In the triple Summer issue

New York Salons Its a new golden age for the art salon, with groups popping up all over New York City (and particularly in Brooklyn), in settings ranging from temporary to humble to spectacular. Agnieszka Gratza examines the phenomenon. Tino Sehgal Martin Herbert assesses the work of Tino Sehgal and finds the most radical, farreaching, beautifully generous art programme of the artists generation. And in a second article about the UK-born artist, whose work is at Tate Modern this summer for the Unilever Series, Jennifer Uleman recalls her heady time as an interpreter in Sehgals This Progress. Present Future Brian Dillon writes on futureoriented art of the last decade or two, looking at Omer Fasts Nostalgia trilogy, Sean Lynchs DeLorean Progress Report and Ben Riverss Slow Action, while J.J. Charlesworth interviews sci-fi writer China Miville and Jonathan T.D. Neil flight-tests Tom Sachss mission to Mars. Plus Shezad Dawood, Mark Beyers Amy + Jordan and an artist project by Raqs Media Collective.

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In this issue
Cover Feature Flow in text, will occupy two columns automatically... Main body text about the feature By Contributors Name Title Main body text about the feature By Contributors Name Title Main body text about the feature By Contributors Name Title Main body text about the feature By Contributors Name Plus Smaller features.... or can list reviews, shorts columns etc.... here. NOTE RE PROOF: Normaly print our as a spread for David to check, with teh cover in siyu so he can see what it wil look like online. NOTE RE EXPORT: See image for how to export as web ready. When you export the page, make sure you only export page 3, or youll have to go in and delete the other pages from within Acrobat.

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Issue 60

Summer 2012

5.00

Contains 7% Raqs Media Collective; 22% silver PANTONE 877; 7% Science fiction; 1 DIY mission to mars

Polite Society the return of the New York salon

Tino Sehgal actions speak louder than words

GEORGBASELITZ DAS NEGATIV

26 JULY 29 AUGUST 2012

SALZBURG

AUSTRIA

M I R A B E L L P L AT Z 2

TEL 43 662 881 393

FA X 4 3 6 6 2 8 8 1 3 9 3 9

R O PA C . N E T

Hauser & WirtH

GuiLLerMO KuitCa
1 JuNe 28 JuLY 2012 23 saviLe rOW LONdON W1s 2et WWW.HauserWirtH.COM

Untitled, 2010 Oil On canvas 199 163.5 cm / 78 3/8 64 3/8 in

KLARA KRISTALOVA
25 APRIL 29 JULY

TORSGATAN 19, S-113 90 STOCKHOLM . WWW.BONNIERSKONSTHALL.SE . T + 46 8 736 42 48 . INFO@BONNIERSKONSTHALL.SE . WED -- FRI 12 -- 19, SAT -- SUN 11 -- 17

2 June 30 September 2012 submarinewharf.com

The exhibition Ballads by the Turkish-Armenian artist Sarkis (1938) will transform the industrial Submarine Wharf in Rotterdams docklands into an extraordinary site. Large sculptural objects, a carillon, video, light, and music by John Cage will establish an illusory connection between water and air. Sarkis will create a world of mysticism and symbolism in the vast space, which measures nearly 5000m2. There will be live concerts in the exhibition every Sunday. Each summer an internationally renowned contemporary artist is invited to create an installation or exhibition in the Submarine Wharf in the Dutch docklands. This is a unique partnership between Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Port of Rotterdam.
Photo: Tot en met ontwerpen

Das pas fietsen!

Grayson Perry
The VaniTy of small Differences
7 June - 11 auGusT 2012

sarah sze
20 June - 11 auGusT 2012

Victoria Miro
victoria-miro.com

GEORG KARGL FINE ARTS

MUNTEAN/ROSENBLUM 11/0520/06/2012 COSTA VECE 11/0520/06/2012 MARTIN DAMMANN 29/0608/09/2012, Opening 28/06
Schleifmhlgasse 5, 1040 Vienna, www.georgkargl.com

Exhibition view Muntean/Rosenblum, Nemesims Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna

Participation Art|43|Basel 1417/06/2012

KIENHOLZ FIVE CAR STUD 6.621.10 NEW NORDIC ARCHITECTURE & IDENTITY 29.621.10
Wolfgang Tillmans: Freischwimmer 130, 2009. C-print. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Augustinus Fonden Main Sponsor for Louisiana

LIAM GILLICK Liam Gillick 199A 199B, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA 23 June 21 December 2012 ANNE HARDY Secession, Vienna, Austria 20 September 25 November 2012 DAVID THORPE The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK 11 February 10 June 2012 WOLFGANG TILLMANS MAM Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, So Paulo, Brazil 27 March 27 May 2012 The Common Guild, Glasgow, UK 20 April 23 June 2012 Neue Welt, Kunsthalle Zrich, Zrich, Switzerland 31 August 4 November 2012 GERT & UWE TOBIAS Der Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany 27 January 18 November 2012 REBECCA WARREN Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Ghent, Belgium 15 April 17 June 2012 GILLIAN WEARING Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK 28 March 17 June 2012 K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dsseldorf, Germany 8 September 2012 6 January 2013 Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany 1 March 9 June 2013 JAMES WELLING Wyeth, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, USA 24 March 22 July 2012 MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK 15 September 25 November 2012

MAUREEN PALEY. 21 HERALD STREET, LONDON E2 6JT +44 (0)20 7729 4112 INFO@MAUREENPALEY.COM WWW.MAUREENPALEY.COM

MICHAEL WERNER

4 EAST 77 STREET

N E W YO R K N Y

10 0 7 5

W W W. M I C H A E LW E R N E R . C O M

TEL. 212-988-1623

SIGMAR POLKE, LADY WRESTLING , 1968, PEN AND WATER COLOR ON PAPER, 11 1/2 X 8 1/4 INCHES

w e i v n O SUMMeR 2012
Roman Ondk do not walk outside this area till June 18, 2012 Gabriel Orozco Asterisms from July 6, 2012
Unter den Linden 13/15, 10117 Berlin, deutsche-guggenheim.de Daily, 10 a.m. 8 p.m.; Mondays, admission free Please note that the dates might change. The Deutsche Guggenheim remains closed between exhibitions.

Editorial Editor Mark Rappolt Executive Editor David Terrien Art Director Tom Watt Design Jonathan Baron Associate Editors J.J. Charlesworth Martin Herbert Editors at Large Laura McLean-Ferris Jonathan T.D. Neil Assistant Editor Oliver Basciano editorial@artreview.com Interns Talia Cohen, Claire Ramtuhul

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On the cover The Silver Shed salon, New York photographed by Gus Powell
Reprographics by PHMEDIA. Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview, ISSN 1745-9303, is published nine times a year by ArtReview Ltd. USA agent: IMS Clevett Worldwide, 19 Route 10 East, Bldg 2 Unit 24, Succasunna, NJ 07876. Subscription price is US $55 per annum. Periodicals Postage Paid at Folcroft, PA. Postmaster: Send address changes to: ArtReview, IMS NY c/o Julie Dorlot, 100 Walnut Street, Door #1, Champlain, NY 12919, T: 1 518 298 3212

18

PACE
www.thepacegallery.com

Wang Guangle
June 22 August 17, 2012 534 West 25th Street, New York City

Contents 1
54

58

50 36

62

82

90

120 154

108

131

114

156

Contents 2
Page 26 30 Title Contributors A New Reference Dictionary Now See This JuneAugust exhibitions Short reports Subject They made this The language of art made plain Writer / Photographer Neal Brown 36 39 From a Belgian coalmine to Central Park Vienna New York Houston The Strip Amy + Jordan A Few Questions A selection of objects you dont yet know you need David Dale Gallery & Studios St Paul Forthright speaking Martin Herbert Kimberly Bradley Joshua Mack Marie Darrieussecq Paul Gravett Mark Beyer Mario Garcia Torres Oliver Basciano Oliver Basciano Matthew Collings Christopher Mooney Christian Viveros-Faun Maria Lind Jonathan Grossmalerman Mike Watson Sam Jacob J.J. Charlesworth

44 46 50 54 58 62

Comic Strip Documenta 13 Now Buy This Off-Space Travels Great Critics and Their Ideas Now Hear This

82 90 101 108 114 118 120

Featured Tino Sehgal New York Salons The Robin Hood of Wisdom Tom Sachs Present Future China Miville Shezad Dawood Reviewed Exhibitions

A critic responds A collaborator recalls Talking shop An artist project Mission to Mars Arts prognostication Another future The alien other

Martin Herbert Jennifer Uleman Agnieszka Gratza Raqs Media Collective Jonathan T.D. Neil Brian Dillon J.J. Charlesworth J.J. Charlesworth

131

154 156

On the Town Books

162

Off the Record

Roger Hiorns Sam Griffin Michael Portnoy Roee Rosen Marco Chiandetti & Rudolf Polanszky Elizabeth Price Laura Parnes Gilbert & George Alejandra Prieto Ralph Lemon Brice Marden Mickalene Thomas Jeffry Mitchell Urs Fischer Antony Gormley Ryoji Ikeda Haim Steinbach Mona Hatoum David Zink Yi Guillaume Bijl 1964 Kishio Suga At Glasgow International and Matts Gallery, London Piecing Together Los Angeles The Lives of Things The Time Machine Rebel Cities The Sleepwalkers Box The Space Between Luigi Ghirri: Project Prints The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard Headhunting curators

Laura McLean-Ferris Martin Herbert Oliver Basciano Chris Fite-Wassilak Ben Street Susannah Thompson Brienne Walsh Jonathan T.D. Neil David Everitt Howe Joshua Mack Jonathan T.D. Neil Ed Schad Jonathan Griffin Barbara Casavecchia Christopher Mooney Martin Herbert Violaine Boutet de Monvel Laura McLean-Ferris Raimar Stange Kimberly Bradley John Quin Terry R. Myers Ian Pierce / Dan Coopey Edwin Heathcote Mark Rappolt Laura McLean-Ferris Justin McGuirk Mark Rappolt Oliver Basciano Laura McLean-Ferris Martin Herbert Gallery Girl

Natascha Sadr Haghighian 20 July 14 September 2012

Eulalia Valldoseras Blood Ties continues until 6 July 2012

5657 Eastcastle Street London W1W 8EQ www.carrollfletcher.com

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.org / Natascha Sadr Haghighian / Manfred Mohr / John Wood and Paul Harrison / Eulalia Valldosera / Thomson & Craighead / UBErMorgEN.CoM / richard T. Walker / Michael Joaquin grey

Contributors
Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet magazine and tutor in critical writing at the Royal College of Art, London. His books include I Am Sitting in a Room (2012), Sanctuary (2011) and Ruins (2011). A collection of his essays, Culture & Curiosity, will be published in 2013. This month he surveys the arrival of the future in art. For further reading he recommends Fredric Jamesons Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Franco Berardis After the Future (2011), Vladimir Nabokovs 1952 short story Lance, and the 2009 Possible, Probable and Preferable Futures issue of the Arnolfinis Concept Store journal. Jennifer Uleman is associate professor of philosophy at Purchase College (State University of New York) and author of An Introduction to Kants Moral Philosophy (2010) as well as various articles and reviews on Kants moral, legal and political thought. She has written more recently about Occupy and Hegel. This month she chronicles her experience as one of Tino Sehgals collaborators. For further reading she recommends Leanne Shaptons Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (Saturday, 14 February, 2009, New York) (2009), as well, of course, as anything by German Idealists. J.J. Charlesworth is associate editor at ArtReview and our very own version of Clement Greenberg, which means hes offensively judgemental and smokes a lot (see picture). This month he interviews new weird author China Miville and assesses the work of Shezad Dawood. For further reading, and as an introduction to Mivilles writing, he recommends Perdido Street Station (2000), Iron Council (2004) and the recent Embassytown (2011). Agnieszka Gratza is a writer and drifter currently based in New York. When not consuming art and film, she is making edible artworks-cumperformances staged across the city (or getting others to do it for her). This month she surveys the New York salon scene. For further reading she recommends Dena Goodmans The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1996), for the historic antecedents of todays salons; Gallery Chronicle, an article on the Bushwick scene by James Panero in The New Criterion (February 2012); and Jerry Saltzs Remembrances of Louise Bourgeoiss Salons (June 2010) on vulture.com Gus Powell is a native New Yorker who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the filmmaker Arielle Javitch, and daughter, Townes Sibley Powell. He is currently at work on a set of captioned photographs inspired by William Steig and a body of street work currently titled Mise en Scene. His blog can be found at dirtywhitebucks.tumblr.com. This month he photographed the New York salons scene. Recent inspirations include, but are not limited to: Joseph Beuyss Capri Battery (1985), Jacques Tatis Play TIme (1967), overgrown houseplants and deep negronis. Raqs Media Collective are Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who founded the group in 1992. Raqs remain closely involved with the Sarai programme at Delhis Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (www.sarai. net), an initiative Raqs cofounded in 2000. Raqs Media Collective enjoy playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as a curators, sometimes as philosophical agents provocateurs. They make contemporary art and have made films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events and collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors; they have also founded processes that have left deep impacts on contemporary culture in India. Raqs follow a self-declared imperative of kinetic contemplation to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that they deploy even as they achieve a consistency of speculative procedures. This month they produced The Robin Hood of Wisdom, an artist project for the magazine. Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, Hettie Judah, Axel Lapp, Joshua Mack, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Neal Brown, Barbara Casavecchia, Matthew Collings, Marie Darrieussecq, David Everitt Howe, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Gallery Girl, Agnieszka Gratza, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Edwin Heathcote, Sam Jacob, Maria Lind, Justin McGuirk, Terry R. Myers, John Quin, Ed Schad, Raimar Stange, Ben Street, Susannah Thompson, Jennifer Uleman, Christian Viveros-Faun, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson Contributing Artists / Photographers Mark Beyer, Dan Coopey, Ian Pierce, Gus Powell, Raqs Media Collective

