ArtReview Magazine, April 2010

Issue 40 £5.00

April 2010

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Justin Lieberman: Not polite, not pretty, not politically correct – a masterpiece!

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Anna Maria Maiolino: Modest gestures, monumental effect

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Jacques Rancière: Art’s favourite philosopher speaks

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Aleksandra Mir: On turning guilty failures into artistic success

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Issue 40 / april 2010

‘I’m not part of the artworld. I’m not involved in the problems and quarrels of the community’ – Jacques Rancière

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The Things That Happen When Falling in Love 2 April - 20 June

Exhibition supported at BALTIC by

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Organized and curated by Stefan Banz & Caroline Bachmann In collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne

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April 13–May 27, 2010 Monday–Saturday 10–5 pm 18 East Seventy Ninth Street New York, NY 10075, 212-734-6300 www.acquavellagalleries.com

George Segal, Portrait of Robert and Ethel Scull, 1965. Oil on canvas, plaster, wood chair with cloth, 96 x 72 x 72 inches. Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya. Art © The George and Helen Segal Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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Contents

on the cover: MING WONG photographed by HEJI SHIN

April 2010

DISPATCHES 25 Snapshot: Stefan Ruiz Now See This: Dawnbreakers, The Talent Show, Ed Templeton, Mark Manders, Pietro Roccasalva, Auckland Triennial, My Generation, Donald Baechler, Georg Baselitz, Jane & Louise Wilson Columns: Paul Gravett chats with Strip artist John Broadley; Joshua Mack deplores the flightiness of American museums; Axel Lapp waxes nostalgic as Künstlerhaus Bethanien prepares to move; and Marie Darrieussecq hazards a cycle ride through Paris The Free Lance: Christian ViverosFauné outlines why Francesco Bonami is no longer the boy who always gets the girl London Calling: Recessions don’t make opportunity and everything is not going to be just fine, says J.J. Charlesworth Top Five: The pick of shows to see this month, as selected by Chrissie Iles Shape of Things: In a new series, Sam Jacob evaluates classic everyday design objects, starting with the toothbrush Consumed: Charles Saatchi’s book, Abäke’s sticky tape, Tacita Dean’s print, Yayoi Kusama’s stools, Nobrow’s new issue, Stephen Barber’s book, Partners & Spade’s photography projects and Artists Space’s print portfolio Design: Hettie Judah wallows in swine design An Oral History of Western Art: Everybody loves Vinnie (van Gogh), but Matthew Collings asks: why only posthumously? On View: What’s with the antagonism in Justin Lieberman’s art? Chris Sharp evaluates. Meanwhile Laura Allsop talks Sicily and cooking disasters with Aleksandra Mir and Coline Milliard discovers there’s no anguish to Anna Maria Maiolino’s decaying clayworks Manifesto: Alejandro Cardenas

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April 16–MAy 15, 2010 534 west 25th street New york City

www. pacewildenste in.com

Contents

April 2010

REAR VIEW Reviews 111 FEATURES MING WONG 68

Age concerns and acting an identity in the works of Ming Wong, by Axel Lapp

JACQUES RANCIeRE 72

J.J. Charlesworth talks to the French philosopher about his unintentional relationship with art

LONDON: A REVIEWS MARATHON 77

Four ArtReview writers ­­ – J.J. Charlesworth, Martin Herbert, Laura McLean-Ferris and Mark Rappolt – take to the four corners of the capital in a test of critical, and physical, endurance

Diana Thater, Wade Guyton and Stephen Prina, Sterling Ruby, Marian Spore’s collection, Rachel Whiteread, VIA/Stage 1, Animism, KwieKulik, Sigmar Polke, Zilla Leutenegger, La Preuve Concrète, Daniela Comani, Giuseppe Gabellone, Walid Sadek

BOOKS 126

In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955; High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture; Reality Hunger: A Manifesto; Hearts of the City: The Selected Writings of Herbert Muschamp

124 70

THE STRIP 130 John Broadley

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ON THE TOWN 132

Julian Schnabel opening at Robilant + Voena, London; Kehinde Wiley at Deitch Projects, New York

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OFF THE RECORD 134

Gallery Girl has a spring in her dainty step and is looking for good times

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Editorial

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 Laura Allsop, Andrew Berardini, Barbara Casavecchia, Matthew Collings, Marie Darrieussecq, Morgan Falconer, Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Sam Jacob, Quinn Latimer, Coline Milliard, Steve Pulimood, Jim Quilty, John Quin,Ed Schad, Sam Steverlynck, David Ulrichs, Christian Viveros-Fauné

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ArtReview

ConTRIBUTORS

aPRIL 2010

HEJI SHIN

Heji Shin photographed cover subject Ming Wong for this issue of ArtReview. Shin was born in 1976 in Seoul and has lived in Berlin since 1998, where she works as a freelance photographer, specialising in editorial and portrait commissions. Her contributions to a diverse range of publications, including 032c, Achtung and Die Zeit, frequently take on a cinematic aesthetic.

SAM JACOB

Sam Jacob is a director of London-based architecture practice FAT and has been the principal for a series of award-winning projects and buildings in the UK and abroad. He contributes to many publications and books, and is currently professor of architecture at Yale and teaching at the AA in London.

J.J. CHARLESWORTH

ArtReview’s associate editor can be found in this issue’s reviews marathon, steaming around London’s East End for a day in February, trying to channel the spirit of Clement Greenberg (close, but no cigar). And if that wasn’t enough, he interviews Jacques Rancière about his new book.

IAN STEVENSON

Ian Stevenson left London’s Camberwell College of Arts in 1999 to hawk himself on a dirty alley named Graphic Design, only to walk away from this world, chanting: “Be gone, airbrushing; farewell, anti-aliasing. I am a man, a man, you hear?” This move to illustration has led to exhibitions, animations and three books, The Shut Up Man (2005), Lost Heroes (2006) and Best Wishes Get Well Soon (2007). 22

ArtReview

JIM QUILTY

Jim Quilty is a Beirut-based Canadian journalist who for a decade has been writing the odd word about the arts and cultural production of the Middle East and North Africa. He’s interested in art’s interrelationship with politics, both in the impact of politics in conditioning the creative process and in how factors of political economy facilitate and inhibit the production and reception of art.

ED SCHAD

Ed Schad is a freelance writer in Los Angeles and runs www.icallitORANGES. blogspot.com, which focuses on general cultural essays alongside art and book reviews. Recently he moderated a series of panel discussions at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, curated shows in Long Beach and San Antonio, and has contributed writing to Flaunt and ArtSlant. He is also curatorial associate at the Broad Art Foundation in Santa Monica. 

BARBARA CASAVECCHIA

Barbara Casavecchia is an art writer and curator based in Milan. She is a regular contributor to La Repubblica and Flash Art, and her articles have appeared in Frieze, Kaleidoscope, Mousse. She curated, with Anna Daneri, the nomadic project My Private, with exhibitions by Gregor Schneider, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Michael Sailstorfer, Pietro Roccasalva and Kris Martin. Since 2007 she has been cocurating, with Andrea Zegna, the public art project All’Aperto, with permanent installations by Daniel Buren and Alberto Garutti in Trivero. 

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DISPATCHES APRIL

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

snapshot

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stefan ruiz

An ongoing series by artists whose work we admire. This photograph was taken several years ago in La Paz, Bolivia, and captures a television broadcast of women fighting, WWF-style, in traditional clothing.

ArtReview

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now see this words

Martin herbert

What’s not to love about an exhibition that uses Prince’s 1999 (1982) as its epigraph? (All together now: “I was dreamin’ when I wrote this/Forgive me if it goes astray/But when I woke up this mornin’/ Could have sworn it was Judgment Day…”) Long ago, the century’s end was the future. Then it was the past, and in between came worldwide anxiety about the Y2K computer bug: a sign o’ the times that, arguably, confirmed our entry into the information

and Piero Manzoni, who’ve absorbed the public into their art, knowingly or unknowingly. You might well be in this show.

age.

Turn up in the work of

Dawnbreakers (John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 27 April – 19 June, www.hansardgallery.org.uk)

employs that retrospectively hysterical millennial moment – and the work of some 20 artists, from Diann Bauer to Ian Monroe, Zebedee Jones to James White – to consider how the threat or wonder of potential futures meet the vantage point of the present. For example, will Prince ever make another good record? (I was dreaming when I wrote this.)

Ed Templeton (S.M.A.K., Ghent, 3 April – 13 June, www.smak.be) and you’re probably a friend

of the artist, a skateboarder, a punk or all three. When not a pro skater and director of skateboard franchise Toy Machines, the multitalented thirtysomething American puts in time as an artist. His labyrinthine installations collate footloose photography, paintings, sculptures and sketches to outline a cultural autobiography that, given Templeton’s subcultural bent, is also a commentary on the wider world, the excluded and included (and perhaps, given Templeton’s CV, those who manage to work both angles at once). Turn up in the work of

One thing that did happen in 1999 was the launch of Big Brother. Reality TV has been a signature of the subsequent era, as has a surge in surveillance. (In 2007 the UK could boast 14.2 million CCTV cameras, 20 percent of the devices in the world.) Half the world wants to be in front of the camera; the other

The Talent Show (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 10 April – 15 August, www.walkerart.org) addresses this half wants cameras away from them.

paradoxical, potentially symbiotic relationship with the lens by showcasing 18 artists, including Sophie Calle, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Phil Collins

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ArtReview

Mark Manders (Zeno X, Antwerp, 12 March – 24 April, www.zeno-x.com)

and you’re probably Mark Manders. Or rather, ‘Mark Manders’, for since 1986 the saturnine Dutch artist has been making work that represents a fictional artist who shares his name but isn’t him – and the

clockwise from left: Justin Hibbs, Constellation, 2006, oil on board, 75 x 100 cm, courtesy the artist; Phil Collins, Free Fotolab (detail), 2009, 35mm slide projection, courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Ed Templeton, Grant, Huntington Beach, 2009

DISPATCHES

from top: Mark Manders, Ramble-room Chair, 2010, 65 x 180 x 85 cm, wood, painted apoxy, offset print on paper, chair, courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp; Pietro Rocccasalva, Untitled, 1998–2006, pastel chalk and oil on paper and wood, 65 x 77 cm, © the artist

John Broadley ‘Does everything seem a little unreal to you?’ quizzes a bearded gent in this issue’s strip, offering a ‘yes’ and ‘no’ box to tick. A certain musky strangeness wafts through most of the topsy-turvy, ‘back to tnorf ’ worlds of John Broadley. In 1996 this Yorkshire lad walked away from unfulfilling freelance illustration and took up a nighttime post at a press cuttings agency. After spending the small hours trawling through every article in the papers, he would bring home dozens of photos and illustrations to stick in a huge scrapbook. His magpie instinct soon gleaned still more sources: old British broadsheets, chapbooks, annuals, folklore, stamps, half-remembered films and TV shows, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious and other master printmakers, and pulpy comics. And from this personal clipping service he set about making pictures, not for a client but for himself. Collated into handcrafted hardbacks in small editions, some as few as ten, with titles like The Twisted Tongue, Pond Life and Dreams of Rotting Teeth, they are about to reach a much wider public, compiled as a ‘graphic novel’. Creating comics was not his aim. “I always find that drawings lose their spontaneity when you draw the same thing again, so the idea of drawing the same characters again and again scares me.” Broadley nevertheless found himself responding intuitively to the tensions sparked when he put random drawings in sequence. Adding captions and speech, he transformed his compendiums of images into quasi-comics, their settings and characters forever changing, from one panel to the next. “I remember thinking there was a certain absurdity already in those three-panel action strips in daily newspapers like Garth or Modesty Blaise, because there is such a limited space for anything to happen. It’s like watching a film in ten-second bursts over a period of a year.” This plus Dada, Situationism, punk and surrealism all helped unfetter Broadley from logical narrative and let his nonsense non sequiturs unravel freely. The more you read, the more his works amass a resonance of colliding scenes, periods and genres within and between panels. Puritan scientists test rats for viruses, and electricity pylons dot the horizon of a seventeenth-century landscape, in his mischievous fusion of associative, looping feedback. “I like the idea that you have a place where everything which ever was now exists at the same time.” Where better to make that place than in the unreal simultaneity of comics?

representation takes the form of a building. Each of his dark, spooked shows maps more of this swelling architecture, or alter ego, and lays out forensic props (raw clay sculptures, dead animals). Given this utterly askew remit and the pungent moods arising from it, Manders may be the least derivative artist working outside the bounds of frivolity today.

Pietro Roccasalva (Johnen Galerie, Berlin, 30 April – 5 June, www.johnengalerie. de) baulks at representation’s feasibility. That If Manders represents himself obliquely,

doesn’t stop the Milan-based artist successfully continuing to fail, though, through exhibitions that ping-pong significance between smeary, slippery, post-Bacon portrait paintings and sculptures such as rice balls, mops of coloured human hair or swirling, space-eating neons

John Broadley’s Books (2010) is published by Jonathan Cape words

Paul Gravett

accessorised with bathetic models of tropical birds. Venturing towards readable meaning and then capriciously withdrawing, Roccasalva is increasingly hyped by tastemakers but well worth watching.

Bonami Agonistes For one seasoned curator, necessity is the mother of reinvention

Bonami, a newly tapped chevalier of France’s Légion d’Honneur, has along with his roster of plaudits accumulated a thicker epidermis than most. ‘Some curators are very touchy’, he told New York magazine in February, indicating that this was not the case with him. To a gaggle of art reporters hungry for news of the biennial, he later joked confidently: “We won’t tell you too much, we won’t spoil your craving for blood.” Truth is, this crown prince of festivalism has made peace with the limits of his curatorial reach and the sell-by date of his once-fresh ideas. Referencing the coming eclipse of artists like Olafur Eliasson, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Maurizio Cattelan, Bonami last year penned a sort of generational coda. ‘It should come as no surprise that what came out of necessity at the beginning of the 1990s after a brutal economic downturn, was then transformed into a conventional strategy’, he wrote. ‘It is a matter of logic – the coming of age of any subversive movement.’ If you listen hard, you can hear a curtain drop. It is also possible to detect an echo of Graham Greene’s weathered hero Thomas Fowler from The Quiet American (1955) in Bonami’s assessment of the eventual cycling of artistic generations: ‘They will go marching off as they always do, naively confident of themselves, yet inevitably unaware of the harm words

‘In theory now you could curate an entire Venice Biennale using only the Internet.’ A fuck-you smuggled inside a bon mot that Francesco Bonami tossed a New York Times reporter in 2006, this provocation expressed perfectly the toplofty heights of a global postmodernism that carried nearly two decades of curatorial authorship. In the lingo of teen dramedies, Bonami was once to contemporary art as callow Andrew McCarthy is to coweyed Molly Ringwald in John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink (1986): the sunken-chested prep who got the girl with every retread internationalist show. Today that is history. But what happens now that Bonami’s breezy globalism looks as smart as a wet patch in the front of his trousers? Bonami’s 2003 Venice Biennale exhibition crammed some 400 artists and nearly a dozen curators into the Arsenale and was universally panned. In 2006 he titled a show of Chinese, Japanese and Korean artists Alllooksame? and lived to work in the artworld again. Now that he is lead curator of the 75th Whitney Biennial, he seems to have adopted a more seasoned, reflective tone. At a biennial press conference, Bonami suggested that “not everything in a biennial holds up with time” while gesturing to a nearby canvas by his friend Julian Schnabel. This statement and others by him have sounded a general note of lowered expectations, pointing not only to a restrained biennial – this edition includes 56 artists, the second smallest cohort ever – but to a genuinely subdued curator as well.

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Christian viveros-faune

they shall do.’ Younger artists at the Whitney this year certainly faced a different curator from the Bonami of old. Gone was the Ozymandias of Venice’s megalomaniacal Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Spectator. Bonami 2.0 laconically titled his American biennial 2010 – just in case, one supposes, anyone got too excited. Times have certainly changed, and curators – and their ideas about art – had best move with them. But Bonami’s retrenchment strikes me as intelligent, measured, mature: just what is most lacking in the New York artworld today. There is, in fact, nothing more embarrassing than a veteran squeezing his ass into some newfangled snakeskin. It is the difference between With It and Rip Van With It – this last indignity being as deadly as a cobra’s bite. A page has turned in the culture. To paraphrase A.A. Gill, contemporary art is like pop music. One day you turn on the radio and realise that nothing is being sung with you in mind any more. If this happens to you, consider Francesco Bonami. Acknowledge your shortcomings, reset your iPod and start all over again – from experience. You could certainly do much worse.

Josephine Meckseper, Mall of America, 2009, video transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 12 min 48 sec. Collection of the artist. Courtesy VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

THE FREE LANCE

CONTEMPORARY ART London 15 April 2010 TURKISH

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It’s been heartbreaking to watch a President with the intellect and promise of Barack Obama meet a nemesis of his own making. Elected to an inspirational chorus of hope and a call for change, he failed to hone these fickle terms into coherent, executable policies. Worse, in a culture which increasingly runs on thoughts defined by the length of a tweet, he embraced nuance. His proposals have seemed reactive, not proactive: his move to end the military’s restrictions on gay service members a sop to liberals; his recent nod to bank reform an appeasement of populist sentiment after the loss of Ted Kennedy’s senate seat to a Tea Party Republican. He allowed Congress to turn his signature promise of health reform into an orgy of horse trading. He has, put simply, foundered because he failed to navigate between the Scylla of governance and the Charybdis of a public which demands simplicity and quick results. Like our government, and our economy, many of our museums have been blindsided by financial crisis and an entertainment culture that caters to the short attention span. In response they are doing an Obama. Except for the Metropolitan, which remains the epitome of the encyclopaedic museum in America, and places like the Frick, which is exactly what it purports to be, most of our local museums lack a coherent shtick. What, for example, does ‘New Museum of Contemporary Art’ mean? ‘Modern’? ‘Whitney Museum of American Art’? The schizophrenic programming these institutions present not only suggests that they themselves have no clue, but that in lieu of defining themselves their strategy is to cast as wide a net as possible in the hopes of dragging in a constituency. In trying to be something to everyone, they often seem like nothing to anyone. Lacking a defining brand message (the market rules) to make the nuances of Matisse, say, palatable to the Twitter generation – or more fundamentally, an idea of how these ethoses might relate – they send tweets and market themselves, as MoMA did in subway ads last summer, as emporia of hip. Doing so further muddies their message and risks cheapening the past, which it is their brief, in part, to preserve and render germane. As in culture, so in politics. George W. Bush stayed relentlessly on message and the nation went along happily, to its lasting detriment. Without the courage of their convictions, or convictions pure and simple, our museums will continue to resemble our government: compromised policy cobbled from the disarray of squabbling interests.

Auckland Triennial (various venues, Auckland, 12 March – 20 June, www. aucklandtriennial.com) has adventure on

its mind. Curator Natasha Conland’s catchall title, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon, might have been drawn from a work by one of the 30 featured artists on her impressive list, Marine Hugonnier’s futureset film featuring a balloon flight over the endangered Alps, The Last Tour (2004), but it aims to present risk and safeguarding as a cultural dynamic to be negotiated. While we’re driven to explore and enter extreme territories, Conland asserts, we also need to conserve resources. True enough. Here Philippe Parreno, Martin Boyce, Olivia Plender, Tino Sehgal, Sharon Hayes and more are pressed to model how that might work.

Environmental disaster is the fault of baby boomers, so try and remember that when you’re

My Generation (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 30 April – 24 October, www.vam.ac.uk). These 200

looking at

photographs are the work of Harry Goodwin, resident photographer on British Top 40 show Top of the Pops from its launch, in 1964, to 1973 – when the music went off, it seems, so did Harry. Here, suspended in silver nitrate, are the Rolling Stones, Hendrix playing guitar with his teeth and a truculent Dylan

words JOSHUA MACK

whom Goodwin briefly blinded with his flashbulb. The photographer was also, apparently, very proud of his Bee Gees pictures, but nobody’s perfect.

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ArtReview

from top: Jorge Macchi, 12 Short Songs (video still), 2009, DVD, courtesy the artist; Harry Goodwin, Jimi Hendrix Onstage at the New Century Hall, Manchester, 7 January 1967, © the artist

New York

Ten years old and fairly solidly established, the

ROTHKO POTKO

INTO AN UNKNOWN WORLD В НЕВЕДОМЫЙ МИР

23 April - 14 August 2010

GARAGE CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

19A Ulitsa Obraztsova, Moscow, Russia Tel. +7 495 6450520 www.garageccc.com

Photo by: G.R. Christmas / Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Mark Rothko, No. 16 {Orange, Purple, Orange}, 1960, oil on canvas, 94-5/8” x 70” (240.3 cm x 177.8 cm)

DISPATCHES

Berlin

“You’re living in the past, man”, Hendrix used to tell audience members howling for Purple Haze (in

words axel lapp

ArtReview

1956 and, to judge from the imagery spread across his paintings, still inhabiting an eternal 1962. Horses, ice creams, trumpets, etc are laid out in thick, vibrating black lines like quivering

diagrams. This prelapsarian innocence, though, runs up against very adult textural backdrops that echo Rauschenberg and Twombly, endowing Baechler’s paintings with an irrevocable tension between optical pleasure, deep nostalgia and loss. Of late, the Connecticut-born artist has also successfully carried this compound tone over to bronze sculptures of the sort Charlie Brown might have made on a daytrip to the foundry. In short, go see. (And for more gnarly-but-sensuous painting, note the latest return of

Georg Baselitz,

Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, 24 April – 29 May, www.ropac.net. There may be

sculpture too, but since Baselitz commented recently that he’d rather make a thousand paintings than a single sculpture, maybe not.)

from top: Donald Baechler, Colorful Ball, 2010, gesso, Flashe and paper collage on paper, 132 x 102 cm, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York; Georg Baselitz, Volk Ding Zero (Folk Thing Zero), 2009, wood, oil paint, paper, nails, 308 x 120 x 125 cm, courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris & Salzburg

Künstlerhaus Bethanien is dead! Long live Künstlerhaus Bethanien! Actually, the death of the institution in its current location will be protracted, but it has begun. Studio 1, the large exhibition hall – formerly the chapel of the mid-nineteenthcentury hospital from which the contemporary arts institution takes its name – is to be shuttered on 14 March, at the close of The Touch of History, an exhibition about the deconstruction of history and ideology. Studios 2 and 3 are showing two more presentations of work by residency holders – Pernille Koldbech Fich & Michael Kutschbach until 11 April, and Patrick Bernatchez & Tine Oksbjerg from 29 April to 16 May – and then they too will be gone. The resident artists and offices will move in May; the grand reopening will be on 11 June. The institution will relocate to a 1910 factory building on nearby Kottbusser Strasse, leaving its original site after 36 years. It was a difficult decision for director Christoph Tannert and his team. Bethanien is a prominent site, and the place has many histories. Hundreds of artists have passed through the international residency programmes. Only in the last couple of years has it lost some prominence, and not because it had a lesser programme, but simply because the art scene has grown so much bigger than it was a decade ago. The monthly studio exhibitions and the semiannual Open Studios events, however, still draw huge crowds. The problem was the condition of the building: it is listed; owned by the district Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg; and falling to bits. Like the rest of the city, the district is poor: there is no money to repair roofs or windows, let alone meet the climate control and security requirements of an exhibition space. A private investor was found in 2005, only to be scared off when squatters moved into a section of the building (they are still there). Bethanien was first squatted (and immortalised in song by Ton Steine Scherben, a famous band of the time) in 1971, after the hospital closed, and the left-leaning local government today does not want to be seen to betray that history and tradition. So the venue is also a political symbol. Künstlerhaus Bethanien’s new location is a collaboration with another investor, Nicolas Berggruen, a property magnate and collector who once nurtured plans for his own museum of contemporary art in Berlin (his late father Heinz’s collection, housed in the Sammlung Berggruen, runs to European Modernism: Picasso, Klee, Giacometti, Matisse). For a basic rent, equal to what was paid previously at Bethanien and guaranteed for the next 20 years, Künstlerhaus Bethanien gets a freshly renovated space of some 43,000 square feet – 25 studio spaces, communal areas, offices, storage and a 7,800 squarefoot exhibition space. It will be a new era for this institution, a new era for international exchange. Though it is quite sad to see Künstlerhaus Bethanien move, and the old building lose what brought it alive, the prospects are very exciting.

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Donald Baechler (Cheim & Read, New York, 2 April – 1 May, www.cheimread.com), born in 1969!). So too is

Inhabiting yesteryear is also the purview of

Paris

previously aimed their video cameras at the Stasi archives; Greenham Common; Victor Pasmore’s graffiti-laced modernist monument the Peterlee Pavilion; and most recently, in Unfolding the Aryan Papers (2009), Stanley Kubrick’s voluminous notes towards an unmade film, the English twins have built up a loose archive of their own: a history of an increasingly darkened twentieth century glimpsed through its still-standing architectures and mouldering documentation, and filtered through the aesthetics of cinema. The Wilsons’ own epigraph from 1999, one imagines, would be ‘party over’. Oops, out of time.

Why not be like Georges Perec or Richard Long and cross Paris from east to west in the straightest line possible? I start with a coffee at the Baron Rouge, a bistro near the Aligre Market. Kilometres of broccoli, carrots and chickens, not organic, not chic, not expensive, then this wine bar, where you lean up against old barrels. The Baron Rouge is selling art this morning: objets and posters by Plonk & Replonk, a amiable Swiss group that plays around with nonsense and penguins. I pick up a Vélib’ city bike on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine. Around noon the Marais smells of spring rolls, leather goods and the saltpetre in cellars. One of Paris’s largest galleries, Daniel Templon, is holding a great show of JeanMichel Alberola’s slogan paintings: ‘Humanity is not starting a new task but carries through the old work with full knowledge of the facts’. Well, well. The streets are lit up in red for the Chinese New Year. I greet a young American gallery owner, John Tevis, who opened a space on the Rue Chapon two years ago. “Paris is the most beautiful city in the world, but why does everyone look so gloomy?” he asks. He’s exhibiting lovely, strange pastels by Jonathan Hammer, who has another show at the Mona Bismarck Foundation, conveniently straight ahead. Rue de Rivoli. Traffic jam. An enduring artists’ squat is still at no. 59, well established and looking onto this (important) street. At the end of the immense Haussmannian perspective, I can see the Jeu de Paume, but there’s so much pollution that I flee behind the Louvre and over the Pont des Arts. The Rue de Seine is particularly calm, not many people in its great many galleries. At the Galerie de l’Europe I stop for a rest and another coffee while gazing at Numa Droz’s uncanny landscapes of empty countryside and winter light. I cross again at the Pont Royale. Courage! A rainstorm: umbrellas bob up all over the Jardin des Tuileries. I click the Vélib’ back onto a stand and am crushed by tourists and their flickering Eiffel Towers. In a bridal designer’s shop window, two large blue-and-black canvases by Manuele Vonthron. Place de la Concorde, I jump on a bus to the Avenue de New York. At the foot of the real Eiffel Tower, Mona Bismarck’s astounding house, thousands of square metres looking onto the Seine. Made in France by Americans: Eight American Artists Breathe New Life into French Ceramics: a show I’d never have dreamed of seeing if it weren’t for Jonathan Hammer. His Button Ass series (2009), 72 kilos of ironic porcelain, swing in the American philanthropist’s old Japanese Room. Full to the brim with art and caffeine, I catch a last bus. Careful getting off.

Jane & Louise Wilson, Oddments Room #1, 2009, c-type print on aluminium with Diasec, 219 x 175 cm. Courtesy Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid

Jane & Louise Wilson (Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid, 25 March – 22 May, www.helgadealvear.com). Having

words marie darrieussecq

in a spin

The idea that the recession is an opportunity for the artworld to change sidesteps the real issue

It’s both hilarious and scary to observe one’s own responses to the job of writing about art during a moment in history in which the world seems to have a) completely turned to shit and b) been taken over by a conspiracy of circus clowns. Oh, sure, fine, you want me to say something interesting about your insightful show of retromystical Modernism/ephemeral sculpture/Indian art now/photographs about teenage identity, or something, right? And you want me to do that while trying not to notice that, as I write this, the political scene in the UK

about even ‘serious’ art, without some acknowledgement that the society art operates in has completely lost the plot, starts to seem slightly futile. So what to do? What’s noticeable about our current moment is the tendency to discuss the recession as a possible ‘opportunity’. With cuts in public spending and even well-established institutions looking wobbly as endowment and corporate income dries up, some would like to believe that this offers a chance for the artworld to rethink itself. That sentiment is no doubt what motivated October magazine, last year, to publish a call for responses to a set of questions under the heading ‘Recessional Aesthetics?’ with such cheery headings as ‘is the art museum of the neoliberal era sustainable?’ and ‘might art biennials (and related exhibitions) wither away?’ These questions have their roots in a critique of the commercialisation, biennialisation and market influence that became common currency within the artworld before the recession. For many critics these are unloved aspects of the excesses of the last decade that few would shed a tear for, and as a consequence, the recession is seen to be a potential force for change, smashing up old institutions and organisational cultures and clearing the way for new forms of art institutions and artistic practices. There is, to be honest, a certain ambiguity about whether the recession really does possess any kind of positive capacity for ‘creative destruction’. Yet even the suggestion that it might be positive tells us something about how confused we’ve become about how to (or whether we even should) respond to the recession. Here in the UK, it’s become normal to find ways to accommodate the effects of the downturn rather than challenge the structures that created it. So, for example, employees are accepting pay cuts for the many in preference to redundancies for the few, while the cuts in education spending recently announced were spun by the government’s Peter Mandelson as an ‘opportunity to reinforce some clear-eyed thinking… about the future of British Universities’. What this tends to suggest is that we have decided that nothing much can be done about the state of the economy: the recession exists as a sort of ‘force of nature’ beyond our influence or control. Not surprising then that the artworld, like other walks of life, should be operating on a weird mix of business-as-usual psychological denial, coupled with strange fits of enthusiasm about how the recession might get rid of all the shit stuff, leaving the way clear for Good New Art to appear. If May 1968 was a words

is now so rudderless and so empty of content that the latest PR shitstorm to engulf the government actually turns on whether the prime minister is (gasp!) a ‘bully’ to his staff! Now that the initial drama of the financial crash has passed, we’re into a much weirder moment where everyone is trying to maintain some working notion of normality, even though it’s becoming obvious that these are no longer normal times. But what can art or culture do about it? On the one hand, dropping everything to man the barricades, in some kind of naff replay of May 1968, doesn’t appear to hold much attraction. After all, what would we be manning the barricades in the name of ? On the other hand, carrying on making, showing and writing 34

ArtReview

J.J. Charlesworth

cultural revolution followed by an economic recession, in April 2010 it seems we need an economic recession just to allow us to have another cultural revolution. Check out the irony! The truth is that to see some positive change artists, curators and the rest of us will have to do more than merely wait for the recession to smash up the artworld we’ve got left, and demand a bit more than the dismal ‘opportunity’ to glue the shattered pieces back together in a slightly different shape. Why settle for just remaking the artworld when it’s the rest of the world that needs reshaping?

Bob and Roberta Smith, The Director of MoMA, 2008, signwriter’s paint on board, 86 x 80 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Hales Gallery, London

London calling

In collaboration with

STARTING THIS YEAR, WE'RE REWARDING THE ENERGY THAT'S FUELLING ART.

The 4 th Enel Contemporanea will have a new vitality. Seven artists from around the world have been invited by seven prominent figures in contemporary art to create a work that expresses the twin values of energy and environmental sustainability. The winning project will be selected by a panel of international experts. It will then be created next autumn in Rome, at the MACRO, Enel's partner in this initiative. With Enel’s commitment, contemporary art keeps on gathering new energy. Why not follow the project at enelcontemporanea.com?

What to see this month by

4 Myths, Legends and Cultural Renewal

Chrissie Iles

LACMA, Los Angeles 15 April – 15 August www.lacma.org

Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art

1 The Promised City: Early Years KW Berlin Until 2 May www.promised-city.org This unusually open collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and a group of mainly Polish artists was born out of a desire to reflect on the possibilities for the future that the museum’s new development raises, in the context of what it has achieved since its early days. Artists whose histories are bound up with the museum have been invited to collaborate on projects that might articulate new ways forward at a critical moment in the museum’s, and Poland’s, history.

3 Otto Dix Neue Galerie, New York Until 30 August www.neuegalerie.org This survey of a key figure in the Weimar Republic’s Neue Sachlichkeit movement is Dix’s first solo museum exhibition in America. Curated by Olaf Peters, it brings together over 100 masterpieces, grouped in themes including sexuality, portraiture and the trauma of war, drawn from Dix’s own experience as a soldier in the First World War, and allegorical and religious pictures, some oblique criticisms of the Nazi regime.

2 Lee Mingwei Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute 9 May – 30 September www.mountstuart.com Mount Stuart’s contemporary art programme, curated by Sophie Crichton-Stuart, is a gem. Each year an artist is invited to make a work that responds to Mount Stuart’s historic house and gardens or to its surroundings on Scotland’s Isle of Bute. Lee Mingwei, this year’s chosen artist, will make a sound installation in three parts, transforming the visitor’s experience of Mount Stuart’s majestic interiors and the natural beauty of its gardens, in echoes of the island’s sea, trees, wind and weather.

36 ArtReview

This compact, scholarly show explores the way in which Germanic myths, folktales and legends have influenced the cultural imagination, from Goethe to the Brothers Grimm and Wagner. Curated by Timothy O. Benson in LACMA’s Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, a group of prints and rare books reveals the impact of Germanic and Nordic folklore and fairytales at a moment when nineteenth-century tradition was buckling under the fractured growing pains of early-twentieth-century modern thinking.

