, eyelids, shady armpits, legs. As backgrounds, the English artist mostly uses pages of staged celebrity portraits and fashion ads for clothes, makeup, bags and perfumes, torn from lifestyle magazines and often retaining a morsel of a recognisable logo or title. Occasionally he employs reproductions of single artworks (by Roy Lichtenstein or Katy Moran, for instance). A few of the collages are assembled in the middle of empty white sheets of paper, like ‘primary structures’ floating in space. They accentuate the formal elegance and exact sense of composition shared by the whole series, where Bainbridge seems to put a personal abstract grammar to the test. These collages are also domestic DIY exercises, carried out with cheap and easily available materials – a recurring theme in the artist’s CV. Bainbridge obscures the original pictures by superimposing on them sets of cumbersome cutout blobs and polka dots of various colours, sizes and shapes, including his characteristic sausage-, phallus- and turd-esque elongated ovals. With playful impertinence and a freewheeling sense of humour, he consciously (and literally) defaces all the It faces. He Supercollage hides their eyes, mouths and forcefully cool smiles under layers of unidentified textures, thus masking the appeal of their ‘face value’. It’s quite amusing, too, that it takes only a few minutes and the turn of a street corner to walk from Via Monte di Pietà, where the gallery is, to Via Montenapoleone, the quintessential shrine of Milanese fashion, as well as the epicentre of the same ‘eternal glam & beauty’, minimalchic rhetoric that Bainbridge loves to deflate. While the ads’ testimonials are to bodies whose visibility and ‘neatness’ are extreme, almost obscene, with every inch glowing, tanned, shaved, ironed, polished and heavily Photoshopped in order to hide all imperfections and signs of ageing, their repressed – but here revealed – furry side subverts such sanitation. Seen collectively, they make you think about the story of John Ruskin, on his first night of marriage, finding the nudity of his wife shocking, since his only knowledge of a naked female body had been based on classical statues of nudes lacking pubic hair. Bainbridge, here, is also playing a subtle game of cross-references within the history of art, ranging from the most notorious icon of Surrealism, Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup and saucer, Object (1936), to, say, Piero Manzoni’s soft, fluffy and hairy white Achromes from 1961 and 1962. (Notably, the gallery is also one street away from Via Fiori Chiari, where Manzoni had his studio). Most of all, though, when one thinks back to Bainbridge’s own signature pieces, such as the everyday objects lined with glued-on synthetic fur that he used to make in the 1980s, the impression one receives here is of an artist sardonically targeting his own history. Barbara Casavecchia

Eric Bainbridge

138 ArtReview

Galleria Salvatore + Carolina Ala, Milan 11 December – 13 February

Untitled, 2009, collage. Courtesy Galleria Salvatore + Caroline Ala, Milan

reviews: europe

Michael Samuels

Villa du Parc Centre d’art Contemporain, Annemasse 18 December – 27 February

If you were to compress the space and furniture of an office in the same way that, say, the French sculptor César once compressed cars, perhaps you’d end up with something approximating the works of Michael Samuels: a table overrun by objects, desk lamps inserted in drawers themselves fixed by clamps, the whole assemblage tangled up with various frames and boxes, or with built-in neon lights, or various disjointed platforms. These structures are, however, not damaged by a process of destruction which is indifferent to them, but are instead dismantled or carefully sawed by the artist, then finely glued, reassembled and condensed into slim structures. As with César’s compressions, there is no question of utility here; what is present is the détournement and repurposing of objects that stylistically hark back to a similar historical moment, to the 1950s and 60s, and the rise of consumer society, which would become the critical focus of so much of the Pop art and Nouveau Réalisme of the time. A bygone era is thus frozen in the elegant equilibrium of these dismantled furnitures. It’s an equilibrium which is the product of a human ingenuity that delights in the assembly of improbable forms as a kind of precarious game. In the midst of recognisable objects, colours start to become organised, between the contrasting surfaces of red, yellow or blue Formica, reddish wood and illuminated boxes, created either by a green bulb or by neon mounted under plastic strips. If the furniture’s colours are deployed without modification, the lighting elements, by contrast, offer varying intensities, especially with the use of changing LEDs. In all these structures, square and yet dynamic, it’s easy to see echoes of the work of the Constructivists: Tatlin, Pevsner, Gabo and Moholy-Nagy are evoked and replayed in controlled bricolages. If art history reveals itself through these various references, however, it does not cast a shadow over the homespun brilliance of Samuels’s sculptures, made up of carefully selected objects gleaned by the artist from eBay. Graphic, chromatic, abstract, these creations float in space without being completely detached from their narrative power and concrete presence, in which feet are there to stabilise, lamps to illuminate, clamps to assemble. There’s something here close to the world of the theatre: it’s as if stage set and backstage are both presented equally, special effects are part of what is there to be discovered and the actors are none other than ourselves, the spectators, who move around these sculptures, trying to understand, to enter into the story told by the structures themselves, as well as by the past story these objects contain. Faced with this inspired DIY, the viewer can only be swept up by the strength of this suspended chaos and a virtuoso momentum which is as surprising as it is elegant. Karine Tissot