26

Raqs Media Collective: photo Martin Waelde; Gus Powell: photo Noel Camardo, 2012

POLLY MORGAN
ENDLESS PLAINS
8 JUNE 31 JULY 2012 TUESDAY SATURDAY 10 6 PM

AL L VI S UAL ARTS
WWW.AL LV I S UALARTS.O R G 2 O M E G A P L AC E K I N G S C R O S S LO N D O N N1 9 D R T E L E P H O N E +44 ( 0 ) 20 7843 0410 I N FO@AL LV I S UALARTS.O R G
Photo: Tessa Angus

Dictionary

Rr

race and art to role distance locus

race and art, Stanshall theory Locus context situation posited by academic Victor Viv Stanshall (194395). Stanshall sought to determine whether a person functioning in a culturally specified manner such as music, and whose skin was (or could be) the colour blue, might be able, for the purposes of a determining locus analysis, to sing in a manner that was in correspondence with the colour white. This is known as the Can a Blue Man Sing the Whites? theory and has introduced new theoretical ideas, including important metaphysical ones, into race discourse. radical See challenging, asking important questions. rape A violent sex offence given grand import in paintings classical tradition. See challenging, asking important questions. readymade See radical. realism See Tom of Finland, male-to-male rape. rear-garde The according of a value determination definition within a spatial locus accordance situation context in which reargarde is an elitist term for certain discriminatedagainst audiences. An association with ideas of the rear buttocks area complicates understandings. The correct oppositional locus is not the term avant-garde but probably undergarde, related to ideas of underclass. See butt plug. recent emerging artist The artist emerged about 11.45am, blinked fearfully in the light, went back inside the house. Was seen reemerging at about 1.15pm and going off to the pub to score crack cocaine. See challenging, asking important questions. receptor nonaffinity locus threshold In TV reportage, stock file footage, or wallpaper, may be used to run under more important spoken narratives, its duration onscreen only fleeting. The viewer voluntarily assumes compliance with such media instruction authority locus strategies and lowers his or her affinity locus with the visual, resulting in a diminishing of retinal locus awareness. It is in such ways that TV editors introduce subliminal micronarratives often disparaging or absurdist ones. British television news has a long tradition of running such visual subcodes. Edits include crowd scenes within which may be a distinctively fat, eccentric or disabled individual, chosen for whatever comic effect an inebriated TV subeditor may enjoy. File footage may also include notable persons suffering indignity, such as that of newspaper executive Rebekah Brooks seen pulling the elastic of her knickers from within an intimate fold in her buttocks when entering a social gathering. Another

example shows Brooks stumbling over a carpet. In a display of incomplete political balance, leftist political adviser Alastair Campbell has also been shown stumbling over a carpet but his male buttocks area was ignored. Theorists argue that such selections are part of a multiplicity cultural meaning locus whose intent is a recombination of the relational grammars of social collectivity and which have an important locus crossover affinity with the mediated locus tropes of contemporary art practice. See challenging, asking important questions. red figure vase painting See Greek art, challenging, asking important questions. red ochre See pigments. reification Alienated, queuing, wallet-bearing object-things who wander a blockbuster art show may only have locus agency returned to them by the active collective consciousness of the revolutionary party of the proletariat. religion Mildly enduring locus trope. remittance exchange locus Primitive barter whereby a prestigious national institution of important historical art seeks to accrue a fashionable status locus by allowing a contemporary artist an exhibition, from which the artist also seeks locus status gain. Most authorities agree these barters are credibility squanders, not just for artist and institution, but also for associated critics, writers, lecturers, audiences, benefactors and sponsors, who all perish as a result. See National Gallery London, Wallace Collection, Titanic. Renaissance See challenging , asking important questions. repetition A very common and still effective art locus trope. repetition A very common and still effective art locus trope. repetition A very common and still effective art locus trope. repetition A very common and still effective art locus trope. revisionist Pejorative term for theories of role distance locus. ritual Common trope in contemporary art. May involve dimly lit shrine and altar locus strategies or repetition. role distance locus Theory that contemporary art is now made by people who are not artists, but detached performers of a prescribed set of socioeconomic behaviours set within a cultural context. Role distance is characterised not by the question Is it art? but instead by Is it an artist? The theory is much contested. See revisionist. NeaL bRoWN

30

Dictionary

HAND-CRAFTED OUTDOOR FURNITURE WITH OVER 20 YEARS OF DEDON EXPERIENCE

Available at DEDON showrooms and select dealers worldwide www.dedon.de

DOOSAN encourages and supports young artists.

T h e Curated by / Kang, Sojung Kim, Sooyoung & Jo, Eunbi Jul. 19th Aug. 18th, 2012 / Doosan Gallery New York Opening Reception / Thur. 19th, Jul., 2012 6pm

F o r c e s

B e h i n d

Kim, Minae Jung, Yoonsuk & Kang, Jungsuck & SklavenTanz Okin Collective Lee, Wan

23/06/2012 - 06/01/2013

Feminist GenealoGies in spanish art: 1960-2010

Pilar Albarracn, Xon Anleo/Uqui Permui, Pilar Aymerich, Eugnia Balcells, Cecilia Barriga, Mara Jos Belbel, Miguel Benlloch, Esther Boix, Cabello/Carceller, Mnica Cabo, Mar Caldas, Carmen Calvo, Nuria Canal, Anxela Carams/Carme Nogueira/Uqui Permui, Ana Casas Broda, Castorina, Mari Chord, Montse Clav, Mara Antonia Dans, Luca Egaa Rojas, Itziar Elejalde, Equipo Butifarra, Erreakzioa-Reaccin, Eullia (Eullia Grau), Esther Ferrer, Alicia Framis, Carmela Garca, ngela Garca Codoer, Mara Gmez, Miguel Gmez/Javier Utray, Marisa Gonzlez, Gabriela y Sally Gutirrez Dewar, Yolanda Herranz, Juan Hidalgo, ideadestroyingmuros, Mara Llopis/Girlswholikeporno, Eva Lootz, LSD, Cristina Lucas, Jess Martnez Oliva, Chelo Matesanz, Medeak, Miralda, Fina Miralles, Mau Monlen, Begoa Montalbn, Paz Muro, Paloma Navares, Ana Navarrete, Carmen Navarrete, Marina Nez, Itziar Okariz, Isabel Oliver, O.R.G.I.A., Carlos Pazos, Uqui Permui, Ana Peters, Olga Pijoan, Nria Pompeia, Post-Op, Precarias a la deriva, Joan Rabascall, Amlia Riera, Elena del Rivero, Mara Ruido, Estibaliz Sadaba, Simen Saiz Ruiz, Dorothe Selz, Carmen F. Sigler, Diana J. Torres AKA Pornoterrorista, Laura Torrado, Eullia Valldosera, Video-Nou/Jos Prez Ocaa, Azucena Vieites, Virginia Villaplana, Isabel Villar.

Laboratorio 987 --------------------------------------

Carme Nogueira Castillete. Mining Tableau (Landscape in Motion I)

Annex Space --------------------------------------

The Project as Methodology

Annex Space --------------------------------------

www.musac.es

Form and meaning exhibition series -------------------------------------23/06/2012 - 06/01/2013 Showcase Project --------------------------------------

Erreakzioa - Reaccin Images of a Project between Art and Feminism

Participants: Antoni Muntadas (Projects Director) Beln Cerezo, Carlos Criado, Oier Etxeberria, Miquel Garca Membrado, Olalla Gomez Jimnez, Miriam Isasi, Lus Meln, Marcos Miguelez, Ana Moya, Juan Pablo Orduez, Alejandro Snchez Garrido

Fore more information subscribe to our newsletter at musac@musac.es MUSAC, Avda Reyes Leoneses, 24. 24008, Len, Spain

-------------------------------------23/06/2012 - 06/01/2013

Photo: Fina Miralles. Petjades, accin realizada en Sabadell en enero de 1976, 1976. Courtesy Ajuntament de Sabadell, Museu dArt de Sabadell.

BALDWIN

MIR

WARHOL FIONA RAE

For more information, go to

Martin Herbert

Documenta 13, Kassel, 9 June 16 September, d13.documenta.de / Manifesta 9, Limburg, 2 June 30 September, www.manifesta9.org / Un-Scene II, WIELS, Brussels, 22 June 26 August, www.wiels. org / David Claerbout, Parasol Unit, London, 31 May 10 August, www.parasol-unit.org / Alice in the Wonderland of Art, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 22 June 30 September, www.hamburger-kunsthalle. de / Muzi Quawson, Annet Gelink, Amsterdam, 1 July 31 August, www.annetgelink.com / Paola Pivi / Oscar Tuazon, Public Art Fund, New York, 20 June 26 August / 19 July 26 April 2013 / Seher Shah, Nature Morte, Berlin, 8 June 28 July, www.naturemorte.com / Ciprian Murean, Galerie Hussenot, Paris, to 20 June, www.galeriehussenot.com

f not the widely reviled seventh Berlin Biennale, something good ought to come out of Germany this summer. Will it be Documenta 13? Initially, aside from a warm-up series of philosophical publications, 100 Notes 100 Thoughts , dedicated to propositional thinking, the quinquennial behemoths advance-publicity machine seemed content to spin out photographs of curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in smiley poses. But now its clarified (via a curators statement) that the show is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory and epistemological closure. This Documenta will be concerned, then, with how different fields of knowledge contribute to reimagining the

Documenta 13 venue Gloria Kino, Kassel

Photo: Nils Klinger

world; but also with productive deferral, with resisting nailing knowledge production down. Christov-Bakargiev, preshow interviews suggest, desires to produce something that evades the prison of categorisation, to the point of building a section of the show in the main venue, the Fridericianum that she sees as an intractable riddle. (It contains fragments of destroyed sculptures from Beirut, a photograph of a former bombsite, and Morandi paintings and their source material.) Underwriting this tactical feinting, the contributors (at press time, we were still waiting for a complete list) range from activists to zoologists, from Theodor Adorno to Salvador Dal, Mario Garcia Torres (see his text A Few Questions, page 46) to Pierre Huyghe, wildcat filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky to, um, wildcat curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Youll learn something here, for sure. Even if its only that you cant learn something. Think of Limburg and what comes to mind? This is a test. No points for Rush Limbaugh, one for cheese that smells like body odour, two for Brian Enos The Fat Lady of Limbourg (1974) and three for Manifesta 9, since the itinerant biennial is setting up in the province of Limburg, Belgium, centring upon the former Waterschei coalmine in Genk. For The Deep of the Modern, cocurated by Cuauhtmoc Medina, Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, 39 selected artists are engaging, were told, with industrialism, postindustrialism and global capitalism. What we know beyond that: the list straddles centuries and diverse practices Carlos Amorales to Richard Long to William Heath Robinson to Henry Moore and 16 tons of coal have been delivered to the venue.

Marcel Broodthaers (see Manifesta 9 )

Trois Tas de Charbon (detail), 19667, installation with coal, wood, paper, variable dimensions. Collection Marie-Puck Broodthaers Gallery, Brussels. Courtesy Estate Marcel Broodthaers

36

Now See This

a B a r BY Jer eM Y Sh aW FOr ABSOLUT 10 16 JUne , 2 0 12

the K irli a n

nOOn t O 3 a M , v Ol K S h a U S nO. 5 , r e B G a S S e 12 , 4 0 5 8 B a S e l W W W. a B S Ol U ta r t B Ur e a U.C OM / t he K ir l i a n

a B S O l U t a r t B U r e a U i S t h e P r e S e n t i n G Pa r t n e r O F a r t B a S e l C O n v e r S at i O n S

ArtReview and EFG International are proud to present the first in a series of five specially GREATS commissioned poster projects P o S T E R S E R i E S featuring unique artworks created by artists following their selection as 2012 Future Greats. Each artwork will be reproduced in ArtReview and available as a full-size limited-edition poster in subscriber copies of the magazine.
FUTURE

No 3

bRENdAN FowlER
SElEcTEd by joNAThAN T.d. NEil

Brendan Fowler turned to making and showing art objects in earnest in 2009, and since then they have grown in scale and ambition. Three cheaply framed inkjet prints fanned like a deck of cards and pierced by a fourth, arrays of similarly framed prints jacked together and attached faceto-face these are becoming something like Fowlers riff style. Breaking the bigger constructions into halves is another. The images and writing are always Fowlers own, the bits and pieces of the world that are grabbed by his camera and shared in a way that makes them more affective, more weighty, than simply giving them over to the world online. Fowlers work is honest in its selfconsciousness, which is just another way of saying that its authentic, which is just another way of saying that its cool. And why shouldnt cool be a criterion of good art?