5 Rufus Wainwright/ Douglas Gordon Sadler’s Wells, London 13 April www.sadlerswells.com Douglas Gordon and Rufus Wainwright collaborate for the first time in a performance marking the release of Wainwright’s new album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu. Gordon’s film shows Wainwright’s heavily made-up eye, crying, in an extreme slow-motion closeup that evokes the dark eyes of silent movie star Louise Brooks, to whom the Lulu of the album’s title refers. Wainwright’s live stage presence is framed by his image on the big screen, where he becomes the femme fatale for whom he sings.

clockwise from left: Anna Molska, Placzki, 2010 (film still), HDV, 16:9, 27 min 38 sec, courtesy the artist and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Otto Dix, Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, 1925, oil and tempera on plywood, 120 x 65 cm, Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Lee Mingwei, The Moving Garden, 2009 (installation view, Lyon Biennial)

top five

_

curated by

pawel althamer galerie dana charkasi

martin arnold galerie martin janda

julien bismuth

ursula mayer

layr wuestenhagen

krobath wien

pierre bismuth

albert oehlen

christine könig galerie

galerie mezzanin

blue noses

tony oursler

knoll galerie wien

galerie steinek

josef dabernig

fabrizio plessi

galerie andreas huber

mario mauroner

valie expOrt

mathias poledna

charim galerie wien

galerie meyer kainer

anna jermolaewa

stephan reusse

engholm galerie

lukas feichtner galerie

laleh khorramian

walter seidl

galerie krinzinger

galerie ernst hilger

marko lulic

nadim vardag

gabriele senn galerie

galerie georg kargl

clemens von wedemeyer galerie nächst st. stephan

amy yoes galerie grita insam

_

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

the SHAPE OF THINGS

Don’t forget to bruSh

words

Kurt Vonnegut once said that stories are devices: ‘they can be fixed so they really can run’. It got me wondering whether that works the other way around: can devices – objects we engineer to help us get through the day – be stories? Perhaps those objects are not only useful and beautiful (or useless and ugly) but also provide us with a babble of tales, myths and narratives as diverse as those held in the Library of Congress. To my mind the stuff around us offers a narrative in one of two ways: as a record of the wants and needs of any given era, telling an anthropological tale through their form; and as subliminal triggers to the stories of our lives – think of Jean-Luc Godard’s adage: ‘all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl’. Might Godard’s tenet work with something less ‘dramatic’ than a gun? What would happen if we began by saying all you need for a movie is a girl and a… toothbrush? Let’s start shooting. We’ll put the girl in the kind of bathroom that suggests a classy hotel. She’s reaching for her rubbery neon sculpted toothbrush. At this point we might go all 2001 and montage the shot with the hand of a prehistoric human reaching for a correspondingly primitive toothbrush, a small twig with a frayed end. The modern toothbrush is generally assumed to have been developed in China during the thirteenth century, but it wasn’t until 1780 that the first mass-produced toothbrush was launched, by William Addis, an Englishman (in the intervening years, civilised Western society tended to use rags, sometimes laced with soot or salt, to clean its collective teeth). Inspiration

38

ArtReview

Sam Jacob

arrays that look like slices through some miniaturised communications infrastructure. The bone has evolved into a moulded plastic rod with colourful decoration that seems to herald the stripy paste it will eventually receive. Toothbrushes have an ergonomic excess that warps them into a kind of techno-organic baroque: bulgings, narrowings, chamfers, then sudden zigzags. Their surfaces are sometimes hygiene-smooth, then grippably knobbly. Their texture is micromanaged into a super complex landscape either exaggerating grippability or flamboyantly gesturing towards exceptional performance: Addis’s animal bones as engineered by Chris Cunningham into a sci-fi futurism by way of seventeenthcentury Rome. Eventually our protagonist picks a Colgate 360° microSonic Power, featuring a cheek and tongue cleaner, and sonic vibrations providing cleaning power equivalent to 20,000 strokes per minute. As our Everywoman engages the Power, she acts out a story that swoops in and out of history, marrying prehistoric primitivism with modernist hygiene obsessiveness. Her simulated twig – or perhaps her techno-bone – vibrates not just with microsonic cleaning power but with the narrative of a Vonnegut-esque device-story, as though past, present and future have collapsed into a single object.

Courtesy Colgate

Because it’s not just about hygiene, it’s about creating the stories of our lives

struck Addis while he was languishing in Newgate Prison for his part in the Gordon Riots. He saved a bone from his jail gruel, bored small holes into one end, then poked through tufts of bristles. Upon his release, he started a company to massproduce a refined version of his jailhouse prototype using cowtail bristles attached to a whittled thighbone. We might now rewind our ‘movie’ to the girl-meetstoothbrush scene. We’re at the supermarket, and she’s surveying the armoury of dental hygiene delivery systems. Their number and variety suggest that selecting the right brush will be a complex decision – after all, the diverse display suggests that what she is doing is somehow matching the type of toothbrush to an idea of herself. (The array of colours alone is bewildering – is she feeling kinda blue? Or is she living the tangerine dream?) She looks puzzled. For although she recognises that she is being asked to choose between brushes based on their distinct difference, all of them are fundamentally the same. Of course, Addis’s cow bristles are now tight bundles of super straight coloured synthetic fibres arranged in geometric

boros

gallery weekend Berlin april 30 – May 2 2010 galerie Mikael andersen galerie guido w. BaudaCh isaBella BorToloZZi galerie daniel BuChholZ BuChMann galerie BQ CapiTain peTZel Carlier i geBauer galerie Mehdi Chouakri ConTeMporary Fine arTs galerie Crone galerie eigen + arT konrad FisCher galerie C/o – gerhardsen gerner galerie haas & FuChs galerie Max heTZler Johnen galerie galerie kaMM galerie Ben kauFMann kiCken Berlin klosTerFelde koCh oBerhuBer wolFF Johann kÖnig Meyer riegger galerie neu neugerrieMsChneider galerie nordenhake giTi nourBakhsCh galeriJa gregor podnar esTher sChipper galerie MiCky sChuBerT galerie ThoMas sChulTe soMMer & kohl sprÜTh Magers galerie BarBara ThuMM sassa TrÜlZsCh galerie BarBara weiss wenTrup galerie wien / lukaTsCh ˙Zak i BraniCka

www.gallery-weekend-Berlin.de

Moshekwa langa ThoMas helBig More CarpeTs (groupshow) Florian puMhÖsl TaTsuo MiyaJiMa kriweT Troy BraunTuCh Mark wallinger hans-peTer FeldMann CeCily Brown norBerT Bisky MarTin eder peTer BuggenhouT loThar heMpel arT CuraTed By MiChael Craig-MarTin MoniCa BonViCini pieTro roCCasalVa aMy granaT, ViCTor piVoVaroV MaTThias dornFeld JiTka hanZloVÁ MiChael snow ToBias Zielony daVid Zink yi korpys/lÖFFler niCk Mauss, ToM Burr losT and Found (groupshow), eliZaBeTh peyTon spenCer FinCh MaTias FaldBakken ariel sChlesinger MaTTi Braun Manuela leinhoss Juan uslÉ riCCardo preVidi andreas gursky Jo Baer FieTe sTolTe, Terry Fox John Miller, Mary heilMann MaThew hale JiMMie durhaM pawel ksia˙Zek

dispatches

Consumed

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

03

£470

01

£5.95

04

$650 05

02

£2 01 Charles Saatchi can sell things. Say what you like about the man, but don’t say he can’t sell things. He sold the Tories in the 1980s, he sold the YBA idea in the 1990s. His notorious reluctance to grant interviews has previously been seen as media shyness, but his third book of collected answers to questions from artworld luminaries – flippant, evasive, very funny – seems to raise another possibility: why should one give answers away for free when they can be packaged and sold?

02 An architect friend of ArtReview’s has a son who is obsessed with tape. The resourceful child can’t get enough of the stuff. Well, he’s going to go ape for this: London designers Abäke have produced tape that takes the late Italian architect Ettore Sottsass’s ‘bacterio’ pattern as its outer side. As part of the Memphis Group, Sottsass developed the speckled pattern in the late 1970s for furniture. We’re not quite sure of the use of this new incarnation, but we love it nonetheless. www.projectspace176.com

03 Initiated in 2008 by Ingleby Gallery, Billboard for Edinburgh has seen a succession of artists create works to fill a tenfoot advertising sign in the city. Floating Dolmen (2009) is a replication of Tacita Dean’s contribution, released as a framed edition of 50 and on sale at the London Original Print Fair. Part of a series in which Dean has been photographing ancient burial sites and manipulating the results with paint, the monolithic rock is here cloudlike, as it originally floated over the road below.

www.phaidon.com

www.gagosian.com www.londonprintfair.com

40

ArtReview

04 One of the defining features of Yayoi Kusama’s work is that she seeks to ‘obliterate’ the world through her unswerving patterning. Now you can sit on that obliteration! She of the red and white spots has produced some stools. They are a more understated affair than one might expect: the two versions are jet-black, but for a detailed yellow top patterning; or a larger, bolder pink. That said, their mushroom shape is sure to add a little of Kusama’s surreal take on the everyday to your home.

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 (Manchester) 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 (Gateshead)

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

Supported by:

SAATCHI GALLERY

Consumed 05

£11 07

$10

06

08

£14.85

$1,000

05

and rising

05 Nobrow have been producing delightful editioned books since 2008 by some of the most interesting graphic illustrators working today. The outfit, set up by three friends, launches its third annual magazine at Somerset House’s Pick Me Up Fair this month. The issue takes inspiration from Gustave Verbeek, who drew stories that could be read both right side up and upside down. Like all the contributors, John Sibbick (his work pictured) worked around this theme and used only a four-colour palette.

06 In his 2003 cinematic essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Anderson details how the titular city has been depressingly subsumed by Hollywood, rendered merely a set. On Broadway Avenue, however there are no less than 12 abandoned cinemas, which Stephen Barber documents in his new book, Abandoned Images (2010). The movie theatres remain intact, which seems to lead to a neat circular: Los Angeles is integral to cinema, and cinema to Los Angeles. Hollywood eats itself.

07 New York studio and boutique Partners & Spade stock some pretty cool stuff, and now they’ve published two photography books documenting the minor, overlooked details of their everyday (probably frighteningly hipsterish) lives. I Think I Can, I Think I Can and The Benefits of Looking Up are both the result of religious iPhone snapping of, respectively, urban weeds breaking through pavements, and balloons trapped in the city’s trees and street furniture.

www.somersethouse.org.uk

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

www.partnersandspade.com

08 Artists Space’s 2010 print portfolio, produced in an edition of 100 and sold on the airfare model ($1,000 to early birds, $3,000 if last-minute is more your thing), includes prints by Liam Gillick (his work pictured), Rachel Harrison, Adam Pendleton, Seth Price and Frances Stark, all packaged in a box by Claire Fontaine. Like Gillick’s thinking man, the relationship between production and consumption is key to picking up a bargain. www.artistsspace.org

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ArtReview

MESSE WIEN VIENNA, AUSTRIA

THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR FOCUSED ON CEE

6–9 MAY

2010

WWW.VIENNAFAIR.AT

design

Why most things in life are, for better or worse, a bit of a pig

words

The relationship between man and pig has always been a dark symbiosis. We praise the pig’s intelligence and utility in equal measure. The wily, omnivorous porker would eat us as easily as we him, but instead he flourishes on our waste. In return we celebrate him as the animal of which every part can be used: clever pig, but even cleverer man. The uses of a dead pig go some distance beyond the various means by which we dispose of his flesh, but quite how far is surprising. Over three years, Rotterdam-based designer Christien Meindertsma’s PIG 05049 project traced 185 products derived from a single pig, from pies to bullets to china figurines to photographic paper to pig-feed pellets. PIG 05049 has just been nominated in the graphics category of the BRIT awards (and won the ‘Play’ category in the 2009 Index Awards), and although the book is superbly designed (down to the pig’s ID tag in its spine), this is a design 44

ArtReview

Hettie Judah

visible response to ‘swine flu’ in Britain has been a proliferation of antibacterial wash. There seems something irresistible in the illusion that man can distance himself from the disease of the pig by ridding himself ever more thoroughly of dirt, the pig’s most notorious failing. The reactions to PIG 05049 have been varied. The project is a testament to a lack of waste – something of a novelty these days – yet it doesn’t feel like a celebration. Some have been heartened by the revelation that all the products pictured are made using ‘natural ingredients’. As Meindertsma points out, however, this is a peculiar prejudice, since everything we use is derived from ‘natural ingredients’, even plastic.

Christien Meindertsma, PIG 05049, 2008. © and courtesy the artist

Utter Swine

project about structures rather than graphics. The process of tracking down the parts of this particular pig describes one of the hidden systems underpinning modern life: man has successfully industrialised the most closely allied of his domestic animals, to a point where we live surrounded by invisible pig. Swine are big right now – although rarely having much fun. Musical artist Matthew Herbert is making a record using sounds gathered from the lifecycle of a pig, a project inspired by the very systems exposed in PIG 05049, which he describes as “vast networks of deceit”. This is not his first work to address the food industry – he also visited it in Plat du Jour in 2005 – but he is returning to the subject because nothing seems to have changed for the better. To Herbert, PIG 05049 comes with a side order of déjà vu. “Once again the perception of how our life functions is at odds with the reality”, he says with despair. Exploitation of the pig is a formidable stepping-stone in the route to civilised human development in the culturally Christian world. Pork is a meat that we absolutely must cook or cure before eating. It is literally a raw material; to profit from the pig, man must acquire skill. There is something ancient about our desire to master the pig, and prove once again our place in the hierarchy of the smallholding. In that regard, it’s notable that Meindertsma’s research period has coincided with a rising interest in artisan pig butchery. There is a thriving trade in hands-on books and DVDs, and British broadsheet newspapers have carried manly accounts of bloodletting and sausage fabrication taking place from Axminster to Zaragoza. Meindertsma’s previous projects have focused on sheep rather than pigs – in the agricultural scheme of things, the docile, silly sheep is the counterpoint to the pig. Unlike the pig, the sheep must roam free to thrive. It is an ally of man the gentle herdsman, but less well suited to an agricultural model that thrives on standardisation and control. The fashionable urge to butcher swine does not really seem to extend to fleecy bleaty things; despite its immaculate free-range lifestyle, the unthreatening sheep evidently lacks cleaver appeal. Pigs still scare us: notably absent from the list of products derived from 05049 was H1N1. No matter that a more logical response to an H1N1 pandemic would be the use of face masks in public places and an enquiry into intensive pig rearing; the most

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

NO 16:

The Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853. After periods attempting to work as an art dealer and as a lay preacher, he became an artist. Largely self-taught, he had a short but intense career. In his late thirties he began suffering from depression and bouts of mental illness, and he died in 1890, at thirty-seven years old, following a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Little known in his own lifetime, his work was a major influence on the development of modern art. interview by matthew collings 48 ArtReview

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889, oil on canvas, 61 x 50 cm. Courtesy the Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Gallery, London

Vincent Van Gogh

ARTREVIEW Everyone loves you. VAN GOGH Ha, ha, yes, it’s a big turnaround. AR What’s your secret? VG It’s not so much me, Matthew, it’s people’s projections. AR Isn’t it the powerful structures, the colours and textures, the vigorous drawing, the simplicity, the energy, the sense of pattern, the mark-making? VG I don’t think people are generally interested in that kind of thing, do you? They more want a figure who doesn’t actually do any work, as in something practical that has to be built up, with inevitable false starts and revisions, and where there has to be a certain amount of learning and experience, and some kind of evolved, adult sense of the world. I think they want an ideal, a figure whose golden wonderment isn’t actually connected to a discipline as such. A freak, really, but a benign one – a boo-hoo saint. Boo-hoo – he died for our sins. In reality I paid attention to practical matters, both in the studio, where you’re alone with your work, and in the market, where you’ve got to think in a more socially oriented way, and you’ve got to be down-to-earth. My relationship to my brother was levelheaded. We thought of ourselves as equals in a modern art dealership. We were going to launch Impressionism as a market concern. It wasn’t just my stuff. We were always on the lookout for other artists to promote.

organisation, and the way that, as humans, we’re always looking for visual variety, patterns that have a kind of organic, unpredictable pulse and life. AR You said “turnaround” earlier. Everyone loves you now, but before… VG They ignored me. And sometimes they hated me because I couldn’t be ignored, but I didn’t seem to have anything to offer except problems. I can’t complain. I was on the edge of something. I hadn’t yet got there, or at least I was there but I hadn’t got it across, and in the meantime the work I was doing was very demanding, it meant I had to force the people around me into a situation where they had to be very forgiving all the time. That’s a lot to ask if they don’t know what it’s in aid of. Not Theo, my brother, who was devoted and understood the work I was doing, but the rest of my environment, everyone really, the neighbours, humanity, everyone you’ve got to deal with. They didn’t want to be taking me on all the time. AR Did you really cut your ear off ?

VG Well, that’s the irony. I work away at a discipline and a practice, I try and understand all the angles, I pay attention to what’s happening in art, its history, its developments, its present moment, the issues that count, I comprehend the social aspects and the aesthetic aspects, I get rid of a lot of misconceptions, I understand more and more about what it is I’m actually involved with, all this maturity, I do a great deal of work that actually does embody those qualities you mentioned earlier – and then I become a popular figure of pointless childish sentimental escapism.

VG You see, I don’t like that angle. I had balls of coloured wool in a wooden box. I’d take them out and use them to try out design ideas, one colour next to another. There’s nature, the objective world, your attempts to capture it, and there are the ideas of art that you can draw on. For me, for a short period – a few months, but it seemed like infinity, because I was concentrating all the time – there was a very intense involvement with colour theory. That kind of thing is worth discussing, because in a way these are practical matters, or at least the ineffable aspects of art have these practical counterparts, and you need that balance. I think of art as mood, stillness, atmosphere, on the one hand, and on the other the constructed aspects of that effect. Chevreul’s 1855 chromatic diagram, my balls of wool and my observations in the art galleries – the way Delacroix makes colour work, for example. And my practical criticism of the work of contemporaries – all this is the important thing. Mental illness doesn’t change much, it isn’t very dynamic, it doesn’t produce much, you’re stuck with its effects, inertia on the one hand, mania on the other, you start to get into a bad rhythm, illness followed by recovering from illness, and then illness again.

AR I suppose it was the mental illness and the suicide.

AR You considered yourself a failure.

VG I really feel those are personal matters. I actually feel it’s impossible if you’ve got any history of mental illness to be taken seriously in many social interactions; you’re always going to be patronised. What’s happened with me is that this condescending attitude has been both blown out of all proportion and inverted, so talking down becomes talking up. I’m idealised in a way that makes it impossible for anyone to grasp anything meaningful about what I actually did. It’s a bit like Ruskin: he has a tiny bit of paedophilia in his life story, and you never hear the end of it. No one gets his great insights into pattern and rhythm, into nature and

VG Yes, I was in a mood that saw struggle as futile, whereas struggle is inevitable and you have to learn to go with it. But this mood did me in.

AR It’s interesting you go from saints to money.

AR What would it have meant to be successful? VG Well, the same as for anyone. It’s another difficulty of reality. I think it must have been horrible being Picasso most of the time. Isolation is a necessary element in anything creative. You’ve got to be alone with your thoughts, and the practical necessities of painting involve a bit more isolation still, as

AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART opposed to, say, drama or ballet, but psychologically it’s very hard to cope with the sort of isolation you get from great celebrity – no one relates to you in a real way, you become the prey of your own nonsense, the comedowns after the ego trips, you become hostile to yourself. You only have to look at those self-portraits by Picasso before he died: it’s like the quaking after the crowing. And he must have felt like that inside all the time. AR Wow, that’s a bleak picture. I just meant, you know, your colour experiments and so on, supposing they were understood, your paintings weren’t considered failures and you had a bit of recognition. You could have gone on developing your work. VG I did very good work for two or three years, and the previous work has its own strength too. I’m not complaining. It’s a strange sort of body of work as a whole. But I like it, and I don’t think there’s any need to drag it on after age thirtyseven, the cutoff point. AR As you had more attacks of illness, do you think the work lost intensity? VG It’s a good question. I’ve been looking at this new Thames & Hudson book of my letters, where you see practically every picture I ever did, and it’s not totally even, I must say. There’s a lot of buildup to each good one, less good ones that I needed to do in order to hit that spot with the good one. But that’s the same before and after I started having fits. I think it’s a very powerful experience, that publication, six books, all this writing, very literate, thoughtful, full of criticism and analysis. I love the business schemes, too. I’m always trying to get Theo to do some little wrangle that will benefit us and slightly do down a rival dealer.

I did very good work for two or three years, and the previous work has its own strength too. I’m not complaining. It’s a strange sort of body of work as a whole. But I like it, and I don’t think there’s any need to drag it on after age thirty-seven, the cutoff point

AR Do you look at the artworld now and just laugh, because you’re so above it all, and our problems just seem trivial?

to me, but artists think visually mostly, they just think about the thing they’re most involved with. I agree it’s a bit unusual for an artist to write so clearly in such a lively way as I do, and to be a great reader as well. Especially in your time – it’s pretty shocking how thick they all are, and that’s the reason the new Thames & Hudson publication is so unusual, so unlike a typical art book.

VG Not at all. I’m really interested in your Tate Modern. I’d like to have one of those Turbine Hall commissions.

AR Do you believe that kind of intelligence is really important to art?

AR What would you do?

VG Actually, no. The myth of me as a kind of antidote to the shallowness of contemporary art is misguided. You have to see the shallowness in any art scene in any period and then work at getting something deep out of it anyway. I’m very envious of your art culture, all this spectacular entertainment activity that gets into the mass media, and everyone simultaneously completely baffled but being told it’s actually for them – and everyone’s included, and elitism is over. Plus all the arguing about aesthetics and ethics, and the big spectre of populism all the time, and all the art schools wondering what they’re supposed to be aiming at, and wealthy artists being considered great barometers of the zeitgeist – we never had it so good.

VG Fuck knows, Matthew. I’d have to read the art magazines and see what everyone’s doing nowadays. You have to be part of what’s happening. You can’t be going on about colour theories and the landscape and whatnot if no one else knows what any of that is. I like that crack in the floor that Doris Salcedo did. That made me laugh. I’m not that wise, you know. You might be attributing great wisdom

Next month: Sonia Delaunay says yes to wonky colour patches

50 ArtReview

On view

career suicide

Art produced in the name of institutional critique has become rather pretty and polite. But not Justin Lieberman’s: his reminds us to kill our idols Perhaps the best place to start this text is by stating the obvious: Justin Lieberman has an intimately antagonistic relationship with art and culture. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that Lieberman is a firm believer in art’s classically avant-garde duty: to be antagonistic. What he makes is not only anything but pretty, it is often anything but politically correct, and does not abide by any of the usual niceties that govern social intercourse or artistic discourse. In fact, it is tempting to see Lieberman as a kind of Rodney Dangerfield from Caddyshack (1980), casually elbowing his way into polite, golf-club society (the artworld?) and recklessly hammering everyone around him with lewd and obnoxious quips about their issues of repression, unconscious motives and outmoded Victorian values and manners. But Lieberman is a bit too calculating and maniacal to fit the part. Indeed, there is something cheerfully psychotic about his work and its methodology; it is full of a hammy, menace-to-society irony

be followed absolutely and logically’ – reversed it – ‘Logical thoughts should be absolutely followed to the point of irrationality’ – and exploded it, both on a plastic and conceptual level (Lieberman’s exhibitions are, incidentally, often accompanied by texts penned by the artist, which are less explications of the work than thoughts that motivated him throughout the process of creation. And although his texts are certainly enlightening, in the end they probably produce more questions than answers). For instance, his two-part/two-gallery exhibitions at Zach Feuer Gallery and Marc Jancou Contemporary in New York last year, respectively entitled The Corrector in the High Castle and The Corrector’s Custom Pre-Fab House, took questions of collecting, accumulation and archiving to the hilt. These two exhibitions centred around Nobusuke Tagomi, one of the protagonists from Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), a dystopian sci-fi what-if-the-Axis-powerswords Chris Sharp

reactively fuelled, one suspects, by American pop-culture’s penchant for equating any kind of sustained reflection with insanity. What he does can be squarely located in a distinctly American tradition that includes the likes of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw and Cameron Jamie, and is directly linked to the underbelly of less examined aspects of American popular culture, as well as general cultural strategies, taboos and a variety of mythologies of the artist and artmaking. Lieberman makes the kind of art many people love to hate, which is to say, an art that aggressively resists any temptation to be beautiful, not to mention traditional and accepted notions of what art is, while nevertheless being seriously invested in the plastic dimension of artmaking. If there is a beauty to what he does, it is a beauty of methodology, of jusqu’au-boutisme, in which very little, if anything, is left to chance, but also in which everything, more importantly, seems to be thoroughly plumbed. It’s as if Lieberman took one of Sol LeWitt’s more memorable Sentences on Conceptual Art – ‘Irrational thoughts should 52

ArtReview

won-the-Second-World-War novel. The Feuer show featured collections of (mostly) Americana, from baseball cards to serial-killer paraphernalia, preserved and ruined in a resin reminiscent of Ghostbusters Ecto-Plazm, with carefully crafted ‘placeholders’ (a diehard collector’s replica of the one missing, unlocatable item that would complete the collection) – from the discontinued Fruit Brute cereal box to Charles Manson’s waistcoat, made by the Family and sent to him in prison. Meanwhile the Marc Jancou show spun off in a different direction, taking Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s architectural study Learning from Las Vegas (1972) as a point of departure. The show largely consisted of an igloolike armature outfitted with a motley carapace of junk and signage – including a 1970s snowmobile, a lifesize Jolly Green Giant, foam-filled inflatable toys, an illuminated FedEx sign and a sevenfoot shark – and came with a computer program (which could be consulted via a computer inside the structure) that meticulously archived and detailed every object in the dwelling. Meanwhile,

Systems, Souvenirs, and Self-portrait as Bernardo Buffet for the People of Philmont, 2009 (installation view). Courtesy Sutton Lane, London & Paris

“

On view

Lieberman’s work is full of an irony fuelled, one suspects, by American pop-culture’s penchant for equating sustained reflection with insanity

The Corrector’s Custom Pre-Fab House, 2009, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Cary Whittier. Courtesy the artist, Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York, and Zach Feuer Gallery, New York

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a sculpture of the Corrector himself, replete with buckteeth, squinty eyes and a Nazi swastika cape, presided over the show at the entrance. In both shows, issues of meaning and purpose seemed to be bound up with collecting and the cultural relativity with which anything is liable to become a classifiable and ‘meaningful’ artefact. More recent exhibitions see the artist explicitly engaging artistic fashions and myths about artmaking and the artist in general. In this sense he is treading on ground already tilled by Kelley and McCarthy, yet he is doing so in a more unrelentingly analytical mode – to the point of navel-gazing, but navel-gazing of the most productive order. In a show last autumn titled Systems, Souvenirs, and Self-portrait as Bernard Buffet for the People of Philmont, at Paris’s Sutton Lane, Lieberman created a complex scenario wherein he positioned himself as a suicided Buffet – one of France’s most celebrated postwar artists, and generally seen to

have been rendered critically obsolete by the rise of a younger artist, Daniel Buren (Buffet’s schlock existential figuration was presumably no match for Buren’s wholesale indictment of painting). The main piece of the show consisted of a stuffed dummy of Buffet with a plastic bag over his head (his singular method of suicide), applying dots to a signature Buren striped waistcoat and wielding a kind of ad hoc Eiffel Tower paintbrush. The ironically self-mythologising/historicising analogy was a clear dig at all those painters, as seen in, say, New York’s Miguel Abreu Gallery, who position themselves in a tradition of institutional critique, which should by nature be antagonistic, and nevertheless make very beautiful paintings. Yet Lieberman’s work could hardly be said to be more attractive than Buffet’s illustrative, depressed postwar depictions of Paris, clowns, religious themes, sexual situations and the like. The artist’s current exhibition, entitled Salto Mortale, at the Bernier/Eliades gallery in Athens, further explores these issues, but in a more general way. Suicide, and the myths that surround the suicided artist, dominate the exhibition. The artist crafted a series of painting/sculptures of various suicided writers in which a painted likeness, executed with amateur skill, of the writer is propped up against various paraphernalia loosely evocative of the writer. For instance the French writer Raymond Roussel is propped up against a gaudy blue ottoman upon which can be found a circular, resin-covered structure of Twinkies. Another sculpture, entitled The Last Bookshelf (2010), which addresses suicide in a more general way, consists of a small library on suicidology, enclosed by a black bookshelf, which has been sculpted to perfectly frame it (picture a graph of sorts). Given how simultaneously taboo and romantic the subject of suicide is, the bookshelf seems to hint at ideas of containment and conformity (picture an art school). As Lieberman himself has said, he’s not out to ‘debunk per se’, but rather exert pressure on certain received (often romantic) ideas about art and culture through a sustained (certifiable? – see above) examination of them. Of course, any treatment of art and suicide inevitably points towards deep-rooted, romantic notions about the greatness of an oeuvre being proportionate to the self-destruction that attended its creation. And this could explain why Lieberman has ironically included a self-portrait in the show (propped against a stuffed hamster in a hamster wheel): maybe he has every intention of being a ‘great artist’ even if it means spending himself on the hamster wheel of mediocrity trying. Justin Lieberman: Salto Mortale is on view at Bernier/Eliades, Athens, until 8 April

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On view

here, there, everywhere Aleksandra Mir’s work often brings groups of people together in the name of failure. First Woman on the Moon (1999), in which she created giant lunar craters on a Dutch beach with a group who were triumphantly photographed, highlighted not only the futility of the gesture, but also the failure to get a woman on the moon before the end of the millennium – a correction that could only be made in art, image and fantasy. For works such as The Church of Sharpie (2005), Mir assembled people to make her large drawings with the ‘world’s favourite marker pen’, all furiously scribbling until the ink ran dry, but also witnessed the beginnings of a spiritual structure within the group. In religion, outer space and Italy, she tells ArtReview what she’s been searching for.

ArtReview Tell us about the How Not to Cookbook (2009). Aleksandra mir While the typical cookbook format gives you a recipe for obvious success, it does not take into account the many ways in which its execution can fail due to the cook’s lack of experience. Based on my own personal history of cooking disasters, the project invited a thousand people from all around the world to give their advice of how not to cook. I have been interested in how we are taught or teach ourselves through trial and error. By making our guilty failures public, we may even be creating an original and subversive form of art, rather than simply aspiring to obvious and repetitive results. Ar Frequently in your work, you try to create and link communities. Where does this impulse come from? Am From a very general interest in sociability. I like to be around people. Ar Is your view of the potential of communities essentially optimistic? Are you convinced of art’s ability to push things forward? Am Not necessarily. My work often encompasses failure. Ar How did your postcard piece at last year’s Venice Biennale come about?

AM I printed one million fake postcards of Venice, entitled Venezia (all places contain all others). The cards depict a range of waterways from around the world: frozen Nordic rivers, desert springs in the Sahara, beaches in Miami, skylines on the shores of Sydney and Manhattan, lakes from German forests, the fountains of Paris. The postcards were giveaways to the public of the Biennale. You could take them home, or write them on 56

ArtReview

geographies; water as carrier and distributor of pollution; water as language; Venice as extended out to the world’s oceans, rivers, lakes and ponds; Venice in every molecule of the rain. Ar You work a lot with archives – what is it about them that attracts you? AM The concentration of information. Ar Your work shows a pronounced interest in news media and in typography. Would you ever want to set up and edit a magazine yourself ? AM I have been working with graphics, print and publishing since I was a child, long before I even knew what art was. I made my own magazine when I was about ten. It dealt with the concerns of a female ten-year-old and only came out in one handmade copy that circulated between readers in the classroom. I loved the idea of talking about my and my friends’ day, of organising information, creating pictures, copy and layouts. The sensual physicality of ink and paper, the way pagination and folds work. I enjoy the systems of distribution and the accessibility of print; that holds a lot of power for me. About 30 percent of my practice today still takes the form of printed matter. Ar Tell me about living and working in Sicily – is there a community of artists there?

interview by

this page: Sicilian Pavilion (detail), 2007, a project by Aleksandra Mir, Marion Franchetti and Paolo Falcone with Luca De Gennaro and Salvo Prestifilippo. Photo: Salvo Prestifilippo. Courtesy the artist facing page: Venezia (all places contain all others)(detail), 2009, postcard. Courtesy the artist

LAURA ALLSOP

the spot and send them out to your relations in the world through two Poste Italiane mailboxes that were installed as part of the work and emptied daily by an actual postman. I have been interested in: demography; ephemera; distribution; tourist economies; truth; authenticity; representation; water as a symbol for globalisation; water as the constitution of our bodies; water as determining the borders of our national

AM I never searched for an art community – I searched for a real location with many different people in it. Changing cultures is good for an artist. The shock forces you to look closer while artistic licence gives you the privilege to romanticise, a combination which I find to be very productive. Despite the huge effort to move, learn a language and form new relations, I happily change cultures like others change knickers. Living in Palermo has been like a four-year-long headstand for me, mainly in regards to my newfound understanding of provinciality. Some capital-city mentalities are more narrow-minded and politically stuck-up than that of a chaotic village life. In Palermo, they say that a red traffic light is not an imperative but a suggestion. You negotiate it. So this is a place of daily and vivid debate which never goes stale. I travel a lot regardless, and they now tell me in Milan that I have a Sicilian accent. I am very much enjoying the sheer politics of that.