Plume, 2009 (installation view, Villa du Parc Centre d’Art Contemporain, Annemasse). © the artist. Courtesy Rokeby, London

ArtReview 139

reviews: europe

Johan Creten, a Belgian artist who works principally with hand-modelled and kiln-fired clay, is one of the few sculptors of recent vintage to successfully move ceramics from its second-class ghetto of vulgar craft into the high-income neighbourhood of contemporary art. He works also in bronze (“when the piggy bank allows”, he says), and this show includes impressive sculptures in that medium, most notably De Bakermat (2009–10), a 250-kilo cradle in gilded bronze incongruously perched on a stout monolith, and The Rock (2009–10), an eight-foot-tall female torso bedecked in fragile-looking but razor-sharp flowers, with a door in the back that opens to reveal a gilded bronze beehive head. These pieces fall outside any art canon except the artist’s own: Creten has been creating elaborate beehives and flowering females for the better part of a decade. The true particularity of his art, however, both technically and aesthetically, is Dark Continent shaped in clay. Other contemporary artists deign to touch the earthy, artisanal stuff of this ‘minor art’, but only when safety-gloved with irony – think of Grayson Perry’s crap vases, Wim Delvoye’s shit porcelains and Jeff Koons’s fornicating tchotchkes. In contrast, Creten’s wall works and large standing pieces, while imbued with wit, are decidedly sincere. Abstract or figurative, wildly protean or soberly classical, they are not containers for ideas but pure objects of art, delicately shaped and coloured things to be touched and admired. Of course, calling a work of art an objet d’art demeans it, and in a double sense: the designation strips away the dignity of the work and its potential for meaning. No longer endowed with intellectual value, it becomes merely decorative – a dirty word in ‘fine’ art for well over a century. Yet no insult is meant here, and none, I’m sure, will be taken. Creten embraces the decorative, and this gives a subversive, in-your-face energy to many of his creations. Part of the power derives from the primal pull of clay, which draws us in physically. As the critic Peter Schjeldahl argues in an essay on Ken Price, another clay master called up from the minors to the majors (Price shows at Matthew Marks, in New York), ceramics belong to the most intimate zone of aesthetic experience: people don’t step back, as they do when they confront a similarly sized sculpture in another medium, but move in closer, to the disorienting point where touch takes over from sight. This is particularly true of Creten’s largest and most ambitious clay works here, The Collectors (2008–9), three giant squirrels in glazed stoneware, each jealously guarding – or perhaps generously offering – the large acorn nestled between its paws. Totemic figures, almost Ancient Egyptian-looking, their scale confutes the simplicity of their form, and their bewildering confusion of lustrous, unphotographable colours lures us in ever closer. Predicting how glazes will react when fired is pretty close to impossible, so the dazzling surfaces of these oversize beasts are almost as surprising to the artist as they are to us. This uncontrollable aspect boosts the volume on their physical presence. They don’t so much stand for something as stand here, oneoffs unique to here and now, but more transgressive than transcendent, retrograde throwbacks that hold us in their thrall. Christopher Mooney

Johan Creten

The Collectors, 2008-9, glazed stoneware (production at the European Ceramic Workcentre, Netherlands), dimensions variable. Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris & Miami