International

www.efginternational.com

Vienna
Viennas art institutions have seen much change in the past year the MAK got a new director, the Belvedere opened its 21er Haus, Francesca von Habsburgs TBA21 foundation secured the use of a new exhibition space and Kunsthalle Wien director Gerald Matt was asked to take a threemonth leave in January 2012 (in late March he stepped down of his own accord). Now the commercial side of Viennas artworld is quietly rumbling as well, with its art fair, Viennafair, on the faultline. In January, Russian investor Sergey Skaterschikov acquired a 70 percent stake in the fair, which has never been a big sales powerhouse, but since its founding in 2005 has evolved into a respectable regional event with a focus on Central and Eastern European art. In mid-April, citing differences under the new regime, fair artistic directors Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schllhammer announced their resignations. So the search was on, fast, to name new artistic directors: within two weeks, Kazakhstan-born Christina Steinbrecher, who directs Art Moscow, and Vita Zaman, formerly of Ibid Projects in her native Lithuania and London, then Pace Gallery in New York, were appointed as two-thirds of the curatorial cluster, with a third person still up in the air. The wait for an unnamed third director has created a level of local buzz with some humorous side effects. Even before Steinbrecher and Zaman were named, Austrias mass-market tabloid Kronen Zeitung printed news that none other than Gerald Matt would be taking over the Viennafair. Viennafairs press department returned with a statement that their third director was a person with close ties to Viennas museum scene but that a preexisting binding contract was causing the announcement delay, which couldnt be the jobless Matt. Within days, Simon Rees came up as a likely candidate. New Zealander Rees was curator at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius before joining the MAK in autumn 2011 and curating the inaugural exhibition under director Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Erschaute Bauten. Rees was sighted having long conversations with Steinbrecher at Berlin Gallery Weekends huge gala at the end of April, arousing even more speculation. Among Viennas stalwart dealers and cultural producers theres a mix of excitement and trepidation, indicating that the bigger question is whether the outsiders will pull influence away from the local artworld and its commercial players. The selection committee is largely the same as in previous years, but the new directors international cachet and hands-on Eastern European experience, the new lateSeptember time slot and other projects, like Skaterschikovs planned Art Vectors Investment Partnership sfund, indicate change that might just be what the fair needs. Attracting stronger artistic positions and a solid collector base is never a bad thing, even if it shakes Vienna up a bit. Kimberly braDley

Spotlighting Belgium makes sense, with increasing numbers of artists supposedly choosing Brussels a complete mess, but in the good sense, as one gallerist who decamped there in 2010 told The New York Times last year over Berlin (or anywhere else). Un-Scene II, the second impression of WIELSs scaled-down national triennial, uses the fact that the country patchworks former territories and languages as a rationale for the stylistic and thematic pluralism that Brussels in particular, uh, sprouts: the dozen artists this time include the appealingly off-beam, darkly faux-naive painter/sculptor Dorota Jurczak, artist/detective/adventurer Olivier Foulon, whos previously devoted his time to hunting down and filming Courbet paintings; and Peter Wchtler, whose videos anatomise ad hoc, under-the-radar social groups. To pursue Tintinland with dangerous alacrity, Parasol Units The Time That Remains covers ten years of Belgian David Claerbouts patient, passively aggressive practice, his digitally augmented videos looping or tweaking modest events and gifting them with flustering airs. In the half-hour Shadow Piece (2005), set in the 1950s, figures repeatedly try to get through a modern buildings glass doors, endlessly barred (as the artist has suggested) from a hygienic modernist future that would never arrive. In the 25-minute two-channel projection Riverside (2009), the man and woman scrambling around on the riverbanks in each are, we realise, heading towards the same topographic point but never to meet onscreen; the storyline, like its makers art in general, speaking of endless irresolution and elegant structural frustration, much solar-plexus twistiness from minimal means.

Dorota Jurczak (see Un-Scene II )

Dym w Oknie, 2007, acrylic, watercolour and ink on canvas, 70 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

David Claerbout
Bordeaux Piece, 2004, singlechannel video projection, DVCAM (progressive) transferred to hard disk, colour, stereo over headphones and speakers, 13 hr 43 min. the artist. Courtesy Collection Muse National dArt Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris

ArtReview

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New York
The most striking thing for me about the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA (closing 11 June) is the impression that, for all the specificity of the personas the artist puts on and the various stereotypes she skewers, there is ultimately no one present in most of her work. In the Untitled Film Stills series (197780), for example, its the settings empty road, seedy motel that set the tone. If the girl werent there, the images would still channel the Hollywood clichs. Yes, I get it: Shermans talking about objectification, stereotypes and the evacuation of identity that they effect; but still, theres an absence at the centre of her art which can make it seem gimmicky, if not empty. Theres a similar vacuum playing out at the heart of American politics, especially as the presidential campaign heats up. Mitt Romney will stand for anything and thus means nothing. Obamas pursuit of compromise with whats proved a nearly implacable partisan opposition is a classic example of Freudian transference: hell do anything, be anyone, to try to gain the approval of the father absent during his childhood. As in Untitled Film Stills, its the noise around these men, intangibles without agency, like hope, change, the deficit and congressional gridlock, that define them, rendering them tabulae rasae onto which anyone can project his own dreams and nightmares. In a body politic of over three hundred million, its easy to drown in the chatter. But as is indicated by 9 Scripts from a Nation at War (2007), a multichannel video installation by David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer, presented four floors below the Sherman retrospective, the resulting sense of inconsequentiality that allows citizens to eschew personal responsibility, much as politicians do by blaming circumstances, is bogus. Each script there are actually ten spins the fallout from Iraq and Afghanistan from the putative perspective of, for instance, the correspondent, veteran, actor or detainee, roles which affect how information is filtered and culpability assigned and evaded. But where Sherman creates fictive scrims, the characters here are rendered vivid by accents, moles and imperfectly concealed wrinkles. Individual presence, and thus culpability, is inescapable. Its not only that all choices are political. As the work of Sharon Hayes featured in a retrospective titled Theres So Much I Want to Say to You, at the Whitney from 21 June to 9 September fervently argues, the political is a macrocosm of the personal. How we act, and allow ourselves to be acted upon, in both spheres is unified by our ethics and passions. Behind the grand platitudes of our politics stands what really matters: us. Its our choice whether to be a Cindy Sherman or something more. Joshua Mack

And if Claerbout leads us down rabbit holes we cant easily rise out of (and if weve already, via Manifestas mining motif, broached the subject of deep dark holes), theres an easy segue to Alice in the Wonderland of Art but were above such crassness, obviously. Suffice to say that Alice, convening some 200 works from the last 150 years, uses Lewis Carrolls heroine as an ingenious, adaptable, Zelig-like character who has inspired surrealists (Max Ernst, Dal), psychonaut artists of the 1960s and 70s, and younger artists such as Anna Gaskell and Kiki Smith. Muzi Quawson, too, draws artfulness from fiction: specifically the vast storehouse of myth on which America rests. Working the blurry edges of photojournalism, contouring her work to reflect American film, music and literature, she has in the past befriended and extensively photographed young mothers in Woodstock, grizzled cowboys and runaways crisscrossing America on Greyhound buses. In her latest work, the 16mm film Shawmut Circle (2012), the London-based photographer scours the milieus of the Deep South that havent shown up in cinema: here, a scuffling community located between Georgia and Alabama.

Max Ernst (see Alice in the Wonderland of Art )

Alice in 1941, 1941, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 40 x 32 cm. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence

Muzi Quawson
Shawmut Circle, 2011, three-channel 16mm film installation. Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam

40

Now See This

houston
Houston, the Menil Collection, ten in the morning. Luxuriant oaks and hazy sunshine. The buildings are by Renzo Piano, built in 1986. The collection here is unique in the world: Magritte, de Chirico, Braque, Picasso, Czanne, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin And an entire building dedicated to the best of Cy Twombly. What is astounding is to find these art giants in this silent, heat-flattened neighbourhood, where the Parisian I am has the very precise sense of being in the middle of nowhere. One street away is the Rothko Chapel. Barnett Newmans Broken Obelisk (19639) is reflected in the rectangle of the pool. It is dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr. Dominique and John de Menil, married French-born collectors, had been seeking a painter for an intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief. They had seen Matisses work at Vence, and Lgers at Assy. It was 1964, and Rothko, after working on the project for a year, had just broken his contract for a series of paintings at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, realising, according to writer Susan J. Barnes (quoting collector Katharine Kuh), that they would be merely a decorative backdrop for the tastes and transactions of a society he abhorred. The Menils, invited to visit Rothkos studio, where they spoke only in whispers, commissioned the artist to create a new series of works for their chapel project. The chapel is one of those buildings that is of little interest until seen from inside, like certain quartz rocks. The 14 very sombre canvases are arranged on the walls of an octagon. There are several benches, and cushions on the floor. The only illumination comes from a narrow skylight at the rooms zenith. The eyes adjust slowly, time beats in the veins. Out come the purples, the blues, the blacks, greys and browns. Then a cloud passes, and everything is seen anew. I think of Morton Feldmans Rothko Chapel (1971) but I am unable to call forth the notes in my blank mind. I have a sense of falling upwards. A place not to think to unthink, says one of the messages in the visitors book. NASA is 30 miles from here. There is a perfect logic to the coexistence, in this haphazard city, of these two places that expand our cosmos. That elevate it even though I resist the religious sentiment that the American context presents as obligatory. Does this chapel make you any wiser? I ask the guard, who has been keeping watch in the shadow of these paintings for five years. Everything that we experience can make us wiser, she answers, adding that one brings ones state of mind here: if anguished, then one leaves more anguished still. Her colleague, greeting visitors for 14 years, tells me that absolutely nothing could make her wise. Marie darrieussecq

Elsewhere in America, credit to the Public Art Fund: outdoor sculpture commissions make substantial sense for both Paola Pivi and Oscar Tuazon, who inject emphatic outlandishness into New Yorks parkland this summer. Pivi, whos honed a compound of the askew, allusive and extremely striking over the last decade, once tipped a huge red truck on its side only to photograph it, and put a lone donkey on a boat for the same purpose; Tuazons modular wooden structures, meanwhile raw materials meeting industrial construction techniques often seem bigger than the galleries that house them (and are bigger, his wooden beams punching through walls). In Central Park, Pivis irruptive How I Roll is a rotating, twin-engine plane; in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Tuazon is modifying his aesthetic: expect cast-concrete cubes, steel hoops and triangles interjected with tree trunks a playground you cant play with, maybe. If theres an element of embattlement in Tuazons engagements with context, seher shah is even more forceful about how public space and architecture can reflect the will to impose dominion. Trained as an artist and as an architect (she no longer practices, though she used to design skyscrapers), she makes hybridised cityscapes, ostensibly located in Asia or the Middle East and delivered in the form of montaged photographs and drawings, sometimes flipped into symmetries and overlaid with fractal patterns. Theyre evocations of a chaotic moment, as capitalism sweeps across continents, bringing with it a stark architectural Esperanto that displaces tradition and specificity: in other words, her brooding art might be less about architecture than about what specific examples of it are metonymic for, and why they are where they are.