On view “Clay is a protoshape containing the possibility of all shapes”, says Anna Maria Maiolino in an email from São Paulo. “It is the primordial material par excellence.” After decades of woodcuts, drawings, performances and films, the Italian-born Brazilian artist turned to a material that harks back to the very origin of art history, to investigate its potential for the monumental. Now seventy-eight, Maiolino is realising this potential in a colossal site-specific installation at London’s Camden Arts Centre involving hundreds of kilograms of hand-shaped clay. More than a new work, she sees this as a continuation of her Terra Modelada (Modelled Earth) series, another chapter in an ever-expanding tale of earth. It’s as if Maiolino is aiming beyond the limitations of a single work or show. Her ambition is to reach through the material for something more profound and essential, something that might be inscribed in the very foundations of humanity. Since 1991 Maiolino has placed pottery’s traditional technique, with its basic elements of clay rolls and balls, at the core of her plastic language. “It’s clay itself that showed me the method by which it should be work”, she says. Clay pots, like primitive stone tools, were one of the first markers of civilisations throughout the world. This lineage brings an immediate sense of universality to Maiolino’s installations; they evoke the urge to mould, to create, but also the need to cook and by extension to feed and to gather. The modesty of the sculptural gestures and their domestic associations undermine the overwhelming scale of the installed pieces. “Exclude nothing”, says Maiolino, who calls her installations “storage of entropy”. Over the course of the exhibitions, the clay dehydrates and crumbles; the supple shapes reify and progressively degenerate. There is no existentialist anguish, though, embedded in the pieces’ impermanence. Clay has the potential for rebirth – just add water,

First Principles

Using a material with a history as old as civilisation, Anna Maria Maiolino plays God and remakes the world for a new hybrid culture they are articulated around what curator and art historian Catherine de Zegher has called ‘the absent matrixial body’. This body, this subjectivity, remains somewhat open and undefined. “Those clay forms”, says Camden Arts Centre’s exhibition organiser Bryony Bond, “could either be attributed to a single individual or to many”. The oscillation between the singular and the collective here is as valid a way to understand the place of the maker as it is to read the sculptures themselves. They exist words Coline Milliard

and the dust turns into malleable matter once more. “The installation affirms itself and finds its meaning through this return to work, to this beginning”, says the artist. Her work is not to be understood in its finitude, but as cyclic and natural development. At New York’s Art in General in 2002, serpentine rolls crowded the floor like a nest of snakes (N Vezes Um/N Times One, 2002). Small clay balls were stuck to the walls with a single press of the thumb, leaving a fingerprint trace on every element of the sprawling composition. Maiolino’s installations bear the physical trace of their making;

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as an entity, as a part of a series and as a collection of independent items. “Removing one, two or more segments can establish a new autonomous sculpture”, explains the artist. “On the other hand, the mother body can grow again with the addition of new shapes-segments, new journeys of work.” The endlessly repeated elements are for the artist a way “to escape from the pulverizing aspect of contemporaneity with its incessant search for novelty”. Maiolino’s concentration on a very limited number of figures allows idiosyncrasies to emerge; her work makes place for the ‘one’ to exist fully within the ‘many’. “Through the experience of my hands”, she recalls, “I began to witness what Deleuze had declared in his writings: ‘repetition is opposed to representation.’”

Among Many, 2005 (installation view, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo). Photo: Isabella Matheus. Courtesy the artist

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On view

Because of her use of modules, Maiolino has often been associated with Minimalism, but her shapes’ organic, process-based nature negates the Minimalists’ focus on industrial techniques. In her 1999 film, +&-, two male hands rub against each other. Occupying the whole screen, they look like autonomous beings mating on a bitty phonetic soundtrack à la Kurt Schwitters. “Sometimes it is enough to show the movement of a hand in closeup for the viewer to be moved, and so redeem the greatest thing he has – himself”, the artist says. Maiolino was born in Southern Italy in 1942. Her family moved to Caracas in the mid-1950s before settling in Rio in 1960. Though she showed her work in Venezuela, it was in Brazil that the artist found a stimulating group of peers. “Contemporary Brazilian art made a definitive impression on me that extended the ludic and sensory aspect of my work”, she says. In 1967 she was part of the seminal exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira, held at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art, and she cosigned the Declaration of the Basic Principles of the Vanguard, together with Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, among many others. “It was one of the last

“ It was one of the last important spontaneous collective declarations I can recall. The declaration assumed, proposed and expanded art as a revolutionary contribution to all fields of man’s sensitivity and conscience”

above: Territories of Immanence, 2006 (installation view, Miami Art Central). Photo: Oriol Tarridas. Courtesy the artist facing page, from top: Many (from Modelled Earth), 1995 (installation view, Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk); Are These, 1998 (installation view, XXIV São Paulo Biennial). Both courtesy the artist

important spontaneous collective declarations I can recall”, she says. “The declaration assumed, proposed and expanded art as a revolutionary contribution to all fields of man’s sensitivity and conscience.” After a few years in New York between 1968 and 71, Maiolino moved back to Rio and started to produce her Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, geometrical grids in which the artist placed words representing herself and elements of her life like pawns on a chessboard. ‘Rubens, Brazil, trip, alone, anguish, return’ reads ‘Í’ capítulo I (‘I’ chapter 1) (1971). The subjective ‘I’ is free to circulate around the board; it is threatened or rewarded according to its choices, but always limited to well-defined paths, locked up in a world with unmovable limits. Following in the footsteps of fellow ‘Declaration’ signatory Clark’s shortlived Neoconcretismo movement (1959–61), the Mapas Mentais inject palpable emotion into the rigid conceptual framework of geometric abstraction. In her Livro/Objeto (Book/Object) series, paper becomes a space to be investigated rather than a support. In Ponto a Ponto (Point to

Point) (1976) the white pages of a book are pierced and a black cord runs through the holes from front to back cover, rendering physical the linearity of a storyline. As the viewer manipulates the object, she accumulates on a subject – the thread – layers of undefined narrative. Maiolino’s work, like that of many of her Brazilian contemporaries, is infused with the thinking of Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto Antropófago. Described by Catherine de Zegher as the ‘basic textbook for twentieth-century art in Brazil’, it celebrates the Brazilian identity as an amalgam of native, African and European elements, where old singularities are abandoned in favour of a new hybrid culture. This seminal concept must have resonated with the artist’s personal history – a history that she herself designates as a major influence on her practice. ‘Art is a mirror of our life experience’, she says. Her film In-Out (Antropófagia)/In-Out (Anthropophagy) (1973– 4) opens with a female mouth stuck shut with a cross of black masking tape. It is then freed, but unable to communicate, tweeting rather than talking. At one point – in what is undoubtedly the most direct reference to Andrade – the mouth absorbs a black thread and then, a few frames later, regurgitates a bundle of colourful wool. In another shot, the mouth-vagina lays a pristine white egg. In-Out tells a story of censorship and silence; it reacts to the artist’s personal situation as a woman artist, but also against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The film asserts the possibility of creativity continuing whatever the circumstances, positioning it within a cycle of absorptions and transformations. Maiolino’s multifarious practice may have changed tremendously since those early days, but all her works carry the belief that the smallest gestures, the most modest propositions, can also be the most powerful. “Following the artistic path using the knowledge of my hands”, says the artist, “was what helped me to achieve what I have always wanted: to understand the world.” Anna Maria Maiolino: Continuous is on view at Camden Arts Centre, London, from 1 April to 30 May

ArtReview

61

Eleanor Moreton, Grey Sigmund, 2009, Oil on canvas, 30 x 24cm

ElEanor MorEton IM WartEzIMMEr 9 aprIl – 22 May 2010 Ceri Hand Gallery 12 Cotton Street, Liverpool L3 7DY T: +44 (0)151 207 0899 [email protected] www.cerihand.co.uk Opening hours Wednesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm or by appointment CER_Advert_Eleanor Morton_AW_02.indd 1

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9/3/10 17:47:45 The most innovative voice in contemporary art

Manifesto

by Alejandro Cardenas

¡Bienvenido Mr Wong! (2009)

Angst Essen/Eat Fear (2008)

Lerne Deutsch mit Petra Von Kant (2007)

feature: ming wong

follow two males around Venice. Or rather they follow one male: the artist Ming Wong, performing a double portrait of Tadzio and Gustav von Aschenbach, the main characters in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). Dressed in a white sailor suit and wavy-haired blonde wig, Wong looks like the adolescent Tadzio; then, donning a white suit, tie, Panama hat and a moustache, he appears to be the older von Aschenbach. On a third screen, Wong can be seen and heard playing Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto (1904) on a piano in the grand setting of a Venetian palazzo, in what he calls an ‘unrehearsed recital’ – his own rendition of the original score. Movies – like books, art or music – are necessarily products of the historical, political and social circumstances in which they were made. They reflect the period of their creation and, at their best, affect it as well, introducing themes into public debate, creating archetypal characters or influencing fashion and style. The epitome of a ‘gay’ film, Visconti’s Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s famous 1912 novella about homoerotic fascination, unfulfilled love and artistic impotence, has become a cliché of homosexuality, and Tadzio an enduring symbol of male beauty. For some time, Ming Wong, who first studied Chinese art in Singapore and then came to London in 1997 for an MFA in fine art media at the Slade, has been using his own adaptations of films – in which he often plays all roles himself – to investigate social structure and its historic constitution. Four Malay Stories (2005) looked at stereotyped figures from Malay/Singaporean cinema of the 1950s before the countries and their languages were separated (Malay gained independence from Britain in 1957; Singapore achieved the same in 1963, joining the Federation of Malaya to form Malaysia, before gaining its own independence in 1965), staging Wong’s interpretation of how he and his view of society were shaped through regular repeats of these films on TV – a cultural heritage that was essentially alien to him in a language he did not speak. For Whodunnit? (2003–4), a video of a theatrical murder-mystery,

Four Malay Stories: Doktor Rushdi (2005)

he uses British actors from various ethnic backgrounds, who in the play alternate between constructed versions of foreign accents corresponding to their ethnicity and the equalising received pronunciation of British English, thus emphasising the various expectations conveyed by look and language. His Angst Essen/Eat Fear (2008), an adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s drama Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974), considers the relationship between an elderly cleaning woman and a young immigrant worker, again looking at the place of the ‘foreigner’ in society, and was made after Wong moved to Berlin in 2007 (initially for a yearlong residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, but now settled, recently moving to a new studio in the heart of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district). While representing Singapore at last year’s Venice Biennale provided Wong with an opportunity to spend time in the Italian city, the decision to ‘do’ Visconti’s film came later; indeed, at the time he was already working on an interpretation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). In the latter, a mysterious young man, played by Terence Stamp, arrives at the home of a bourgeois Milanese family and, one by one, seduces the members of the household – mother, father, daughter, son and maid. When he leaves, the family is shattered. Wong’s five-screen – one for each member of the family – video installation, currently in production, sets the story in Naples and uses the Neapolitan landscape – the precarious estates of Scampia (where 2008’s Gomorra was filmed) and the postindustrial and apocalyptic scenery of Bagnoli – as poignant markers of its contemporaneity. As with most of the artist’s work, it looks to be a very personal adaptation, not only because Wong plays all the roles himself but also because he vests the roles with elements of his own personality – the son, for example, who in Pasolini’s original becomes an abstract painter after the stranger’s visit, here transforms himself into a video artist. Wong has made a similarly personal investment in Life and Death in Venice, helped, most certainly, by the fact that his age (he was born a year before Visconti’s adaptation was released) puts

feature: ming wong

follow two males around Venice. Or rather they follow one male: the artist Ming Wong, performing a double portrait of Tadzio and Gustav von Aschenbach, the main characters in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). Dressed in a white sailor suit and wavy-haired blonde wig, Wong looks like the adolescent Tadzio; then, donning a white suit, tie, Panama hat and a moustache, he appears to be the older von Aschenbach. On a third screen, Wong can be seen and heard playing Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto (1904) on a piano in the grand setting of a Venetian palazzo, in what he calls an ‘unrehearsed recital’ – his own rendition of the original score. Movies – like books, art or music – are necessarily products of the historical, political and social circumstances in which they were made. They reflect the period of their creation and, at their best, affect it as well, introducing themes into public debate, creating archetypal characters or influencing fashion and style. The epitome of a ‘gay’ film, Visconti’s Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s famous 1912 novella about homoerotic fascination, unfulfilled love and artistic impotence, has become a cliché of homosexuality, and Tadzio an enduring symbol of male beauty. For some time, Ming Wong, who first studied Chinese art in Singapore and then came to London in 1997 for an MFA in fine art media at the Slade, has been using his own adaptations of films – in which he often plays all roles himself – to investigate social structure and its historic constitution. Four Malay Stories (2005) looked at stereotyped figures from Malay/Singaporean cinema of the 1950s before the countries and their languages were separated (Malay gained independence from Britain in 1957; Singapore achieved the same in 1963, joining the Federation of Malaya to form Malaysia, before gaining its own independence in 1965), staging Wong’s interpretation of how he and his view of society were shaped through regular repeats of these films on TV – a cultural heritage that was essentially alien to him in a language he did not speak. For Whodunnit? (2003–4), a video of a theatrical murder-mystery,

Four Malay Stories: Doktor Rushdi, 1971 (2005)

he uses British actors from various ethnic backgrounds, who in the play alternate between constructed versions of foreign accents corresponding to their ethnicity and the equalising received pronunciation of British English, thus emphasising the various expectations conveyed by look and language. His Angst Essen/Eat Fear (2008), an adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s drama Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974), considers the relationship between an elderly cleaning woman and a young immigrant worker, again looking at the place of the ‘foreigner’ in society, and was made after Wong moved to Berlin in 2007 (initially for a yearlong residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, but now settled, recently moving to a new studio in the heart of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district). While representing Singapore at last year’s Venice Biennale provided Wong with an opportunity to spend time in the Italian city, the decision to ‘do’ Visconti’s film came later; indeed, at the time he was already working on an interpretation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). In the latter, a mysterious young man, played by Terence Stamp, arrives at the home of a bourgeois Milanese family and, one by one, seduces the members of the household – mother, father, daughter, son and maid. When he leaves, the family is shattered. Wong’s five-screen – one for each member of the family – video installation, currently in production, sets the story in Naples and uses the Neapolitan landscape – the precarious estates of Scampia (where 2008’s Gomorra was filmed) and the postindustrial and apocalyptic scenery of Bagnoli – as poignant markers of its contemporaneity. As with most of the artist’s work, it looks to be a very personal adaptation, not only because Wong plays all the roles himself but also because he vests the roles with elements of his own personality – the son, for example, who in Pasolini’s original becomes an abstract painter after the stranger’s visit, here transforms himself into a video artist. Wong has made a similarly personal investment in Life and Death in Venice, helped, most certainly, by the fact that his age (he was born a year before Visconti’s adaptation was released) puts

him somewhere between Tadzio and von aschenbach. Like von aschenbach, the artist describes how he felt that he was at a point of artistic crisis: representing his country in Venice is something that many artists might consider a highpoint of their career, but it left Wong feeling at once too young (to have achieved such recognition) and too old (having achieved this honour, to what could he now aspire?). For despite his success in Venice – where he also received a special mention – Wong has never had a museum show before. The attention came not unexpectedly, says the artist, but felt sudden nevertheless. Wong’s work has been exhibited previously in galleries and artist-run spaces to much acclaim but little result, and he is only just in talks with commercial galleries for international representation. an additional element of ‘crisis’ arises from the fact that the most famous location of book and film, the Lido’s Grand Hotel Des Bains, was about to close it doors and be converted into luxury apartments. The artist managed to film there during the final week of its existence. as in the Visconti production, Wong’s film features the two characters as they wander the city, seemingly following each other. Then, when their paths cross and they exchange a glance, the perspective changes: von aschenbach, seen on one screen as he makes his way through the city on a boat, meets the gaze of Tadzio, standing on a bridge on the second screen; as the boat passes under the bridge, von aschenbach swaps screens, but when he looks back for Tadzio, the younger man is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, several times in the film von aschenbach’s longing looks are frustrated, directed at an empty space which, as it passes to the second screen, is revealed as occupied by von aschenbach himself. While removing any illusion that we are dealing with two separate individuals, this device might also be a reference to the fact that Björn andrésen, the actor who originally played Tadzio, is now older than Dirk Bogarde’s von aschenbach was in 1971. Ultimately, Life and Death in Venice is very much a film about Ming Wong, no matter how convincing his makeup as

Tadzio (with those slightly-too-pink cheeks and rosy lips of the 1970s) or how closely he replicates the Visconti original. There are scenes that anchor the film clearly in the present – when his von aschenbach passes a poster for Wong’s exhibition at the Palazzo Michiel dal Brusà, for example, or when the Icelandic artist ragnar Kjartansson (who represented his country at last year’s Biennale in a space directly below Wong’s) is filmed painting in that building; when ‘Tadzio’ sits in the café designed for the 53rd Biennale by Tobias rehberger or when ‘von aschenbach’ mirrors himself in the broken remains of a performance by Michelangelo Pistoletto in the arsenale. Wong adapts the historic images and storylines to a city that through his time there has also become his own – and an important part of his Venice are the works in the Biennale. Moreover, in Thomas Mann’s time, the Hotel Des Bains, in its elegiac luxury, was probably the most glamorous location in Venice; today the city’s biennial exhibition of contemporary art has taken much of that aura. This piece, with all its reverence for Mann and Visconti, and for their stories and heritages, clearly places the past in the context of the present, without which it could not be seen. Ming Wong’s Life and Death in Venice is being exhibited at the Hermès Gallery in Singapore from 31 March to 2 May and at the Biennale of Sydney from 12 May to 1 August

aLL WorKs Life and Death in Venice, 2010 (film stills). Courtesy the artist

Whodunnit? (2003–4)


OQBSFBT

…

feature: ming wong

follow two males around Venice. Or rather they follow one male: the artist Ming Wong, performing a double portrait of Tadzio and Gustav von Aschenbach, the main characters in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). Dressed in a white sailor suit and wavy-haired blonde wig, Wong looks like the adolescent Tadzio; then, donning a white suit, tie, Panama hat and a moustache, he appears to be the older von Aschenbach. On a third screen, Wong can be seen and heard playing Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto (1904) on a piano in the grand setting of a Venetian palazzo, in what he calls an ‘unrehearsed recital’ – his own rendition of the original score. Movies – like books, art or music – are necessarily products of the historical, political and social circumstances in which they were made. They reflect the period of their creation and, at their best, affect it as well, introducing themes into public debate, creating archetypal characters or influencing fashion and style. The epitome of a ‘gay’ film, Visconti’s Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s famous 1912 novella about homoerotic fascination, unfulfilled love and artistic impotence, has become a cliché of homosexuality, and Tadzio an enduring symbol of male beauty. For some time, Ming Wong, who first studied Chinese art in Singapore and then came to London in 1997 for an MFA in fine art media at the Slade, has been using his own adaptations of films – in which he often plays all roles himself – to investigate social structure and its historic constitution. Four Malay Stories (2005) looked at stereotyped figures from Malay/Singaporean cinema of the 1950s before the countries and their languages were separated (Malay gained independence from Britain in 1957; Singapore achieved the same in 1963, joining the Federation of Malaya to form Malaysia, before gaining its own independence in 1965), staging Wong’s interpretation of how he and his view of society were shaped through regular repeats of these films on TV – a cultural heritage that was essentially alien to him in a language he did not speak. For Whodunnit? (2003–4), a video of a theatrical murder-mystery,

Four Malay Stories: Doktor Rushdi, 1971 (2005)

he uses British actors from various ethnic backgrounds, who in the play alternate between constructed versions of foreign accents corresponding to their ethnicity and the equalising received pronunciation of British English, thus emphasising the various expectations conveyed by look and language. His Angst Essen/Eat Fear (2008), an adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s drama Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974), considers the relationship between an elderly cleaning woman and a young immigrant worker, again looking at the place of the ‘foreigner’ in society, and was made after Wong moved to Berlin in 2007 (initially for a yearlong residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, but now settled, recently moving to a new studio in the heart of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district). While representing Singapore at last year’s Venice Biennale provided Wong with an opportunity to spend time in the Italian city, the decision to ‘do’ Visconti’s film came later; indeed, at the time he was already working on an interpretation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). In the latter, a mysterious young man, played by Terence Stamp, arrives at the home of a bourgeois Milanese family and, one by one, seduces the members of the household – mother, father, daughter, son and maid. When he leaves, the family is shattered. Wong’s five-screen – one for each member of the family – video installation, currently in production, sets the story in Naples and uses the Neapolitan landscape – the precarious estates of Scampia (where 2008’s Gomorra was filmed) and the postindustrial and apocalyptic scenery of Bagnoli – as poignant markers of its contemporaneity. As with most of the artist’s work, it looks to be a very personal adaptation, not only because Wong plays all the roles himself but also because he vests the roles with elements of his own personality – the son, for example, who in Pasolini’s original becomes an abstract painter after the stranger’s visit, here transforms himself into a video artist. Wong has made a similarly personal investment in Life and Death in Venice, helped, most certainly, by the fact that his age (he was born a year before Visconti’s adaptation was released) puts

¡Bienvenido Mr Wong! (2009)

Angst Essen/Eat Fear (2008)

Lerne Deutsch mit Petra Von Kant (2007)

feature:

When

Ming Wong

refilms

touchstones from cinematic histor y, he plays all the starring roles himself, transforming the silver screen into a looking glass with multiple ref lections Wo r ds : A x e l l A pp p o rtr a it: h e j i s h i n

„†


OQBSFBT

Alejandro Cardenas was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1977, and raised in Miami. He moved to New York in 1996 to attend the Cooper Union, where he received his BFA in 2000. Since then he has exhibited in various galleries; his first solo show was presented at Miami’s Bas Fisher Invitational in 2005. Alejandro is represented by James Fuentes LLC, New York, where he has had two solo shows, Arctic Cross (2008) and Narcomedusa (2010). Alejandro works mainly in drawing and painting with gouache and watercolour, creating works with foundations in the abstract but containing linear pictographic and figurative elements. The subject matter of the work is narrative based, usually around themes of exploration, nature, science and technology. Alejandro also collaborates with New York fashion house Proenza Schouler, designing their textiles and prints.

14|04|2010_30|09|2010

FRISSIRASMUSEUM Contemporary European Painting | 3, Monis Asteriou st., 105 58, Plaka, Athens | www.frissirasmuseum.com

feature:

When

Ming Wong

refilms

touchstones from cinematic histor y, he plays all the starring roles himself, transforming the silver screen into a looking glass with multiple ref lections w o r d s : A x e l La p p p o rtr a it: h e j i s h i n

68

ArtReview

feature: ming wong

follow two males around Venice. Or rather they follow one male: the artist Ming Wong, performing a double portrait of Tadzio and Gustav von Aschenbach, the main characters in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). Dressed in a white sailor suit and wavy-haired blonde wig, Wong looks like the adolescent Tadzio; then, donning a white suit, tie, Panama hat and a moustache, he appears to be the older von Aschenbach. On a third screen, Wong can be seen and heard playing Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto (1904) on a piano in the grand setting of a Venetian palazzo, in what he calls an ‘unrehearsed recital’ – his own rendition of the original score. Movies – like books, art or music – are necessarily products of the historical, political and social circumstances in which they were made. They reflect the period of their creation and, at their best, affect it as well, introducing themes into public debate, creating archetypal characters or influencing fashion and style. The epitome of a ‘gay’ film, Visconti’s Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s famous 1912 novella about homoerotic fascination, unfulfilled love and artistic impotence, has become a cliché of homosexuality, and Tadzio an enduring symbol of male beauty. For some time, Ming Wong, who first studied Chinese art in Singapore and then came to London in 1997 for an MFA in fine art media at the Slade, has been using his own adaptations of films – in which he often plays all roles himself – to investigate social structure and its historic constitution. Four Malay Stories (2005) looked at stereotyped figures from Malay/Singaporean cinema of the 1950s before the countries and their languages were separated (Malay gained independence from Britain in 1957; Singapore achieved the same in 1963, joining the Federation of Malaya to form Malaysia, before gaining its own independence in 1965), staging Wong’s interpretation of how he and his view of society were shaped through regular repeats of these films on TV – a cultural heritage that was essentially alien to him in a language he did not speak. For Whodunnit? (2003–4), a video of a theatrical murder-mystery,

he uses British actors from various ethnic backgrounds, who in the play alternate between constructed versions of foreign accents corresponding to their ethnicity and the equalising received pronunciation of British English, thus emphasising the various expectations conveyed by look and language. His Angst Essen/Eat Fear (2008), an adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s drama Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974), considers the relationship between an elderly cleaning woman and a young immigrant worker, again looking at the place of the ‘foreigner’ in society, and was made after Wong moved to Berlin in 2007 (initially for a yearlong residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, but now settled, recently moving to a new studio in the heart of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district). While representing Singapore at last year’s Venice Biennale provided Wong with an opportunity to spend time in the Italian city, the decision to ‘do’ Visconti’s film came later; indeed, at the time he was already working on an interpretation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). In the latter, a mysterious young man, played by Terence Stamp, arrives at the home of a bourgeois Milanese family and, one by one, seduces the members of the household – mother, father, daughter, son and maid. When he leaves, the family is shattered. Wong’s five-screen – one for each member of the family – video installation, currently in production, sets the story in Naples and uses the Neapolitan landscape – the precarious estates of Scampia (where 2008’s Gomorra was filmed) and the postindustrial and apocalyptic scenery of Bagnoli – as poignant markers of its contemporaneity. As with most of the artist’s work, it looks to be a very personal adaptation, not only because Wong plays all the roles himself but also because he vests the roles with elements of his own personality – the son, for example, who in Pasolini’s original becomes an abstract painter after the stranger’s visit, here transforms himself into a video artist. Wong has made a similarly personal investment in Life and Death in Venice, helped, most certainly, by the fact that his age (he was born a year before Visconti’s adaptation was released) puts

him somewhere between Tadzio and von Aschenbach. Like von Aschenbach, the artist describes how he felt that he was at a point of artistic crisis: representing his country in Venice is something that many artists might consider a highpoint of their career, but it left Wong feeling at once too young (to have achieved such recognition) and too old (having achieved this honour, to what could he now aspire?). For despite his success in Venice – where he also received a special mention – Wong has never had a museum show before. The attention came not unexpectedly, says the artist, but felt sudden nevertheless. Wong’s work has been exhibited previously in galleries and artist-run spaces to much acclaim but little result, and he is only just in talks with commercial galleries for international representation. An additional element of ‘crisis’ arises from the fact that the most famous location of book and film, the Lido’s Grand Hotel Des Bains, was about to close it doors and be converted into luxury apartments. The artist managed to film there during the final week of its existence. As in the Visconti production, Wong’s film features the two characters as they wander the city, seemingly following each other. Then, when their paths cross and they exchange a glance, the perspective changes: von Aschenbach, seen on one screen as he makes his way through the city on a boat, meets the gaze of Tadzio, standing on a bridge on the second screen; as the boat passes under the bridge, von Aschenbach swaps screens, but when he looks back for Tadzio, the younger man is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, several times in the film von Aschenbach’s longing looks are frustrated, directed at an empty space which, as it passes to the second screen, is revealed as occupied by von Aschenbach himself. While removing any illusion that we are dealing with two separate individuals, this device might also be a reference to the fact that Björn Andrésen, the actor who originally played Tadzio, is now older than Dirk Bogarde’s von Aschenbach was in 1971. Ultimately, Life and Death in Venice is very much a film about Ming Wong, no matter how convincing his makeup as

Tadzio (with those slightly-too-pink cheeks and rosy lips of the 1970s) or how closely he replicates the Visconti original. There are scenes that anchor the film clearly in the present – when his von Aschenbach passes a poster for Wong’s exhibition at the Palazzo Michiel dal Brusà, for example, or when the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (who represented his country at last year’s Biennale in a space directly below Wong’s) is filmed painting in that building; when ‘Tadzio’ sits in the café designed for the 53rd Biennale by Tobias Rehberger or when ‘von Aschenbach’ mirrors himself in the broken remains of a performance by Michelangelo Pistoletto in the Arsenale. Wong adapts the historic images and storylines to a city that through his time there has also become his own – and an important part of his Venice are the works in the Biennale. Moreover, in Thomas Mann’s time, the Hotel Des Bains, in its elegiac luxury, was probably the most glamorous location in Venice; today the city’s biennial exhibition of contemporary art has taken much of that aura. This piece, with all its reverence for Mann and Visconti, and for their stories and heritages, clearly places the past in the context of the present, without which it could not be seen. Ming Wong’s Life and Death in Venice is being exhibited at the Hermès Gallery in Singapore from 31 March to 2 May and at the Biennale of Sydney from 12 May to 1 August

all works Life and Death in Venice, 2010 (film stills). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

71

feature:

As political philosopher

Jacques Rancière

turns to contemporar y art in

his latest book , ArtReview asks him whether art can ever i ntervi e w by j. j. ch a r l e s wo rt h 72

ArtReview

Photo: Hendrik Speck

change the world

A r t R e v i e w : I am curious to know your thoughts about what it means to be in demand. What does it mean to bring certain ideas to a public that needs new ideas? J a c q u e s Ra n c i e r e : I think it’s a complicated question. I think there are perhaps two kinds of interests that overlap. Firstly, I think that there is an interest that is specific to the world of art: the old ideas that don’t work anymore. There are some standards, like the standard of critical art, but this has become repetitive and there is nothing subversive about it any more. As I started discussing the relationships between politics and art, people were interested, thinking maybe they don’t have to choose between this critical art that nobody believes in any more, and ‘art for art’s sake’. There is a search for a new kind of relationship, perhaps one that is more indirect. Perhaps people think they can find it in what I write. At the same time, I’m not part of the artworld. I can be kind of somebody from the outside, a reference at the same time. I’m not involved in the problems and quarrels of the community. The other point is I’m also a kind of survivor of a generation that was trained by Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and so on. Many people of my generation, who were harsh revolutionaries 30, 40 years ago, are now right-wing – sometimes far-right-wing! So how can people of that generation give something from the experience of that time? The 80s and 90s was a kind of depressing time, with neoliberalism and conservative and reactionary thinking about politics. People are looking for something new, looking for a way of making a new link between the new and the old. That’s part of the demand, I think. A R :

As I understand, you were not always in a discussion directly about art or aesthetics.

J R :

Not at all. It’s not at all my world. I was supposed to be teaching philosophy, but for a very long time I was doing research in the archives of the workers’ movement. I was looking at the practice of the autodidacts in the nineteenth century, working on emancipation. Early on I was asked by some people in the artworld to think about the relation between history and the representation of history. It was the first time I was asked by a curator to write on art. It was for an exhibition in Paris: the title was Facing History. Perhaps I was able to bring some fresh ideas about the relationship between history and art. That’s how, in a way, I got into the artworld. It’s not at all my natural field.

A R : In your latest book, The Emancipated Spectator, you mention

quite a number of artists, Alfredo Jaar and Martha Rosler, for example, who are contemporary artists. You seem to find an affinity in their work with something that is useful and productive. It’s not all the bleak critical art of the 1980s and early 90s that you just gestured to. Did your writing start to affect the art you were looking at or did the art made in the last 10, 15 years start to affect your writing?

J R :

I wasn’t really looking for anything particular in the field of art. My interested was firstly about a debate within contemporary art related to the debate (if it was a debate) about the end. That was the time of those statements about the end of history, art, politics – the end of everything. I got into the debate from

this angle. The other thing that interested me was a debate about aesthetics. Long ago I criticised Bourdieu and the idea of aesthetic experience as something reserved for privileged people. I disagreed, arguing that social emancipation was also a kind of aesthetic emancipation, getting the people involved in it out of a certain position that constrained the capacities of the body in a certain social world. That was the background. Sometimes artists or curators came to me and said, ‘I’m doing this. I’m preparing this exhibition. I would like you to come and see.’ Every time I’m looking at the work and thinking, is there something that’s interesting for me in this? For instance, if you look at the cover of my book, the installation of Alfredo Jaar, what interested me was not the place of Alfredo Jaar in art, but it was the way in which his work gives a certain response to a debate. It was a debate about the unrepresentable. Can you represent images of massacres? Can you make images of the Holocaust? What interests me is the point at which the debate on the work of art is, at the same time, a kind of political debate. Are you authorised to present this or that image? What is the implication of making this image? For instance, in the case of Alfredo Jaar, what is the implication of making those installations with no images of the massacres, but installations with words, giving visibility to the names, of the histories given in the press and the reasons why those people have been massacred. What interests me is what I call the ‘distribution of the sensible’, the way in which bodies and individuals are located in a certain space of visibility or invisibility and the way in which an image can be linked to a certain meaning, can be given certain cogency. A R :

You are quite intolerant of forms of art or expressions in representation which attempt to fix meaning and presentation too much, and of ‘critical’ art that attempts to designate what one should think and what one should experience, as if the coding of representation was easily controllable.