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Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris 9 January – 13 March

reviews: europe

Marc Camille Chaimowicz

Secession, Vienna 2 November – 24 January

The building that houses the Secession is a bunkerlike block of stripped-down geometrical forms with adornments of laurel leaves, owls and gorgons. When it opened, at the end of the nineteenth century, one critic described its seemingly dual exterior ‘personality’ as resembling ‘a cross between a greenhouse and a blast furnace’. At first glance, Marc Camille Chaimowicz has brought that duality up to date by fusing the Secession’s big central white-cubed gallery space with some sort of bizarre IKEA showroom. That’s partly because the exhibition features furniture (vanity units in particular), carpets (exhibited on subtly angled plinths as if suspended between a state of art and furnishing – Carpet Land’s dream), painting, a curtain, wallpaper, parasols and collage, many featuring the kind of pastel colours that seem to belong more to a Miami than Viennese art deco. Nevertheless, you get the impression that the Secession’s designers (architect Joseph Maria Olbrich and his artist buddies) would have appreciated Dual (1992–4), a pair of identical pieces of furniture (upholstered in a Jugendstil-patterned fabric), one stood up as a high-backed throne, the other flipped over and laid down as a chaise longue – doer and dreamer, analyst and analysand. Of course, other of Vienna’s most famous sons might appreciate that work, too. As if to support the connection between ‘Secessionists’ old and new, one of the tortoises that normally supports the topiaried plants and their attendant pots on either side of the Secession entrance (but which at the time of this review appear to have been removed as part of some sort of renovation works) has waddled inside the building and, relieved of his or her (how do you tell?) ornamental burden, beached itself on one of Chaimowicz’s carpets, now smugly at rest on the kind of ornamental feature it once supported. The tortoise is not the only alien object Chaimowicz has welcomed into his show. Nestled on one of the vanity units is a Franz West catalogue, both a homage to and perhaps a recognition of the way art is disseminated from the gallery to the more personal spaces of daily life. This theme is further expounded in invited contributions by architect Hermann Czech and artist Simon Thompson, and, most strikingly, An Elliptical Retort… (2009), a lengthy letter handwritten on variously sourced sheets of hotel letterhead by Chaimowicz while on a visit to Los Angeles, in which he muses on a kind of projected Californian Vienna, featuring (among other things) West’s 2009 MOCA retrospective and the historical migration of Viennese chefs and architects to California in such a way as to make space and time seem much like the mysterious eddies that might appear in one of the artist’s wallpaper designs. It’s a pattern which forms a circle with the Vienna Triptych, Leaning… and Surrounded by Chorusgirls and Sentinels… (1982), a relic of Chaimowicz’s previous encounter with the Austrian capital, on a residency some 20 years ago. If Chaimowicz is suggesting that there is no such category in artistic production as the truly monographic (because an individual identity is constructed out of myriad encounters and influences – littered throughout time and space – and the output is not the result of some ‘shazam!’ moment), it’s ultimately balanced by the fact that his work, and its display, are the product of an undeniable sense of precision and beauty that’s the product of one highly individual mind. If IKEA showrooms were all like this, I’d never visit a display place that wasn’t painted yellow and blue again. Mark Rappolt

Marc Camille Chaimowicz, 2009 (installation view). Photo: Wolfgang Thaler. Courtesy Secession, Vienna

ArtReview 141

REVIEWS:

Books in 1976, Birgit Jürgenssen took the photograph on this book’s cover, a portrait of herself in primly

feminine dress (brooch included), her features lightly distorted and evidently pressed up against glass, upon which she had written (in German): ‘Get me out of here!’ She was twenty-seven, she’d gone to art school and been told to stop hefting lithographic stones around because “you’re just going to get married soon, anyway”, and she was utterly impatient with patriarchal society. By 2003, when she died, the photograph’s entreaty might well have referred to her obscure position in art history. ‘Birgit Jürgenssen’, Peter Weibel has argued, ‘is the missing link that is finally being discovered not just for Austrian feminism… but also for the international women’s art movement from Francesca Woodman to Cindy Sherman.’ But this recognition didn’t come in her lifetime. Trailing a big Austrian retrospective and a catalogue raisonné, this abundantly illustrated, seven-essay monograph (marking 60 years since Jürgenssen’s birth) underlines the injustice of that obscurity. It tracks a blazingly intelligent artist’s symbolic progress – what wasn’t going to happen in life would do so in art – from frustrated evocations of constraint to emancipatory strategies of self-irony and evocations of autonomy and self-actualisation, and the parallel formal restlessness that accompanied it (lithographs, drawings, photographs, rayograms, collages, watercolours, sculptures and more). ‘Missing link’ seems about right. In the 1970s, the Viennese artist carried a stove around her neck (shades of Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975)