Paola Pivi
How I Roll (detail), 2012. Courtesy Public Art Fund, New York

ArtReview

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Image Ed Reeve

HAYward gallery

wide open school

100 INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS REINVENT SCHOOL
11 JUNE 11 JULY 2012

THE STRIP BY
Mark Beyer (see overleaf) For many reasons, the whole issue about whether to be a cartoonist or not has been a source of a lot of confusion for me, says Mark Beyer. As an only child, an average student bullied at school and a disappointment to his father, he used drawing as a way to kill time, gradually evolving his distinct, intense, decorated style, avoiding any forethought, formal art education or guidance from how-to books. Far from being faux-naif, his art is the only way I know how to draw. I couldnt draw a realistic picture, or draw in any other style, if my life depended on it. More interested in becoming a writer or filmmaker, Beyer might never have pursued making comics if not for the inspiration of Americas uncompromising underground comics and the early support of Art (Maus) Spiegelman and Bill (Zippy) Griffith, coeditors of the anthology Arcade: The Comics Revue, who chose Beyers second-ever comic for their sixth issue in 1976. Encouraged, Beyer found that his style lent itself to comics and selfpublished three minicomics, followed by his comic books A Disturbing Evening and Other Stories (1978) and Dead Stories (1982), as well as being commissioned by Spiegelman for RAW magazine and other prestige titles. Beyers most recurring characters are Amy and Jordan, a pair of eternal victims, vulnerable, doll-like, one dressed in her diamond-patterned smock, the other all in black with a crosshair target on his chest. Seemingly imprisoned within the panels of their comics, they endure endless urban despair, which is made visible in the unsettling layouts and compositions, and the menacing forms lurking just outside the panels. Traumas are never far away in their besieged subsistence, recounted in the graphic novel Agony in 1987 and in weekly newspaper strips from 1988 to early 1996, compiled into a 2004 compendium by designer Chip Kidd. More growing cult than mass market, Beyers work offers no comforting punchlines or reassurances, but conveys an uncanny nightmarish atmosphere and taps into an undercurrent of modern anomie. Uncertain of his artistic direction, Beyer abandoned comics around 1997 and resumed making large single images, which he had been exhibiting as early as 1977 at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, near his hometown of Allentown. Not strictly paintings, these drawings in pen and ink were made on glass or Plexiglas and coloured in acrylics applied onto a fine layer of fixative. Beyers new Strip for ArtReview signals his surprise return to his signature avatars after 16 years, although (spoiler alert!) this may be their swansong. I wanted to kill off Amy and Jordan in the grand tradition of Fritz the Cat and other murdered cartoon characters, he says. (In 1972, R. Crumb famously created a story in which his feline star was stabbed in the back of the head with an icepick by an irate ex-girlfriend, an act of vengeance for the distortion of his character in Fritz the Cat, Ralph Bakshis then-new animated movie.) It was only in autumn 2011 that Beyer started working again on a comic and feeling happy with the results. The truth is, I am completely burned out on Amy and Jordan, but I am not burned out on the idea of making comics. As the borders separating comics and art dissolve still further, so too can Beyers singular, self-invented expression, as both cartoonist and artist. Paul Gravett

In aesthetic terms, Ciprian Murean appears to be all over the map. Hes made animations in which babies are baptised by Santa Claus, videos of Coke/Pepsi taste tests and, lengthily, a handmade copy of an illustrated book of Piero della Francescas paintings which resembles a pale, delicate illuminated manuscript. But conceptually hes at one particular cartographic spot: Murean was born in Romania, reached his maturity when religion rushed in to fill the space voided by communisms fall, and makes art that changeably engages with and tries to understand the diverse sways of authority. His 2010 show at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein featured a reworking of Maurizio Cattelans sculpture of John Paul II felled by a meteorite with the Pope replaced by the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church, while a work from 2004 featuring a prone man on a pavement sets itself up as the mordant aftermath three seconds later of Yves Kleins famous midair photomontage, Leap into the Void (1960). Any number of things, this time around, could land and impact here.
Ciprian Murean
Portrait of Bas Jan Ader (detail), 2012, 79 drawings and video animation. Courtesy Galerie Hussenot, Paris

Seher Shah
Radiant Lines: Capitol Complex (X-Block), 2012, collage on paper, 28 x 36 cm. Courtesy the artist

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44

Mark Beyer, Amy + Jordan, 2012

ArtReview

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Documenta 13

A Few Questions Regarding the Hesitance at Choosing Between a Bottle of Wine or a Bouquet of Flowers
By Mario Garcia Torres

ometime in 1971, Harald Szeemann visited Turin in preparation for the documenta exhibition he was curating for the following year. Among the people he tried to meet in the city was Alighiero Boetti, but when Szeemann visited Boettis studio, the Italian artist wasnt there. All indications are that somebody took the curator through the studio and showed him around, and that, mistakenly, Szeemann forgot a small piece of paper with a list of artists names. Several weeks might have passed before Boetti returned to Turin (that year he took two long trips to Afghanistan) and found the piece of paper in his studio. To his surprise, there was a question mark next to his name. It can be deduced from the correspondence that followed the incident that Boetti misinterpreted Szeemanns notes. During their epistolary exchange, the artist confronted the curator and the misunderstanding was corrected: the question mark next to the artists name didnt have to do with doubts about his work or about its inclusion in the exhibition. However, it was only then that the discussion about Boettis participation in documenta 5 really began. If Szeemanns early curatorial strategies for documenta were surrounded by debate, it is assumed today that when one is asked to participate in an exhibition, what one is actually expected to do is to temporally inhabit a specific work frame, and the host - the one who extends the invitation - also becomes a sort of caretaker. For this notebook, I will try to invite you, dear reader, to become the guest of my own thoughts and questions, those that emerge as I find myself thinking about dOCUMENTA (13). These have mainly to do with the different layers implied by inhabiting a preset context, and with how easily a guest, in situations like this, could turn into a host. In other words, they have to do with the negotiations between intention and generosity. When one is invited for, say, dinner or to spend the night at someones house, one might need to choose between bringing a bottle of wine or a bouquet of flowers; or, in a more determined gesture, one could decide to accept the invitation by entering the back door and helping in the kitchen. When an invitation is accepted, there are innumerable ways one can react and behave: one could easily dwell on what one assumes the host is expecting from his guest; or one could go so far as to take over the space - to mention two opposite cases. The same could happen in an exhibition. Some might say it is possible to take shelter in a framework, in a statement; or one could occupy someone elses space, personalise it as much as possible, and then let the curatorial statement continue on its path. There is also the most haunting possibility of all: being unable to affect the discourse. Such a result, or rather, lack of result, would render ones nature as a guest harmless. Furthermore, one might as well not accept an invitation or, even more significantly, have the invitation be withdrawn from you. But probably the most radical way to impact a situation like this would be to accept the invitation and then walk away from it, by suddenly quitting the status of a guest. But ideally, or most of the time, as one accepts an invitation one can hope to slightly transform a situation, to bring something to it, in the most refined way, by simply spending time in it, by being oneself in it. There are as many possibilities of achieving this as there are ways to extend an invitation, and sometimes things might get even a little more complicated. The way invitations are made, the ways of reacting to them and thereby
46 Documenta 13

developing a relationship, deserve, under this light, a closer look, all the more so in a case like this one, when the one who writes has been obsessed with artists and their relationship to hosting. The correspondence between Szeemann and Boetti is short but nevertheless very telling. Its clear, for example, that several works were suggested and considered before a final agreement was reached. By looking closer at the different works Boetti suggested for the show, one could draw a number of conclusions as to how the artist wanted to react to such an invitation. The work by Boetti that was mainly under discussion for his participation in documenta 5 was at the time called Larazzo the first embroidered world map that the Italian artist conceived and created in Afghanistan. It was dated precisely the year in which Szeemann visited Turin. The 1971 Mappa, as it was later titled, only arrived in Europe in the spring of 1972, probably a bit late for the exhibition and likely the reason other works by the artist were considered. In the end, a different work was exhibited, but the fact that Mappa was the work reproduced in the catalogue suggests that it might still have been shown, which makes things in this relationship more interesting. However, the work that was without a doubt displayed, and which is not mentioned in the available correspondence, is Lavoro postale (permutazione) (1972). Without drawing conclusions yet, it is important to mention that one more work was considered. In early 1972, Boetti returned to an apparently previously discussed idea (Ritorno, quindi, allidea prima, he wrote to Szeemann): to do a very small intervention in the exhibition. Boetti wanted to make a brass plaque with his name on it and planned to place it at the entrance of the Museum Fridericianum. Is a strategy such as Boettis a way of learning how to react to an invitation? How long does it take to understand ones own relationship to it? Is it possible to negotiate ones position and at the same time attempt to play the expected role of the guest? Is there a way to break with that expectation? How much can the concept of the guest be expanded in a situation like this one? Are these hypothetical attitudes of the guest a continuation of the original invitation? Is an invitation real before the event? Does one destroy an invitation by publicly analysing it?

This is an extract from Mario Garcia Torress contribution to 100 Notes 100 Thoughts, No. 26 Mario Garcia Torres, part of Documenta 13. 2011 Documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel; Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Mario Garcia Torres

Richard Long

works on paper
14 June 2012 - 2 September 2012

text works

Willem Boshoff

Organised in collaboration with Haunch of Venison, London

s t e l l e n b o s c h m o d e r n a n d c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t g a l l e r y

1st Floor, De Wet Centre, Church Street, Stellenbosch | Tel: 021 887 3607 | www.smacgallery.com | info@smacgallery.com

Jacob Hashimoto, Silence Still Governs our Consciousness, 2010 MACRO, Museo dArte Contemporanea di Roma, Courtesy Studio la Citt Michele Alberto Sereni

Jacob Hashimoto
RONCHINIGALLERY
29 June - 28 August 2012
Studio la Citt
22 Dering Street Mayfair London W1S 1AN | www.ronchinigallery.com
in collaboration with

Now BUY This

Non la guerre!
This screenprint, in an edition of 20, is a version of a wall drawing from Stephen Sutcliffes recent solo show at Rob Tufnell, London. In it we see a gnome seemingly reject war. As in much of the artists work, however, the formal meaning is opaque; lost, in this instance, in the collision of two source materials, a philosophy textbook and a Frenchlanguage crime film released in 1974. Neither of which, the artist claims, is of particular significance to the reading of the work.

The pick of things you didnt know you really needed Oliver BascianO

Hide and seek

David Horvitz lurks in Wikipedia. The Canadian artist has infiltrated the open-source online encyclopedia through various digital photos he has uploaded that ostensibly document entries, but also feature the artist or a part of the artists body. Theres Horvitz staring at the menu in the entry for Vancouvers apparently notable Japadog foodcart, and there he is behind a sign in the entry for the same citys 9 OClock Gun landmark. In this print, in an edition of 30, the artist can be discerned within a Scotch Broom shrub: an image that, at the time of writing, still adorns the Wikipedia page for Cytisus scoparius.

Monster rerelease
A timely release of a complete facsimile collection of Destroy All Monsters magazine, the publication produced by the band of the same name from 1976 to 79. Packed with contributions from the groups artist members Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara and Jim Shaw this package comes in a limited edition of 75 (with the first 30 priced at $100). The magazines are accompanied by a silver print by Loren and a small glassine baggie of dirt from Gods Oasis, a commune Shaw and the late Kelley lived in during the bands heyday. robtufnell.com

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10
50

World of interiors In 1913 painter/critic Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops to commission design objects from fellow Bloomsbury Group members. While undertaking a residency at the Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, earlier this year, artists Giles Round and Phil Root were inspired by this entrepreneurial collision of disciplines, and have formed their own unit, the Grantchester Pottery. To date the duo have produced only a coffee service, but plans are afoot to commission houseware from their contemporaries. In the meantime, an online shop has been set up to sell kitchen ephemera such as this natty tie-dyed tea towel. thegrantchesterpottery.co.uk

fillip.ca

$150

primaryinformation.org

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 Mundanity
In a typically seductive project from designers Mass Observation comes this singlecolour offset print in an edition of 100. Its the first product of Lesser Known Architecture, a new series that seeks to draw attention to the spectacular design process of historic structures that might otherwise be perceived as mundane. The description that comes with the edition, titled 132kv PL16, notes that it was leading architect Sir Reginald Blomfield who selected the design for this standard English transmission tower after an open competition was held in 1928. The second print in the series has also been released, and demonstrates the use of architect Hugh Segar Sam Scorer and engineer Hainal-Konyis hyperbolic paraboloid roof motif in the building of a Little Chef service station.

Nuts
In this odd, delightfully crazed sculpture, produced in an edition of 50, Rachel Harrison has a particular reason to be asking the title question, Wheres My Fucking Peanut (2012). Harrison claims a peanut was stolen from an installation she produced for Right Bank, a Williamsburg bar that had its heyday in the early 1990s. The artist, as witnessed in this editions 26 printed cards, is on a mission to recover said nut, and by the looks of it, shes hoping that the editions buyers will spread the message by pegging her pleas around town.

massobservation.org

canopycanopycanopy.com

Buy and sell

Basel: the city with the 15th best zoo in the world (according to Forbes). It also has Art Basel (1417 June), which, though perhaps not as fun as a visit to the flamingoes, is the premier art fair in the world, with a farreaching exhibitor list. Consequently, even if you havent got the cash to spend on works such as the sculpture pictured here, Versions (2012), by the excellent Oliver Laric, available from Berlins Tanya Leighton Gallery, its a place to come across new artists and provides a good excuse to visit some of the citys plethora of institutional spaces.

artbasel.com

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Now Buy This

Oliver Laric, Versions (2012), courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

Tees release The image you see pictured above is by artist Karen Tang. And somewhere there are perhaps a hundred people wearing this image on a T-shirt. These would have been bought from Amsterdam-based outfit Sequoia Tees, who each day release a new design, in an edition of 100, for sale via their website. Each shirt is the design of a different artist or illustrator, and Tangs fellow contributors have included John Wood and Paul Harrison, Laura White and Conrad Atkinson. Adam Chodzkos take on the apparel will be sold on 24 July. sequoiatees.com

15 Sept - 20 Oct

www.oh-wow.com

Off-Space Travels

No 6: DaviD Dale Gallery & StuDioS, GlaSGow

An ongoing series of journeys along art roads less travelled this month to Glasgows east end