J R :

Yes. Let’s say I’m as much against the pedagogical model of critical art as I am, in general, against the pedagogical model of politics. What is important for me is to shift from the question ‘Is it possible to make this or that image?’ to the question ‘What does it imply, more generally, about the distribution of the sensible, how people are located in a certain universe, in a certain interrelation of words and images?’ My point about critical art is about this pedagogical model, which is, in the lasting instance, the old Platonic model: the irony that people don’t see you, people are like prisoners and they don’t see the truth, they only see shadows. We’ve seen this model painted a number of times. I’ve mentioned before this image by Martha Rosler with the lady who is pulling back a curtain, and behind the curtain there is a window and behind the window there is the war in Vietnam. Of course the war in Vietnam is a reality, but she is unable to see it. It’s this idea that if you put together the two images, you give an image of how people ignore the truth, with the idea that if they know the truth they will act. But there’s no reason to act if you know the truth. There’s no reason to act just because you know what’s happening behind the window.

jR :

A R :

The pedagogical mode is also implicated in a political activist mode, which seems to be about trying to teach other people that they’re blind or that they can’t see. Does that go back to May 1968, to a certain loss of faith among left intellectuals with regards to the capacities of ‘the people’ or the working class? That seems to be something which circles in some of your comments, your antagonism towards those who think that everybody else is stupid or everybody else can’t see.

Emancipation, precisely, is about the possibility of constructing

Yes, but I think that precisely what I call the pedagogical model is a kind of general framework which says that people are dominated or oppressed because they don’t know, because the place where they are prevents them from seeing. The idea is that they are dominated because they don’t know the law of domination, so we have to teach them. Or they are dominated but they are passive, so we have to make them active. This is the old couple of presuppositions – that people are passive and people are blind but we can bring them light. If we bring them to the light, of course, they will act. My long-standing idea is that this is wrong. Of course it’s a presupposition you must have in mind, if you are a Marxist. But basically the point is not that people are dominated because they don’t know. I think people know. People know they are dominated. The point for them is, is there anything other than domination? Are we able to construct another world? Emancipation, precisely, is about the possibility of constructing another world. It is, I would say, a direct relation between two worlds and not mediation through knowledge. This has been, for me, a kind of constant concern since May 68, since the time I started to criticise Althusserianism and Marxism and the idea of oppression as a kind of ‘optical machine’. You mentioned earlier that social emancipation was also aesthetic emancipation. In terms of your study of the workers’ movement, certainly around the nineteenth century, social emancipation is very energetic. We now are in the situation where the dynamic of social emancipation is very weak. It seems to me in many of your essays that aesthetic emancipation might almost be a precursor to social emancipation.

another world

J R :

For me, the aesthetic is not a precursor; I think it’s part of social emancipation. At the same time, for me, the point is that aesthetic emancipation is not the result of political strategies of the artist. It is very important for me, this kind of dissociation between aesthetic experience and artistic strategies. The strategies of artists are always strategies to make people see what they did not see or to make people active while they are passive, etc. Aesthetic emancipation supposes that the very people that are supposed to be ignorant or passive spectators are able to reappropriate in their way the product of the strategies of the artist. The fact is that for the emancipated proletarians of 1840s in France, the model for their emancipation was not taken from social novels, but more from the romantic novels and romantic characters.

Yes, I think probably it’s a more open period because certain dominant models have perhaps disappeared, although much of the critical model is still working. This means that the aesthetic field is a field of multiple forms of experimentation. It’s true that we don’t exactly know where these forms of experimentation may lead. I would say that there is a kind of connection – but it’s a connection with a distance – between political and artistic experimentation; trying some new forms of connection between objects and practice, between framing the visible and making sense. This is a period of indecision. I’m not a champion of the undecidable, that’s not my point, but the fact is, I think it’s always good when you know what you don’t know. When you know that there is no evidence of any kind of direct effect from a certain strategy to a certain effect. There is the idea with many artists and curators that they are doing politics; that the practice of art and the practice of the curator are a way of redistributing the relation between the objects. The idea that any installation, in a way, is a political gesture.

A R :

Do you see then that there is an opportunity in postcritical art to do something more authentic with subjectivisation than these rather formulaic declarations of certain kinds of subjectivisation? Is it a more open period at the moment?

My point is: there is no general strategy. A work, the practice of art, the practice of exhibition, it’s always addressing a specific form of visibility and what I call a dissensus. It’s not a general form. It’s always a relation to a given form of visibility – an

J R :

Photo: Hendrik Speck

A R :

feature: Jacques Ranciere

attempt at displacing that given form. For instance, in The Emancipated Spectator I’ve focused on many works dealing with the Middle East – Israeli, Palestinian or Lebanese issues – and how people try to displace a line separating the world. It’s what Godard joked about: that epic is for the Israelis and documentary is for the Palestinians! The idea that there are certain situations where only reality can be taken into account – there is no place for fiction. The point is that many artists who are Palestinian or Lebanese or Israeli are trying to displace the border: when the Atlas Group creates fake archives, artists who are working not on the images of war but on what war does to images. Or when Israeli filmmakers play with animated film, like Ari Folman [director of Waltz with Bashir, 2008], with the creation of a digital mask for filmography. There is an attempt to displace the very forms of representation, to blur the border between fiction and documentary. The problem is not blurring in general – there is no point in blurring in general. It’s always in relation to the idea of what kind of representation looks at people in certain spaces and in a certain distribution of the sensible. A R :

Do you ever think about that with regards to what appears to be the expansion of the institutional space of art presentation internationally? It seems to me that one thing we can say about the last 10, 15 years is that contemporary art has expanded and generalised as a venue for spectatorship and a location to mediate internationally in a way which was possibly not the case 20, 30, 40 years before. Is spectatorship changing, do you think, precisely because of a change in the phenomenon of presentation? Is that a way of looking at it that you are concerned with?

J R :

For me it’s an ambiguous phenomenon, because at the same time there is an internationalisation of experimentation that goes hand in hand with a certain multiplication of the forms of artistic practice. The danger comes when all this becomes a kind of specific scene with the same artists, same curators and the same works basically, or the same way of doing works, circulating all around the world. So it’s a problem, this function of art as a substitute, but with the lack of a political perspective. There is this idea that the art scene – especially in an international exhibition – creates a kind of [political] ‘international’ of a new kind. It’s true that there is a kind of circulation of ideas and experience. At the same time, it becomes a world of its own.

A R :

I’ve noticed that you’ve turned more and more to the very contemporary. Historically there seems to have been a focusing on what is going on now because of the interest that is being paid to your work. I was wondering whether at any time you felt like curating an exhibition. I’m thinking of Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux, Virilio making exhibitions at the Cartier Foundation. I wonder if you’ve ever been tempted to test the relationship between presentation and theory. An aesthetic project in a way that puts you in a more responsible position, or perhaps a more dangerous position?

J R :

business, all the aspects of the relations with the institutions, the mediations between the artists and the institutions. Also, trying to resist what the institution wants, because the institution tells you that you are free, but at the same time the institution wants a lot of things. I hesitated and I thought, no. Perhaps from what I say or from the examples I’m commenting on, it’s possible to create the frame of an exhibition, but... it’s another job. Also I think there is something very authoritarian in the curatorial function! It’s a way of wanting your ideas to be materialised in the space and to have the control of that space. For me, that’s not the way of emancipation! A R :

I was reading Nicolas Bourriaud’s The Radicant. It seems to be that if we’re no longer certain of previous forms of political activity or political projects, are we ‘waiting’ for something? I wonder whether you think that we are in a ‘prepolitical’ moment. I am quite curious about this sense of anticipation, which is focused on the possibility of what subjectivity can be. I wonder whether you are also involved in thinking about a more purely social, political project that might be coming, might come or that you might want to come. Are you any more active in that kind of dimension?

J R :

I’m not directly active. Of course there is some kind of interaction between what I see and what I write, and people who are involved in specific political activities, sometimes there is a kind of dialogue. What I’m waiting for is what many people are waiting for, perhaps the idea of a new kind of political movement that could be free at once from all the official notions of politics, elections and so on. And free at the same time from the strategical model of ‘the way to the revolution’. I would think of a political movement that would be the expansion of real experiments of political practice and of a thinking about the possible universalisation of these experiments. You know my point about emancipation is always the same. It’s about politics based on equality, where equality is a presupposition and not a goal to achieve. What can we, from the experiments today, construct as a new form of political subjectivity that would accept the point that we start from equality, from the idea that there is universal competence – that there is a universal capacity that is involved in all those experiments and that we are trying to expand – to expand the field and the capacities of that competence. It is not much, but I think, for me, it’s what I’m hoping. I don’t know if we are in a prepolitical period or more of a kind of interval. Most of my work is devoted to trying to say we are not in the time of the end – but nor are we in a time with a goal – but this doesn’t mean that we are in the end. We are in a time which is a kind of interval. One in which precisely the question is, what do we think we are able to do together?



J acques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (2009), is published by Verso

I was once asked to curate an exhibition in Paris. I hesitated and I asked some artists who I knew. I thought, that’s not my ArtReview

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“tate Modern’s best exhibition for years”

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–the evening Standard

Lo n d o n R e v i e w s M a r at h o n / It’s been over a year since the wicked witch that is ArtReview last dispatched its purple, green, red and black flying critic-monkeys to terrorise the capital’s art scene. So off the winged simians were sent, to fly around town and provide their queen with a portrait of the artworld now. But given that they’ve had plenty of practice and can’t be spared for too long (ArtReview is sorely in need of another pair of ruby-red snakeskin slippers), the monkeys were told to deliver their reports in two days flat. (Yes, the red monkey took four, but she was weighed down as a result of her fetish for Continental gherkins and kept confusing the current mission with some previous quest for a girl, a tin man, a scarecrow, a lion and a dog.) Fly, my pretties, fly…

e a stern zone J . J . Charl e swo rth 40 Years On FLOWERS EAST Vanessa Billy Limoncello Graham Dolphin, New Display Strategies Seventeen Photo I, Photo You Calvert 22 Jost Münster Museum 52 Richard Bateman, Yves Beaumont Studio 1.1 Boo Saville Trolley Where Three Dreams Cross Whitechapel Gallery Anders Clausen HOTEL Miranda Watkins Ritter/Zamet Matthew Darbyshire Herald St James Pyman

Maureen Paley HAP Grieshaber: The Angel of History, 1964-1981 Hollybush Gardens John Stezaker The Approach Nicholas Byrne Vilma Gold Mark Aerial Waller Cell Project Space Frances Young Madder 139 Josh Blackwell Kate MacGarry Magali Reus IBID PROJECTS Daisy Addison, Adam King, Rebecca Stevenson Nettie Horn Peeping Tom Vegas Athi-Patra Ruga FRED A.K. Dolven Wilkinson Alex Robbins MOT Field Recordings Five Years Rachel Cattle, Steve Richards Transition gallery

centr al zone Martin herbert Chiharu Shiota, Jitish Kallat Haunch Of Venison Group Show Waddington Ken Currie Flowers Central Waseem Ahmed Laurent Delaye Cornelius Quabeck Stephen Friedman Bob Dylan on Canvas Halcyon Bernard Frize Simon Lee Philip Guston Timothy Taylor Matthew Barney Sadie Coles Alan Davie Gimpel Fils Arshile Gorky Gagosian gallery Cipriano Martinez Maddox Arts FOS Max Wigram Rula Halawani Selma Feriani gallery Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2010

Photographers’ Gallery Yan Pei-Ming Carlson Raghu Rai Aicon The Figure Show Jill George Daphne Wright Frith Street Gallery Albert Bitran Grosvenor Gallery

northern zone Laura McLean-Ferris Marcus Coates Milton Keynes Gallery Art & Language Lisson Gallery Emily Wardill The Showroom Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard Gagosian gallery Knut Henrik Henriksen King’s Cross Station, Northern Line Ticket Hall Damien Roach David Roberts Art Foundation Ori Gersht Mummery + Schnelle Michael Huey Josh Lilley Ana Mendieta Alison Jacques Collier Schorr Stuart Shave/Modern Art Charles Avery Pilar Corrias Lydia Bifford, Manuela Leinhoss, Laura Riboli Laura Bartlett Gallery What Where Sutton Lane The Sun Is the Tongue, The Shadow Is the Language Ancient & Modern Kilimanjaro Edits: Art, Love And Everyday Life 20 Hoxton Square Projects Sam Porritt Brown Candice Breitz White Cube Eva Hesse, Katja Strunz Camden Arts Centre Photo I, Photo You Calvert 22 Journeys with No Return A Foundation William Eggleston Victoria Miro Gallery Wolfgang Breuer Cubitt

Southern zone M a r k R a p p o lt Decode: Digital Design Sensations Victoria & Albert Museum Ellsworth Kelly, Hans Ulrich Obrist Walther Konig Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde Tate Modern Arshile Gorky Tate Modern Miroslaw Balka Tate Modern Michael Landy South London Gallery Mark Allen, Tim Bouckley Hannah Barry Gallery Tim Etchells Gasworks Aisha Khalid, Imran Qureshi Corvi-Mora Gretchen Faust Greengrassi Lillian Bassman Wapping Project Bankside Andrzej Jackowski Purdy Hicks Inscription: Drawing/ Making/Thinking Jerwood Space Katie Cuddon Alma Projects Julian Schnabel Robilant + Voena Ala Ebtekar, Yael Kanarek Holster Projects Franz Ackermann White Cube Zang Enli Hauser & Wirth Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes Bischoff/Weiss Billy Childish ICA

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40 Years On / Flowers Ea st

‘And now, Watson, it only remains for us to find out by wire the identity of the cabman, No 2 704, and then we will drop into one of the Bond Street picture galleries and fill in the time until we are due at the hotel…’

10.30am. I swear on Greenberg’s dead bald head that I’m going to see all these shows even if it kills me, or at least makes me quite tired. Saturday morning at half past ten is not a good time for Shoreditch. Sunlight hangs over the Hoxton zone like – you know what I’m saying - a hangover; a bleach-white glow washing over grimy pavements. A few Shoreditch casualties wander about, looking offended that they have to forage for a pint of milk this early, or that they are not in anybody’s bed. A young guy in skinny jeans, espadrilles and a big fur coat staggers along wearing aviator sunglasses. A girl in ripped fishnets and a Day-Glo yellow leotard with a black lightning pattern and hair gelled up like a Flake 99 waits for the bus to London Bridge. Feeling ancient, I step into Flowers East. Somehow I always end up respecting this relentlessly unhip operation, Angela Flowers with her unending dedication to a sort of sincere, modernist traditionalism – where all the artists are supposed to really mean it, and aren’t acting like poseurs - mixed with the goofier end of 1980s British return-to-figuration painting (Peter Howson, anybody?). The gallery is stuffed full of mostly paintings from four decades of ‘affiliated’ artists, and it vibrates with the pathos of a gallery that was once perhaps a buzzy place and is now just ticking along. Which is to say that more recent work looks like high-finish corporate-friendly painting and photography, while works from the 1960s, 70s and 80s crackle with the sense that something important was at stake in British art, mostly to do with the mutation of Americanised Modernism into postmodern heterogeneity and crisis: the acid-burnt figuration of Derek Hirst’s 1967 Interior of a Kind and the synaesthetic musicality of Jack Smith’s extraordinary abstract painting Sound Infiltration (1977) are highlights.

Va n e s s a B i l ly: W h o S h a p e s W h at / Limoncello 10.50am. Through a grey door in the side of a bunkerlike commercial complex as if built for a shit British version of Blade Runner (which, come to think of it, would be a working definition of Shoreditch) is Limoncello. Vanessa Billy seems to be a pure-blooded Limoncello artist. Elegantly lo-fi combinations of indescribably in-between materials that verge on the formless, which still bear witness to work and labour, while you wonder

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Thus Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, off to enthusiastically apply what his sidekick calls ‘the crudest ideas about art’ to ‘the modern Belgian masters’. That was in 1901. The reason Holmes could find plenty of art around Piccadilly to vociferate about while blitzed (as most artworld people in the area still are) on his favoured seven-percent solution of cocaine was because the Royal Academy, after bouncing around the West End a bit, had settled there in 1868. Suckerfish galleries followed the whale, as they still appear to do – if not always hugging the RA, then chasing whatever residual mythical glamour it is that hangs around the place (or if their memories are shorter, White Cube; or if they’re truly honest, the gastronomic opportunities). As a result, at last count there were 3,274,485 galleries within a half-mile of the Ritz, and coincidentally, only seven percent of them are any good. On the upside, that means proximity, which in turn means that when ArtReview

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L a u r a M cLe a n - F e r r i s

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Day one. I am hurtling along the boulevards of Milton Keynes in a taxi which is going too fast, given the regular appearance of the many roundabouts for which this town is famed, and thus I am being thrown about a bit. But when I’m not fearing for my life, I am thinking, wow, Milton Keynes – its concrete newness all decaying at the same rate. You can see for miles. I’m going to Milton Keynes Gallery, which is at 900 Midsummer Boulevard, and later today, the curator is going to tell me that the sun rises and sets at each end of this road, and he will also tell me how much J.G. Ballard loved Milton Keynes. In fact, Ballard said that he ‘always suspected eternity would look like Milton Keynes’. So right now I am zooming down those eternal roads, and I know what you’re thinking: Milton Keynes? This is an ambitious take on North London. But right now I am very optimistic about covering a lot of ground. As optimistic as Milton Keynes.

D e co d e : D i g i ta l D e s i g n S e n s at i o n s / Vic toria & Albert Museum

M a r c u s Coat e s : P s y c h o p o mp / M i lto n K e y n e s Gallery This is a select retrospective of Marcus Coates’s work, including the multiscreen film installation Dawn Chorus (2007) in which footage of series of individuals filmed

‘Never work with children’, goes the oft-quoted W.C. Fields maxim; for the art critic who’s attempting to complete a 20-exhibition marathon in the space of two days, this translates as ‘don’t try to do that marathon during half-term week’. “Speak into the microphone and interact with it!” shrieks a father as he thrusts his young daughter towards a computer terminal just around the first corner of the V&A’s sold-out show. I feel awkward now, because I’m not sure I noticed the microphone or ‘interacted with it’ in the way Daddy prescribed: I did some discreet tapping when no one was looking, and when that triggered some sort of nervous twitch on the screen in front of me – job done – I slunk away. The problem is this: I’m uncomfortable about the feeling that I, as much as the work, am on display. When I interact with the digital universe, I like to be no more than a username or email address. Now I’m feeling the pressure to bat virtual bubbles back and forth (which involves flapping around in thin air in front of a screen) or to use a hairdryer to blow dandelion seeds around another cluster of digital screens. It was quite chilled out when I first entered the show, wandering past some fibre-optic ‘grass’ that illuminates as you brush past it, knowingly viewing some slightly retrolooking (yes, already) animated ‘paintings’ by digital art pioneers C.E.B. Reas and John Maeda. But now it’s all gone a bit Axl Rose and welcome to the digital jungle. I worry that to get the full ‘experience’ of this show (and thus be better placed to review it), I need to ‘interact’ (that fucker was clearly a Guardian reader:

over the sheer low-temperature-ness of the resulting visual event: a bundle of what look like giant Twiglets made from cement, tied with a bit of red rope. Grungy bits of plaster or something scattered in the trough of a sheet of acetate hanging in a loose tube around a strip light. A video projection depicting the hands of a gymnast working the parallel bars. It’s to do with work, for its own sake, and matter, in its own right, and description, which is about concepts, failing to account for what is manufactured. Groovy, in a vaguely constipated way…

Graham Dolphin, N E W D I S PLA Y S T RA T E G I E S / S e v e n tee n 11.10am. Pleasantly elegantly filthy double show at Seventeen; ‘filthy’ in the sense that the boys at Seventeen have a knack for locating art that wallows in the mess of ordinary life without having to wear a prim art-apron. Graham Dolphin’s show, Burn Away Fade Out, is all about the suicide notes of famous rock stars and the graffiti-covered public monuments that their fans commune around. What appears to be a careful reproduction of Kurt Cobain’s letter to Courtney, and a bench covered in Nirvana-fan marker-pen lamentations, might be entirely invented, or at least modified. Wow, I think, Cobain talked a lot of shit, but, well, he was depressed. Dolphin’s show works because the fetishlike quality of the objects (replica casts of a bust of Jim Morrison, covered in fan-scrawl) hums with the naive self-indulgence of the righteously hurt emo, screaming authenticity at you while you work out it’s all been made in the studio. Ethnographic replicas. Downstairs the group New Display Strategies concoct a sardonic complex of videos and sculpture that attempts to revitalise the idea of the decorative as a sort of repressed Dionysian politico-aesthetic excess that runs throughout history from the Pyramids to the postmodern furniture of Ettore Sottsass. There’s also a very funny video in which footage of fashion models doing test screenings is dubbed to turn them into young painters and sculptors. “You’re a sculptor?” an off-camera voice asks a flawless young man. “Take off your shirt.” He does.

P h oto I , P h oto Yo u / C a lv e r t 2 2 11.40am. Calvert 22 is a private nonprofit dedicated to Russian and Eastern European art, and this is a mostly entertaining and thoughtfully curated show of artists from Eastern Europe who use photography and video. Loads of good wall-texts to read. Old series of photo-superimpositions by Boris Mikhailov before he was photographing naked tramps is the highlight for me, along with Jan Mancuska’s slide-rolls of him having his

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asked me to visit a mere 20 of them, there was no way I wasn’t going to get it done in one day, including a long lunchbreak and an unmissable appointment with a cocktail before sundown. (‘Marathon’ infers effort, after all.) And lo, so it came to pass, with the first stop for the application of crude ideas being the biggest suckerfish of all – the one that’s glommed so tightly onto the RA that it rents the fucking museum behind it.

C h i h a r u S h i ota , J i t i s h K a l l at / Haunch of Venison Bad start: Chiharu Shiota specialises in precisely the sort of grindingly spectacular tableaux bobbins that ought to have vanished in the mid-1990s. A huge curving structure, made from old and broken window frames sourced from East Berlin, winds a viewer towards its centre – to reveal, yes, a plaintively battered empty chair. Elsewhere, beds and microscopes and bugles and children’s dresses are suspended in or blocked by the Japanese artist’s signature webs of black string. Hold on, could this have something to do with, I don’t know, Memory and Trauma and the Unreachable Past? Could it ever – and while there’s little cause to doubt Shiota’s sincerity, her art manages to feel at once precious and bludgeoning. Fortunately, Jitish Kallat occupies the rest of the gallery spaces with a rangy confidence that seems earned. On video, X-rayed food items spin like asteroids in star-flecked blackness; paintings feature flayed bodies surrounded by sketches of teeming crowds and piled-up cars; a giant kerosene stove is decorated with a friezelike procession of animals eating each other, sourced from architectural friezes at Mumbai’s central public transport terminus. Kallat’s works soliloquise on India’s morphing metropolises, the individual’s role in a teeming population and elemental survival – but do so aslant, actively inviting parsing. Just a shame that no one else is doing so: Haunch is utterly empty.

Group Show / Waddington Round the corner on Cork Street, the thoroughfare of choice if you want to see, say, The Art of Sir Anthony Hopkins (no thank you, Gallery 27), a shock awaits at Waddington, traditionally home of the surly reception: the girl at the desk smilingly says hello. No doubt she’ll have been fired for insubordination later that day, and the usual routine – a gallerina pointing a shotgun at visitors and bellowing ‘Get out!’ in a Linda Blair voice – will have been reinstated. Meanwhile, Group Show, the sort of odds-and-sods display that always seems to be on at Waddington, is a weird soup bobbing with nice things. There’s a pretty good John Wesley painting of two pink bulls leaping expressionlessly over a blue striped bed, a decent late de Chirico and a very quiet Ben Nicholson abstract, all subtle spatial inference and satisfyingly modulating whites, which I use to play Gallery Game #43.

alone singing slowed-down birdsong has been speeded up and choreographed to recreate an entire dawn chorus. While one younger woman twitters to herself in the bubble bath, an old man sits alone at home, occasionally letting out a mournful barking cry. It’s difficult not to attribute meaning to this music that they are making – a chorus of people, together alone. This exhibition is mainly made up, however, of Coates’s work in which he plays the role of a shaman, dressed in fur, feathers and contemporary clothes, who can communicate with what he terms ‘the lower world’, an animal realm. In the past I’ve been uncertain as to whether Coates’s shaman shtick was a genuine thing or a pre-scripted performance – not that this really made much difference to the power of the films and their comment on our need for such answers from special or magical beings. An early film, however, captures Coates’s nervousness, and from the other documentation here, it appears that the artist is offering himself out as a something of a public service – dealing with everything from mothers with anorexic daughters to municipal bicycle law in Japan. Day two. I’ve been teaching this morning. I gave a lecture to some students being introduced to theory for the first time, and I think it went pretty well, and this is, for the most part, because I have been using Charles Harrison’s An Introduction to Art (2010) as a teaching aid. This is the last book Harrison wrote before he died, and it’s such a warm, generous introduction to art, delivered in an intelligent yet plain-speaking manner. I like the idea that, after all the complexities of language and art that he investigated over his life, this will to share art and enthusiasm with others was his last gift to the world. So, as I’m off to see the last Art & Language show that Harrison was in any way part of, I reread on the Tube the introduction to the book written by his wife, Trish Evans, in which she says that it represents for her ‘a poignant fusion of sadness and triumph’. I’m feeling peculiarly sad at this, and I’m thinking that it’s really going to affect the way that I see the exhibition.

insisting that his offspring leave nothing wasted in the show and assuming that at her age – five, max – her general vocabulary included the word ‘interact’), but it’s clear that kicking the youth off the interactive works so I can, ahem, ‘review’ them (what the children do, of course, is clearly ‘play’, and I’m going to be envious of that for the remainder of this trip), without getting beaten up by a parent who’s ready to snap, is going to be a problem. But despite my passive approach to interaction, I can’t help liking this show. OK, a number of works, like Golan Levin’s titillatingly titled OptoIsolator II (2007) – some sort of robot eyeball – were out of action, and the works that work are somehow a little slight, falling into types too easily classified as either technological wizardry or attempts to recreate analogue artforms in the digital medium. But if the kids are anything to go by, digital art and design has the potential to reach a wider audience than the old duffers who are shuffling through the V&A’s British sculpture galleries. And it’s certainly a medium that ought to be in pole position when it comes to commenting on or critiquing culture today.

E l l s w o r t h K e l ly, Thumbing through the Folder: A Dialogue on Art and Architecture w i t h Ha n s U l r i c h Obrist / Wa l t h e r K o n i g

Art & L anguage: Portraits and a Dream / L i s s o n Gall e r y But actually it doesn’t, in the end, have much bearing on how I see the show at all. Emotions tend to get left at the door when one is confronted by a grey wall of text about art theory. In effect, what I see is a long essay printed on grey paper, hung on the wall in a grid. At the top of each page is a log of how many ‘portraits’ there are on each page. Counting up, I realise that this refers to the number of artists named on each page. Which amounts to what? The second half of the grey essay has been cut up and made into paper chains hung from the ceiling. I don’t read the first half of the essay because a) it hurts my neck, and b) I think this would be unreasonable, but the section that I do read is a refutation of the definition of conceptual art given by writers in the journal October and the textbook Art Since 1900 (2004). There are several chairs made out of

There’s nothing on at the Serpentine, which has just taken down its Konstantin Grcic show and is about to install Richard Hamilton, but the marathon must go on. So instead (of making up the numbers by going somewhere in deepest southeast London that’s not near a Tube – apologies to the Agency) I’m going to be reading yet another of Serpentine Co-Director Hans Ulrich Obrist’s

wife paint every bit of his body he can’t physically see for himself, and Anri Sala’s video of a saxophonist on the roof of a dilapidated tower block. Feeling educated, informed and refreshed by this diligent show, I head to Redchurch Street. A Foundation, round the corner, was supposed to be open at midday, and it’s 10 minutes past and nobody’s there, so I skip them. As it turns out, in my enthusiasm I’ve been poaching a fellow critic’s galleries, and you can read her take on this and other shows I shouldn’t have been reviewing (Calvert 22) a couple of columns to the right across the page.

Jost Munster: Ground Control / Museum 52 12.10pm. Like Vanessa Billy’s, Münster’s sculptures and wall objects are a sort of meditation on the ephemeral and the surplus to be found in next-to-worthless materials. Except here, the materials are strips of two-by-four, hardboard, ply and cardboard, all fixed together and painted up in muted Ben Nicholson tones, to produce rectilinear modules and structures. It’s hobbycraft Constructivism, but there’s a sort of poetry of putting and placing, of one thing arranged to support or sustain the next. A sort of humble craftsman-modern that just about manages to slip through the gaps left by its ancestors.

R i c h a r d B at e m a n , Y v e s B e a u m o n t: Surface/Memory / S t u d i o 1.1 82 ArtReview

(Stand in front of any piece of work and observe it, very seriously, for longer than the regulation five seconds; soon you’ll have company.) Sure enough, two Frenchmen come scuttling up behind me and linger. They speak: Parisian insights will be mine! “C’est bon”, says the first. “Ah, oui”, says the second. Could it be the ghosts of Baudelaire and Apollinaire? I dare not look round.

Ken Currie / Flowers Centr al

Then again, I clearly don’t get Cork Street. For instance, I walk into Flowers and am pleasantly surprised by Ken Currie’s still life paintings, which are sumptuously painted, knowingly overdetermined takes on the vanitas tradition: a phallic candle with two testicular eggs at the base, two fried eggs in a pan on a stump and the solemnly offered accoutrements of the painter’s art: bolts of canvas, a Stanley knife, etc. It’s all pretty funny, this steadfast undermining, and only when I read the press release do I realise that Currie isn’t kidding. He’s been genuinely inspired by looking at Chardin and reckons there’s still some life in the format. Gadzooks, not to say zounds.

Waseem Ahmed: s i lv e r b u l l e t / L a u r e n t D e l ay e By now, after two French references in two galleries, I’m ready to visit Laurent Delaye, le survivor. Back as a sole trader after partnering up temporarily with Richard Saltoun, Delaye is also on a global tip this month. Lahore-based Waseem Ahmed has taken the increasingly

paintings on canvas in this show, too, and on a couple are resting vitrines full of little pin badges depicting, variously, close-up money-shots of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1866) and oak trees (the two images have a formal similarity). What kind of conference would it be where you had to pick up one or the other of these? There is one piece in which the chair is made up of paintings that seem to depict the artists’ studio in a snowstorm – open to the elements. There is something in this that one can get at, I think, but as for the rest of the show, it is I who is left out in the cold.

E m i ly W a r d i l l : G a m e K ee p e r s Without Game / The Showroom

stream-of-consciousness interview books (someone told me the other day that Obrist conducted an interview recently that was designated number 42 in the series, even though only 22 or so have so far been published, and the curator’s project has become something of an artworld Library of Babel to my mind – somewhere beneath Hyde Park is a labyrinth containing all possible interviews with all possible artists) on the Tube and bus as I travel the ridiculous distances between galleries on this odyssey. Updates as I go along.

Va n D o e s b u rg a n d t h e I n t e r n at i o n a l Av a n t - G a r d e / Tat e M o d e r n One thing’s for sure: whatever Kelly and Obrist have to say about the dialogue between art and architecture, it’s going to have to go some way to match what’s on offer in this superb exhibition documenting the work of the De Stijl founder and the way his generation’s ideas for a utopian new world order spread through painting, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, publishing and architecture. It documents an epic boomerang-path journey towards abstraction and then back into reality. And it’s too big and too interesting for this flyby to do it justice (and no, I’m not making this excuse for anything else). But its documenting of networks (featuring a cast of characters that includes the likes of Constantin Brancusi, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, Gerrit Rietveld, Kurt Schwitters and Sophie Taeuber-Arp) before computers, before Facebook and before the world started continuously consulting wireless devices to pick up the crumbs from some spastic Twitter trail is reassuring to someone still recovering from demands that he interact. More important, at a time pregnant with opportunity for political, social and economic change, the reminder that art can be more than simply a forum for rethinking society and might also take a more active role in shaping it is a welcome one indeed.

This film is 76 minutes long, and it’s causing me some marathon anxiety as I wait for the screening to start. Then I read that the people are filmed like ‘airline food’ on a plane – sorry, plain – white background, and that nothing ever touches anything else in the film. We occasionally see people, but more often hear a voiceover narrating images of still life objects, in a fashion that becomes absolutely gripping and, more than this, thoroughly disturbing. Wardill has demonstrated (in her ‘blank’-film Sea Oak, 2008, for example, which consisted of recorded dialogue over an empty film, her sophisticated knowledge of the way voice and text creates images and connections in the mind of the viewer. The film follows a family, whose home landscape is peopled by carefully chosen design objects, as a disturbed teenage daughter named Stay, whom they put up for adoption as a child, is reintroduced into their lives. Stay’s dialogue, when it runs to madness, is powerfully frightening. It seems best not to reveal the entire plot here, but the final scene of Game Keepers… is like the shower scene in Psycho

Hans Ulrich is talking about the fact that Gustav Metzger is concerned about the lack of drawing classes in art schools today. It’s not clear why Ellsworth should care about what Gustav thinks.

A r s h i l e G o r k y: A R e t r o s p e c t iv e / Tat e M o d e r n Entering this exhibition you experience influence transmitted in a different way, as Gorky attempts to absorb and reconstitute the winning styles of Picasso, Cézanne and Miro. After the resolute Modernism (in the sense of creating a rupture with the past) of van Doesburg and friends, this seems like something of a drag. If what’s impressive about the van Doesburg show is the

12.20pm. I’m fond of this little artist-run gallery, just for the fact that it manages to keep going. I can’t say much about Richard Bateman and Yves Beaumont’s ultramute little canvases. While there’s a certain enigmatic presence to the half-lit almost-objects in Bateman’s gloomy and inscrutable canvases, and an almost opposite delicacy in Beaumont’s evaporating wavescapes, I feel I’ve seen too much washed-out, post-Tuymans infrafiguration to be able to say anything useful. Maybe the lighting’s not right in here…

B o o S av i l l e : Tot em / Trolley

popular traditional-technique-plus-modern-content route, rerouting a classical Persian miniature painting style via images of insurgent Pakistani militancy: faceless, burka-clad figures being lectured to by a goat-headed preacher, and bodies turning into bullets. The work is ornately detailed, intermittently luminous and subtler than it looks, but it’s hard to concentrate on it because Delaye is yelling so loudly in the next room in his mile-wide accent. Still, he sounds happy – he’s got a “byootehfeuhl edission” that he’d like to sell someone – so I leave him to it.