Birgit Jürgenssen

By Gabriele Schor & Abigail Solomon-Godeau Hatje Cantz, £35/$60 (hardcover)

and accessorised her body with constraining masks, spike heels and, in manipulated photographs, breasts-as-biceps in a manner that recalls (and outdoes for punch) Rebecca Horn. She adopted alter egos, wore animal masks and made her body into a ritualistic site of adornment, and the variable degrees of self-reliance, self-distortion and self-renovation place her in a continuum with Hannah Wilke, Maria Lassnig (alongside whom she taught) and the aforementioned Sherman. Jürgenssen was also a brilliant draughtswoman, and her drawing styles underscore the changing emphases of her work: tight and pinched in early images (see the nightmarish Stiefelknecht (Bootjack), 1976, in which she appears lashed painfully into some kind of torture device of neck restrainer and ropes), and opening up in the 1980s into a dissolving and merging of bodily forms in which limiting boundaries feel transgressed. Her Bath Polaroids (1980), meanwhile, with their fragmenting of Jürgenssen’s body in coloured liquid, deploy water as a correlative for the shifting self: one imagines Roni Horn might have seen them. At points in her later career, corporeality disappears, leaving behind the fetish object, ‘the focus of male fantasy’: shoes, for example, with Jürgenssen’s mid-1970s Schuhwerk subjecting feminine footwear to an extraordinary range of transformations in a manner comparable (as Abigail Solomon-Godeau demonstrates here) to Meret Oppenheim’s best work. The catalogue of names with which Jürgenssen’s intersects might, indeed, be one clue to her previous lack of status: her oeuvre adventurously synthesises many diverse impulses and also performs a kind of ethical withdrawal, rather than hammering a single point home. In some ways, her being relatively underknown at her death has a sourly poetic aptness to it comparable to Bas Jan Ader’s death at sea; it indicts an artworld that might have room for a limitless number of male artists, but only a finite number of female ones. At least, in her own case, the glass Jürgenssen pressed so ardently against has finally been broken. Martin Herbert

142 ArtReview

‘if it’s successful’, the architect Cedric Price says of his own work midway through this book, ‘it has the seeds of its destruction built in right at the start’. It’s ironic that a man who was so opposed to permanence should now be the subject of so much monumental edification (primarily surrounding his unrealised Fun Palace, 1961–74, a ideal museum to which Hans Ulrich Obrist and curators like Daniel Birnbaum constantly seem to refer these days) in the artworld. But the bizarre relationship between Price’s comment – an unacknowledged echo of Antonio Sant’Elia’s 1914 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture: ‘things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city’ – and Obrist’s project of total preservation is precisely what makes this encounter such an enjoyable one. This book documents a series of conversations, beginning in 1999 and lasting up until shortly before Price’s death, in 2003. Their subject revolves (rather vaguely) around Obrist’s interest in a twenty-first-century reinvention of the museum and Price’s interest in the temporary, the flexible and the technologically advanced. And it’s fascinating to observe Obrist’s attempts to steer Price towards a particular space in which their interests might overlap (one in which art and architecture should encourage forms of dialogue), versus the spanners Price occasionally feels obliged to chuck into the curator’s normally well-oiled conversational gears. Recalling an incident during which he came across a dressing table that he had designed and built 25 years earlier, Price, who played an important role in the development of radically avant-garde and socially conscious (even socialist) architecture in the postwar era, describes how he found the fabricator’s stickers plastered all over a mirror hidden underneath its lid. He realised that during that quarter-century no one had worked out that the top lifted to reveal the mirror. ‘I always assume that it is extraordinarily easy to understand what I say. When I write it, it’s almost a tablet from the mount… but it isn’t’, is the architect’s conclusion. Indeed, it’s unclear as to whether or not Cedric meant to be taken quite as straightforwardly seriously as his interlocutor sometimes takes him: ‘You mentioned this notion of the menu in relation to architecture’, Obrist begins. ‘Did you mean the recipe or the menu? I mean, would it be like the architect writes recipes? Was this the analogy?’ ‘No, no’, Price replies, ‘it was a mixture… I like breakfast particularly… having crinkly bacon… of a particular form’. Like some Hollywood stalker, Obrist fishes Price’s throwaway remarks out of the dustbin of irrelevance. A sketch in which Price substitutes ‘commonity’ for ‘commodity’ in a description of Vitruvius’s