Oliver BascianO

f you arrive during one of the citys typical frame which is strung from the ceiling of the main squalls, the Bridgeton area of Glasgow exhibition space. The melting ice sculpture, titled appears, superficially at least, a bleak kind of Untitled (Refresh) (all works 2012), is by Kate V place. There is a whole road fenced off for Robertson. Burning away in some sort of demolition, and apart from a pair of Strathclydes elemental race to destruction with the ice is finest walking the beat, some kids playing around Untitled (Wane), a huge totemic candle by the the Bridgeton Umbrella (a Victorian bandstand same artist. If this juxtaposition hasnt delivered that marks the areas central crossroads) and a a sense of (perhaps slightly overwrought) theatre few old boys having a fag outside a local pub its to the show already, then Kilian Rthemann, with pretty quiet. Historically the area was Glasgows whom Robertson shares the exhibition, does his industrial heartland, and particularly as part with three expansive sheets of steel that lean witnessed by street names like Muslin and against the supporting architectural girders McPhail (after merchant Duncan McPhail) a of the postindustrial space and transect the gallery place of cotton milling and dyeing workshops. seductive and ominous in equal measure. For better or worse, regeneration remains a way A further sheet work by Rthemann off, leaving space and opportunity for artistic occupies the stairs which lead to the studios. endeavours to flourish. David Dale Gallery & Its a neat opening gambit by the curators Studios is one such setup (around the block is (the gallery has three permanent directors, another, the influential Chemikal Underground Ellie Royle, Max Slaven and Ralph Mackenzie), Records label). The gallery is named after the with both artists work drawing attention to, eighteenth-century businessman who set up complementing and challenging the building. Britains first Turkey-red dyeing works in the area, Untitled (Leak), for example, another work by and who, using his resulting wealth and building Robertson, is a waist-high rectangular plinth clad on his early utopic socialism and strongly held in tiles that are identical to those that line the religious views, was keen to promote education walls of the entrance corridor (the parenthetical among the working classes. reference is to a trickle of ink trailing out the Walking into the inaugural two-person bottom of the sculpture); similarly, Untitled show at the gallerys new space (on the same (Compromise) consists of a brick-shaped glass block as its original venue), a slow drip-drip-drip mould that seems to bulge organically from a can be discerned. Spend any time in artist-run pane in one of the gallery windows. spaces or studios and you get used to down-atThe curatorial thematics of this opener are heel architecture, but this seepage not coincidental. The directors interest turns out not to be from a leaky in the formal context of staging exhibitions extends beyond the roof (indeed the gallery, not disguising its pragmatic heritage, immediate architecture to an awareness below: is well turned out) but from a large Kilian of the relationship between the Rthemann block of ice frozen around a steel Untitled, 2012, steel sheets exhibiting artist, the local area and the city in general, Royle and Slaven tell me. While the gallery doesnt exclude local practitioners or those whose work is perhaps familiar to a Glaswegian audience, it does seem to favour a model of introducing artists from further afield. Residencies, for example, have begun to form a more frequent production model for exhibitions. The last exhibition in the gallerys former premises, The Eclectic Is Now (2011), was created in situ by Danish artist Sren Httel, the third, after Kevin McPhee and Darren Tesar, to partake in the programme. None of them had
54 Off-Space Travels

exhibited in the city previously. Its a position that works in Glasgows favour. The city is blessed with a number of institutional spaces and a plethora of artist-run galleries (most notably SWG3 and the perennial, excellent Transmission Gallery) that are integral to the rude health of the citys art scene, offering, in general, space and clockwise from left: Kate V Robertson opportunities to the mass Untitled (Wane), 2012, wax, of artists living within the candlewick city, not all of whom are Dan Miller Sculpture for Penrose, 2010, simply graduates of the enamel paint and laser-cut plywood (installation view, Point/ Glasgow School of Art. Line/Surface/Solid, 2011) But the quality and fecundity of the citys Dominic Samsworth Ad Removed, 2011 (installation homegrown art scene can view, Container and Contents, 2011) work against a wider plurality with regard to Sren Httel The Eclectic Is Now, 2011 the exhibitions staged. (installation view) (When the commercial all images: Max Slaven. Sorcha Dallas gallery, Courtesy David Dale Gallery & Studios, Glasgow with its far-reaching list of represented artists, closed last year, this point came up repeatedly.) David Dales attempt to build a bridge between fond localism and outward-looking perspective is, therefore, a welcome and necessary element within the citys ecosystem.

ArtReview

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Great Critics and Their Ideas

interview by Matthew Collings

No 14:

ST PAUL ON WHY ART IS WRONG

ARTREVIEW Theres a whole industry of art now, which is the modern-day, commercialised, popular version of a long tradition of art production. In the past there were problems of elitism and exclusivity. Nowadays theres a whole different ethos. Art is for all, not just a few. And yet here you are saying art shouldnt even exist. ST PAUL Thats right. God is spirit. He doesnt need anything from us. Temples, idols and icons, these are in the name of false gods. Plus you shouldnt eat meat that has been sacrificed to idols. Well, Tate Modern is a temple of art in a way. People leading atomised lives are brought together by the great sights there. SP We walk by faith, not by sight. Faith comes by hearing and by the word of God. What do you think of Alighiero Boettis maps, made by women in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s? SP Beautiful, although I prefer the postage works, and the little squares filled in by all sorts of people. They have this theme of community and beauty. The maps are maybe the brighter, sillier aspect, while the other things are more visually delightful and subtle. A rhythmic accruing of elements: postage stamps, writing in different colours and by different hands, the postal marks building up. Its a marvellous celebration, and in a way, yes, it amounts to a kind of reverence, reverence for life and the world, for beauty. What is beauty in art? SP Artistic beauty is the byproduct of arts original depictive or symbolic intention. The beauty of art is not inevitable, but when it does happen, it is a thing in itself, related to but different from religious reverence. What I mean is that when we experience this kind of beauty, which is concentrated, condensed, abstract, we are recreated by it, the world is reseen, existence is altered. Dont you think art should deal with ethical problems? SP It deals with them like it deals with everything else, by being efficient as art. Then it is capable of endless reinterpretation, which will inevitably include ethical and moral considerations. How can you say art is wrong but then also have a lot to say about whats right about it? SP Its wrong in the context of the Lord returning, this world coming to an end and everyone living their lives in preparation for that event,

St Paul started out persecuting Christians on behalf of a fanatic Judaic sect, but after a famous conversion on the road to Damascus he became Christianitys most fervent and effective leader, founding churches throughout the Roman Empire. He denounced art as mere idolatry, condemning the marble statues in Athens celebrated all over the world for their beauty as a forest of idols.
58 Great Critics and Their Ideas

Andrej Rublev, Saint Paul, 1406. Photo: Scala, Florence. Courtesy Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow

SP Meaning is everywhere its hard to avoid. Representation looms up in spite of intentions, but I can imagine a new kind of abstract expression where the painter aims to examine what the world looks like if you take away familiar forms, with their confusing narrative resonances, and instead substitute a neutral, Why is that important, though? complex structure. A simple grid, perhaps, one that supports a complex harmony of SP The instruction flee from idolatry is part of colours arrived at by the artist intuitively, by a whole set of observances and restrictions that have to be obeyed so you can inherit the eye, as a metaphor for light. A sort of Kingdom. My letters in the New Testament landscape painting without the landscape You mean art? Art is its own justification? enumerate them. They are written to different the kind of landscape it would be, if there SP Yes. Leave the spiritual to whatever it is God, Christian communities so they will keep the were one, would be urban rather than rural, because urban experience is more relevant and so on. No need to mix this stuff up. faith while I am not there. How have you strayed, my brothers? How should you correct today. Painting is in some kind of crisis: what yourselves? Who has corrupted you? How is the point of an antiquated form in a world But isnt that exactly what art did for centuries? should you resist them? Having local and where representation is ubiquitous? An temporal specificity, the lists of dos and answer could come from looking at paintings SP Yes, but weve got to be realistic. It doesnt donts seem strange in translation and place of origin: the history of art, and the do it any more. Things change. The story of across so many centuries: antiwomen, the beauty of Christian art is that initially byproduct of arts original symbolic and depictive intentions that we have been there are thousands of years of pagan art antihomosexuality, antisexuality, passivity whose depictive and symbolic meanings are towards outrageous injustice such as slavery. discussing today: beauty. taken over and made to serve new ends, and They are instructions on how to live in then as Christianitys meanings themselves preparation for the Day of Judgement. To Oh gawd, not more Untitleds! lose their hold and become fragmented, one understand them, when all your priorities bit going here and another there, so art in the and sense of perspective are radically SP Since Untitled was always, in fact, deeply name of these meanings also kaleidoscopes. different, you have to realise they are basically titled as Art & Language once remarked, It goes this way and that. Beauty likewise is against the flesh, against living for the flesh. maybe appropriate titles for such idealised Everyone is flesh and spirit, but in order to persistent but no less broken up. Arts ability paintings as these, which I am now proposing to be awesome, popular and direct, all at once prepare for rebirth, a process that doesnt as the way forward one that advances by (for example), goes into new forms such as involve the body but only the spirit (after all, looking back might be quotes drawn from advertising and cinema. Here, the kind of flesh cannot be reconstituted once it has the Book of Genesis, whose origin myths are beauty that used to be concentrated in an decayed), we have to live against the rule of integral to Christian, Jewish and Islamic icon, on the one hand, where it was a matter flesh. Covetousness and desire are of the history, and whose tales inform early Western of extremely stylised, formal repetition, or flesh. Idolatry is of the flesh. depiction. in a Renaissance painting by Raphael (or a post-Renaissance one by Rembrandt), on the So how does it work with the letters? other hand, where conventions are deliberately reinvented in a startling manner, SP Each community that theyre sent to has a Next month no longer has a place. Meanwhile, arts ability different makeup, often they are in very Gilles Deleuze on art theology
ArtReview 59

which is just about to happen. Art is of this earth, whereas the domain of heaven is the most burning matter. But in the context you just referred to, this new social experience of people going to Tate Modern, well, if I go there I might have two responses. One will be to the crowds: how can I convert them? But the other is aesthetic. And here faith isnt the thing; the wisdom of the wise, or appealing to reason, is the thing instead. So I ask myself, What is the art experience? What are its limits? Since its a secular age now, the question of arts use in following God no longer applies. The use it has instead is broadly philosophical. It is an instrument for understanding existence, for getting the most out of it. I like Clement Greenbergs idea that art is about proportions, relations (as he writes), because this idea doesnt bother with context. It assumes that formal rightness will always imply some kind of applicability, but it doesnt ask for applicability or utility to be built into artistic goodness in the first place. As for Tate Modern as a temple, well, a temple is an object, plus it has a theatrical function it separates out experience so that the visual, and ultimately the spiritual, are dramatised and heightened. When art galleries are considered to be something like temples, with the implication that art is something like God, I think its dubious, only because it suggests a justification for something that should already be its own justification.

to be transforming to make us radically resee the world, recognise what we already know but be overwhelmed or even shattered by new truth about it is still there. But now its on its own, isolated, its all were offered, the sole reason for arts continued existence, apart from its market function. Beauty becomes complicated. Im finding it hard to keep idols in mind. Having a thought about them one way or the other is so far from the ArtReview experience. We travel round the world attending exhibitions, drinking on expenses with our buddies from other art mags, all of us having a knowing attitude towards things offered up as art. Its not that an idol would never figure; its just that theres no reason it would stand out. SP I bring the news of the Living God, but nothing made by man can be that. Everyone is the offspring of God, so we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone shaped by art and mans devising. God made the world and everything in it. Being the creator of heaven and earth, He doesnt dwell in temples made by hands. Nor is He worshipped with mens hands, as though He needed anything. To believe otherwise is to be an idolater.

different parts of the world, Turkey or North Africa, or the Balkans the kinds of places you yourself travel, discoursing merrily with colleagues about career openings in the global professional artworld and each needs a specific kind of encouragement or chastisement, depending on what spiritual problems that particular community is having. Theology eventually absorbs, digests and transforms all the initial contradictions. For me it is a new fiery philosophy, or antiphilosophy, since it is so against reason, but then after me, over the centuries, it becomes seamless and subtly alters, so that it calms down you can read Alain Badiou on the original fieriness, if you like. Very flattering. What do you think about anyone doing abstract paintings now? Its had its day, hasnt it? Everyones interested in meaning now, and engagement with society, with ideas that make sense to normal people. Not mere decoration.

salon international dart january 31st february 3rd 2013

call for applications

applications for galleries, art institutions and publishers are open: please visit www.artgeneve13.ch to register

Politics of Amnesia

Swandown The Installation

Andrew Ktting Iain Sinclair (with Anonymous Bosch)

Richard Ducker Nooshin Farhid Tim Head Lee Holden Mariele Neudecker Lucy Reynolds

13 June 15 July

27 June 29 July
Wednesday Sunday 12 6pm

Wednesday Sunday 12 6pm

Cafe Gallery Southwark Park Bermondsey www.cgplondon.org

Dilston Grove Southwark Park Bermondsey www.cgplondon.org

Now HEAR This

Christopher Mooney In Paris, size matters Christian ViVeros-faun Blowing bubbles Maria Lind Making a mockery of design Jonathan GrossMaLerMan An artist hits the skids Mike watson Italys solace saM JaCob Where design trumps art J.J. CharLesworth Kicking bankers when theyre down

Christopher Mooney

n the world stage of contemporary artistic creation, Paris has gone from star performer to understudy to watching from a seat at the back of the house. The reason is deceptively simple: the city attracts fewer artists. The Muse du Louvre is no longer, as Czanne described it, the book where artists learn to read. Caf society is dead; housing is expensive; the citys educational institutions attract fewer talented art students from abroad; the state gives students that do come fewer incentives to stay once theyve finished their studies; collectors are not strongly encouraged fiscally to buy contemporary art; and though the French Ministry of Culture allocated 70 million to visual-art creation this year (less than 1 percent of its total operating budget), that creation, inevitably, due to the officialising nature of public funding, promotes and promulgates academicism over edginess. Recent institutional efforts spurred by a weakened economy and lessons learned elsewhere to encourage more mixed private/public sector participation have enlivened the scene noticeably, as has the growing success of Pariss annual art fair FIAC, which now rivals Londons Frieze in attendance and sales. But the citys artistic role is still, at best, secondary. Is that about to change? Paris remains a place where people go to see art. In droves. The most tourist-choked city in the world, it is overcrowded with art destinations, many of which strategically maintain contemporary relevance by commissioning new works. These include the Louvre, which brings in the biggest hordes, more than 27,000 a day. Most visitors are not artists or art students, and they come to see Old Masters, not the Cy Twombly ceiling or Wim Delvoyes porcelains, bronzes and stained glass. Still, the commissioning of contemporary works, part of an aggressive, arguably successful, though equally contentious, strategy by the Ministry of Culture to vitalise its patrimoine, elicits buzz and brings in fresh eyes.