Cornelius Quabeck / Stephen Friedman

12.30pm. Freakish paintings, mostly painted on black ground in murky ochres, present various disembodiments of the human figure through various ethnographic object types – the mask, the mummy, the idol or the effigy – but rendered with a sort of cold, cybernetic clarity which plunges you into a sense of the human body as inhuman and transcendent, in a sadomasochistic, alienated way, like paintings by Francis Bacon if they had served as mood boards for The Matrix (1999). Technically very refined, to the point at which you’re not sure if these were made by someone who wanted to enjoy making paintings or instead wanted to translate their terrifying CD cover art for a techno-industrial death-noise band into the cultural prestige of having paintings in an art gallery. Queasy.

Where Three Dreams C r o ss : 1 5 0 Y e a r s o f Photogr aphy from I n d i a , P a k i st a n a n d Bangladesh / Whitechapel Gallery 84 ArtReview

I gave Cornelius Quabeck’s last solo show here a one-star review (out of five, or maybe six) in another magazine and said it was pandering dreck. So it’s chastening to discover that either a) he’s gotten much better or b) I missed something. It helps that the German painter is no longer making big pencil drawings of gurning rock guitarists. Having spent time in Marin County, California, and become dreamily though not wimpily inspired by the flora and fauna there, Quabeck is now making tie-dyelike all-over abstractions dotted with either teasing hints of figuration (leaves, moons or faces beginning to appear, or dissolving) or outright readable elements like the comical head of that poster boy of extinction, the dodo. Conjectures filter through about nature’s cycles,

stretched to the nth degree – the characters couldn’t be further apart, but you will leave with the vivid memory of a blade piercing flesh, which is your very own. I have nightmares about this later tonight.

way in which it traces the development of an artistic language (which, I’ll grant you, may be a kind of preEsperanto), what’s annoying about the Gorky show is the fact that it opens with what seems now to be a history of dead tongues. Still, that’s redeemed when Gorky, via a series of portraits of himself and his mother (who died of starvation after they fled Armenia), begins to search for his own identity in his own past. Gorky made up his name, was vague about his age and pretended to be related to the writer Maxim Gorky (who had, in fact, made up his name, too), and these portrait works provide an interesting corollary to that search for an aesthetic identity in art. You may say that it’s unfair to compare one exhibition to another, and that a retrospective of a single artist should be taken on its own merits, but the fact is I’ve never been able to leave my baggage in the cloakroom. Ellsworth says that Max Beckmann was only interested in work by female students. It’s sort of a complaint.

Day three. A package arrives for me this morning. It’s a present from my boyfriend, and it is Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979), which is a book. Part of the reason he’s getting me this is that I asked for it for Christmas from my little brother, who on Christmas Day told me that he’d been to HMV and looked through all the CDs but couldn’t find “this album you want by Joan Didion”. So having had Charles Harrison with me at the beginning of yesterday, I think, maybe this is happenstance; Joan Didion should come with me today. So I read some of her essays on the buses and trains I have to take into town (being that I haven’t got any real friends to take with me). I’m on my way to see Gagosian’s J.G. Ballard exhibition, and I’ve occasionally thought there is a certain connection between the two writers; both considering (in highly different ways) what a lack of affect could mean. In the first essay in this collection, Didion writes about her feelings of vertigo, nausea and withdrawal, and of escaping to a Honolulu beach in response to the summer of 1968. Her psychiatric report describes that the ‘content of the patient’s responses is highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations’.

Cr a sh: Homage to J.G. Ball ard / G a g o s i a n GALLER Y Concrete towers in the sky, motorways, aeroplanes, nuclear rockets: all developments of the twentieth century in which humanity appeared to get beyond itself. Though this is the universe that J.G. Ballard drew from, it’s really not what he actually created. As you enter you are faced with the giant wheels of a Boeing 747 undercarriage, tipped on their side, monstrously threatening – it’s called Honda Teen Facial (2010), by Adam McEwen, which seems like it has the ring of Ballard to it, but on closer inspection doesn’t do more than say ‘death, sex, machines’, really, and it emerges that a lot of the work

Mirosl aw Balk a / Tat e M o d e r n

Given that the work consists of a massive black box into whose darkness you’re invited to enter, this has that interaction thing going for it again. I wonder why I think of this as a more acceptable face of art theatre. Maybe it’s because even though I have a natural instinct to attempt to pick out other faces in the darkness (partly because I have some concerns about running over an infant), I’m also comforted by the fact that as I walk in I’m also less visible myself. It’s a wonderfully creepy experience (I’ve just met a friend who says he couldn’t take his child inside because it was too frightening). So, three out of three for the Tate – it’s on a roll. Max Bill didn’t want Ellsworth in his gang, but that’s

12.50pm. Utterly massive show of photography spanning, well, what the title says, yes? A great effort, but it’s the kind of show you give awards to, not write criticism about. One or two things stick in one’s memory, out of the hundreds of pictures that surround the visitor – studio portraits of Indian women in the 1920s, in 1920s haircuts and flapper dresses, for example. Otherwise it’s a blur of well-tempered interest in the life and history of the subcontinent. Weirdly, though, after leaving, I realise that I can’t recollect a single image that suggests the presence of the British Raj, as if the imperial epoch somehow hadn’t happened, or as if Pakistan, India and Bangladesh had always existed in their present form. Indira Gandhi had good handbags, though. Out of the other shows that populate the massive new Whitechapel, there’s an endearing video projection by Melanie Manchot documenting the festive gathering of people from an East End neighbourhood as they ready themselves to have a group portrait taken. A hook moment turns out to be watching a little blonde girl who is dressed in an Indian-style tunic dress, almost entirely preoccupied, for the duration of the video, with examining the intricate henna design that adorns her hand and wrist… Time for a curry. Tayyabs in Fieldgate Street.

fades and entrances, and our role in them, but the work feels airily undogmatic and gratifyingly freaky. Mea culpa, then, although tune in next time when Quabeck goes rubbish again and I’m carried triumphantly down Old Burlington Street on Stephen Friedman’s shoulders, playing lead guitar and pulling crazy faces.

B o b Dy l a n o n c a n va s / H a lc yo n ‘Drunken Matisse impressions’, say my notes. ‘The culmination of everything Dylan has done with The Drawn Blank Series’, says a big wall text, which goes on to assert that the works ‘visually echo the stylistic hallmarks of Dylan’s prose, poetry and music’. We can’t both be right. Actually, it’s not just Matisse; there are echoes of – of all people – Quentin Blake in Dylan’s thick black outlines and unruly but sweet coloration, and his wobbly winding staircases and sidewalk café scenes do have a sort of ramshackle charm, in a ‘no way would I be looking at this if it wasn’t by Bob Dylan and/or I wasn’t being paid to do so’ manner. There’s a generalised Côte d’Azur nostalgia, a view of bobbing boats called, wonderfully, Vista from a Balcony and a strange, pseudoincestuous image of two sisters. Mostly, though, what David Bowie sang in 1971 on Song for Robert Zimmerman (“then we lost your train of thought/your paintings are all your own”) remains true, and you’re welcome.

Bernard Frize: red, yellow and blue / Simon Lee

Anders Clausen / H O T EL 2.30pm. Superslick, ultraclever, hyperironic, Clausen’s sexy big photo-objects, high-gloss on aluminium, are mostly of hi-res screengrabs off Mac’s OS X, mostly of spectacularly cluttered desktops, on which are mostly files of other screengrabs, along with the occasional bit of gay porn. Scroll bars enlarged into giant jewelsausages, various bits of Internet junk imagery, and one splash screen for an Adobe ‘help’ index, where the word ‘help’ becomes the dominant message. This is waycool work, but of course, Clausen is a way-cool artist, because he owns a Mac, not like us shitty art critics,

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I’ve never much liked Bernard Frize’s albums (although his 1963 opus The Turps It Needs a’ Changing isn’t bad), but the Frenchman’s shimmering process paintings remain dependably excellent. This show opens with a pyramid of polychrome circles on a white background, a onechance-only highwire act made by dragging a brush of rainbow-toned paint around (one imagines Frize, in a light mood, sending an assistant out for a bucket of stripy paint). That work is immediately outclassed, though, by a series of canvases featuring horizontally and vertically squeegeed paint, deeply Richter-ish but somehow sultrier, lighter, which spreads and dribbles in gorgeous spectra and feels simultaneously luscious and cold. None of which, though, alters the fact that Frize can’t sing for toffee and should never have dabbled in acting.

Philip Guston / T i m ot h y Tay lo r Suddenly I’m batting two for two. Timothy Taylor has managed to root out some pretty uninvolving Guston

here has been curated to fit this formula. The show is intensely adult in its bleakness, and the presence of some parents visiting with children on scooters only reinforces this. I almost cry in anger over Damien Hirst’s When Logics Die (1999), in which, hanging above a surgical table of instruments, are images of pilots’ body parts crushed by crashing at high speed: mangled legs, split-open brains. There’s an intense lack of humanity to this work that just callously looks to provoke a reaction. A huge amount of stuff – Koons’s Hoovers, Warhol’s carcrash screenprints, sexy nurses from Richard Prince, a lonely woman from Edward Hopper, Paul McCarthy’s sweetly snoring pig – and no space to speak of it. However, it will come as no surprise that Ballard’s own presence in this exhibition captures his tone best – a framed text piece entitled Project for a New Novel (1958) includes the phrases ‘the catatonic plateau’ and ‘fragmentation beach fatigue’, which sounds pretty much exactly like what Didion will go through ten years later. Ed Ruscha’s photographs of swimming pools from 1968 have the same fascination with that serene blue surface and what it hides as Ballard’s narrator in Cocaine Nights (1996; as Didion says of swimming pools, they are symbols ‘not of affluence, but of order, of control over the uncontrollable’). Ballard wrote of the longing for new rules – of unlocking the part of the human psyche that was developing in tandem with technology: new erotics, desires and dark little corners for poking around in – and not just about cars and planes.

OK, because Ellsworth realised he didn’t want to be in it anyway. Except when he tried to score a teaching post off the Swiss artist. But apparently that doesn’t count. The wanting in that instance was superficial.

M i c h a e l L a n dy: Art Bin / South London Gallery

Knut Henrik Henriksen: Full Circle / King’s Cross S tat i o n , N o r t h e r n L i n e t i ck e t h a l l Down in the new Northern Line ticket hall I realise that I am walking past a relatively new art installation by Art on the Underground (the first new permanent sculpture since Paolozzi’s Tottenham Court Road mosaics in 1984). At the end of one of the tunnels is a large stainless steel circle which is cut off where it meets the floor. Henrik Henriksen has created the ‘missing’ piece of the circle in the same material, and places it inside the original circle. It’s a minimal, delicate intervention that may go largely unnoticed, but the perfection of the geometry, and the sense that it gives us of ‘missing’ pieces of architecture and shape, creates a feeling of restfulness – of things having been ‘put right’ in such a busy site of pushing and shoving.

D a m i e n R o a ch : Sh i i i n , J e t S t r e a m , White earphones / Dav i d Ro b ert s

Balka’s people bin finds its opposite (but not its equal) at the SLG, currently home to Michael Landy’s Art Bin. This container’s transparent and the people are outside it looking in (in an arrangement that echoes the setup of a sports stadium), watching donated artworks being dumped into the big plastic box (the art that’s chucked in it will be dumped in a landfill at the show’s conclusion). On the one hand it’s a comment on the tabloid treatment of art as an inherently wasteful activity (here reclaimed by the act of waste removal); on the other, it hams things up to play up to the popular (but very dated) expectation that sensational is what British art should be. What interests me is that you can’t put just anything in the bin. All works have to be approved by Landy or his representative (which on one occasion was me). This is partly for legal reasons and partly because, behind all this, Landy is forcing

who crank this shit out on some shitty PC running shitty Windows, like the complete squares that we are. Seriously, though, this is all about the obsolescence of technologies of representation, of the invisibility of the tools we use, even as they become omnipresent mediators of our work and even of our subjectivity… and it’s also about how Macs are better than PCs, and how anyone who uses Windows is a fucking retard.

paintings in the past – a feat in itself – but this is a stellar set of drawings: Guston’s career in paraphrase, in miniature. Forget about the fact that five of them are dated a year after he died (huh?). Focus, instead, on the most economical summation of Guston’s shift from abstraction to figuration you’re ever likely to see – a handful of sketches from 1960–8 in which a scrabbly abstract cloud of ink marks gives way to tangled forms, then blocks on a horizon, then Klansmen heads. And the image of Guston smoking before the canvas, face covered in plasters, is at once tragicomic and a flat-out heartstealer. If I see more deeply felt art than this today, I’ll be lucky.

M at t h e w B a r n e y / Sadie Coles

M i r a n da Wat k i n s / Ritter/Zamet 2.45pm. The show’s closed, but it’s been a while since I last saw Marcus Ritter, who’s in his office. Surprisingly engaging, er, mobiles by designer Miranda Watkins. Watkins’s mobiles are made up of little more than rectangular slats stacked up on a central spindle, in various tones of powdery grey, or otherwise are made of fine interlocking tubular frames. The key to Watkins’s uncanny, unmoving mobiles is the purity of the manufacture, the precision-machining of the joints, acrylic spacers, rods and finished edges, and the close harmonies of the muted tones she applies. Makes you feel that Modernism must have been a good place to live, or else that all its promise can still survive in a few angles of metal…

M at t h e w D a r b y s h i r e : E L IS / Herald St 3.10pm. Walking round the corner to Herald Street – which has recently seen the erection of a glossy, lifestyle-architecture hall of residence for students – I find that the entrance to the gallery, and the

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I always feel like I need crib notes when I encounter Barney’s work. This time, however, a good part of the show seems to be a set of crib notes relating to his ongoing project, Ancient Evenings, whose starting point is Norman Mailer’s Egyptology-centred 1983 novel of the same name. Seven vitrines filled with a kitchen midden of photographs, books, texts and objects (hippos, Hemingway, Egyptian gods, fat women, cars, wrecked faces from www. bestgore.com) obscurely parallel the seven stages the soul passes through after death. Drawings on the wall in ‘self-lubricating frames’ feature bulletins from the American artist’s impressively fervid imagination (eg, a woman screwing a vizierlike skeleton by a river). Downstairs there’s one of those floor-based arrangements of grease that make Barney look more like he’s clinging to Beuys’s coattails than he probably is; still, somehow, the show feels like offcuts, a nudge towards seeing Ancient Evenings itself – but not a very strong nudge.

A l a n Dav i e : n i g h t g e ms / Gimpel Fils Guilty pleasure. I’ve loved Davie’s painting for 20 years, at least partly because it’s so dependable: the same vibrating organisations of mandalas, talismans and rotating amulets in febrile paint, like fragments from a cabalistic carpet. Davie has always been a compositional whiz, but this show leans heavily on gemlike and irreproducible colour: fleet modulations from fleshy orange to fiery pink, opulent blues and glowing grassgreens. Speculating on whether Davie’s rapt intimations of higher experiences relate to the fact that he’s still running full speed ahead at an age to make Methuselah respectful, I head out of Night Gems into sunshine that feels, for the first time today, oddly underpowered.

A r s h i l e G o r k y: v i r g i n i a s u mm e r 1946 /

a r t F o u n dat i o n Hanging sheets of coloured Perspex, patio-style flooring surrounded by plants and projections – this space is like some kind of utopian nightclub, in which your perceptions can be altered at your extremely well designed leisure. Gentle optical illusions, allusions and reflections range from Bridget Riley prints and motivational posters to Tropicália and hallucinogenic drugs. This environment has been curated by Roach to include furniture, found objects, his own work and that of others: shells, paintings, Ping-Pong balls and mountain landscapes all gently revolve around what is your pretty little head like carnival music. This show is really more of a lounge – a venue in which perceptions are altered, and as such, today they are having a talk and discussion with a psychoanalyst, which I would like to stay for, but duty calls.

himself into the uncomfortable position of having to decide what art is (a collection of bottle tops, for example, was refused on the grounds that it was not art, even though it was nicely mounted). Hans Ulrich was oppressed by Switzerland (the land of his birth). In fact he seems to be suggesting to Ellsworth that when we say “I was born in Switzerland” people understand it to mean “I was an oppressed child”. I wonder if Hans Ulrich would have interacted with the microphone at the V&A, whether his oppression would have translated into repression (like mine has, and I intend henceforth to blame England for it) or into him running in chanting a mantra to interactivity while waving his arms at every screen and fingering every fibre-optic rod as part of the revolt against his oppressor.

Ori Gersht / M u mm e r y + S c h n e l l e We are entering the grey area – the half-light world of the not-quite-there. This exhibition of photographic works by Gersht depicts landscapes of haze and uncertainty. Some are clearer than others – but in all we are faced with an inability to quite register. The series Evaders (2009), which hangs in the first room, is taken in the Pyrenees along the Lister Route, the site of Walter Benjamin’s failed escape into Spain from Nazi-occupied France – finding the path closed, he committed suicide in desperation, though it would soon reopen. We are on a blue rocky outcrop. A pale pink cloud hides the path ahead. A leather bag – Benjamin’s famous missing manuscript? – sits abandoned on the rocks. The indeterminacy here feels like the terrible back-and-forth of decisionmaking: what will happen, what should we do? Yet how beautiful it seems such anxiety – hovering between being and annihilation – can be.

M i c h a e l H u e y: S to r y Problems / Josh Lilley This exhibition from Michael Huey deals in lost images – of archives that have come to light, and been rephotographed. There is a literal and metaphorical rosy, peachy tint to many of the images. Hand-tinted prints from the 1870s depicting rosy-cheeked boys at work and at play. The texture of these images occasionally lifts them out of this cosy fug – the roughed-up surface of an image of a boy carrying a dead deer called The Chamois (2007) is as irregular and furry as soft leather. There is an ongoing concern with the plasticity of images – photographs taken from inventory albums in which possessions are numbered, entering another economic, legal realm as they are catalogued. But if I tell you that there are images of a young girl’s drawings of the stars, you will probably get the idea.

Michael Allen, T i m B o u c k l e y: G r e e n Hill Zon e / Hannah Barry Gallery Apparently the title refers to the landscape on the first level of a 1991 Sonic the Hedgehog videogame, although this is anything but obvious when you’re standing in Hannah Barry’s large warehouse space. Three ‘islands’ – stages covered in grey industrial carpet with heating vents (not working on my visit) – each located beneath a speaker hood which sounds like it’s broadcasting extracts from radio discussions and interviews. I hang around for about five minutes. Some of the dialogue is interesting (one discussion about orchestra conductors), but as an installation I don’t get it. There’s nothing that compels me to stay, nothing that makes me want to errrr… interact. So I leave.

whole corner of the shabby warehouse block in which Herald St resides, appear to have been boarded up behind an equally glossy hoarding. Big chunky colourful texts and graphics advertise the imminent arrival of a multipurpose development, ELIS, in the kind of moronic ‘aspirational’ language that we’re now used to whenever another block of flats goes up, with its weird grammatical habit of turning nouns into adjectives, and twenty-something baby language of narcissistic selfactualisation: in Playskool-coloured big letters the hoarding declares that there will be ‘INSPIRATIONAL’ ‘student accommodation’, a ‘DESTINATION’ ‘bar and grill’, ‘CUTTING EDGE’ ‘inclusive art commissions’, ‘DYNAMIC’ ‘live/work stables’ and a ‘young people’s centre for excellence’ under the euphoric declaration of ‘RESPECT’. Fuck this, I think, the regeneration toytown androids have arrived, and they’re fucking with my artworld!

Gagosian gallery Which is maybe why Gagosian are trying to make it sunny inside their boutique space: their show of Gorky drawings is bathed in lemon light thanks to a yellow scrim covering the window. Actually, it’s not why. This is a show of work from summertime: summer 1946, when Gorky had just lost a ton of work in a studio fire, was living in the Virginia hills and was drawing like a demon. Some of the results are in the Tate Modern show; equally good others are here. Turning the modernist deformation of the body sensuous instead of violent, Gorky’s sinuous yet mechanistic line and miscellanies of automatist forms are unique: stringy, bulbous and sylphlike body parts sit alongside each other in hugely confident improvisational choreographies. You throw adjectives at them, and the drawings tantalisingly evade capture. The big blowsy photograph of Gorky at work outside is properly crass, and the attempt to reproduce antique sunshine is sort of stupidly sentimental, but you can’t have everything.

Cipriano Martinez / Maddox Arts

Of course, after a moment, it dawns that this is a parody, and a very good one, installed by Darbyshire. Parodies hinge on our credulity, of course, on the borderline where the rhetorical clichés of official language become so hollow that they lose their authority and are momentarily reclaimed by their sceptical opponents. Darbyshire’s hoarding plays with our suspicion of the ersatz and sinister vision of a totally administered, liberal-orthodox world of contemporary design, lifelong learning, service-sector employment and consumer-lifestyle-loft-style leisure time that is the depoliticised urban ideology of regeneration. Mind you, given the crumbling, shagged-out old shithouse of a building that poncey Herald St gallery occupies, you can see why ordinary Brits might not mind a bit of regeneration, however inane the packaging. So there’s a modicum of condescension in Darbyshire’s assault on the aspirational; between us smart artworld people who see how stupid all this is, and the masses who just don’t get it…

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And yet nobody’s looking at the Gorkys except me, and there are a whole bunch of people keenly considering Cipriano Martinez’s paintings, proficient but boring computer-driven neo-cubist/vorticist evocations of colliding grids: Sarah Morris or Franz Ackermann for pyjama people, which make press-release spiels about the dizzying urban experience a cakewalk and, furthermore, bring joy to the hearts of masking-tape manufacturers worldwide. It’s not often I wish larger attendance figures on Gagosian, but really, there’s no goddamn justice in this world.

A n a M e n d i e ta : S i l u e ta a n d S i l e n c e / Alison Jacques

Ellsworth feels at home in twelfth-century cathedrals. It makes me think of Victor Hugo’s description of the Hunchback of Notre Dame taking on the physical aspects of his dwelling – ‘one might almost say that he had espoused its form the way a snail does the form of its shell. It was his home, his hole, his envelope… he adhered to it, as it were, like a turtle to its carapace. This rugged cathedral was his armour.’ Of course, Ellsworth is identifying his paintings rather than his person with constructions like Le Thoronet Abbey (to which, the last time I looked, Ellsworth bore no obvious physical resemblance), but Hugo would have appreciated the residual elision: the painter enveloped in the armour of his work.

Tim Etchell s / Gasworks

Ana Mendieta is a very important figure in the development of performance/body art in America, and so it makes sense that Alison Jacques (who also represents the work of Hannah Wilke, another female performance artist who died very young) would like us to reappraise her work in the light of the current interest in performance art. Mendieta’s performances were hugely experimental – featuring her smearing her own blood down the walls, rolling in blood and feathers, killing birds – but she also made many, many films, and these are the best things in this show. But there’s something missing from the exhibition, I think. The political elements of Mendieta’s work are somehow lost, and although the exhibition focuses on images of the artist’s Silueta series (1973–80) – effigies of the artist’s body in the landscape – they aren’t the best of those images that exist. I’m asking too much of this small show. But being as it is the first solo exhibition of Mendieta in the UK, I did want more.

Collier Schorr: G e r ma n F a c e s / S t ua rt S h av e / modern art The images that open this show of collages, drawings and photographs by Collier Schorr are of tangled constructions of sticks, bright flowers and thread. While the flower heads are rich and bright in colour,

This, however, is a keeper. City Changes (2008) is a series of 20 A4 sheets of paper, each typed with a story beginning, ‘There was once a city…’. Initially that city is one where nothing ever changed, and the text goes on to describe the governments, quality of life and generally the experience of living there. Through each of the 19 further iterations, the text is edited, each redaction colour-coded, to describe another condition of the city (where, for example, change was constant) and its consequences. While the mutating text is a narrative about editing, the experience of reading it is also like looking at so many redacted election manifestos. It’s also exploring the idea of linear progression (one change at the start leads to changes throughout), which brings me back to the van Doesburg show, although here the focus on editing (and consequently omitting) casts things in a more ambiguous, postmodern light. For Art Flavours (2008), Etchells asked curator Roberto Pinto to persuade ice-cream maker Osvaldo Castellari that he should respond to four concepts (‘body’, ‘memory’, ‘spectacle’ and ‘archive’) by creating an appropriately flavoured gelato for each. “I can’t do it”, Castellari protests over and over again, sweating and looking anxiously at the camera. (I can sympathise, as it reminds me of myself in the V&A.) Curiously, after all that, he produces surprisingly ordinary confections slopped into industrial serving vats – raspberry, vanilla, a peach-and-strawberry mix and, for ‘spectacle’, a luridly unappetising combo topped off with biscuits, green sludge and powdered gold. Apparently the architect Renzo Piano once said that in the future architects will be creating buildings that look like Ellsworth Kelly sculptures. I make a mental note not to invite Renzo to design my loft extension after all.

Aisha Khalid/Imr an Qureshi / Corvi-Mor a

James Pyman / M au reen Paley

F OS : c l u t c h / Max Wigram

3.20pm. Which brings me neatly to the bottle of liquid soap in the toilet at Maureen Paley (which is, by the way, of a very high specification). So, I kid you not, the brand of the liquid soap is something called Aesop, and get this, the stuff in the bottle is apparently Resurrection Aromatique Hand Wash, whatever the fuck that is. I mean, I just wanted to wash the piss off my hands, not have a biblical episode. But perhaps this is a parody of the language of contemporary bourgeois luxury-value lifestyle identification. Or maybe it’s not.

No, there really isn’t, and FOS is another case in point: the pseudonym of Danish artist Thomas Poulsen (and nothing to do with the Financial Ombudsman Service, though that doesn’t help either), who ought to be a lot better known but is handicapped by living away from a major art centre and making forward- (or at least sideways-) thinking work that won’t play to short attention spans. Here Paulson’s modified telescopes, videos of flickering arrangements of blocks, fractured star-maps and orrerylike mobiles of concentric circlets shift the terms of apprehension: assuming that there’s no objective truth to be had from vision, they’re visual evocations of the slippery, subjective process of looking, thinking, wondering. The contrast in assumptions between this and what I’ve just seen is, to say the least, marked. (Talking of no justice, this is the 12th solo show in a row I’ve seen by a male artist today.)

James Pyman, though, presents pencil-drawing illustrations he made for his own edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1987). What’s strangely effective about them is how little they explicitly indicate the vampire’s presence, but instead conjure a hazy world of Victorian gentility, of overbright days and mysteriously glowing nights. Seeing the show without the explanation heightens the sense of a narrative hidden, to be reconstituted from the prim surface of appearances. It’s a chic bit of neoVictorian dandyism, the romantic obsolescence of old culture ranged against the IKEA blandness of the world outside.

HAP Grieshaber: The A n g e l o f H i s to r y, 196 4 –19 81 / H o l ly b u s h G a r d e n s 3.40pm. Archival show about the publication Der Engel der Geschichte (The Angel of History), founded in 1964 by Helmut AP (HAP) Grieshaber, presenting a selection of the magazine’s issues, translations and photographs of an exhibition of Grieshaber’s woodcuts. Grieshaber, declares the press text, ‘aspired to a politically engaged figurative art’, reinventing the woodcut as a largescale panel medium. The show wants us to reconsider both figuration and political commitment, by pointing to an era in European art in which the debate over partisan figurative art had reached critical mass, only to implode in the following decade. It’s amazing how much that work has disappeared from art-historical view (what did you do during the 1960s, Daddy?) and this show is an attempt to reinvoke that history, which is great, though what to make of Grieshaber’s woodcut aesthetic is another matter…

J o h n St e z a k e r : Ta b u l a R a s a / T h e App r o a c h 4pm. As I walk up Cambridge Heath Road, it starts to

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Rul a Hal awani: p r e s e n ce a n d Im p r e s s i o n s / Se l m a F e r i a n i gallery After a touch of confusion over whether this gallery is actually called Le Violon Bleu, as I’d thought – turns

the construction around them looks like a fence. Is this fencing protecting them, or are the flowers shutting themselves in? Is this horror or beauty in the bucolic? These questions remain throughout Schorr’s images of pretty Aryan youth in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a town she has visited and occasionally worked in for many years. A violent, brightly coloured circular saw in Whirl (2009) recalls those flowers, and touches them with danger by association. Some boys are dressed like soldiers, grafittied by Schorr with clown faces. A youth with a red clown’s mouth smiles down from a tree, a naked young child reaches out to touch a cactus – this landscape veers between beauty and horror still.

Colin Perry reviewed this show for ArtReview’s website a few weeks ago (http://tiny.cc/corvimora) so I know a bit about it from that. Like the fact that Aisha Khalid and Imran Qureshi are a married couple who live in Lahore, Pakistan. Colin said that Khalid’s geometric patterns ‘are deeply imbued in the iconography of women’s art and craft in Pakistan’, but I can’t help feeling that they’re not when they’re in London. While they clearly reference traditions in Islamic art, I’m not sure I’d have made Perry’s link had I known nothing about the artist. Instead I’m interested in the strange disruptions – the green swoosh that strikes through what looks to be an abstracted chrysanthemum flower – and thinking of them in relation to the Mondrians and van Doesburgs I’ve just seen and the different sense of order these works represent. Qureshi’s fascinating miniatures, featuring portraits of himself, his wife, his gallerist and his assistant, provide a subtle commentary on the courtly dynamics of the artworld. I’m not sure why the couple are exhibiting together or whether it adds to or subtracts from the works – if I didn’t know about their relationship, I’m not sure gender would have had a big impact. But go see Colin’s review for the full whammy. Fernand Léger told Kelly to do one when the Yank applied to study with the Frenchman.

Gretchen Faust / greengrassi

C h a r l e s Av e r y: O n o m ato p o e i a Pa r t 2: The Port / Pil ar Corrias Another look at Avery’s island, and Untitled (The Port), (2009-10) is the largest-scale drawing that he has ever made. If you have seen some of these drawings, then you can guess what I’m looking at right now, but what I like best about this exhibition is the text hung at the back of the room, in which a character from the island speaks, revealing doubt and anxiety. Has he wasted his time searching for something on this island? For this I can only extrapolate Avery’s own doubts about his project, and I’m glad that, just as it is becoming so familiar to us, it is a little exposed, Truman Show-like, with Avery cast as both fearful doubter and mastermind.

This show consists of photographs of paired pistols, arranged as if by a butterfly collector. But a butterfly collector who might recognise himself as portrayed in a John Fowles novel. I recognise a Walther PPK muzzling/ nuzzling a Luger (because I watch enough James Bond and World War Two films to know). Looking at them is like being asked to undergo a Rorschach test when the psychologist has already told you what you’re supposed to see. I’m intrigued however by the fact that while I couldn’t be more aware that what I’m looking at is a collection of firearms, part of me wants to see something else (nice colours, pretty patterns, aircraft, relationships, etc). Each of the works is hung below eye level and titled Mudra, which refers to ritual hand and finger gestures performed in Hindu iconography. However, reading that last bit in the press release on the way out doesn’t stop my final thoughts drifting towards Fowles’s The Collector (1963). Hans Ulrich wants to know whether or not Kelly has ever worked with Frank Gehry. The answer seems to go: Yes. Sort of. I wanted to. I wrote to him. He replied to my letters. You want a definitive answer? No.

L i ll i a n B a s s m a n / Wapping Projec t Bankside I’ve never heard of Lillian Bassman. In the portrait of her in the show she looks like she could be described

become apparent that public disorder is taking place, focused on the York Hall leisure centre ahead. Young men are running about in groups, shouting and pointing at other young men who are busy quickly leaving the scene. It seems some sort of confrontation has taken place between opposing factions at a youth boxing tournament, but rather than wait to get my face punched as I nostalgise about the folkloric East End and its colourful inhabitants, I hurry on to the Approach, just as the Old Bill turns up in force. Stezaker’s deeply unnerving photocollages, or photosutures, don’t pull any surprises, in the positive sense that Stezaker is doing well what he has been doing well for a long time: taking film stills of 1940s Hollywood and dissecting, superimposing and recombining them into surrealist disorderings that rarely fail to touch a nerve. Also provocative is the historical disordering of Stezaker’s own work, mixing new works from 2009 with others from the late 1970s, and slipping from one to the other as if time had stood still. Untitled (1977–8) is the exemplar work, a weird bedroom scene in which a man peers under the blankness of the bedsheets/peers under the blankness of the image itself, which makes you feel like you’re looking through the back of your own head. Not since Max Ernst’s picture story Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) has surrealist image-play worked so violently. Stezaker seems to have a lot of groovy young fans in the gallery, so something must be working right…

out I can call them whatever I like, actually – the run of masculinity is broken. Rula Halawani’s photographic process is about as economical and indexical as it gets: she pairs archive photographs of Palestinian towns prior to 1948, when thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed following the creation of the state of Israel, and the stark appearance of those places today. Suba, formerly a road with a settlement and men on horseback, is now an alienated field full of metal poles; the neat agricultural landscape at Qula is now fenced off and free of dwellings. It’s quietly pained work, although some of what detains about it is formalist: the disjunction between the soft, silky textures of the enlarged archive images and the richly detailed new ones.