The Conversation Series 21: Cedric Price celebrated architectural trinity (commodity, firmness and delight) comes under scrutiny, with Obrist wondering whether this was accidental, on purpose or perhaps even accidentally on purpose. Meanwhile Price is mischievously celebrating the fact that his advanced years mean that he can now add the pleasures of memory loss to those of cooked breakfasts, jellied pig’s trotters and ‘Bath Chaps’ (some sort of pork chop – food is Price’s favourite theme). ‘I value my position of unassailable ignorance’, Price says with evident glee when, despite Obrist’s (presumably horrified) prodding, he realises that he can’t remember a word of (deceased) friend and eminent architectural historian Sir John Summerson’s history lessons on London’s Sir John Soane Museum. You get the distinct impression that Price is enjoying the inherent comedy in Obrist’s insistence that his own words should not suffer the same fate. And perhaps that’s where the true value of this book lies – in highlighting the lunacy, or at least the innate paradox, of curatorial or institutional initiatives that seek to set in stone words that were once so lightly and elegantly thrown. Mark Rappolt

Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist Walther König, £20/$35 (paperback)

reviews: books

i have to confess that I miss the prescriptive elements of the university: the syllabus, the reading list, the lecture series. While I can compensate with book recommendations and public lectures, this longing is exacerbated, I think, by the flight into digital that has occurred in the years since I left; now it is easy to succumb to the temptation to read only the things that one desires. Reading a newspaper online, I click on the sections I think will interest me and, as a result, bore myself (literally) stupid. Dexter Sinister (the compound name used by David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey) have, at this moment usefully then, decided to release a curriculum of sorts, under the title the Serving Library. Its first incarnation as a book, Portable Document Format, is a small brick-red plainly bound volume resembling a slim hotel Bible. The first segment is a collection of texts that they have previously distributed online, and the second, smaller one is a reproduction of printed text and image works entitled W.A.S.T.E. Proof Prints, originally created for a gallery exhibition. While the language games and composite texts made of random sentences might have functioned well in a gallery, they tend to run aground here. In the confines of a book, they tried my patience, although perhaps this is also because they follow the more generous writings selected in the first part of the book. These circulate around themes of information distribution, dispersion and communication, and range from a history of the modern American postal system, through Edgar Allan Poe’s Purloined Letter (1844), to Seth Price’s modern touchstone text Dispersion (2002). That one is sometimes lost in a sea of reading material is not new, we are reminded by Robert Giampietro’s analysis of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–42), focusing in particular on one character’s feelings of bewilderment in a library upon finding that he is unable to know what he wants. As a portrait of the period before the Second World War, this fragment expresses a desire for order and a unifying theory from that time while concluding that excessive order can only end ‘in bloodshed’. Rich and dryly fascinating is Anthony Huberman’s Naïve Set Theory, with its neat diagrams explaining the different strategies that artists employ in order to stop the flow of information in their work, so as not to kill it dead. More unnerving is Louis Kaplan’s analysis of László Moholy-Nagy’s so-called Telephone Paintings (those that he ordered to be made by tradesmen over the telephone), in which it appears as though the artist was acting as a ‘mouthpiece’ for the wants of the communication device itself, unable to control, despite his later

Portable Document Format

By Dexter Sinister Lukas & Sternberg, $19.95/€15 (hardcover)

protestations, the subsequent legacy of what Kaplan terms ‘telephone becoming’: ‘the telephone rings, sounding the death knell of the author’. Like a well-curated exhibition, the overarching ideas that are expressed by this collection make their points with a light touch, inviting the reader to connect the many links, lines, inroads, tangles and threads in what is collectively a vast, floating mind living the ‘hovering life’ of the essayist: reading, thinking and writing. Portable Document Format, and any that follow, meet a desire for an editor to draw these threads together. Perhaps the internet has already sounded the death knell for the editor and curator, one that will be heard more clearly sometime in the future to come. For now, however, they are enjoying some days in the sun. Laura McLean-Ferris