East of the Louvre, the multidisciplinary mix in the Centre Georges Pompidou pulls in another 10,000 visitors a day, slightly more than the Left Banks Muse dOrsay and twice as many as the Orsays upstream neighbour, the Muse du Quai Branly. Across the river from the Branly is the polished and stately Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Built in 1937 and home to the citys modern collections since 1961, it attracts 2,800 daily visitors, about four times as many as its next-door twin, the intentionally unpolished and unstately Palais de Tokyo. This last, after lying derelict for 30 years, reopened its doors a decade ago as a centre de la cration contemporaine. Conceived cleverly on the cheap as an artist squat de luxe by the architectural team of Lacaton & Vassal, the contrast of the buildings neoclassical facade with its cannibalised interior unfinished walls, exposed wiring, chainlink fencing, spraypainted and stencilled signage, dusty floors marked with yellow-and-black security tape and an aluminium food-van converted into a ticket booth was as much the draw as the thematic exhibitions contained within. Open till midnight six days a week and housing a popular world-food restaurant, it became one of the most dynamic contemporary art centres in Europe, attracting a young hipster public and inspiring copycat art centres and kunsthalles everywhere. The expressed mandate of the Palais was to provide a platform for international and French creation, a place of resources and exchanges, a space for open aesthetic debate, for putting the public closely in touch with contemporary creation. This it mostly achieved. Under the direction of Jrme Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud from its inception until 2006, and Marc-Olivier Wahler from 2006 to 2011, the self-proclaimed antimuseum functioned as a relational laboratory, where the exhibitions, and often the artworks themselves, were designed to be participatory not objects placed in front of

62

Now Hear This

Peter Buggenhout, Quand les artistes sapproprient le btiment, 2012 (installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris). Photo: Hillary Goidell

is A reborn pAlAis de tokyo About to mAke pAris the cApitAl of contemporAry Art?

spectators so much as social encounters cocreated by artists, curators and the community. The Palais was a boon to a young public hungry for the hip and happening. Like the Pompidou, however, and unlike, say, the Louvre in the nineteenth century, or the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1930s, or even Tate Modern in London since 2000, the Palais did little to foster actual art creation. It affected the way people accessed and engaged with art, but not the way artists thought about their work. It felt more a concept store than a laboratory. Now, however, the Palais de Tokyo, which reopened in April, is potentially the most important art institution in the city a magnet for artists and a true generator of artistic production. Not because Lacaton & Vassal just spent ten months and 20 million renovating the bottom two floors, adding 14,000 sq m to the original 8,000 sq m space, and thus turning the building into the largest contemporary art centre in the world. Nor because a significantly larger operating budget has been raised 14 million, half from the Ministry of Culture, half from the private sector. Nor because of the new director, the ever-energetic Jean de Loisy, formerly curator at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and at the Pompidou, and best known for last years gargantuan Anish Kapoor installation at the Grand Palais, the spectacular Traces du Sacr show at the Pompidou in 2008 and Avignons giant La Beaut festival in 2000. Size matters enormously, as does curatorial thrust and clout. But the reason that the Palais could potentially place Paris back at the epicentre of artistic creation is that, after one of the artworlds ugliest fights in recent memory, a noholds-barred internecine battle between two generations of artists, curators, critics, cabinet ministers and presidents, the expanded Palais is finally poised to fulfil its mandate and become, on a truly massive scale, not just a showcase of the French art establishment specifically, a satellite of the Pompidou devoted to prominent and midcareer French artists living in France but a more open and fluid place of exchange, dialogue and hybridity, nonidentitarian, cosmopolitan and international. The details of the battle are complicated, sad and not particularly interesting. Suffice to say that there may be dust on the Palais de Tokyos floor, but there is blood on its walls. And there are an awful lot of walls. Filling them and the vast labyrinths they surround will be a serious challenge, requiring an enormous amount of energy, not just from curators, the Ministry of Culture and the private sector, but from legions of contemporary artists the world over. Will it happen? Will it have edge? Can it hold off the nationalists? Can it reflect something larger than its official status? Can state- and businesssanctioned bohemianism produce anything other than safe hipster representations of its sanctioners? So many questions. So many square metres. We should look forward to covering them all.
ArtReview 63

Christian Viveros-Faun

here is a spectre in alligator shoes haunting the artworld the spectre of an art market bubble. Familiar characters from the old boom-time economy are puffing it up: the gazillionaire hedgefunders, the bankers preaching the gospel of art as an asset class, the swish auction houses, the Johnny-come-latelies who invariably squeak in before the hammer drops (there wouldnt be greater fools without them). Together, these forces conspire to turn art into a wholly financialised concern a convenient meta-widget to replace todays hollowed-out stocks and real estate values. If recent art-market history had a picture, it would be one of Karl Marx in a fright wig. Economists define a bubble as a situation in which prices for assets are a great deal higher than the assets intrinsic value. So, what to do when the asset in question is not known to have an essential value beyond the last price someone paid for it? The current runaway art bonanza is best described by Sothebys auctioneer Tobias Meyers breezy remark that the best art is the most expensive art because the market is so smart. In the words of another important player, art fund manager Jeff Rabin, this most illiquid, opaque market in the world has flourished precisely where other traditional markets have faltered. Far more sober experts than these cheerleaders speak openly of the present art market as easily manipulated (Its gambling, really, says Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon). Also, Asian art auctions are rife with reports of elegant corruption (ie, money laundering), with Chinese buyers like the Japanese before them in the late 1980s routinely failing to show up to settle their bills. Yet most buyers today prefer to ignore the following: As soon as art turns from a passion these warning signs. The findings most high-net- acquisition into an investment class, the economics worth individuals really care about (the Mei Moses of the art industry changes and, I would argue, All Art Index and the 2011 Art & Finance Report) the seeds of its destruction are planted. In seemingly point in one direction only. According referring to the cheap and ever more debased to them, art as an investment is as good as gold, currency new investors would bring into the and wealth managers should continue market, and what he called a finite supply of constructing their artfinancial golem. A clumsy investment-grade art, Morais then took one end Frankenstein monster in pinstripes, this new of the ballooning art market and made a tidy knot presence will likely ring in along with a few jolts of it. These are, he wrote rather succinctly, the of economic electricity some extremely dire perfect conditions you need to create a worldconsequences. class asset bubble. Consider the scenario described by One of Moraiss more respected sources, financial journalist Richard C. Morais in a recent the art dealer and financier Asher Edelman, column for the financial magazine Barrons. concurred. We already have an asset bubble with Speaking to the dangers of a new group of pure about 50 artists, Edelman pointed out. As a investors invading the art market, he proposed random sampling of auction results indicate, there has been a cooling off in the auction prices of artists as varied as Damien Hirst (according to the Financial Times, the most expensive 25 percent of Hirsts work is currently at 37.5 percent of its 2008 value) and Wade Guyton (whose 2011 auction high is down by nearly half ). In the cases of other young artists whove seen early meteoric
64 Now Hear This

A critic with A bAd cAse of the bubble jitters sees the Artworld outsmArting itself yet AgAin

rises unaccompanied by comparable institutional and critical success Kelley Walker and Jacob Kassay, among others more corrections will likely follow. A recent radio interview with a tech entrepreneur got me thinking about what have long been referred to as the four stages of a market bubble (which, when it comes right down to it, are really five). Theres the stealth stage, where very connected people recognise an opportunity and pour money into what looks like a great investment (say, contemporary art). Then theres the awareness stage, when other not especially well informed folks jump headlong into a hot market. At some point, a mania phase takes over, when certain commentators make hay from the insanity and when, consequently, dumb money pours in after good. And then theres the final stage one were all quite familiar with from recent experiences with the worldwide housing market when the bubble pops and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. And the fifth stage, you ask? Why, rationalisation, of course.

Courtesy Sothebys, New York

LUKE FOWLER
THE POOR STOCKINGER, THE LUDDITE CROPPER AND THE DELUDED FOLLOWERS OF JOANNA SOUTHCOTT

23 June 14 October www.hepworthwakefield.org Admission Free

Commissioned by The Hepworth Wakefield, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Film and Video Umbrella, through the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award: commission to collect. Image: WEA Archive, TUC Library, London Metropolitan University. Photo: A.S. Parkin.

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17/04/2012 11:22

Mutatis Mutandis curated by Catherine David

29. 6.2. 9. 2012
with: Babak Afrassiabi, Edgar Arceneaux, Hany Armanious, Louidgi Beltrame, Andrea Branzi, Elisabetta Benassi, Luke Fowler, Suzanne Treister

secession
Friedrichstrae 12, A-1010 Wien, www.secession.at

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08.05.12 13:23

Maria Lind

A critic chuckles AwAy At the AnArchic, off-the-wAll Antics of A swedish design collective
in Uglycutes offerings, often happens to be broken and rough-edged). One of their favoured materials is chipboard, which they often break without tools, so as to be true to its cheap, unlovely nature. As such, imperfection is a hen did you last laugh while at constant feature of their work, revealing the way a design exhibition? Last week that they are light and heavy-handed at once, in I found myself laughing as I a way not dissimilar to the Swedish word fulsnygg, wandered through design uglycute. Here functionalism meets collective Uglycutes retrospective at postmodernism and things go slightly surreal Marabouparken in Sundbyberg. Take, for it is the unlikely encounter between earnestness example, the video in which Uglycutes four and irony that lays the ground for laughter. (The urban-dwelling members all male decide to titling of their house fanzine, in which theoretical take the principle of DIY to an extreme by elaborations mix with food recipes, as spending a weekend in the countryside cutting Katsenjammer, meaning hangover, is pretty down a tree and then struggling to make a bench funny too.) The process is always at the core of what out of it. Or the pair of white T-shirts with small, embroidered emblems in gold and silver bearing these four people trained in art, architecture and the slogan 150 hours of man v/s machine. One interior design do. Often they go for the most is produced by machine and the other by the basic methods of any technique or medium, such most skilled embroiders of the Friends of Craft, as carpentry or embroidery. Responding from who donated 150 hours of labour to Uglycute. the outset to invitations to teach and run The Swedish collectives home turf was, workshops, they have made the education and and still is, overwhelmed by a neo-Modernism training of themselves and others an integral part devoid of vision. And this exhibition is a timely of their work. In some ways Uglycutes overall reminder of a moment, during the late 1990s, practice might be thought of as an ongoing when Uglycute radically broke through the icy workshop where things are continuously being grip of the countrys legendarily elegant design tested. In addition to ambitious works such as style. Like lovable tearaways ripping through an the installation Sonic House (2003), in collaboration ordered world, the collective propagate stylistic with artist Karl Holmqvist for the Utopia Station heterogeneity and use art, craft and design as project, exhibition architecture for Budapests the genesis for debate, questioning notions of Kunsthalle Mcsarnok, interiors for clothes brand taste, quality and the status of the surface (which, Cheap Mondays stores and the restaurant Bar Central in Stockholm, they have an office-cumworkshop in Stockholm. Here they conduct hands-on experiments with materials and ideas, organise evening classes and workshops, curate exhibitions and even stage dance performances. It is mostly within the art context that Uglycute have found space to publicly manoeuvre. The exhibition at a centre for contemporary art was a beautifully installed sculptural gesamtkunstwerk which employed the kind of see-through grid walls usually used for storage units as exhibition architecture. The gallery walls were left empty, and Uglycutes stools, chairs,

Uglycute, chair, 2004, pen holder, 2003, reindeer hide from lounge chair, 2008. Photo: Joakim Begstrm

benches, shelves, platforms, dining tables, lamps, walls and ceramics were concentrated on the floor. Next time you see an object clad in recycled materials, which will probably happen soon at a design school near you, remember to look beneath the surface and to check how many workshops the makers have run as part of the process, and in particular whether they have conducted an experimental bread-baking workshop in which participants are given plenty of flour and yeast but no recipe.