De u t s c h e B o r s e Photogr aphy Prize 2010 / Photogr apher s’ Gallery

Nicholas Byrne: A C at h o l i c E p i s o d e / Vilma Gold

4.20pm. It’s not often you see paintings as truly odd as Byrne’s. Oil paint fussed onto copper sheet, whorls of geometric curves, turns, radiating circles and spirals in overrich tones that leak from a palette which seems to have dropped out of a migraine labelled ‘early 1950s’, sort of Wols fucked over by Picabia, with a bit of pedantic Graham Sutherland anthropomorphism thrown in. Possibly they’re a genuine response to the desire to rehabilitate the tactile and visual resources of lyrical abstraction while investing in the atavistic delights of mystical, irrational Modernism. Or maybe they’re really the very perverted outcomes of a lot of mistaken assumptions. Who knows? 94 ArtReview

So, who did make the most significant contribution to photography in Europe between 1 October 2008 and 30 September 2009? We’re going to find out. What if it was someone who won in the previous 13 years, and can’t enter again? Then this prize is bunk. Out of Anna Fox (crazed domesticity, realist flash, comically masked acquaintances), Zoe Leonard (ramshackle storefronts narrating the rise of big business and the death of the little guy), Sophie Ristelhueber (elegant games with Photoshop, photographic truth and falsity) and Donovan Wylie (dour pictures of the Maze Prison being demolished), I choose – consults Magic 8-Ball – Fox. No, wait, Leonard.

L y d i a G i ff o r d , M a n u e l a Le i n h o SS , Laura Riboli / Laura Bartlett Gallery This is a lovely little show (with no stated conceptual theme) in Laura Bartlett’s slightly oddly proportioned gallery. Lydia Gifford has made small architectural interventions that meet me as I walk in the door and follow me along the angled walls. They are different forms of Roost (2010), each tiny perch less tangible than the last. One is polystyrene painted grey, another simply a pin in the wall, with paint glancing over the point of impact. Downstairs are some films from Riboli of gymnasts moving around their hoops and balls in a way that so fully and beautifully explores those two shapes and their relationship to a body. Perhaps the highlights are two sculptures from Manuela Leinhoss. They Have Clearly Declared Themselves (2009) is a small box structure, almost the shape of a large half-open matchbox, screwed to the wall with a pink lumpy piece of clay inside. It almost looks like a box covered over by a duvet, and the top lid, which is also washed over with paint, looks like it is being peeled back. There are many elements of layering and screening here, which all extend from the physicality and handling of the material.

as the Louise Bourgeois of fashion photography (for the record, though, Bassman is six years younger than the ninety-eight-year-old). I’m not really into fashion photography (it’s simply not my bag), but there’s something about these works that reminds me of Aubrey Beardsley’s decadent fin-de-siècle drawings (definitely my bag), although not strongly enough to constitute a madeleine moment. I’m starting to panic about spending the rest of this marathon in search of lost time, so it’s off to the next venue. (But if you are a photography fan, you should check out Bassman’s work.) At this point I’m starting to have problems with even passive interaction. Georges Vantongerloo (in the van Doesburg show) ‘became a need’ for Ellsworth. ‘He [Vantongerloo] was so alone’. Maybe that’s why the Belgian decided to cofound De Stijl.

Andr ze j Jackowski: T h e Remem b e r e d Present / P u r dy H ick s

W h at W h e r e / Sut ton L ane This brilliant painting show, featuring Tauba Auerbach, Alex Hubbard, Nathan Hylden and Zak Prekop, is based on physicality. Auerbach’s Untitled Fold XVII (2010) is an undeniably lovely painting that appears to be a folded piece of iridescent paper, gleaming from fluro violet and pink through to gaudy yellow and green. The acrylic paint seems to turn into light and spill off the canvas towards you. One of Nathan Hylden’s paintings appears to be a painting of a print of a photograph of a painting, and that makes it sound boring, but it isn’t.

The Sun is the tongue, the Shadow i s t h e l a n g u a ge / Ancient & Modern What a beautiful phrase this is for the name of a show about the sun, featuring the work of artists and scientists investigating the ways in which the sun can ‘speak’. There are photographs of sunspots from scientist Carl David Andersen, alongside Ernest Caramelle’s images made by fading coloured paper in the sun at different

Jackowski grew up in a refugee camp, and it clearly affected him. A fox occurs in a number of works, in front of a bunkeresque, concentration camp-like factory, and I can’t help thinking of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox (1970) – that book’s typically Dahlian mixture of cruelty and cuteness is mirrored in Jackowski’s paintings drawings and etchings (which feature a cast of other animals as well). I’m glad to have discovered his work. Ellsworth says Brancusi asked a girl with long hair to ‘come sit on my lap’ but wouldn’t have any truck with girls with short hair. Probably because shorthaired girls are all lesbians.

Mark Aerial Wa l l e r : R e s i s ta n c e D o m i n at i o n S e c r e t / Cell Projec t Space 4.30pm. Any attempt to summarise Waller’s suite of sophisticated, erudite, visionary, demented videos, loosely based on Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy of tragedies, would probably be a mistake. The sound is shitty, though, and makes it tougher to make sense of much of the already bizarre dialogue.

F r a n c e s Yo u n g : Sites of Transition / Madder 139

4.40pm. A darkened gallery full of video projection. In one, video footage from a road journey (Young apparently drove across America with a girl rock band) has been edited and processed and degraded to become a flickering, warping progression through suburban-transit America, sliced through by the rhythm of car windscreen wipers. Young’s video art is all about edit, heightened texture through analogue reproduction, rhythm and formal self-consciousness, which of course works well as it transforms the mundane into something curious to watch. A video of clouds of starlings wheeling away from an empty rollercoaster, against the rhythmic pop of the end loop of a vinyl record, sucks every element into a cyclical dance. Young’s video looks hard, but treads softly. Unless you have a headache, that is.

Josh Bl ack well: Juniors / K at e M acG a r ry

Ya n P e i - M i n g : Destinies / Carlson I like Yan Pei-Ming because he baffles me. I can’t figure out how painting from photographs in a massively splashy way, on a large scale, in black-and-white or tinted monochrome, can imbue familiar subjects with such (seriously) aching gravity. But Yan can, and does, and does it here with paired portraits of the Queen and Puyi, last Emperor of China, both seen in youth and in age. Puyi looks like T.S. Eliot in his younger picture and the Queen looks utterly mad in her older one, and between them is a huge portrait of Yan stretched out in imitation of Mantegna’s foreshortened Dead Christ (c. 1480). So he elevates himself to the level of both royalty and son of God, which we can’t take very seriously, but the painting feels very serious. Which is a pretty smart and mystifying mix, and almost makes me forgive Carlson for showing, in the front space, Huang Yong Ping’s horrible little installation featuring a grasshopper taped to the wall; the cover of a book featuring Maurizio Cattelan’s old piece where he taped Carlson head honcho Massimo De Carlo to another wall; a glass case full of live grasshoppers trying desperately to get through the air crack in the upper corner; and a bunch of email exchanges suggesting that taping a live grasshopper to the wall would probably upset animal rights activists. Ugh, ugh, ugh, make it stop.

times and rates – a process that takes several years. Raphael Hefti’s images of bullets travelling through the air look like dark shadows travelling through water and breaking walls. This last little Farringdon triangle of galleries holds a handful of aces.

Inscription: Dr awing/Making/ Thinking / Je r w o o d S p a c e This is a group show that promises to involve some sort of analysis of process and some sort of ‘conversation’ between the various outputs of the three artists on show. The last bit doesn’t quite come off, although David Connearn’s drawings are definitely worth checking out. I’d have put Philip Eglin’s ceramics and Charlotte Hodes’s ceramics and collages into another show. Possibly at the South London Gallery. Ellsworth likes drawing people once they have died. He started with his dad. I wonder if America oppressed him.

K at i e C u d d o n : I n o lo n g e r k n o w w h at the money is / Alma Projec ts Kilimanjaro Edits: A r t, Lo v e a n d E v e r y day L i f e 20 hox ton square projec ts This show is really a magazine (Kilimanjaro) made physical, which means that – in this case – this is really an exhibition about sexiness and sex, and it is

Apparently ‘Cuddon’s practice is essentially concerned with the human condition and its enduring struggle to find expression’. How that, rather than the constraints of Alma’s tiny space, led her to load more than 100 slides of her drawings into a carousel and project them, rapid-fire style, onto a wall as the centrepiece of this show I don’t really know. Perhaps she is trying to say something about the mind struggling to keep up with the eye or with our image-saturated world, but it doesn’t work for me. The V&A show did that much better. Does Hans Ulrich know Jeff Koons? Don’t make him laugh. Hans Ulrich and Jeff are tight as peas in a pod. Jeff’s working on ‘XXL sculptures’ right now if Ellsworth really wants the Koons skinny.

Julian Schnabel: N av i g at i o n Dr awings and one painting/ Robil ant + Voena Want to know why I like Schnabel’s big dumb gesturely oil daubings (in this show applied to a series of navigation maps that may, in themselves, be more interesting than the final works – and just to be absolutely clear, I do like them)? Because I think it’s healthy that someone can still exhibit big dumb daubings that demonstrate nothing other than their creator’s pretensions and the fun he gets from making big dumb art. As if to reinforce

4.50pm. This is very strange. Kate MacGarry’s shows often look colourful, but are also sometimes quite extreme, in the most unexpected ways. Josh Blackwell’s show is little more than a range of little paper cutout drawings of, well, what looks like children’s knitwear sweaters, pinned across every wall of the gallery. Drawn in cartoony ink and gouache colours, they’re the kind of little sweaters often worn in winter: bold patterns, snowflakes, rabbits, deer. The press release refers to the history of American textiles, the ski sweaters of New England preppies, Scandinavian knitting designs and Memphis Group textiles. Apparently it’s a ‘playful exploration of the high and low of fashion and art, situating them somewhere in-between painting, drawing, textiles and sculpture’. Which makes me think, whuhh? But so odd a presentation is it that I kind of admire it for its total self-assurance. Perhaps we’re heading for a superdecorative phase in handmade art, combined with a redemptive desire for cuteness and sentiment – which is possibly a very scary prospect...

M a g a l i Re u s / IBID PROJ E CTS

R aghu R ai /

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Downstairs from Carlson, meanwhile, is Raghu Rai, who (shame on me) I’ve never heard of but whose photographs of India clarify immediately that he’s an absurdly good Magnum photographer. On its own, Traffic Constable and Horse ‘Bagghie’, Kolkata (2004) would be worth the price of admission (which is nothing, but I could have walked into the Absolut Icebar instead); the sort of magical, heavily vertical composition that just drops your jaw. Here’s a girl by a motorbike, seemingly elongated by her dangling scarf; a whooshing horizontal created by a blurry moving car whipping across the image’s centre; and a bizarre backdrop in which a cab seems to be crossing a truncated bridge: after a while, you think this has to be a model. Real life as surrealism and casual formalism, and a number of the 20 photographs here are equally good.

The Figure Show / J i l l Ge o r g e Then Riflemaker turns out to be closed for installing, so I spin on my Cuban heel, and there, right over the road, is Jill George – where I’ve never knowingly been. And what do you know, inside is a crazy-quilt arrangement of artists working with the figure, and I don’t know most of them except for, first, David Mach, whose photographic collages are winningly excessive deflations of leisure fantasies featuring scuba divers beneath curling surf while luxury boats above whiz past golden towers of commerce; and second, Kathryn Ensall. When I was a callow youth (as opposed to a callow adult), Ensall briefly taught me at art school. “Martin is brilliant because he thinks he is”, I remember her telling my unconfident studio partner. Very astute she was, and her paired paintings of two stages in some unconsummated (or just consummated, who knows) tryst get the requisite disproportionate attention from me.

4.58pm. Magali Reus couldn’t be more different from Blackwell. Highly finished and considered objects, composed of different units of high-gloss green, hinting at military camouflage, and also configured to suggest various forms of stress, effort and tension. Two slabs of green mass are balanced high up across some metal beams fixed from wall to wall in a bay of the gallery. In the back room, a video of men dressed as army recruits in a desert valley, the group performing various strenuous but choreographed actions, which include handling a long reflective metal beam. Reus’s works seem to play minimalist sculpture against a sense of physical human effort, discipline and its erotic associations. But all this feels a little heavy-handed, the message being served up all too obviously.

Daisy Addison, A d a m K i n g , Re b e c c a Stevenson: Podium

D a p h n e W r i g h t: traits of sidney / F r i t h S t r ee t Gallery Apparently the white sculpture of a horse with its legs in the air is supposed to look at first playful – like it’s rolling in the grass – and then, when you close in and see its chest has been flayed, a lot less playful. I’ve never seen a horse roll on its back, so it didn’t do the first thing for me. Daphne Wright might be that uncommon artist who has rarefied their work to that elegant point where there’s nothing really to say, aside from that it looks sombre and professional. Certainly Frith Street seems totally stumped by her watercolours (‘delicate washes of blue colour creating ephemeral images’ is the press release’s will-this-do gloss), and

mainly a range of photographs by the magazine’s favourite photographers. Models, dogs, nudity ‘n’ stuff. There’s a bit of nasty sculpture from Alex Hoda, of models of creatures coated in rubber. Leave it as a magazine, I say, I’m sure it looks great. This doesn’t really.

S a m P o r r i t t: L i f e I s A Journey / brown I was kind of looking forward to this show, and thinking I was going to like it. As I’m walking in, what I’m confronted with is a roomful of sheets of paper with black ink squiggles on them in loopy rows, like handwriting exercises. They have titles that relate to the passages of life – like some kind of squiggly bildungsroman, and in the middle of the space are four sculptures based on feet, some casts of feet, some casts of footprints. So I’m thinking about walking, walking around these squiggles of obstacles until I die. As I am about to leave, I stand and think, he makes this work – just. But then later on I think, what were you thinking? That didn’t work at all. So now I’m a bit confused, and I don’t know which edition of myself to trust.

Candice Breitz: Fac tum / White Cube At least I don’t have a twin to argue about it with, though. So plainly revealing are Candice Breitz’s twin screen films of identical twins of the human condition that I want to stay and watch all of them, but White Cube are throwing me out of the door because the chimes are ringing six throughout Hoxton Square, and the day is done.

E v a He s s e : S t u d i o w o r k , K atj a Strunz: Sound of the Pregeometric Age / C a m d e n A r t s Ce n t r e Day four. This exhibition of Eva Hesse’s small ‘test pieces’, as they were known, have been reclaimed by writer and curator Briony Fer as ‘studioworks’. They are magical, odd wonderful things, full of bodily comedy. From 1967: what looks like two little cymbals that also look like nipples have huge springs dangling out of them. Hesse really harnessed the comedy, the impotence and the oddness of the double (just don’t mention that to any

this, one of the charts onto which he’s splattered his painterly jism is stamped ‘warning: not to be used for navigation’. Incidentally, as I come across the great man wandering through wearing the usual set of purple pyjamas, it strikes me that Will Ferrell is the only man to play the leading role in the Schnabel biopic (no, Chevy Chase is too old to play the ‘younger years’ convincingly). It’s a shame, therefore, that Ferrell’s already been in a film titled Land of the Lost (2009). ‘My boyfriend and I argue constantly about what time we go to bed. I find it impossible to sleep until he comes to bed, because he wakes me. I’m definitely slightly obsessed about it, because I find my day so stressful if I’m not well rested – but I can’t get through to him and make him change his habits. Do you think we need separate rooms?’ No, that’s not from Ellsworth’s discussion with Hans Ulrich. It’s from the ‘Aunt Sally’ advice column in the Sunday Times Style mag that I’ve picked up off a seat on the Tube. But somehow it seems to reflect the way Hans Ulrich keeps trying to wake Ellsworth up to the architectural theme of the book.

A l a E b t ek a r , Y a e l K a n a r ek : I n T r a n s l at i o n / Hol ster Projec ts I recently read Reyner Banham’s Scenes in America Deserta (1989) – his ‘review’ of the California desert – and I think he’d have appreciated Kanarek’s Horizon (2007), made up of the silicone-cut word ‘horizon’ in English, Hebrew and Arabic (repeated hundreds of times) as a dune-created horizon in black. Banham would have liked the perversity of trying to define an empty skyline this way. Nearby is Wavelength of Roughly 630–740nm (2010), the word ‘red’ cast in silicone and spelled out in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish and Spanish, layered and assembled into a squashed-doughnut-shaped cacophony that resembles a more sensible (and sensitive) version of one of Anish Kapoor’s recent red wax splatters. Kanarek’s attempts to fuse the virtual and the real make me think she would have appreciated the V&A experience. By the way, Sally suggests that her correspondent consider asking his or her boyfriend to sleep in a separate room, but the correspondent reckons his or her partner would take that as an insult. I wonder if Ellsworth has ever sent any of his interviewers to a separate room, when he feels they’ve pestered him for too long about the wrong thing.

F r a n z A c ke r m a n n : Wait / White Cube Franz Ackermann might have liked it as well. His whirligig installation of paintings, sculptures and kinetic art fuses colours and images that you’d associate with 1990s

and Pandemonium / Ne t t i e H o r n

5pm. Nettie Horn is riding the recession with more playful, ultradecorative and easy-on-the-eye objets d’art. All due credit to them for keeping spirits up. Rebecca Stevenson’s resin bust of a woman garlanded with plastic flowers; Adam King’s chaotic, multicoloured paper-and-wire scatter sculptures. Only Daisy Addison’s more dull-toned sculptures – a giant house of cards with every card bearing the motif of a feather, or a feltboard with paper cutout chainlinks breaking up – seems to suggest a gloomier horizon…

Pee p i n g T o m /

Ve g a s

5.05pm. Raucous salon-hang group show with a cast of thousands curated by Keith Coventry, basically on the theme of voyeurism, or ‘scopophilia’, as pensioned YBAs used to call it. Pensioned YBAs are out in force, along with a younger gang of high-concept perverts and hedonists, and it’s a refreshing experience, if stained with nostalgia; the art equivalent of a long night in a smoke-filled pub in 1997. Lots of tits, cocks, fuck and wank, a ribald, sweaty collection of artmaking steeped in the funky joy of revelling in artists being wrong, despised by society and generally acting like sexy fuckups, rather than all those cybernated, pen-pushing Eurocuro institutional-critique career-climbing fucking android hypocrites with no arsehole and an iPhone where their heart should be, who are pouring out of the curating academies intent on locking up all the thick artists in rehabilitation centres, so that the whole artworld ends up looking like fucking Holland.

I watch the film downstairs, which pans over some marble statuary while someone makes vague little noises in response, without a single thought for several minutes. That’s no bad thing; Wright may even be the first artist to have built Buddhist mindfulness exercises into her work.

Albert Bitran: obliques / Grosvenor Gallery

identical twins). There are the lightest papier-mâché works here too, which look ready to set sail, or to fly away – in any case, to transcend their material. Katja Strunz’s sculptures seem to want to do the same: burnished assemblages made from candlesticks and ashtrays, but also cymbals and brass instruments. Vibrations and small mechanical movements create a kind of music of objects, and sprinkly, twinkly radio crackle.

P h oto I , P h oto Yo u / C a lv e r t 2 2 There’s a little café on Calvert Avenue, where I am going next, which I’ve been wanting to go to, so I arrange to meet someone for lunch there. I have a cheese, ham and cornichon sandwich, and then afterwards a soft little dusty nougat cake and a small milky coffee. Now to Calvert 22. I don’t really get the theme of this exhibition – something about Eastern Europe dealing with the encroaching world of advertising, which doesn’t really ring very true, given what’s on show. There is a focus on the rundown and the ephemeral (Igor Eskinja’s pattern on the floor of a carpet created from dust is a nice case in point, as are Anna Jermolaewa’s images of bird’s perching on large public clock hands at different times of the day – some ‘times’ are better than others). I haven’t seen a really great show here yet (although I haven’t seen every one), and I’m starting to wonder if the geographical focus of Calvert 22 is holding it back a bit. I think when this gallery relaxes about what it is supposed to be doing, the exhibitions here might seem less heavy-handed.

club culture, the Internet’s image overload and urban graffiti to create a strange, sometimes bewildering, slightly sinister yet definitely recognisable portrait of modern urban life. It oscillates between states of total chaos and a kind of order (a sense of geometry and clean edges) that van Doesburg might have appreciated. Perhaps it twitches between Modernism’s sense of new world order and postmodernism’s interest in combining all possible orders, but as the title suggests, it seems grounded in the still of a present moment, rather than the tidal wave of some future to come. Ellsworth says everything is fragmented in the world.

Zhang Enli / Hauser & Wirth

Journeys with no return / A F o u n dat i o n Across the road, and good Lord, it’s another massive group show with a geographical theme. This one, however, really shows up Calvert 22, because of the sophistication of the work on show and the gentle, more fluid curating. Among the works here are the split, shattered narratives of Ergin Çavusoglu and the split photographic images of Melanie Manchot – who takes portraits of loved ones who are split apart by geography, but sets up the shot as if they could be sharing the same space. Adam Chodzko’s film The Pickers (2009) follows a group of young Romanian strawberry pickers working in England as they research images and footage of strawberry pickers in the countryside. We watch them editing and discussing a film that compares themselves to those who picked strawberries on their site before. They keep pointing out how much fun everyone seems to be having – “They come together to have fun and to pick berries” – whereas when they watch themselves, they see labour and efficiency, charting the unstoppable, clinical rise of capital that transforms work from personal, social or community pleasure into the hard graft of economic growth.

Enli also offers up a portrait of the world around him, but in the form of almost translucent paintings of individual objects from the world around him – designer sinks, a sofa with a sheepskin slung over it, curtainwall skyscraper glazing, lighting sconces, some sort of net. His delicate washes and turpentine dribbles mean that this doesn’t take the form of consumerist fetishism, rather the opposite – it makes them look worn in or, as someone like Georges Perec might say, infraordinary. Which is why I find it a little weird to see them in the austere grandeur of this bunkerlike former bank. If you want to get something architectural done in New York during the five years either side of the turn of the millennium, you had to write to New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. That’s what

Probably the worst/best offender in the show is dandy mediocrity Sebastian Horsley’s photograph of himself fucking a prostitute who has no arms or legs. Horsley recounted this episode in his 2007 autobiography, which sticks in the mind for having only one really good line in it. Musing on his lack of any real life achievements as he turns thirty-six, Horsley has a striking insight: ‘Mozart at my age had already been dead for a year’. Turns out he nicked that line from someone else. Splendid.

At h i - Pat r a R u g a / FRED

Last show already? But it’s only lunchtime! (Not really.) Now eighty, Albert Bitran was a Turkish painter of the School of Paris, and his work from the 1970s to 90s here mostly looks spiffy. Tailfin-shaped planes of roughened colour strafed with scratchy, twisty pencil marks and thickening storms of paint, they’re gnarly and obsessive things: not overdone but caught at a tense point that feels at once midway and conclusive. Still, that’s only partly why I’m ending here. Grosvenor Gallery has some serious, perspective-inducing history. It was founded in 1877 and was the place you showed if you were too racy for the Royal Academy, which is why it showed the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler. Oscar Wilde made his London debut there, in 1877, wearing a coat the colour and shape of a violoncello. And the gallery used to be on Bond Street, so private detectives could pop in and blather ignorantly. (And like almost everybody else in London, it’s lately jumped on the Indian art bandwagon, partnering with Vadehra in New Delhi since 2006…) But the best thing about Grosvenor, not least for the thirsty marathon-ending critic, is this: it’s a stone’s throw from the century-old Dukes Hotel. As no less an authority on drinks than John Baldessari has it, the bar at Dukes makes the best martinis anywhere – agreed, Mr B – and as long as Dukes is there, there’ll always be a picture gallery around. After all, we need to “fill in the time until we are due at the hotel”, don’t we? No shit, Sherlock. THE END

5.15pm. Identity-politics art made by a quite camp young black South African artist. Masquerade, dressing up in tights and high heels, climbing the face of a church (quite a feat, in fact), dressing as an Afro-pom-pom in the midst of white sheep in Switzerland around the time that the Swiss were voting on whether they wanted more immigrants (God, the Swiss are overrated…), it’s funny, angry, self-centred and a bit overobvious. Probably more fun as a cabaret night than a gallery show. But Fred declares that it has had a bit of a rethink, and is now going to be focusing on emerging African art. So there you go.

A . K . D o lv e n / Wilkinson 5.20pm. Starting to flag. A.K. Dolven’s show is elegantly cold, suiting the huge walk-in fridge that might be Wilkinson’s main gallery space. Well, Nordic. There’s a monumental rectangular projection screen leaning against the wall; some people appear to be carrying a woman up

Ellsworth did with his proposal for the World Trade Centre site. Herbert promised to follow it up. Errr… that’s where the story ends.

Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes / B i s c h o ff / W e i s s

William Eggleston: 21st Century / Vic toria Miro Gallery I love William Eggleston and I like this show – although I’ve been spoiled by having seen his Democratic Camera retrospective at the Whitney in New York last year, which rates among the eight best shows I have ever seen. The photograph that ends this exhibition is a tight composition of squares – we see a tiled chequerboard shopfront and a doorway. Out of step with the neat tiles, a green door, marked ‘Delivery Entrance’, leans wonkily off its hinges. Meanwhile, behind a hazy frosted glass screen, we see soft women’s hair on a styling dummy and other patches of green and pink colour. The fact that we can’t get at this part of the image makes the eye pore over it, but there is something protective about this milky, frosted screening. Eggleston’s images are famed for their colour, but they have such texture, too – wood looks like pheasant feathers, a bathroom is bathed in pink light from fuchsia curtains, but also a mallow softness, and grass and paper crackle alike, in gentle visual noise. And now I really have to rush if I am going to make the last gallery on my list.

wolfgang breuer: News from rome / cubitt Fail. I don’t make it to Cubitt because I have run out of time, so I go home in the freezing rain. But all the way home I am thinking about Cubitt and feeling bad about it. And I know what you’re thinking: why did you have your lunch in that café when there was no time? And you had cake! Nougat, whatever. And you would be right – what

I don’t get what Paul Simon has to do with this show. Although this verse might provide a clue: ‘And I could say oo oo oo/As if everybody knows/What I’m talking about/As if everybody would know/Exactly what I was talking about/Talking about diamonds on the soles of her shoes’. There are works by three artists on view: Alicja Kwade, Matthew Smith and Raphaël Zarka. I like them all individually, but they don’t truly seem to be tied together by the show’s conceit, although there is another connection in terms of a collective attempt to reclaim the ruins of Modernism (of the Le Corbusier ilk). For me, Kwade’s sculptures (restoring and reconstituting everyday objects), which I’ve never encountered before, are a real standout. The cover blurb claims the Ellsworth book is ‘a huge literary journey’. It seems totally to miss the point.

B i l ly C h i l d i s h : Unknowable But C e r ta i n /

ICA

I’m uncertain about Childish’s paintings, wonderfully hung in the ICA’s groundfloor gallery. I’m moved by the paintings that reference the Swiss writer Robert Walser, but I suspect that reflects more about what I feel about Walser than about the paintings. Although maybe that means Childish has simply managed to capture something of the Walser moment (the writer’s death in the Alpine snow). I’m not sure about his references to some retro-England of rough, homespun woollen suits and steamships and whether or not this is simply escapism. I change my mind when I get upstairs, passing through a room commemorating Childish’s musical output and into a room celebrating his publishing and poetry. This

a steep, snowy slope, which corresponds to the slope of the projection screen. But I’ve run into Roger Malbert from the Hayward and we end up chatting about a piece I’ve written about the organisational and financial mess currently engulfing the ICA, and I realise, panicking, that I have three more shows to see. A.K. Dolven, well done, I’ll come back, I guess.

Alex Robbins /

MoT

5.40pm. I never remember which floor of this block MOT is on. They should have a sign outside the lifts. MOT has gone all recessionary-curatorial free-form jazz, declaring that it’s ‘dispens[ing] with conventional programming’ and basically just hanging around and trying stuff out, right? Which in this case is Alex Robbins, who presents some out-of-date books, scattered in orderly fashion on the floor, with titles like Capitalism for Beginners, The Concise Dictionary of Christian Tradition, Clinical Tropical Diseases, Meteors and Meteorites and The Will to Live. Except that these are actually replicas of those books, carefully tooled in wood, and with the covers exactly remade as silkscreen prints. There’s a historical sadness to them, as if remaking them now were a kind of voodoo charm to recall the old-fashioned goodness of books, and a world where people tried to understand things and get things done, not like now, where everyone is just wanking on Facebook and worrying about their carbon footprint. The books are all drawn from Robbins’s library, apparently. Maybe he needs some new books, or maybe he could do something with the knowledge in them other than make art, but that perhaps is the point, and like Graham Dolphin and his replica fan-idols, artists now are haunted by their awkwardly self-conscious distance from the rest of the world, which doesn’t really recognise what they do anyway.

is wrong with me? And all I can say is, I’m sorry! That Milton Keynes optimism about myself and my abilities was clearly misplaced. THE END

man is clearly capable of producing brilliant, moving, approachable stuff. Ellsworth on one of his collages: ‘This reminds me of a girl I once knew. It’s like the dream of a cock fight in St Martin.’ The mind boggles. The collage, however, is great. It’s one of a series of postcard-size works that Hans Ulrich has asked the artist to dig out and which are reproduced in glorious colour in the middle of the book. Hans Ulrich suggests that they should be more widely exhibited. He’s right; they’re quite wonderful. Do it in the Serpentine, Hans Ulrich! THE END

Field Recording / Five Years 5.45pm. Five Years is having a sound art programme of events for a month. It’s getting dark when I step in to the little gallery space, which has a couple of electro knob-twiddlers – I think they must be Shelly Parker & Paul Purgas, going by the programme – sat at a desk while a few visitors sit in the twilight gloom, quietly attending to the gentle fizz and hiss that Parker and Purgas are modulating, drawing live feed from a mike outside. Little red LED monitors glow in the shadows. This is what art will be like at the end of the world. People gently listening to beautiful static, in the cold, before the faltering lights, at last, fade out.