144 ArtReview

a lot of people haven’t heard of Anton Vidokle, but they have heard of e-flux, the widely read artworld news service, a commercial project in which Vidokle has played a central role since its inception, in 1998, and which now lays claim to around 70,000 subscribers. The Russian-born, New York-based artist has since come to play an important role in redefining the discussion following the ‘new institutionalism’, that mixture of Institutional Critique and activist artmaking and curating that emerged at the end of the 1990s. Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat gathers essays by associates and colleagues which examine the nature of Vidokle’s recent experiments in ‘institution making’: from the aborted Manifesta 6 art school cum biennial of 2006 to the quasiart school that emerged from it, unitednationsplaza, along with other ongoing projects, such as Martha Rosler Library, e-flux video rental and the current critical output of e-flux journal.

Anton Vidokle: Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat

Edited by Brian Sholis Lukas & Sternberg, £13.95/$19.95 (softcover)

What of course intrigues many about Vidokle’s projects is how they are underpinned by the resources made available by e-flux’s commercial activity as a news service. As Boris Groys argues, ‘today, an artist has to create an independent institutional infrastructure to remain in the great twentieth-century tradition of autonomous art’. And with e-flux, Vidokle has developed an exemplary mechanism by which to siphon resources from one subset of the artworld – the publicity needs of art institutions – into his own artistic practice, which emerges as a sort of practical meditation on the politics of institutional power within the artworld. Maria Lind sees Vidokle’s activity as a necessary working-through of the contradictions that first emerged with the Institutional Critique art of the 1960s and 70s. With artists such as Hans Haacke and Michael Asher, ‘fault-finding in institutions was the favoured method, and it was conducted from a position ostensibly outside the institution’, Lind writes. That this form of critique ended up being assimilated by the institution, she argues, led to a phase in which artists sought to work to reform the institution from inside; but a more recent group of ‘institution builders’ (such as Vidokle) comprise a further phase in this evolution of Institutional Critique: ‘this time, artists take a step sideways and initial new entities’. Vidokle’s recent activity via these various projects seems on the surface to be not so much about producing contesting ‘alternatives’ to artworld institutions as producing paradoxical quasi-institutions that aren’t entirely clear what they should be ‘for’ – but operate as practical deliberations of precisely this problem. Yet there is, subtly, an aspect of contestation in Vidokle’s projects. As Monika Szewczyk suggests, ‘e-flux increasingly aims to be something not necessary different or dissonant for its own sake, but better. What is the horizon of unitednationsplaza but a better school, even an alternate university? What is the horizon of e-flux journal, but a better Artforum or frieze? What is the horizon of the e-flux announcement, but better advertising?’ These might be self-congratulatory pronouncements – who can decide whether these are better or worse? – but they point to the fact that Vidokle’s projects, however couched in terms of open-endedness and self-initiation, necessarily contain the seed of a potential challenge to other, more defined, institutional actors, because, for perhaps the first time, an independent network of practitioners is supported by significant independent resources. Yet while Vidokle’s astute organisational model allows a new sort of Institutional Critique to persist (the production of a para-institution, subsidised by the bigger artworld’s need for information), this begs closer scrutiny of what qualitative difference, what ambitions for a ‘better’ artworld, Vidokle’s experiments might demand. What e-flux makes of its own success will be worth watching as it moves into the next decade. J.J. Charlesworth

the strip: by amruta patil

146 ArtReview

on the town: 21 January

Adam Kimmel Fall/Winter 2010 Casino collection, inspired by artist George Condo and presented at Yvon Lambert, Paris, by models wearing masks suggesting characters in the painter’s works