ArtReview

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Jonathan Grossmalerman

ecently, early one morning, as I put the finishing touches on a new and excitingly relevant painting I had worked on all night, I was startled by a phone call. It was a curator from the New Museum, where a Grossmalerman career retrospective is in the planning. The cheque I had written for the requisite curatorial fee had bounced, and he didnt sound happy about it. Before hanging up he threatened to pull the show if I didnt get the money to him tout de suite! I was horrified! Id been working towards this show my whole life! And I had already paid the museum fee, the exhibition fee and the press fee! After checking with my bank, which took some time, as in all honesty I had never done it before and didnt know how, I discovered, of all things, the outrageous fact that my gallery owed me money! Can you believe it? And it wasnt that they owed me some money. They owed me a lot of money! A truly obscene sum that my gallery, through some series of oversights, had neglected to pay me! Me! Jonathan Grossmalerman! When I called them about it, you can imagine how embarrassed they were. Maximilian Bingeweary, my good friend and gallerist, scraped and bowed and assured me that it would be remedied within the week, apologising profusely. I was assuaged. Its good to be friends with the woman I dont ordinarily like, said something big cheese. about an art fair and a bank holiday in Brazil, and Relieved, I called the curator and explained, explained that everything was in order. Frankly, He seemed to understand, but wasnt nice about I wasnt really listening, but the cool confidence it. Ill be honest: I dont like curators. They like of her voice was calming and I was assured that to think of themselves as a sort of cultural DJ, but all would be put right in the course of the coming DJs make you dance. I love DJs! Curators are days. I put down the phone and called the curator really more like hoity-toity waiters in a crappy to explain the situation further. After a burst of chain restaurant with a very limited menu. But invective and what sounded like weeping, he hung ever since my Moscow debacle, when rogue up. Or just dropped the phone. Probably the curators kidnapped and beheaded my studio latter. manager and sent his head home in a box marked The days came and went, and still there catalogues, Ive accepted that they are insane was no money. I called the gallery, furious and and shouldnt be crossed. ready to take no prisoners. Unfortunately, neither After a week of eating the post-expiration- Max nor the director was available and I was date contents of my refrigerator, I couldnt help forced to reexplain the whole predicament to Tara noticing that there was still no money in my the German intern. She was so confused that I account. I was forced to call the gallery again. lost my train of thought and was carried off by This time the boss wasnt in, but the director, a her alluring Prussian accent. She said that she would approach Max at the earliest opportunity and was incredibly sorry that this had happened to me, Jonathan Grossmalerman, their star artist. Tara is a sweet girl. Satisfied, I hung up and told my studio assistants that everything was going to be fine and to stop freaking out and to maybe start packing their own lunches.
68 Now Hear This

An Art stAr discovers whAt its like to be short of money And ignored by his gAllery

Grossmalermans career retrospective hangs in the balance

That night there was a pounding on my studio door. Terrified, but hopeful it would be someone with some money, I opened it, and there stood the curator trembling with rage. He punched me square in the jaw and stomped in. Where is it? Wheres the goddamned money!? Thinking on my feet, I gave him my envelope of hooker cash. I keep it in rubles, pesos and, increasingly, euros. You know, so the girls can send it straight home and not blow it on drugs. Im kind of a humanitarian that way. Anyway, he grabbed the envelope and scurried away into the night, assuring me my retrospective was safe for now and seemingly unconcerned that what I had just given him was a small fraction of what I owed. All of this because my gallery owes me money! What terrible carelessness! What an unbelievable blunder!

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON Opening & Inauguration of the new museums space Friday, 31.08

GALERIA

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DR. FOURQUET 12, 28012 MADRID. TEL:(34) 91 468 05 06 FAX:(34) 91 467 51 34 e-mail:galeria@helgadealvear.com www.helgadealvear.com

8 de mayo 30 de junio

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14 17 de junio Art Basel. Stand M8

ETTORE SPALLETTI

01.09.28.10.2012
CENTRO DE ARTES VISUALES FUNDACIN HELGA DE ALVEAR migrosmuseum.ch migros-kulturprozent.ch

APROXIMACIONES I ARTE ESPAOL CONTEMPORNEO Un proyecto de Rafael Doctor

Noviembre 2011 Septiembre 2012 Cceres, Espaa

STEPHEN G. RHODES Opening Friday, 09.11

art-review-130x94.indd 1

David Claerbout the time that remains

27/4/12 14:06:43

10.11.06.01.2013
Migros Museum fr Gegenwartskunst Limmatstrasse 270 8005Zurich

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Parasol unit 31 May 10 August 2012

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art 14 Wharf Road / London N1 7RW Tel: +44 20 7490 7373 info@parasol-unit.org www.parasol-unit.org

An i

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Mike Watson

Annamaria di Giacomo and Stefania Zocco, LOspite Ostile, 2012 (installation view with Sebastiano Mortellaros Agor, 2012). Courtesy the artists and Box of Contemporary Space, Catania

hile Romes MAXXI, the national museum of twenty-first-century art which opened in 2010, four years behind schedule and $28m over budget faces attempts by the government to have it taken over by an appointed commissioner following difficulties meeting a 43 percent budget cut, the country is fielding questions about how to support the arts at its southernmost point, Sicily, where funding for contemporary art is extremely difficult to come by. A local population historically noted for its resilience and adaptability is addressing the situation with great industriousness. The islands two principal cities Palermo and Catania fierce rivals in the fields of cooking and football, are both home to contemporary art initiatives that aim to utilise arts communicative potential to address wider social issues. To this end, Palermos Teatro Garibaldi was reopened by occupiers as Teatro Garibaldi Aperto (the Open Garibaldi Theatre) on 13 April this year. The theatre is symbolic in that it was inaugurated by the idealistic unifier of Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi himself, in 1872, yet has remained out of use since its closure for restoration five years ago, even though the restoration works themselves have been long since completed. Its occupation follows the occupation of Teatro Valle in Rome, ongoing since last June, and the occupation of Teatro Coppola in Catania in December, creating along with numerous other occupied art spaces, galleries and foundations across Italy a network for creative expression and debate. Indeed, the upside of funding cuts is that people are finding that they can run art projects without state, council and business assistance.

A critic finds thAt itAlys precArious economy is A boon for Artist-run spAces

Among such initiatives, Catanias BOCS Box of Contemporary Space opened as an artistrun space by Giuseppe Lana and Claudio Cocuzza in 2008, seeks to provide an exhibition venue for young Sicilian artists, alongside a residency and exhibition programme for visiting international artists. Since then it has hosted 18 exhibitions, the most recent of which is LOspite Ostile (The Hostile Guest), an installation by Annamaria di Giacomo and Stefania Zocco that builds upon the artists research into Gela, Sicilys fifth most populated city, and once a thriving area for industry, tourism and cotton farming. Gelas flagship seaside entertainment centre, La Conchiglia (the shell so called for its distinctively shaped roof ) has fallen into disrepair; a fitting symbol for a town where unemployment is high and where cotton cultivation its traditional source of income ceased around 50 years ago. Di Giacomo and Zocco paid tribute to Gelas cotton-farming past which looks set for a revival, following trials reintroducing cotton plants to the area by covering the floor of a large constructed wooden agor (a kind of canopy or roofed piazza, under which meetings are held) left in the BOCS gallery space by a previous artist, Sebastiano Mortellaro, with wildly grown cotton that they had handpicked. Di Giacomo and Zocco covered the agor in transparent plastic so as to create a barrier between the harvested cotton and those who came to view the installation from the narrow space left between the agor and the industrial grey walls of the BOCS, highlighting the disjoint between Sicilys agricultural past and the present day. Mortellaro had previously left the agor open (for a show entitled, simply, Agor), with a video by collaborating artist Aldo Taranto, in which the short phrase Esiste lanima? Nessuno pu dirlo (Does the soul exist? No one can say) was intermittently called out. This sentence could well be applied to the national spirit, which here in Italy is hard to locate. Post-bunga bunga, this country, which remains besieged by corruption and other economic problems, may well have to look to artists for solace and, along with it, an identity, due to the failure of traditional political alternatives and to the increasing politicisation of art. Increasingly those artists may be found outside museums.

ArtReview

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Sam Jacob

t the end of Rupert Murdochs grilling on press ethics at the Leveson Inquiry, he was o ered the chance to soliloquise on the future of print. Queue the lament of a press baron whose life had been wound tight as bindweed to the structures of power that ink-and-paper publishing once commanded. Despite his apparently loose grasp of them, Murdoch characterised the forces that are changing the industry with the well-worn phrase disruptive technologies. We all know what he means; the e ects of such technologies are felt even outside the raging torrents of mainstream media and politics. Even in the stillest of backwaters. Even in the halfformed world of design history. For the most part, design history exists as a series of marginal notes to the grander narrative of architectural history, where bent pieces of tubular steel, for example, act as staging posts in the progression of architectural development from Arts and Crafts to the modern. It has grown somewhat through curatorial accidents at museums (a few freakish chairs, variously acquired, one might imagine, as part of a job-lot archive or as a favour to an architect during lean years), or as a sop to the sponsorship readies that high-end furniture brands can deliver. And rather than looking for designs history But design has one advantage over its within a museum or academic institution, what more illustrious art and architecture cousins. better place to observe the real ow of stu than It really exists in the world. High art and eBay? At any one time, there are around ten architecture are exceptional states that exist million things on the UK site alone, for example. outside of the ordinary, outside of the vernacular, Everything from ordinary stu out of lofts and as freakish exceptions to the world as it actually garages, bought from shops that closed many is. Design exists as a mass of stu that oods years ago, to something as extraordinary as a the world, that pours out of factories and dinosaur skeleton. Since 1995, when its early workshops, out of warehouses and trucks, into version sold a broken laser pointer for $14.83 (to our homes, our schools. a collector of broken laser pointers), it has evolved Perhaps design doesnt need a grand into a catalogue as multitudinous and shifting as history. Perhaps we should view the discipline the sands of the Sahara. as a branch of anthropology rather than an If we look at design through the lens of autonomous activity, as social document, as eBay, rather than through scholarship, the ethnography. Just as we can extrapolate or museum or the furniture fair, we begin to see a speculate on the technological and cultural whole other language evolving. eBays database narratives of preliterate societies from fragments melds the amateur, semiprofessional and the of axe head, we can do the same with the stu connoisseur in a volatile combination. It is that surrounds us today. populated by photographs often bleached by ash bursts or framed in ways that give us slightly too much insight into strangers homes, and accompanied by text descriptions that read like Wallpaper magazine set in Comic Sans. And out of this a new pidgin design language emerges. From fragments of multiple design languages and cultures, traditional narratives of design history mix with aspiration, with the partially informed, the ill-informed or the completely uninformed, and crossbreed in ways that simultaneously misunderstand received history and write it anew.
Now Hear This

SOON WELL ALL BE SPEAKING EBAY, SAYS A DESIGN CRITIC

The central gure to this eBay history of design is the term midcentury, a catchall that sweeps up postwar design from roughly 1950 to 1970 and that breaks down into subcategories such as Eames Era, Danish and Space Age. Words like faux or inspired by seem to lose their pejorative senses, just as the mix of objects, as likely knocko s as originals, challenges traditional hierarchies relating to authenticity. These new grammars of design language can be just as impenetrable as the languages of academia and scholarship. They too erect de facto rewalls of specialist words and phrases. In order to navigate its territories e ciently to nd, say, that particular teak co ee table you need to learn how to speak eBay. If this new perspective on the world of objects is in e ect a disruptive technology, will the design collection at an institution like MoMA feel the same pressures as print journalism? eBay might not quite be an Arab Spring of design history, but nevertheless the perspective it gives us on the lives of countless objects and their owners overlays the history of design with anthropological narratives.