R ac h e l C at t l e , Steve Richards: Cosmogr aphia / Tr a n s i t i o n G a l l e ry 5.55pm. They have almost locked up at Transition, but the attendant switches the video back on. Cosmographia is a monochrome video in which a hand is seen pencilling a geometric design on paper, then manipulating two mirrors to create kaleidoscopic patterns and movements. There are also shots of hands handling various fragile polyhedral objects, also apparently made from paper or card. There’s a slightly ridiculous operatic vocal soundtrack to this, and the whole thing seems unwitting, naive in its delivery, but still grasping towards a vaguely understood sentiment about the exotic and intoxicating prospect that utopian Modernism once offered. Fugitive Modernism, hibernatory Modernism, postlapsarian Modernism. It’s clear that, even for all the shit that artists get taught, what they really want is Modernism back. Or instead, that these stylistic ciphers of Modernism operate as placeholders for something invisible, that is, that ‘the future’ is worth holding onto. But it’s ten past six, and it’s time to switch the projector off. Lights out. THE END

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 Robert & Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection 13 Apr - 27 May CHAMBERS FINE ARTS 522 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011 T +1 (212) 414 1169 Open Tues- Sat 10-6 Chambersfineart.com Things: New Works by Guo Hongwei 3 Apr – 15 May 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 Fiona Rae: Special Fear! 2 Apr - 1 May PACEWILDENSTEIN 545 West 22nd Street New York T +1 (212) 989 4258 pacewildenstein.com Kiki Smith: Lodestar 30 Apr- 19 Jun 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 Joel Shapiro: New Work 16 Apr- 15 May Artist talk on Art Soho20 Chelsea Gallery, 547 West 27th St., Suite 301, New York, NY 10001 atoa.org

UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON Alice Anderson Rifle Maker 79 Beak Street London, W1F 9SU T +44 (0)20 7439 0000 Alice Anderson: Time Reversal to 24 Apr Barbican Art GAllery Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS Ron Arad: Restless to 16 May Camden arts centre Arkwright Road London NW3 6DG T +44 (0)20 7472 5500 camdenartscentre.org Anna Maria Maiolino: Continuous 1 Apr - 30 May CubitT 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 Haunch Of Venison 6 Burlington Gardens London W1S 3ET United Kingdom T+44(0)20 7495 5050 Open Mon - Fri 10 - 6, Sat 10 - 5 [email protected] Rina Banerjee 9 Apr - 15 May Hauser & Wirth London 196A Piccadilly London, W1J 9DY T +44 (0)20 7287 2300 [email protected] Bharti Kher - Outdoor Sculpture to 15 May NETTIE HORN 25B Vyner Street London E2 9DG T +44 (0)20 8980 1568 [email protected] nettiehorn.com Marko Maetamm 2 Apr – 2 May SADIE COLES HQ 69 South Audley Street, London W1 sadiecoles.com Open Tue-Sat 10-6 David Korty to 17 Apr Sam Durant to 5 Jun

Stephen Friedman Gallery 25-28 Old Burlington Street London W1S 3AN T +44 (0) 20 7494 1434 [email protected] Wayne Gonzales to 17 April TATE Modern Millbank, London SW1 T +44 (0)20 7887 8888 tate.org.uk Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective to 3 May The Delfina Foundation 29 Catherine Place, Victoria, London SW1E 6DY T +44 (0)20 7233 5344 delfinafoundation.com Nathaniel Rackowe- New works to 23 Apr the saatchi gallery Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road, London SW3 4SQ T +44 (0)20 7811 3076 [email protected] saatchi-gallery.co.uk The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today to 7 May White Cube 25-26 Mason’s Yard London SW1Y 6BU T +44 (0)20 7930 5373 Cerith Wyn Evans 14 Apr to 22 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 UNITED KINGDOM A Foundation liverpool 67 Greenland Street, Liverpool, L1 0BY afoundation.org.uk The Economy of the Gift 9 Apr – 22 May AXIS Round Foundry Media Centre Foundry Street, Leeds T +44 (0)8453 628 230 axisweb.org The online resource for contemporary art

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 Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 881 393 ropac.net Imi Knoebel (new space) Mar 25 to May 15 Wings, the Wings in Contemporary Art 27 Mar to 15 May

Mumok Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, MuseumsQuartier, Museumsplatz 1, A-1070 Wien mumok.at Changing Channels Kunst und Fernsehen to 6 Jun

Xavier Hufkens Rue Saint-Georges 6–8 1050 Brussels T +32 2 6396730 xavierhufkens.com Hans Op de Beeck/ Malcom Morley to 10 Apr

Kunsthaus Graz Space02 Lendkai 1, 8020 Graz museum-joanneum.at Tatiana Trouvé Il Grande Ritratto to 16 May

ZENO X GALLERY Leopold De Waelplaats 16 B-2000 Antwerp T +32 32 161 626 zeno-x.com Mark Manders to 24 Apr

Galerie Hubert Winter Breite Gasse 17 A-1070 Wien T +43 (0)1524 09 76 galeriewinter.at Richard Nonas to 24 Apr

NETHERLANDS

Belgium 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 Galerie BaronianFrancey 2 rue Isidore Verheyden 1050 Brussels T +32 25 12 9295 baronianfrancey.com Joseph Marioni to 17 Apr Galerie Rodolphe Janssen 35, rue de Livourne 1050 Brussels T +32-2-538 08 18 galerierodolphejanssen.com think.21 Rue du Mail 21 Brussels 1050 T +32 2 537 87 03 think21gallery.com Tim Van Laere Gallery Verlatstraat 23-25 2000 Antwerp T +32 (0)3 257 14 17 timvanlaeregallery.com Faris McReynolds to 24 Apr

GRIMM FINE ART Keizersgracht 82 1015 CT Amsterdam T +31 (0)20 422 7227 grimmfineart.com William Monk to 1 May GERMANY DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin T +49 (0)30 20 2093 deutsche-guggenheim.de Wangechi Mutu 30 Apr - 13 Jun SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE Römerberg D-60311 Frankfurt T +49 69 29 98 820 [email protected] schirn-kunsthalle.de Uwe Lausen to 13 Jun Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH Museum Mile Bonn Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 4 D-53113 Bonn T +49 (0)228 9171 200 bundeskunsthalle.de Liam Gillick Ein langer Spaziergang... Zwei kurze Stege... 1 Apr - 8 Aug 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

Kunsthalle Zürich Limmatstrasse 270 CH-8005 Zürich Elad Lassry Parallel: Christodoulos Panayiotou to 23 Apr

Galleria Massimo de carlo via Giovanni Ventura 5 20135 Milan T+39 02 70 00 39 87 massimodecarlo.it

MIGROSMUSEUM für gegenwartskunst Limmatstrasse 270 Postfach 1766 CH-8005 Zürich migrosmuseum.ch While Bodies Get Mirrored to 30 May

Galleria Massimo Minini Via Apollonio 68 25128 Brescia T +39 030 363034 galleriaminini.it

Greece ART ATHINA art-athina.gr 13–16 May Frissiras Museum 3 Monis Asteriou Plaka, Athens tel: +30 2103 234678 or +30 2103 316027 frissirasmuseum.com Grzegorz Wnek 14 Apr - 30 Sep ITALy Galleria Continua Via del Castello, 11 53037 San Gimignano T+39 0577 94 31 34 galleriacontinua.com Chen Zhen/Berlinde de Bruyckere/Luca Pancrazzi/ Arcangolo Sassolino/Nedko Solakov to May 15 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 Galleria Francosoffiantino Artecontemporanea Via Rossini 23 10124 Turin T +39 01183 7743 francosoffiantino.it Josh Tonsfeldt: 4:Cat-Cos to 1 May

Galleria Lorcan O’Neill Via Orti d’Alibert 1e 00165 Rome T +39 06 68 892 980 lorcanoneill.com Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna, Roma Viale delle Belle Arti, 131 00196 Roma, Italia DONNA: FEMINIST AVANTGARDE OF THE 1970s from Sammlung Verbund, Vienna to 16 May GALLERIA PACK Foro Bonaparte, 60 20121 Milan T +39 02 86 996 395 galleriapack.com Oleg Kulik to Apr 17 Alberto Di Fabio 4 May - 11 Sep Enel Contemporanea enelcontemporanea.com The 4th Enel Contemporanea Award 2010 Prometeogallery Via Giovanni Ventura 3 20134 Milan T+39 02 2692 4450 prometeogallery.com Riccardo Crespi via Mellerio n° 1 20123 Milano T +39 02 89072491 riccardocrespi.com SALONE INTERNAZIONALE DEL MOBILE Milan Fairgrounds (Rho) April 14-19 cosmit.it Villa Giulia Verbania Corso Zanitello 8 Verbania T +39 0323 557691 craavillagiulia.com Masbedo to 30 May

listings: museums and galleries

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 Vincent Olinet 1 Apr - 15 May Galerie Olivier Houg 45 Quai Rambaud 69002 Lyon T +33 4 78 42 98 50 olivierhoug.com David Hevel: Glamadermist 2 Apr - 29 May 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 Richard Serra 1 Apr - 15 May

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 Debelleyme 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 72 99 00 ropac.net Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: The Flying Paintings to 17 Apr George Baselitz 24 Apr to May



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 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 Educando el Saber 10 Apr - 6 Jun

China

Saudi arabia

Galeri Canna Jalan Boulevard Barat Raya, Blok LC 6 No. 33-34 Kelapa Gading Permai, 14240 Jakarta Utara T +6221- 452 64 29 galeri-canna.com

athr gallery Fifth floor business center wing B, Serafi mega mall Prince Mohammed Abdul Aziz, Tahlia T +966 2 2845009 athrart.com 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 Skype: carbon12knf Twitter: carbon12artgallery Open Sun–Thu 12–7 Sara Rahbar- Recent works “Whatever we had to lose we lost, and in the moonless sky we marched” 25 Mar - 20 Apr

Ov gallery 19C Shaoxing lu Shanghai 20002 T +862 15 465 7768 ovgallery.com INDONESIA

Brazil Galeria Luisa Strina Rua Oscar Freire 502 01426-000 São Paulo/SP T +55 11 3088 2417 galerialuisastrina.com.br Galeria Fortes Vilaca Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500 05416-001 São Paulol T +55 11 3032 7066 fortesvilaca.com.br Carlos Bevilacqua to Apr 17

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 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 Tarek Al Ghoussein: A Retrospective Works from 2001–2010 to 13 May

ArtReview 109

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Rear View April

Reviews Books The Strip On the Town Off the Record

ArtReview 111

REVIEWS:

USA Diana Thater

Between Science and Magic

David Zwirner, New York 11 February – 13 March

Just how many times can you watch a magician pull a rabbit out of his hat? This is surely not the central question asked by Diana Thater’s new film installation, Between Science and Magic (2010), but it is one that will occur to most viewers, and in the end its answer will be seen to supersede the work’s more obvious concerns and conceits (which does make it central in some sense). For the answer to that question is ‘more than you would think’, and the reason is that Thater’s new work, for all its reflexive exfoliations – perhaps because of all its reflexive exfoliations – is an object lesson in cinephilia, both Thater’s and our own. The title of Thater’s piece is drawn from the late Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (1962), in which the father of structuralism, forever staking out the dyads of our understanding, describes art as halving the axis between ‘scientific knowledge’ and ‘mythical or magical thought’. For nearly two decades, Thater’s artistic province has been the camera arts, which have long enjoyed dual membership in the societies of science and magic. It only makes sense then that Between Science and Magic is dedicated to filming a representative from the first while revealing the mechanisms of the second (and if you’re paying attention, the first as well). That is, what we see is a magician, decked out in tux and tails, repeatedly perform the illusion of making a live rabbit (Josephine is her name) appear in what was his demonstratively empty top hat. We see him do this (Greg Wilson is his name) from two angles simultaneously: the first one fixed, and filmed by Thater, the second from a series of clockwise positions, filmed by Thater’s assistant. These two angles are then ‘screened’ side by side, so that we see Wilson both from the front and in the round (we catch glimpses of Thater and her assistant, too); but what we are really seeing is the refilming of a previous side-by-side screening of the same footage on the screen of the Los Angeles Theater (a Golden-Age-of-LA relic), all of which is now being reprojected in the gallery, split-screen-style, by two synchronised 16mm projectors, replete with a soundtrack of the previous recordings and projection. So much for the exfoliation. Over and over again the rabbit appears, and with each iteration, with each successful conjuring of the illusion, we get a little closer to figuring out how the trick works – both the magician’s and the artist’s. The precision of the former’s choreography is matched by the mechanics of the latter’s apparatus. Each is exacting; both, we come to realise, are refugees from the era of what Hollis Frampton named the ‘last machine’ (aka film, when precise parts and movements could be ‘seen’). If we attend to science to figure out what the world is like, and we attend to magic to be amazed, then somewhere in between, the camera arts let us do both, and we love them for it. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Between Science and Magic, 2010 (film still). Courtesy David Zwirner, New York

112 ArtReview

reviews: Usa

Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2010, Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 213 x 175 cm and Stephen Prina, PUSH COMES TO LOVE, Untitled, 1999-2010, 2010, contents of a can of enamel spray paint. Photo: Lamay Photo. Courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York

In 1954 Picasso remarked, ‘For me, an image is the sum of its destructions’, a statement that could be variously interpreted as a comment either on the process of painting or its reception. Picasso’s thought is a summation of the creative destruction inherent to artmaking, a clever echoing of art in an era in which postwar atrocity was a poignant and palpable memory, and an affirmation that the destructive rhetoric of the avant-garde is as innate as its will to create anew. But if an appetite for destruction remains de rigueur in contemporary artistic practice, then what today constitutes a nihilistic gesture? Wade Guyton and Stephen Prina have produced a small exhibition that serves as a meditation on this and other extrinsic questions about painting. On the night before the opening, Guyton installed four blue paintings, his first coloured monochromes (previously they were all black and grey), reflecting the colour of the kitchen floor in his new studio space. Prina’s contribution consisted of exhausting the entire contents of a black gloss enamel spray-paint can at a chosen location on each of the Guyton paintings, a performative gesture that he titled PUSH COMES TO LOVE, Untitled, 1999–2010 (2010), which was adapted from the title of his 1999 album. As indicated by the exhibition checklist, each pairing – the painting and its respective spray mark – is two separate works. That each of the spray marks is in the same upper left section of the canvases is, as the artists explained, mere improvisatory coincidence. The artists have combined complementary practices: Guyton’s blue monochromes, created by folding a canvas in half along its vertical axis to fit inside the maximum width of his printer and running it through on both sides, bear a striking resemblance to Prina’s Blind Painting No 2, Fifteen-foot Ceiling or Lower (2007), which consists of a pair of roller shades painted partially blue. Moreover, like Guyton’s printer drawings, Prina’s spray-painting, first initiated a decade ago, has a similarly undisciplined tact as a repetitive, mechanical process in which errors are permitted, if not encouraged. As Prina sprayed in situ, a skein of black paint snaked down the surface of the paintings and dripped off their bottom edges. The mirrorlike sheen of the resulting puddles acts not only like Narcissus’s reflecting pool but also intimates the aftermath of iconoclastic violence. For if a painting was shot and left to bleed, then this series of work may be as shocking as any execution scene. Consider, as a somewhat specious comparison, Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814), a masterpiece of unflinching drama that depicts a firing squad the instant before it lays waste to a band of rebellious Spaniards. Each spray-paint can, killing softly, voided its contents over 15 minutes onto — or into — the Guyton paintings. Out of the ensuing haze was born the result of their collaborative, yet separately defined, executions. Steve Pulimood

Wade Guyton and Stephen Prina

Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York 5–27 February

ArtReview 113

reviews: USA

Sterling Ruby 2TRAPS

PaceWildenstein, New York 5 February – 20 March

For all the excitement that Minimalism sparked when it first landed in the galleries, the prospect of it being found in the outside world has always been a grim thought. When Robert Smithson looked at New Jersey through the prism of the style in his 1967 project The Monuments of Passaic, he found, among other horrors, ‘a self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur… zero panorama… ruins in reverse.’ If Minimalism has now largely passed from the galleries, Sterling Ruby’s art has often asserted its presence in the environment. In 2TRAPS, Ruby’s first show for Pace (he moved to the gallery last year), the artist shows two large-scale sculptures and seems even more dismayed by the style’s real-life survival than his predecessors. Bus (2009–10) appropriates a vehicle that has been through several miserable lives: as transport for the Los Angeles Police Department’s convicts; as mobile harem and vomitorium for a heavy-metal rock band; then, prickling with subwoofers, as a hi-fi salesroom. Whatever condition it was in when it came to Sterling, he has tried to return it to a state in which it remembers all those lives, with speakers in the back and a series of grim cages up front where the seats once were. Its smoked and blasted aspect says it’s been to hell and back, and the grilles over the windows say it might just do another round-trip if needs must. Accompanying this monster is Pig Pen (2009–10), a similarly proportioned oblong work made up of 68 cages like confinement cells, themselves constructed from the kind of grilles you see on front doors in bad parts of town. It’s reminiscent of an animal transport, though the cells are commodious enough – and the metalwork tired and rusted enough – to suggest that it’s done long service as a cattle pen for society’s rejects on the way to the dump. Ruby, a thirty-seven-year-old Los Angeles-based artist, has deserved the stripes he has earned over the past decade for his very various output. His sculpture has long been influenced by Minimalism and its aftermath, which suggests that this is how 2TRAPS should be read, though both pieces fail to make anything worthwhile from their precursor, having neither the interest nor impact of Minimalism’s finely calibrated sense of scale and objecthood, and far, far too much of its inhumanity and foreboding darkness. But that is too often the case with Ruby’s sculpture. His supporters often have to defend him from the charge that he’s a little boy in love with the rhetoric of power and horror; he is not, they tell us, while wielding art theory like a power tool. Neither is he dialoguing with that canonical style for the pleasure of high-stakes brawls with the big boys; they tell us that ideas you’ve never heard of remain to be contested. Sometimes, however, when a spade looks like a spade, and feels like a spade, and digs like one too – you know what? Morgan Falconer 114 ArtReview

Bus, 2010, bus, electrical conduit, foam, speakers, spray paint, stainless steel spheres, steel, sub-woofers, T5 fluorescent light fixtures, T5 bulbs, tyres, vinyl, 285 x 244 x 1247 cm). Photo: G.R. Christmas. © the artist. Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

reviews: Usa

The latest pseudo-moniker on the New York art scene, Marian Spore is neither artist collective nor alter ego, but a curatorial project that sequentially unfolds across 16,000 square feet of windowless property in Brooklyn’s Industry City. Conceived by Michael Connor, Spore is also the project’s resident spook: a mystic, artist and third wife of city founder Irving T. Bush, who communed with dead artists like Gustave Doré and channelled their sombre portents into surrealist drawings and paintings. Spore’s engagement with past futurities operates as an organising principle for Connor, allowing him to acknowledge, on one level, Industry City’s manufacturing history and emergent role, through a subsidised studio scheme and cultural initiatives, as – per New York Magazine – ‘the New Factory’; on another, to posit the project as an ‘accumulative museum of contemporary art’, in which new artworks are accessioned on long-term loan, and upon sale of the collection to a third-party, the artists and organisation will share in the profits. While the instrumentalisation of exhibition and curator, per Connor’s conceptual proviso, reaches as far back as the curatorial premises of Lucy Lippard and Seth Siegelaub, its museological angle also dovetails Boris Groys’s recent discussion of the ‘new’. The theorist reinvests the value of the museum as a viable cultural agent that engenders the production of new forms of art through the differentiation drawn with collected works. The accession of new artworks, Groys argues, not only underscores their designation as such, but also guarantees their qualitative longevity. Connor’s museum gains a preservationist function, from this angle, aggregating works of young artists – and aspiring towards third-party collection – as a way of ensuring their place in posterity. ‘Life today looks alive, and is alive, only when seen from the perspective of the archive, museum, library’, Groys writes – a statement that could readily apply to the first five works of the Spore collection. In Conveyor Loop/Löpande Bandet, Swedish artist Anna Lundh presents a slideshow of a list of sounds the composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl created, in the late 1960s, for an unrealised opera adaptation of Hannes Alfvén’s novel The Tale of the Big Computer (1968). Echoing the protagonist, a future historian outlining the evolution of the computer, Lundh deploys apparatuses and Collection aesthetics of Blomdahl’s time yet also revises his list to incorporate sounds of interim devices, such as modems and mobile phones, thereby measuring the composer’s predictions along the axis of actual technological evolution. Heavier-handed is Andy Graydon’s Untitled (Fault), comprising a digital sound recording made at a recent exhibition of nineteenthcentury photography and transferred to an acetate record. The stylus’s gradual erosion of the flimsy disc leads to the increasing abstraction of the source, enfolding the index of the recorded exhibition with that of its exhibited performance at Spore. Similar concepts recur in works by Joe Winter, Graham Parker and Joyce Kim, lending a thematic quality to the collection that echoes its inventive premise. Tyler Coburn

Marian Spore, Brooklyn Ongoing

Graham Parker, Kid Weil (detail), 2009. Courtesy Marian Spore, New York

ArtReview 115

reviews: USA

Fluidly working through Rachel Whiteread’s art is one slow but potent idea: though structures are necessary, they fail to understand or completely contain the pregnant ghost of their contents. This is where the constant critical association of Whiteread with Bruce Nauman falls short. For Nauman, mice run in the dark once we’re out of view, technologies shape and disrupt our communication, and a harsh camera angle can void the poetry of our work. For Whiteread, the stain left by us through our interactions with these things is what matters. The Hammer presentation dedicates its first gallery to drawings of chairs and the spaces underneath them as if to eliminate the elephant in the room. The poetry counts, though – a box is nothing without what we put in it; the space between a chair and the floor is a fact that would have no flavour Drawings without our ability to sit in the first place. Whiteread’s drawing can draw attention to these distinctions, and this show, curated by Allegra Pesenti, offers important insights into not only how Whiteread works but also how she thinks. The drawings have never been shown in depth before, and though they recall her sculpture, they exist in their own right, fully alive in their media and not beholden as studies. Like her sculptures, Whiteread’s drawings work on existing structures – it is rare to see a work on paper that is not lined or graphed in some way. However, that is where the structure ends. In these musings on space and the objects of everyday life, there seem to be no rulers or straight lines, no crosshatching with a pencil; instead, the juice of liquids like correction fluid, acrylic, watercolours and gouache establish density. Whiteread allows her brushes to drip across lines and her drawings to quiver with awkwardness and human heat. For example, in Untitled (Double Mattress Yellow) (1991), Whiteread demonstrates a link between watercolours on a drawing and the stains on a mattress: both liquids bleed through and establish beyond us something that outlasts us. Yet this is no mere game of the index and no mere plan for a 3D object. Whiteread’s drawing instead suggests the multiple ways the human animus can linger on and in things. The drawing is less a tomb or a marker of human space like her sculpture and more an active, metaphoric and personal account of Whiteread’s reflections on the history of a mattress. Like anthropologist Daniel Miller, Whiteread reads humans through their objects. Her approach to drawing is exactly the point. Consider Whiteread’s drawings of floor tiles, such as Study for Floor (Perspective) (1993). Yes, the tiles will eventually be cast and laid in a gallery, a ghost of their former life in the home. But only in the drawing can they recall crumbling towers or ruins in decline; only in drawing do they take on the lyrical properties of expressive representation, and ultimately register as a metaphor for our stories and our lives. Ed Schad

Rachel Whiteread

Untitled (Double Mattress, Yellow), 1991, acrylic, ink and watercolour on graph paper. Private collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Courtesy the artist

116 ArtReview

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 31 January – 25 April

reviews: Usa

Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), various venues, Los Angeles VIA/Stage 1 Ongoing A necessary expansion of the borders of the museum to a place that cares more for roads than buildings? A bold new public art initiative for a city regularly touted as being both bereft of culture and a world cultural capital? A decent excuse to move to LA? Recently founded by former Whitney contemporary curator Shamim M. Momin and current LACMA associate curator Christine Y. Kim, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) is riding a frothy wave of public art initiatives in LA, from Emi Fontana’s West of Rome projects (including the popular Women in the City, 2008), LAXART’s work with press relations firm FYA and now the MAK Center getting into the mix with (sigh) another series of art on billboards. But more is more in a city that has often subsisted on less, especially when it comes to going public. In conjunction with the Mexican bicentennial, LAND has inaugurated VIA, an ongoing series of installations, interventions, actions, etc sprinkled across the sprawling urban landscape. In part due to sluggish and underfunded institutions, Mexican artists have very successfully taken art to the streets in the last few years. Not in the classic socialist murals of another generation, but in more conceptual strategies that poetically take on the political realities of their country. VIA/Stage 1 participants Artemio, José León Cerrillo, Gonzalo Lebrija and Moris have, respectively, had their work embedded in the floor of a design mall, installed in an empty Schindler house in the Hollywood Hills, screened on an electronic billboard in Hollywood and affixed to the doorstep of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. The artists of this inaugural have an enormous challenge on their hands: how to make art resonate in the scattered clusterfuck of LA topography. And with varying degrees of success, they have. The most strangely moving is Moris’s installation, if only because a letter denying the established midcareer artist a visa to do the project is a part of the installation, itself a take on absence, presence and disappearance, including a series of initially invisible portraits at the museum’s entrance that are revealed as they collect dirt tracked in on visitors’ feet. Still a little thin on educational material about what exactly they’re doing, the floating institutional presence that LAND is promoting has been around in New York for a while, but having it in LA is another thing entirely; it’s not a wholly transplanted idea. My favourite metaphor for these things is like the gourmet taco truck phenomenon in LA: architectural ice cream sandwiches, Korean BBQ, fancy French fries, all in taco trucks; it’s a movable feast that in some ways suits LA – uncentred, mobile, ignoring the infrastructure of the city except for its roads, the historically defining feature of the territory. Public art has become a popular trend in curatorial tactics in LA; we must now wait and see if it’s actually popular with the public. Andrew Berardini

Artemio, Colt Frac-Tiles, 2010, ceramic. A LAND project: VIA/Stage 1. Photo: Emily Young

ArtReview 117

REVIEWS:

Europe

There is something contradictory about Animism, the ambitious group show which spreads across these two Antwerp art spaces. Though examining the concept of animism – the belief in the existence of individual spirits that inhabit, and thus bring to life, natural objects and phenomena – the 45-artist cross-media exhibition ironically enough makes a rather dead impression. This is partially due to the very nature of museums, which the curators also challenge by means of institutional critique. Yet it is doubtful that this feeling of mummification was intended to dominate the entire show. Though conceived by its five curators to be Animism experienced not merely on a cerebral level, Animism turns out to be a rather academic exhibition into which entire bookshelves of theory have been poured: not exactly the most enlivening strategy. One could argue that this heavy theory-based concept might at least lead to a thorough, multifaceted show, yet few interesting points are being made here. The exhibition’s concept is swamped in a predictable postcolonial discourse regarding the white man’s ethnocentric view of cultures that attribute life to inanimate objects rather than categorising them according to objectifying criteria. The wild and ecstatic – characteristics one would associate with animism – have been completely tamed here. Even the genius of Jan Svankmajer, the Prague animation filmmaker, is muffled by the inclusion of only some of his sculptures and 3D collages, which are hardly his best work. Most of the pieces seem to have been selected as mere illustrations of the curators’ stance, notwithstanding their individual quality, which explains the inclusion of mediocre works by Henri Michaux, Lili Dujourie, Brion Gysin and Luis Jacob. Luckily, however, there are some sparkling moments, like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s brilliant film Phantoms of Nabua (2009), where nature, and specifically lightning and fire, are still experienced as enchanted. Jimmie Durham’s The Dangers of Petrification I+II (1996–2007), meanwhile, is one of the only contributions with a sense of humour, bringing a welcome, lighter approach to the rigid subject matter. By presenting pieces of petrified pizza and sausage, Durham delivers an ironic take on museums’ ‘fossilising’ practices and the mythical character Medusa, whose petrifying gaze had the exact opposite effect of animism. And though it has been widely shown, Daria Martin’s Soft Materials (2004) – a quasi-erotic dance between man and machine, filmed in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the University of Zurich – is genuinely mesmerising. But these are exceptions. Interviewed about the exhibition, curator Anselm Franke (the project’s driving force) wondered, ‘Can we picture a butterfly without pinning it down?’ Judging from Animism – which will, until 2012, tour in altered versions to Kunsthalle Bern, Vienna’s Generali Foundation and Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt – one would be inclined to answer in the negative. It looks like the curator and the nineteenth-century anthropologist, who by classifying things unwittingly deadens them, may have more in common than the former is willing to admit. Sam Steverlynck

Daria Martin, Soft Materials, 2004 (film still). Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

118 ArtReview

M HKA and Extra City, Antwerp 22 January – 2 May

reviews: EUROPE

KwieKulik

Activities with Dobromierz

Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik worked together as KwieKulik from 1971 to 1987. Completed between 1972 and 1974 – and shown in part during Documenta 12 and at last year’s Istanbul Biennial – Activities with Dobromierz incorporates the Polish duo’s young son into their work. It consists of 900 photographs, 400 of which are here projected as slides. Whether on the floor of their kitchen or living room, surrounded by onions or oranges, or in a bucket, toilet, sink or bathtub, their often-naked baby boy, Dobromierz, is photographed in various calculated positions. These are not the normal photographs parents take to document a son’s childhood. Every single element is meticulously placed, and the arrangement of objects is based on a previous installation developed by the duo entitled Activities with the Unknown X, or the Table with ‘Xs’, which linguistically dealt with three different mathematical-logical operations. ‘X’ refers to three different types of situations: that something could happen; that something might happen but normally does not; or that something usually does not happen. In Activities with Dobromierz, the duo’s child replaces ‘X’ and, in an almost documentary style, is shown in situations that range from the conventional to the absurd or even shocking. Often presented in a triptych layout, obviously alluding to the three operations, the photographs slowly fade in and out in a seemingly random way. Appearing in a loosely chronological fashion, they not only illustrate various complicated mathematical propositions but also chart the first two years in the life of Maksymilian Dobromierz, who is now teaching economics near London. Four hundred images flash before our eyes Zak|Branicka, Berlin in 30 minutes, and by the end we are none the wiser. The little boy appears with a variety of household 5 February – 13 March items: his head pops out of a mopping-bucket or a sink, or disappears completely under a red blanket. He finds himself lying on the floor, naked, surrounded by a circle of partly clothed onions, or with his arm shoved inside a goose’s half-gutted carcass. While on the surface these images are nothing like the glossy work of cute-baby photographer Anne Geddes, there appears to be a deeper similarity, since babies crawling in and out of cabbages seem just as surreal as a baby taking a bath in a toilet bowl. Ultimately, Activities with Dobromierz is part of the larger documentation of artistic life in Poland in the 1970s and 80s that KwieKulik undertook. (The pair stopped collaborating in 1987, two years before the end of the Communist regime; they now live as neighbours on the same street in Warsaw.) Inevitably, then, a political dimension also resounds through this series. Yet the intellectual preoccupation with mathematics, the (perhaps unintentional) references to another great artist duo, Gilbert & George, active on the other side of the Iron Curtain around the same time, and the poor, studentlike interior which serves as the backdrop for a new life mean that the series with their son is not only probably their most deeply collaborative work, but is also imbued with optimism and hope. David Ulrichs

Activities with Dobromierz (detail), 1972–4. Courtesy Zak|Branicka, Berlin

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A poster by Klaus Staeck, the designer and activist, at the entrance to Politics, the third instalment of this exhaustive, thrilling analysis of Sigmar Polke’s protean work of the 1970s, depicts military policemen assaulting a journalist in Athens. Alongside the image, a slogan declares: ‘The art of the 70s is not happening in museums’. More than framing the conflict between progressive engagement and right-wing repression that riled the decade, and blurring the border between art and politics, the placement of Staeck’s piece indicates that what follows – that is, this decade in Polke’s oeuvre – must be understood as a complex Hamburger Kunsthalle reaction to turbulent times. We Petty Bourgeois! Contemporaries 13 March – 17 January Indeed the exhibition, and the ten-work cycle at its core, are titled after a 1976 essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘On the Inevitability of the Middle Class’. These paintings, multiple sheets of paper mounted scroll-like on canvas, are a riot of layered imagery cribbed from newspapers, leftist tracts, underground comics, nineteenth-century ethnographic studies and books about ancient Egyptian religion. Like so much of the work on view, they are messy, often crude and hard to read. Relying on extensive documentation, the curators – Petra Lange-Berndt, Dietmar Rübel and Dorothee Böhm – trace the myriad sources and references Polke used as a kind of opensource library of imagery and references. They also examine his collaborations with Achim Duchow, Klaus Mettig and Katharina Sieverding, among others, with whom he lived, on and off, at the Gaspelshof, a commune in Willich. Just as their freeform use of printed matter and their exchange of imagery among themselves challenged conventions of authorship, authenticity and artistic propriety, their circuslike performances, frequent drug taking and participation in feminist and left-wing events flouted the niceties of a convention-bound society. But for all the political undertones in his work, Polke rose above finger pointing. Unlike Staeck, who shot from the left, his work conveys the complexities of a middle-European society squelched by conformity on the one hand and beset by the fear of left-wing terrorists such as the Baader-Meinhof gang on the other. And if Polke lived on the fringe, he was ultimately along for the ride. His engagement-as-entertainment is, in retrospect, symptomatic of the bourgeois co-option of the margins his work wrestles with. This is but one of the many contradictions the curators embrace. But where the exhibition makes a researched argument for the work, it fails to address its aesthetic force. Polke’s paintings and photographs may seem dirty and haphazard, but his art, as messy as life, was wildly creative, sumptuously colourful and often radiantly if not psychedelically beautiful. Works such as the print portfolio Cologne Beggars (1972) tease a lush but gritty beauty from quotidian ugliness, in this case transforming photos of homeless men into a meditation on citizenship, dignity and middle-class recoil from poverty. Missing, too, for those not deeply versed in the artist’s work, is a sense of how the 1970s function as a fulcrum in his career, with the artist expanding on the persiflage of German society he pursued in the 1960s, and setting up the material experiments and even wider cultural plunderings in the 1980s and 90s. But it sets the stage for this kind of reappraisal while signalling that Polke’s work will truly yield only to those who embrace its rough, open-ended ethos. Cologne Beggars, 1972. Courtesy Museum Ludwig, Cologne Joshua Mack

Sigmar Polke

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Zilla Leutenegger Off the Wall

Zilla Leutenegger once described her relationship with architects Herzog & de Meuron, with whom she has collaborated, as ‘like the relationship between King Kong and the woman’. This funny, slightly alarming portrayal could also be applied to her work in general, in which a female protagonist, usually the artist, is often posited against something outsize to herself: a polar bear, say, or various architectural settings, including kitchens, art studios and swimming pools. Against these larger if benign forces (less threatening than an ape or the Empire State Building, anyway), the female figure variously appears lost, absorbed, waiting or plaintive. The material nature of the works reinforces the polarities of these relationships. Although the Zurich-based artist makes drawings, videos and sculptures, most works combine all three formats: this show, for example, included a dioramalike white wood box with two sides. A flight of stairs travels up one wall-like side; another features a black line drawing of a woman in a chic chair, one heel kicked off, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette burns expertly red – it’s a tiny video projection – and a hazy line of smoke rises slowly upward, the very blue of video. At Night (2009) conjures the cosmopolitan languor – something more studious than ennui – that Leutenegger’s figures, placed against their decidedly modernist environs, invariably project. Her drawing style is equally urbane, as sketchy and jazzy as 1960s-era magazine illustrations. Similarly her taste in interiors: Eames chairs and clean, minimalist design furnish her impromptu installations. At Night is just one of a series of new pieces that show the female figure in her various environs and in various shades of abstracted thought. Studio (2009), a white wooden architectural model of a studio, contains a video projection of a figure wandering its layout, as if searching for inspiration just out of reach. Endless Pool (2009), meanwhile, features a projection of an aerial view of a glittery turquoise lap pool, in which a small figure swims and swims, going nowhere fast. A few autonomous drawings on view dispense with the multimedia angle. About Nothing (2005) depicts an interior; Untitled (Lemon) (2009) offers a naive portrait of a figure in a bright yellow sweater. Best is a lovely black-and-white illustration of the famous Eames wire chair, its crazy cross-hatching of lines offering cogent humour and an odd poetry. Nevertheless, Leutenegger’s sensibility is most fluently expressed in set pieces that, as Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich her exhibition title puts it, come ‘off the wall’. Piz 16 January – 6 March d’Urezza (2009) comprises a framed drawing of the titular Swiss Alpine peak, its crevices and summit sparely articulated in pencil. Below the drawing, a wooden daybed against the wall contains a snowwhite duvet tufted up in a long, tall heap. If at first one thinks the duvet might hold a body, one then discerns how its pale cotton peaks and creases ape the mountain depicted above almost exactly. As in the artist’s other installations, the conceit is simple, a little childish, very charming. But the work’s effect is more complicated and altogether adult. By transforming the inherent two-dimensionality of drawing into three dimensions, Leutenegger presents two ideas of the same thing – here a drawing of a mountain and a mountain; elsewhere a drawing of a cigarette and a video projection of one. Her scepticism about representation is taken, but so is her poetic interest in describing both the world and how we ourselves, in our mind’s eye at least, describe it. Quinn Latimer