27 January

Matthew Barney opening, Sadie Coles, London photography karl hab and ian pierce

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adam kimmel/george condo A Adam Kimmel’s Casino collection B Uncle Harry C Jean-Louis and the Insane Janitor D Superman E Lord Dink of Sainsbury F The Eskimo G The Insane Janitor H Son of Rodrigo I Rock Star, the Madman and the Insane Janitor Matthew Barney 1 Esther Joyce and Paul Harte 2 Chef Fergus Henderson 3 Singer Beth Orton 4 Serpentine Gallery’s Hans Ulrich Obrist 5 Graphic designer Peter Saville, photographers Juergen Teller and Anna Blessman 6 Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes 7 Sadie Coles and Tate director Nicholas Serota 8 Collector Dakis Joannou and Matthew Barney 9 Photographer Peter Sutherland 10 Artist Sarah Lucas, musician Paul Simonon and artist Julian Simmons 11 Gallerist Barbara Gladstone and Sadie Coles 12 Lucian Freud muse Sue Tilley and photographer Johnnie Shand Kydd 13 Artist Alan Kane 14 Artist Gary Hume 15 Film director and photographer Mike Figgis

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Thursday, January 28, 2010 17:18 Subject: off the record Date: Thursday, January 28, 2010 17:17 From: [email protected] To: Conversation: off the record

Personally, I place myself squarely alongside those many readers who see my column as a trend-watch, and this month two particular questions from those readers are on my mind. Firstly, a reader who wants to be known only as ‘Hans’ writes: ‘Dear Gallery Girl, what shall I do with my Christopher Kane backless dress with atomic-bomb print now that the winter party season is over?’ Meanwhile, a second reader, who wants to be known only as ‘Gormo’, writes: ‘Dear Gallery Girl, I am an established, well-respected and widely known artist, but I want to branch out. Any suggestions?’ Let me address the second question first – make a feature film! This is what all leading artists are doing now to differentiate themselves from the herd. For instance, I understand that the renowned artist Steve McQueen recently made a hard-hitting film called Hungry. I haven’t seen it myself, but I hear it follows the traumatic journey of an artist looking for canapés at his own British Council party in Venice before, in a horrifying denouement, he realises that the British Council has been scrapped by a newly elected mysterious cultural tsar who smears shit down the walls of the hallowed offices in Spring Gardens. Being new to all this ‘cinema art’ stuff, I thought this was the first and most groundbreaking example of an artist making a proper film, but the burly technician who works for us said that, in fact, Julian Schnabel had previously made an even more hard-hitting blockbuster. Called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, this beautiful and moving film follows a shambling bearded wreck of man who, clothed only in a red silk dressing gown, cannot escape from his huge pink condominium in the West Village. Unable to be heard through the thick walls, he can only communicate through huge expressionist canvases that he desperately hurls through the tenth-floor window at passersby in order to try and attract attention. Finally he makes a vast and terrifying diptych about his personal crisis using only his left eyelid and a brush attached to his penis. And now Sam Taylor-Wood has also made a biopic, in which she marries Liam Gallagher. Everyone’s at it! I’m mulling over the Christopher Kane problem when Hans emails again: ‘I have seen a lovely Marc by Marc Jacobs princess cerulean coat with gold buttons reduced to £350 in the sales – shall I buy it?’ I say, no! Look forward, not back, and instead of that stuffy coat, start wearing your underwear as outerwear (Alexander Wang’s lingerie slips are key here) and mismatch with long coloured socks by Gaspard Yurkievich. Also, set up your own art fair! This is a trend that this spring is being headed by Darren Flook and Elizabeth Dee, who are setting up the fantastically groovy ‘Independent’ that will take place at the same time as the Armory in the former Dia Center in Chelsea. According to my technician friend, the Armory was founded in 1913 by Marcel Duchamp and Matthew Marks, and used to be really quite good. But then the whole thing was bought by a large shop in Chicago, and all the blue-chip dealers went off to a different uptown shop. Meanwhile, Darren Flook decided to open up a groovier fair. Or something like that. Anyhow, the long and short of it is that this year the Independent is the fair that you have to either go to or pretend to have gone to. If you don’t get to go, simply say things like, “Forty hipster galleries is so much more manageable” or “I’ve never liked the Armory since Frederick C. Torrey beat me to Nude Descending a Staircase, despite me texting the dealer to put it on almost-definite reserve until I’d finished lunch.” Final thought for the coming month: nostalgic bling is going to be huge. Think Jo No Fui military medals, Hans! GG

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