At Night, 2009 (installation view), video installation with projection on model, drawing on model. Photo: Barbora Gerny. Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

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La Preuve Concrète

Centre Européen d’Actions Artistiques Contemporaines, Strasbourg 14 November – 31 January

La Preuve Concrète (Concrete Proof) is proof that there is sensible, optical life after digital technology. Curated by Bettina Klein, this modest, elegant and succinct group show, featuring four artists of varying backgrounds and generations – Josh Brand, Marieta Chirulescu, Alexander Gutke and Michael Snow – explored the use of analogical, imagemaking techniques as a processual and material engagement with photography and, perhaps inadvertently, with experimental film. Although the work is very much a response to the ethos of digital technology, many of the concerns it raises – such as reflexive materiality – fall well within the historical jurisdiction of structural cinema. Yet contrary to structural cinema, which deployed said technique to disclose the mechanism (and hence unveil the illusion) of cinema, this show is at its best when it does the exact opposite, using materiality to create illusion. Take for instance Alexander Gutke’s Cine-scope (2008). A silent, looped, black-and-white large-format projection, this video generates the illusion of spatially entering a piece of blown-up celluloid on a quasi-molecular level (think of the 1987 Hollywood sci-fi flick Innerspace). Digitally engineered perspectival marks and scores, which are mixed with genuine analogue wear and tear, antically wriggle and sidle up towards you, as if you were advancing through a skeletal forest of scratches. As such, the piece, for all its emphasis on celluloid materiality, performs an exact reversal of structural disclosure via the seamless Frankensteining of digital and analogue technologies. Marieta Chirulescu’s photographic prints, about a dozen of which were on show, mostly unframed and of varying formats, enact a similar bravura of imagemaking. Adroitly blending Photoshop, analogue photography and photocopy technologies, Chirulescu creates abstractions of a rarefied and brooding beauty. So seamless is the admixture of these technologies that it is virtually impossible to pick them apart. Thus does the ambiguous identity of the work gracefully exacerbate the ontological, digitally enhanced crisis of postpainterly practices as recently explored by American artists Kelley Walker and Wade Guyton, by investing it with a raw and organic edge. Josh Brand’s photos, on the other hand, which are exclusively the stuff of analogue technology – if it can be so described, given his approach – are liable to be mistaken for slick Photoshop abstractions. The half-dozen small-format photos exhibited here, suffused with rich colours from aquamarine to a kind of voluptuous infrared, are actually photograms, each image of which is unique and patiently created over several days. One photo, which consists of a white bramble of marks scratched into a field of black monochrome, foregrounds the history of experimental film (eg, Stan Brakhage, Len Lye) that underpins the show’s materialist concerns. And this perhaps accounts for the presence of Michael Snow’s Sidelength (1969–71). Made soon after the artist’s best-known film, Wavelength (1967), this work consists of slide projections of test shots and the like taken from the making of Wavelength. It is ironically significant, at least as far as this show is concerned, that a great many of the slides feature hands holding lighting gels or other light-controlling devices. It’s as if the piece has become a metaphor for the hand’s enduring reluctance (at least since modernity) to entirely withdraw from the image. Chris Sharp

Alexander Gutke, Camera, 2008, steel and photographic emulsion, 55 x 25 x 25 cm. Photo: © Klaus Stöber. Courtesy Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, from Neuerscheinungen hrsg. von Daniela Comani (New Publications Edited by Daniela Comani), 2008, Piezo print on Photo Rag, 28 x 20 cm. © the artist and Edition Patrick Frey, Zurich

There’s a family in-joke that runs through Martin Amis’s new novel, The Pregnant Widow (2010), where two brothers play a wordsubstitution game in their correspondence with each other. The phrase ‘hysterical sex’ is put in place of ‘love’, giving us Hysterical Sex in a Cold Climate, Stop! In the Name of Hysterical Sex and so on. It’s puerile, but very funny. Daniela Comani uses a similar ploy here: for Neuerscheinungen (2008) she has taken the covers of 51 canonical tomes and cunningly détourned their titles to deliver a library from a Borgesian parallel universe. Great care has gone into the alterations, using identical fonts to the originals, to transform well-known covers into genuine oddities. Gender swap is her agenda: imagine a Linder more allied to literature than representations of the body. Here, then, we have A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, the Viking Compass paperback, which has a limp-wristed Joyce carrying a white stick in his other hand, blind to the titular transformation above his head. Then there is Our Woman in Havana, the Bantam edition, with its terrific blurb courtesy of The Kansas City Star: ‘a fine lunatic tale’. And of course this game works both ways: these literary hits switch-hit. Boys will be girls and girls will be boys. In Amis’s book much angst is expended over one mädchen who acts ‘that way’ – like a boy. Similarly Comani gives us Monsieur Bovary, which has a drawing of Emma on the cover now resplendently 365/51/1 wearing a Duchampian moustache. Emma, we remember, behaved like a boy and, it being the nineteenth century, paid the price. She had a hot ass. But does Mr Bovary? Elsewhere there is much multilingual punning in Comani’s work, recalling Nabokov’s japes in Ada (1969): witness Tante Vanya and The Sisters Karamazov. Comani’s other work here is a curtain lined with text, featuring the details of a faux diary (It was me. Diary 1900–1999, 2002–10), whose 365 days compress a century. Here we learn that she founded the Communist Party of Germany on 1 January and on the 2nd was able to look at her Stasi file. By 8 January she’s in Memphis, in a recording studio, reliving Elvis’s first session – ‘I make a recording at my own cost: the single That’s All Right Mama, which I intend to give to my mother for her birthday’. But the next day brings high drama – ‘following the death of my father I become the emperor of Japan’. At least her widowed mum will have that record to console her. Comani’s literary fascinations are present and correct here too. On 7 February she publishes Berlin Alexanderplatz, but by the 12th she’s arresting Solzhenitsyn. By the 18th, in Berlin again, she asks a crowd if they want total war and notes ‘excitement and enthusiasm at my speech in the Sportpalast’… There’s much death and destruction at her hands throughout the year: from the Sharpeville apartheid massacre to sarin gas in Tokyo. The end of August sees her in a Paris tunnel ahead of a speeding car, soon to crash. Plangently, she tells us that ‘I only wanted to take a picture’. Comani’s personal identification with these events is both monstrous and hilarious. This is the diary of a luridly manic psychotic, and the lies pile up in a gargantuan feat of confabulation. Her ideas, then, are deftly achieved, but one suspects she is a novelist manqué in conceptualist garb. John Quin

Daniela Comani

Souterrain, Berlin 7–28 February

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Giuseppe Gabellone

Studio Guenzani, Milan 21 January – 27 March

In Giuseppe Gabellone’s photographs, the difference between a mental image (that is, of something that doesn’t exist) and a memory image (of something previously experienced) is subtle. The artist carefully builds and stages his subjects – ad hoc sculptures – but destroys them immediately after the shooting, so that what remains for the viewer to experience are only images anyway. They are like ghosts, uncanny objects that can revert from an actual to a potential status, and thus travel from the present tense to the past and the future. In the chapter ‘Operator, Spectrum and Spectator’ (ie, photographer, subject and viewer) in his Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes writes that ‘the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.’ The Brindisi-born, Paris-based Gabellone has travelled along these lines for some time. In 1999 he produced Untitled, a photo of a complex, fragile meandering structure in plywood, calling to mind a rollercoaster and appearing made to measure for the space it sat in: a claustrophobic industrial interior flooded with chilly neon lights. A previous Untitled (1996) photo depicted an underground garage with a car parked among big cactuses in brown clay, while his Untitled (2002) series, shown at Documenta 11, portrayed various stems of giant coarse blue flowers resting their weight on shelves, analogous to the posing stands and head clamps once needed for daguerreotypes. Although empty, nondescript and postindustrially anonymous, the landscapes used as backgrounds in these tableaux are all from Puglia, the region of Southern Italy where the artist spent his childhood, as if carrying an echo of personal memories locked in the past. The series of eight relatively small (52 x 35 cm) Untitled photographs presented at Studio Guenzani (and first exhibited last summer at the Beaufort 03: Art by the Sea triennial, in Ostend, Belgium) has a similar setting. At the centre of each image – but more upfront than usual, so that the urban landscape of Paris’s banlieue becomes less conspicuous – Gabellone has positioned a metal frame anchored to cement blocks. It holds a cloth banner silkscreened with old found photos: the closeup of a lunar rock, some kids playing, a foundry… None of these has any direct autobiographical connotation, but their shared 1950s/60s aesthetics seem to voice a longing for another era, more carefree and future-friendly. Moved by the wind, the fabric becomes a sail, so that the image (in black and white, but also in richly saturated colours such as orange or magenta, yellow and green) suddenly acquires volume and freely floats beyond the geometric boundaries of the grid. It’s a photo of a sculpture of a photo, the spectrum of a Barthesian spectrum, lighter than air, unexpectedly happy. Barbara Casavecchia

Untitled, 2009, digital print, 52 x 35 cm. Courtesy Studio Guenzani, Milan

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Beirut

The two objects projecting from the gallery wall at eye level are, we are told, trumpet mouthpieces. Below, stencilled in Arabic, is, ‘Or what my father sees most probably’. This piece is one-fifth of a cluster of works collectively entitled Learning to See Less (2010). With two other clusters, Love Is Blind (2006) and Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse (2007), it comprises Beirut-based artist Walid Sadek’s first major solo exhibition. To call this a visually understated show would be an understatement. The exhibition hall’s rectangle is enclosed behind a wall with two doorways, bisected by a diagonal interior wall and punctuated with three Place at Last pillars. Within this landscape, the show’s 12 discrete components have been precisely placed. Sadek has kindly provided a map of the space – handy, since there is so little to see here that spectators might lose their bearings – and a pamphlet with Englishlanguage translations of the show’s Arabic texts. His lines of allusive, lyrical prose so dominate the exhibition that the space is transformed into something like a spatially arrayed book of poetry. The other components of Learning to See Less are, first, 11 fictive aphorisms that the artist ascribes to the backs of different depictions of the Cimon and Pero myth (the images aren’t reproduced, but a quick Google search will track down this oft-rendered classical story of a daughter who suckles her imprisoned father, who’s been sentenced to death by starvation). Second, a stack of identical 70 x 100 cm papers, each reproducing the same conceptual portrait of a woman, consisting of complementary text and pair of circles on either side. And third, a pair of texts, apparently derived from letters to friends now living overseas, both alluding to art objects and contemporary film. The other pieces here employ absence equally energetically. Veterans of Out of Beirut, the 2006 exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, will recall Love Is Blind: still Sadek’s most accessible work, it stages a conversation with ten mid-century works by Lebanese painter Moustafa Farroukh, whose romantic landscapes are the dialogue’s absent subject. Their exhibition labels are here in full, as are Sadek’s image-sceptical rejoinders. To View of Beirut (c. 1952), Sadek replies, ‘This city is not here. Pilgrims will not find in it a shrine to circumambulate and to no avail will believers proclaim their divorce with its place. Names are fated to be abandoned by us as we are fated to be abandoned by places.’ Aesthetically spare Place at Last may be, but the show is neither puritan nor exclusive for its own sake. A painter by training, the forty-three-year-old Sadek has over the years felt compelled to absent image and object from his practice, though his work obsessively references individual artworks that are readily, at least virtually, available via the web. Rather than cushioning his works with preemptive explanations, he uses text to provoke dialogue, conversations extending beyond the white cube as you track down, say, all those representations of Cimon and Pero. You approach the trumpet mouthpieces. Your first, image-conditioned instinct is to squint down the barrels of the metal projections embedded into the wall, imagining that devices designed for mouths may yet prove to be ocular. Yes, they could be sculpted eye-sockets staring blindly, bereft of eyes; or, if you know Cimon and Pero, nipples concaved by a tongue’s pressure. You may imagine the proximity of past mouths to these worn bits of metal, the tongues that get jammed into orifices – sensual gestures, tentative, aggressive or refined, evocative of touch, taste, fluid and the cries that fill the air in their wake. Jim Quilty

Walid Sadek

Beirut Art Center 28 January – 9 April

Untitled, from Learning to See Less, 2010, two trumpet mouthpieces and silk-screen text on wall. Courtesy of the artist.

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Books is a magazine about art, but not an artwork in itself, right? That’s to say: however much you might think of this publication as a ‘work of art’ (flatter us, go on), its status as an ‘art magazine’ rests on its difference from the stuff that artists do – and what artists don’t do is produce art magazines, do they? Of course, the fact is that artists do, and have for a long time, made magazines of their own, and In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 makes a timely contribution to the growing interest in their history. The renewed attention among artists and art historians to the legacy of the avant-garde artistic practice of the 1970s and 80s has, for example, cast new light on the history of publications such as Willoughby Sharp’s New York-based artist-interview magazine Avalanche (1970–6) or the Canadian group General Idea’s long-running FILE Megazine (1972–86). FILE is prominently featured among the 50-plus publications here, while Avalanche is not, a choice that points to the tricky distinction between magazine as artwork and magazine as journalism. As Victor Brand argues in a text included here, ‘These publications claim the status of art – they are artworks before they are anything else.’

In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955

Edited by Philip E. Aaron and Andrew Roth JRP Ringier & PPP Editions, £50/$90 (hardcover)

But what constitutes the magazine that is ‘art before anything else’ is never really clarified, an ambiguity which somewhat undermines the coherence of In Numbers, and which could have done with a lot more critical attention. Clive Phillpot, an enduring authority on artists’ publications, effectively argues against Brand in his essay ‘Artists as Magazinists’, suggesting that ‘it may be going too far to canonize artists’ magazines as art, for any work that could be so designated is not likely to be a real magazine’. So what picture of the ‘artist’s magazine’ finally emerges from In Numbers? Given that the book’s selection of titles is in large part drawn from one aficionado’s collection (that of editor Philip E. Aaron), there are some clear areas of emphasis. Fluxus-inspired ‘mail art’ publications feature heavily, though in many ways these occupy the fringes of ‘magazine’ status. Their presence is nevertheless useful inasmuch as they highlight how, from the 1950s and throughout the 60s, the mail-art movement – works created for a distribution network rather than a gallery – defined the role of artists’ serial publications in creating and sustaining contacts between small and isolated communities of experimental or underground artists. Though it’s not much discussed in the book’s essays, mail art and Fluxus are crucial to the establishment of an international culture of art that we now take for granted. Rather than the group-based manifestos of the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes, these post-1960s publications assisted in the international distribution of art ideas that were not otherwise represented through mainstream journals; the lines between publishing one’s own art, publishing that of others and reflecting more generally on artistic actuality are constantly being redrawn, whether in Vito Acconci’s 0 to 9 or the British group Art & Language’s long-running journal Art-Language. In Numbers’s tendency to privilege artists’ most fleeting ‘serial publications’ – Gilbert & George’s postcard-series works, for example – distracts from the more interesting historical question that emerges when artists attempt to sustain a publication which puts them in the driving seat of critical reflection on art, not just by creating a network of distribution for their own ideas, but by creating a forum that could reflect on a ‘community of ideas’ among artists and readers. Artists’ magazines get most interesting when they take on, hijack or challenge the formats and circuits of mainstream media. This is something of a 1990s phenomenon, it turns out, strongly represented here in publications such as Maurizio Cattelan’s Permanent Food, Carsten Höller’s AMOKKOMA, Josephine Meckseper’s FAT and the British collective BANK’s eponymous artworld-baiting tabloid. In Numbers may be a bit lacking in a broader historical analysis of its field of study, but its eclectic breadth and loyalty to the often fragile cultural economy of artists’ magazines, plus Brand’s careful archival research, make it a useful record of this forever-endangered aspect of art’s self-representation and collective memory. J.J. Charlesworth

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Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World (2008)? Do you still feel a bit ashamed, nay nauseous, for enjoying that bedazzled guide to artworld dress codes? Dr Graw will see you now. High Price roots itself in the same market-centric Artworld 2.0 as Seven Days, but – as befits the cofounder of stone-faced Berlin art journal Texte zur Kunst – its author doesn’t turn up swooning at Takashi Murakami’s studio gates or worry about being mistaken for a collector’s arm-candy. Instead she stays home with a stack of sociology books and German newspapers, and big grievances about a) those who sell their souls to the market and b) those who pretend it’s possible to ignore it. Isabelle Graw, you’ll realise, is a Third Way theorist, though discovering what that means in practical terms – in a book dotted with come-hither subheaders such as ‘Internalized Norms in the Neoliberal Regime’ – isn’t easy, or fun, or quick. Not that seriousness is bad, but things surely don’t have to be as leisurely as Graw makes them. Translated from the German, this is something of a grinding read (maybe she and Thornton ought to collaborate next time). Unless you’re a detail fiend, skip the first 79 pages if you’ve already noticed that the rise of the market has made art the ultimate commodity, albeit a shifty one; that critics, to whose purpose and potential Graw naturally pays much attention, have been sidelined into boosters (still important as creators of ‘symbolic value’, just not as opinionated entities); and that there’s not really an ‘outside’, a space for standing apart, to the artworld any more. Graw hits her stride further in, as she considers how art – in haloing objects with magical significance – invented branding and the commodity- and status-driven world we inhabit today,

High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture and asserts the futility of wishing the commercial artworld would go away, or of making art that tries to evade it. (‘Those aspects of an artwork that cannot be reduced to marketing categories are the best argument for its marketability’, she notes; Graw has an eye for irony and paradox.) Elsewhere she thinks past clichés, unpacking the current state of affairs which ‘obliges members of the art world to cooperate unceasingly’ (hence the absence of negative criticism) and bemoaning the disappearance of ‘fixed-profile’ galleries in favour of unpredictable trendhoppers like Gagosian. And she has a detailed view of why art, with its promise of access to a wonderland of prestige and parties, has penetrated a mainstream which peddles the myth that anyone can be a success. What one is waiting for, perhaps wrongly, throughout all this, is to hear Graw offer some kind of route out of the general nightmare, something more than dour diagnosis. What we get is the notion of ‘market-reflexivity’, approval of Courbet’s prescient self-awareness regarding sales and fame, and a lengthy presentation of Warhol as Janus-faced: ‘as much as his practice imitated and reflected these conditions, it also distanced itself from them. Warhol both accepted and analyzed the laws of celebrity culture… market conformity and resistance to market conformity always go hand in hand.’ Etc. Frankly, it’s a bore to hear St Andy invoked again in this way. (Hirst, naturally, isn’t nearly so warmly regarded.) Is anyone younger, or even alive, capable of contributing? We end with a hearty thumbs-up for the deliberately disappointing strategies of Merlin Carpenter, who, the acknowledgements reveal, ‘read the English version with a critical eye’. Right. Well, as Graw says, there’s no ‘outside’. Martin Herbert

By Isabelle Graw Sternberg Press, £18 (softcover)

reviews: books

a manifesto lands on one’s desk, proclaiming to be a ‘provocative, incendiary call to arms for new literature and art to match the complexities of the twenty-first century.’ Right – pens and swords in hand – let’s get to it, then. Reality Hunger is a book of short numbered paragraphs assembled from hundreds of quotes from other writers and some interjections from the author, David Shields. All broadly reference one of two subjects: appropriation as the future of writing and art in general; and the abandonment of fiction in favour of the lyric essay. To argue the latter, Shields identifies a tendency among writers to smuggle ever more reality into their work. Shields’s beef is really with the novel rather than with art: the core of the novel, he believes, is problematic artifice and illusion, which we don’t need. Having reread the De Stijl Manifesto recently, I detect some affinities between the two (despite their nearly 100 years’ separation). While Mondrian, van Doesburg et al thought that nature was being used as an excuse for painters to convey colour and form, Shields believes fiction is being asked to do the same for writers’ insights. As for the appropriation part, art has rehearsed this argument until it is blue in the face – it is part of the standard art-school syllabus, after all. The Nicolas Bourriaud take on this argument is ‘postproduction’: artist as DJ, sampler and mixer of the culture around us. Shields may have a point, however, if we consider how ‘referential’ art has spawned art of ever more multiple references (though he never actually says this, such a take is a generous extrapolation from the essence of his argument). The past few years have seen a rise in artists who make work that uses

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto enormous swathes of multiple referents – obscure countercultural movements, historical archive material, musical movements, art processes, little-seen documentaries, writers, philosophers – all in one exhibition, or even one work. If one thinks of Mark Leckey, or of the performative lecture as art in general, then here might be an example of a similar impulse, related to Shields’s lyric essay. It is possible to see reference becoming a plastic form for art. As for reading Reality Hunger, though, the book quickly becomes boring. Take a tip from De Stijl and cut it down to a page or two. This is like being hit over the head with the same phrase 617 times, and, in my view problematically, there is very little ‘reality’ to speak of here – the very kind of reality that Shields admires in the essays of David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Joan Didion and Roland Barthes. My beef with it is there’s virtually no meat. The only chapter (entitled DS) in which Shields talks about his life and experiences of reading and writing rather than speaking in slowly anaesthetising aphorisms is 12 times more engaging than the rest. I read most of the book in a hospital waiting room, and I kept being distracted by a Nigel Slater food programme on the television set. The hearty food looked delicious, and I was hungry. It reminded me that the title of this book is about hunger, and what David Shields gives you is a plate of bones. There are some polished beauties among them, but they are bones all the same. Laura McLean-Ferris

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By David Shields Hamish Hamilton, £17.99 (hardcover)

, best known for his 12-year stint as architecture critic for The New York Times, died in 2007 at the age of fifty-nine. The fact that this volume comes in at around 900 pages is testament to the sheer volume of writing that someone in Muschamp’s position churns out. Fortunately it’s also indicative of the fact that what presumably made selecting this ‘greatest hits’ collection something of nightmare is also what makes it such a pleasure to read: the sheer quality of Muschamp’s writing. When collected, that writing constitutes a history of architecture over the past two decades, and ranges from an intelligent explanation of why the rather unpromisingly titled Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (which set up funding for the development of mass transportation systems) should be of paramount interest to anyone who wants to support a new vision for cities, to a hymn of praise to the twenty-first-century retail experience offered by the Rem Koolhaas-designed New York Prada store. Along the way we get his description of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao as the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe and his vociferous opposition to Daniel Libeskind’s winning proposals for the redevelopment of Ground Zero. In

Hearts of the City: The Selected Writings of Herbert Muschamp one column he looks back on the 1900s as the century that ‘has given us Camus, Genet and Steve Martin’, while a 1993 column responding to the first attack on the World Trade Center anticipates cultural theories that philosophers such as Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard would propose in the wake of 9/11 (‘exploding buildings are this community’s landmarks’). If Muschamp has a project, it’s one that seeks to explore the territory that architecture might operate in at the end of the twentieth century, following the socially prescriptive ideals of architectural modernism and the aesthetic freedom established during the era of postmodernism, and in the context of the rise and rise of rampant capitalism during the 1980s and 90s. A brief description of what exploring this might mean for the architecture critic comes in an analysis of Koolhaas’s (unbuilt) proposal for a pair of libraries on the Jussieu University Campus in Paris: ‘architecture can do more than contain the mind’s adventures. It can also lead minds out of containment by embarking on adventures of its own.’ This emphasis on ‘adventure’ proposes the kind of accessible personal narrative – storytelling – upon which the Muschamp seduction technique (and hence the seductive powers of the architects he promotes) is based. It’s something more directly illuminated at the end of this collection, in fragments from Hearts of the City, an unfinished memoir, in which Muschamp recalls the impact that the first Times architecture critic (Muschamp was only the third), Ada Louise Huxtable, had on him as a child: ‘I can’t remember when I first read one of her columns. And I couldn’t have analysed the hold that her stories had on me. I did sense the power with which she claimed the city – possessed it with words. She used her authority to challenge the authority traditionally represented by architecture. With a pen she cracked walls open. She faced an art that, historically, has been used to cover up problems and turned it into an occasion to expose problems. In the process she produced a powerful mythology about the city’s potential as a democratic form of art.’ Of course, he’s really writing about the goals he has set himself. Fittingly, it’s not when talking about Koolhaas or any other of the so-called starchitects who pop up so frequently (Venturi Scott Brown, Hadid, Hadid, Koolhaas, Koolhaas, Koolhaas, Gehry, Gehry, Gehry, GEHRY, etc) and a little irritatingly in Muschamp’s later writing that the critic hits his heights. Rather, it’s in columns such as an essay on social housing, written for The New Republic in the late 1980s, that transforms into an examination of how New York City is dealing with AIDS. Muschamp saw the role of the architecture critic as one of explaining a specialist discipline to a mainstream audience and, arguably more interestingly, explaining the feelings of that audience to sometimes cloistered architecture specialists. I read this collection with some regret, not just because I wished I’d paid more attention to Muschamp’s words as they were flowing out but also because I find it almost impossible to think of anyone (particularly in the UK, where architecture criticism frequently seems to involve little more than going on the press junket and copying out the press release) who does anything like what he did best. Mark Rappolt

By Herbert Muschamp Alfred A. Knopf, $50 (hardcover)

the strip: by John Broadley

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on the town: 8 February

Julian Schnabel: Navigation Drawings and One Photograph, Robilant + Voena, London

17 February

Kehinde Wiley: World Cup 2010/Puma, Deitch Projects, New York

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photography ian pierce and conrad ventur

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julian schnabel A Television presenter Trinny Woodall B Photographer David Bailey, Julian Schnabel and Catherine Bailey C Julian Schnabel and arts correspondent Judd Tully D Architect David Pun E Gallerist Edmondo di Robilant F The BBC’s Alan Yentob and wife Philippa Walker G Gallerist Marco Voena kehinde wiley 1 Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation’s Vanessa Rodriguez, artist and curator Derrick Adams, and Rush Foundation’s Marc Eastwood 2 Fashion designer Jose Duran 3 Gallerists Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicola Vassell, and collector Susan Hort 4 Artist Chuck Close and art adviser Simon Watson 5 Scholar Barbara Chenot Camus and Puma’s Anthony Evrard 6 Gallerist Kathy Grayson and artist Rosson Crow 7 Gallerist Jeffrey Deitch and editor Kim Hastreiter 8 Musicians Zozo Afrobeat 9 Collectors Susan and Michael Hort 10 Kehinde Wiley, Chuck Close and Nicola Vassell

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Thursday, February 25, 2010 14:15 Subject: off the record Date: Thursday, February 25, 2010 14:14 From: [email protected] To: Conversation: off the record

Spring is here! And with it the clouds of gloom are lifting to reveal a bright new dawn in which the crisis of capitalism has been cast off and we all run around in soft ice-cream colours and statement jewelled neckpieces. Just about everyone is opening bigger commercial spaces to show how well we’ve all survived the piffling downturn. In dear old London town alone there have been moves aplenty. The devilishly handsome Max Wigram is moving to a grand new West End space. Our favourite, ever-glamorous Euro ladeez, Bischoff/Weiss, have ditched the horrid, grimy East for lovely Mayfair. And I understand that Hauser & Wirth are designating their cramped quarters on Piccadilly a ‘project space’ and moving to the whole of Savile Row. This might mean turfing out a few tailors, but for me, since poor Lee McQueen went, tailoring is finished. Instead I fully expect Mr Wirth and his crew to be wearing double denim, fringing, bra tops and sleeveless jackets. The market is gathering force. Even in the dark days of late winter, rumours were reaching my delicate ears of splendour inching back. A nine-course private-view dinner was thrown by the inscrutable Thomas Dane. Fine cocktails were being served by people-of-a-shorter-stature at Dicksmith Gallery in deepest East London. White middle-aged art folk were doing vigorous dancehall-style reggae at a Victoria Miro party – a sure sign that things are on the mend. New art fairs sprung up, like small shoots to be tended by a burly but tender gardener. Antony Gormley wrote a moving piece in The Guardian alluding to the challenges of heating his incredibly large studio. Like leading world economists, Gallery Girl was alert to these signs of recovery, and now I can exclusively reveal to you, dear reader: the so-called recession is definitely over. Get rid of your Gap skinny slouch jeans and get your hands on an Antonio Berardi trench coat. Wear it daringly with sheer black stockings and get busy! And yes, some doom-monger correspondents are already writing to me, asking: ‘Gallery Girl, hasn’t the artworld learned anything from the near total collapse of the financial system, the wild speculating that led to it and the concomitant fortunes of an art market bloated by greed and bankers with no understanding of history?’ And I say, get back, naysayers! In the words of Italo Calvino, ‘It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin.’ Or in other words, it’s time to speculate to accumulate. I, for one, have plumped my investments in deepest Africa, which my art-consultant friends tell me is going to be the next Brazil. GG’s favourite collector, Belgian Phil, has been guiding my purchases and has convinced me to go short on India and long on Nigeria. Anyhow, here in the gallery we’re pleased that the gay times are back. All that ‘new seriousness’ malarkey was getting rather dull. There’s only around four or five standby phrases commercial galleries can use when no one has any money. These include: ‘It’s great – real collectors are back, and they are looking properly at works, not speculating.’ Or: ‘The market was getting unhealthy – it was time for a correction. We are finding quality, well-priced works are holding their own.’ Once you’ve uttered this around a hundred times, not even Todd Lynn’s elbow cages with optional horsehair can lift the gloom. And moreover, the collectors who come through our doors wouldn’t know how to ‘look properly’ at work if they tripped over their Narciso Rodriguez bondage-lite spindly heels and straight through Barnett Newman’s Eve. For us, this chapter of penny-pinching and having to say no is over. Let the good times roll again – what could possibly go wrong? GG

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ArtReview

DOOSAN Gallery New York isdedicated to the discovery and support of emerging, young Korean artists. Managed  dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging, young Korean artists. Managed  DOOSAN Gallery New York is DOOSAN Gallery New York is dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging, young Korean artists. Managed  by DOOSAN in South Korea, the DOOSAN Gallery New York is the first non-profit organization from that country to  by DOOSAN in South Korea, the DOOSAN Gallery New York is the first non-profit organization from that country to  by DOOSAN in South Korea, the DOOSAN Gallery New York is the first non-profit organization from that country to  be recognized by the state of New York, as well as New York City’s education department.  be recognized by the state of New York, as well as New York City’s education department.  be recognized by the state of New York, as well as New York City’s education department. 

Taewon Jang, Mother’s Prayer : Incense, 2010, Taewon Jang, Mother’s Prayer : Incense, 2010, Taewon Jang, Mother’s Prayer : Incense, 2010, digital print, 44x54 in  digital print, 44x54 in  digital print, 44x54 in 

Osang Gwon, Installation view of Deodorant Type Osang Gwon, Installation view of Deodorant Type Osang Gwon, Installation view of Deodorant Type at Manchester Art Gallery, 2008 at Manchester Art Gallery, 2008 at Manchester Art Gallery, 2008

Inbai kim, Installation view of Turbulent Inbai kim, Installation view of Turbulent Inbai kim, Installation view of Turbulent O’Clock,2010 2010 O’Clock, O’Clock, 2010

Nakhee Sung, Frequency, 2006, Nakhee Sung, Frequency, 2006, Nakhee Sung, Frequency, 2006, flash paint on canvas, 63x59 in flash paint on canvas, 63x59 in flash paint on canvas, 63x59 in

Sung Soo Kim, Undecided #001, 2010, Sung Soo Kim, Undecided #001, 2010, Sung Soo Kim, Undecided #001, 2010, pencil on paper, 8.5x5.5 in pencil on paper, 8.5x5.5 in pencil on paper, 8.5x5.5 in

Kyoung Tack Hong, The Triumph of Death, 2009, Kyoung Tack Hong, The Triumph of Death, 2009, Kyoung Tack Hong, The Triumph of Death, 2009, acrylic & oil on canvas, 39.8x39.8 in acrylic & oil on canvas, 39.8x39.8 in acrylic & oil on canvas, 39.8x39.8 in

Kim m    Feb 11 -  Mar 13 IIInnnbbbaaaiii   Ki Feb 11 -  Mar 13 Ki m Feb 11 -  Mar 13 Taewon Jang    Mar 18 -  Apr  24 Mar 18 -  Apr  24 Taewon Jang    Taewon Jang    Mar 18 -  Apr  24 Osang Gwon        May 06 May 06 - Jun Jun 05 05 Osang Gwon         Osang Gwon         May 06 Jun 05 Sung Soo Kim        Jun 10 Jun 10 - Jul 10 Jul 10 Sung Soo Kim        Sung Soo Kim        Jun 10 Jul 10 Nakhee Sung        Sep 02  Sep 02  - Oct 02 Oct 02 Nakhee Sung        Nakhee Sung        Sep 02  Oct 02 Kyoung Tack Hong Oct  07 -  Nov 06 -  Nov 06 Kyoung Tack Hong Oct  07 Kyoung Tack Hong Oct  07 -  Nov 06 Sang-ah Choi Nov 11 -  Dec 11 Sang-ah Choi Nov 11 -  Dec 11 Sang-ah Choi Nov 11 -  Dec 11 Sang-ah Choi, Welcome to America, 2007, mixed media, 40x80 in Sang-ah Choi, Welcome to America, 2007, mixed media, 40x80 in Sang-ah Choi, Welcome to America, 2007, mixed media, 40x80 in

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