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PARTICIPATING GALLERIES
1301PE Los Angeles Galeria lvaro Alczar Madrid Alexander and Bonin New York Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe New York Gallery Paule Anglim San Francisco John Berggruen Gallery San Francisco Galleri Bo Bjerggaard Copenhagen Daniel Blau Munich, London Russell Bowman Art Advisory Chicago Galerie Buchholz Cologne Valerie Carberry Gallery Chicago Cardi Black Box Milan Cernuda Arte Coral Gables Chambers Fine Art New York, Beijing Cherry and Martin Los Angeles James Cohan Gallery New York, Shanghai Corbett vs. Dempsey Chicago CRG Gallery New York D'Amelio Gallery New York Stephen Daiter Gallery Chicago Maxwell Davidson Gallery New York Douglas Dawson Gallery Chicago Catherine Edelman Gallery Chicago Galera Max Estrella Madrid Fleisher/Ollman Philadelphia Galerie Forsblom Helsinki Forum Gallery New York Marc Foxx Los Angeles Fredericks & Freiser New York Barry Friedman, Ltd. New York Friedman Benda New York The Suzanne Geiss Company New York Gering & Lpez Gallery New York Galerie Gmurzynska Zurich, St. Moritz James Goodman Gallery New York Richard Gray Gallery Chicago, New York Galerie Karsten Greve AG Cologne, Paris, St. Moritz Kavi Gupta Chicago, Berlin Carl Hammer Gallery Chicago Haunch of Venison New York, London Hill Gallery Birmingham Nancy Hoffman Gallery New York Rhona Hoffman Gallery Chicago Honor Fraser Los Angeles Vivian Horan Fine Art New York Leonard Hutton Galleries New York Bernard Jacobson Gallery London, New York Annely Juda Fine Art London Paul Kasmin Gallery New York James Kelly Contemporary Santa Fe Sean Kelly Gallery New York Robert Koch Gallery San Francisco Michael Kohn Gallery Los Angeles Leo Koenig, Inc. New York Alan Koppel Gallery Chicago Yvon Lambert Paris Landau Fine Art Montreal Galerie Lelong New York, Paris, Zurich Locks Gallery Philadelphia LOOCK Galerie Berlin Diana Lowenstein Gallery Miami Luhring Augustine New York Robert Mann Gallery New York Lawrence Markey San Antonio Matthew Marks Gallery New York, Los Angeles Barbara Mathes Gallery New York Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie Paris Galerie Hans Mayer Dsseldorf The Mayor Gallery London McCormick Gallery Chicago Anthony Meier Fine Arts San Francisco Nicholas Metivier Gallery Toronto Mitchell-Innes & Nash New York Galera Moiss Prez de Albniz Pamplona Carolina Nitsch New York David Nolan Gallery New York Nyehaus New York The Pace Gallery New York, London, Beijing Franklin Parrasch Gallery New York P.P.O.W. New York Ricco / Maresca Gallery New York Yancey Richardson Gallery New York Roberts & Tilton Los Angeles Rosenthal Fine Art Chicago Salon 94 New York Marc Selwyn Fine Art Los Angeles William Shearburn Gallery St. Louis Manny Silverman Gallery Los Angeles Carl Solway Gallery Cincinnati Hollis Taggart Galleries New York Tandem Press Madison Galerie Daniel Templon Paris Paul Thiebaud Gallery San Francisco Tilton Gallery New York Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects New York Vincent Vallarino Fine Art New York Van de Weghe New York Washburn Gallery New York Daniel Weinberg Gallery Los Angeles Weinstein Gallery Minneapolis Max Wigram London Stephen Wirtz Gallery San Francisco Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery New York David Zwirner New York

THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY / MODERN ART & DESIGN

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Wednesday September 19 Vernissage Opening Night Benefit for Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Model Study in Mylar, Studio Gang Architects Photo courtesy of

expochicago.com

J.J. Charlesworth

nly a few years ago, art people could feel dizzily euphoric about the relentless rise of the art market, the celebrity status of artists and collectors, and the aspirational lifestyle that contemporary art had come to represent. Now, after four years of economic downturn, the backlash against Big Money has reached fever pitch, and those linked with corporate interest and the monied upper reaches of the artworld can do nothing right. In the UK, BPs sponsorship of the National Gallery, Tate and others continues to be dogged by the antiBig Oil antics of groups like Liberate Tate. In February, New Yorks Whitney Museum fell foul of anticorporate hoaxers, whose flawless copy of the Whitney Biennial website targeted two of the exhibitions main sponsors Deutsche Bank and Sothebys criticising financial speculation by banks and the ongoing Sothebys lockout of unionised art handlers. Can we continue to be complicit with such iniquity? Running through this is the criticism that Big Money profits from its association with art, which launders the reputation of big corporations while they continue to do well out of the economic crisis. Occupy-inspired protesters see artworld institutions tainted by such associations and demand that the relationships be severed. Its a seductive message, with a lot of traction at the moment. But it turns on a naive understanding of the relationship between culture and politics, and puts art institutions in an impossible situation. Visual art is unusual in that its economy is based on the wealth of rich individuals rather than the mass market; its public institutions are increasingly dependent on private wealth. So to condemn the involvement of the for the Whitney Biennial catalogue, Andrea Fraser, rich in the artworld puts much of its current form doyenne of institutional critique, agonises over and functioning into question. If substantial her own increasingly unbearable sense of wealth is itself morally objectionable, where does complicity with an artworld whose discourse is steeped in criticality but still unable to speak of that leave an art economy largely based on it? Not surprisingly, the extreme, shrill tone the actual relations of power that artists, curators, of such criticism has provoked reaction from critics and others engage in on a daily basis. Frasers essay has some pithy criticism of those who have made careers out of criticising the institutional intertwining of art and corporate the political claims made for critical art: Much power, but who now sense that such critical art of what is written about art, she says, seems to no longer provides justification for participating me to be almost delusional in the grandiosity of in the artworlds dodgier aspects. In her essay its claims for social impact and critique, particularly given its often total disregard of the reality of arts social conditions. Yet Frasers analysis is unable to escape the simplistic, Occupyinspired anxiety that we should somehow be honest about the machinery of the artworld with which we are supposed to be complicit. From where does this notion of complicity spring? Being involved in art professionally means negotiating the structures that make it happen
Now Hear This

Are protests AgAinst the Artworlds moneyed upper reAches missing the point?
often wealthy interests. But why does this make us complicit? Does buying a CD online make us complicit with offshore corporate tax arrangements? Is it possible to distinguish the value of the culture from the politics of the system without feeling painfully conflicted? Frasers obsessive use of psychoanalytic metaphors to identify the artworlds apparent complicity with Big Money only reveals an impotent anxiety that ones little corner of culture doesnt meet up to ones political desires and aspirations. What Fraser and much of the Occupyinspired protests end up with is just another form of ethical consumerism: Im involved with art, so its through art that I can assert some sense of ethical purity and moral superiority. But ethical consumerism is always a delusion. Sweating about the excessive wealth of the 1% and whether art is somehow implicated in growing social inequality might make you feel better about the big bad world, but it doesnt encourage you to act politically beyond the artworld. At the same time, it undermines any sense of the value of the art itself. Because unless you can explain why art is worth caring about as anything more than a glitzy investment option, why be so bothered about the system that supports it? Rather than criticising wealthy capitalists for being wealthy capitalists, why not criticise them for liking and buying the truly appalling art they seem to want to throw their millions away on? Karl Marx was able to write Capital (1867) partly due to the financial support of his friend, the capitalist cotton-mill owner Friedrich Engels. Marx didnt sweat too much about his complicity. He had a book to write; he believed in what he was doing. Rather than agonising about the iniquities and injustices that have always underpinned the artworlds economy, maybe its complicit critics should ask themselves what the purpose and value of art is, and might still be.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Corporate Exploitation and Economic Inequality!, 2011, digital photograph, dimensions variable. Photo: Abigail DeVille. and courtesy the artist

74

FOCUS TURKEY SOLO PROJECTS: FOCUS LATIN AMERICA OPENING: YOUNG GALLERIES HIGHLIGHTED ARTIST EXPERTS FORUM PROFESSIONAL MEETINGS INTERNATIONAL COLLECTORS PROGRAMME

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The Bruce Lacey Experience

7 July16 September 2012 Admission free Arkwright Road, London, NW3 6DG camdenartscentre.org

Exhibition curated by Jeremy Deller and David Alan Mellor. Touring to The Exchange, Penzance in late September 2012. The exhibition coincides with the release of The Lacey Rituals: Films by Bruce Lacey and Friends, a DVD of restored films by BFI. Image: Bruce Lacey, The Bruce Lacey Experience, 2012

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A pr oj e c t i n it i at e d by MO T/A RT S s e e k s c r o s s - d i s c ipl i n a r y c ol l a b or at ion s a m on g internationally-renowned artists, designers, and architects. In 2008, Yue Min Jun KAWS, Zhou Chunya, Liu Ye, Zhou Tie Hai, and Jin Nu incorporated art, design, and fashion into ART TOYS. In 2011, Chinese sculptor Zhan Wang and the Dutch architecture team MVRDV gave birth to JIA SHAN DE WU. In 2012, Zhou Chunya and Jaime Hayon together interpret the concept of libido, presenting ALIVE AND KICKING. e project generates new forms of art collection, bringing art into everyday life.

HUA GALLERY, London, UK 7 June - 6 July 2012 Unit 7B, Ground Floor, Albion Riverside, 8 Hester Road, Battersea, London SW11 4AX www.hua-gallery.com RED STAR GALLERY, Beijing, China 14 July 5 August 2012 798 Art Zone, 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015 www.chinaredstargallery.com

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performing intellectuals, memorised oral contracts, an unhappy Brussels gallerist, a two-sided game, domineering strictures, Bootylicious, the experience economy, assumed kissing poses

words Martin Herbert

n the receding winter of 2010, I found myself standing on Fifth Avenue in New York, caught up in a lengthy conversation with a total stranger, a middle-aged woman. Wed both halted at a stoplight, and shed turned in the midst of speaking to someone else and realised, laughing, that she was addressing herself to me. Carrying on regardless, she pointed out that talking to strangers was apt, since shed just come from seeing or participating in Tino Sehgals This Progress at the Guggenheim, discussing progress with four progressively older volunteers, child to pensioner, while ascending Frank Lloyd Wrights iconic spiral. So had I, and we chatted about Sehgal until I wondered aloud whether in doing so we were still, somehow, part of his work. In the loquacious afterglow of This Progress proper, we allowed that we might well be. Sehgal, whose commission for Tate Moderns Turbine Hall is unveiled this July (having first been mooted in 2008), is a UK-born artist of Indo-German parentage, in his mid-thirties, whose works since 2000 using human interaction as their medium constitute what is probably the most radical, far-reaching, beautifully generous art programme of his generation. And which do so despite, or more probably because of, Sehgals complete refusal of physical art objects or artefacts (including photographic documentation). Joseph Kosuth once told him that, in his opinion, everything pertaining to the artwork, including critical commentary, folds into its sphere; Sehgal didnt agree at the time, he says, but the conversation has stayed on his mind. And certainly his art that leaves behind no trace, as The New
82 Feature

York Times put it right down to his insistence on memorised oral contracts for the sale of his work paradoxically leaves traces everywhere. Its just that none of them are physical. So this piece of writing, and any responsive thoughts that you might have, are perhaps still part of the work, if hardly a major part of it. And, relatedly, although I had lunch with Sehgal a few weeks ago while a digital voice recorder swallowed our conversation, this isnt an interview piece, in that it doesnt privilege the artists thoughts on the work and have everything else flow from those. Thats as per his request: if Sehgal believes, or hopes, that we are post- the age of art objects a conviction that reflects a wider sense that the degree of material production on the planet is wholly unsustainable then he sees his own commentating voice as another excess, inimical to his arts emphasis on flowering outward via cocomposing, and equivalent to being asked to play tennis with himself. He sees criticism as a necessary process in the two-sided game that is art, and blames its crisis at least partly on a fascination with the opinions of artistic personalities. (One of the first things he asked me, solicitously enough, was how, as a critic, Id survived the seven years since we last met.) If, as someone working for an art magazine, one agrees to these seemingly domineering strictures no quote-heavy, personality-driven writing; no photographs its perhaps for the same reason one engages with Sehgals art proper: for the pleasure of participating in something that feels new. His work, indeed, is a call for different

models from start to finish. Sehgal arrived at his dematerialised format the unconventional way, by electing to be dual-trained in economics and dance, and in 1999, transitioning, he made Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century, a choreographed museum of dance in one body, referencing 20 different dance styles (from the Ballets Russes to Merce Cunningham) fragmentarily performed nude by Sehgal. The following year, encouraged to focus on art by curator Jens Hoffmann, he made Instead of Allowing Some Thing to Rise Up to Your Face Dancing Bruce and Dan and Other Things (2000) for a gallery context, a continuous performance work for two figures appropriating bodily movements from Bruce Naumans video Wall-Floor Positions (1968) and Dan Grahams double-film projection Roll (1970). If first-wave conceptualism maintained a slim handhold on the object via documentation, Sehgal here pointedly detached it. Kiss (2002) would similarly make reference to art history, its two live, clinching figures assuming kissing poses from a panoply of historical representations, Rodin to Koons. I asked Sehgal why he wanted to engage art history in this way; he asked me why I think he might have done. I wondered for a second about how artists maybe need to lay out their territory with some explicitness early on (I thought, specifically, about Untitled, 19972003, which features both an ensemble table-dancing to Destiny Childs Bootylicious and a spoken lecture about economic growth), and hazarded that Sehgal wanted to figure a prior world of objects against an art that refuses them. (For our purposes, it doesnt matter what he said in response.)

If you make that connectIon Its somethIng Ive never thought about, but you say It and It starts convIncIng me. thats not my poInt, yet I thInk Its very valId. but Its not my IntentIonalIty

Such works were in some ways warm-ups for the evanescent situational art that Sehgal has made since, where the viewers entry into a space triggers an action from a primed volunteer, and in which intangible social interactions are given primacy. These can be brief and beguilingly gnomic, as when an invigilator greets one by quoting a headline from the morning newspaper (This Is New, 2003), or lengthy. This Situation (2007), Sehgals densest work, involves six performing intellectuals who will interrupt an ongoing debate to greet each new visitor who arrives and then resume their routine one delivers a quote (uncredited; some, pointedly, are about how societies evolve from material scarcity) and the others respond, philosophically, open-endedly. There is a rule, or there are a few rules, and the art spins out of them, sometimes simply and effusively guards parading up and down shouting This is so contemporary! for instance (This Is So Contemporary, 2003) and sometimes darkly, baroquely. Friezes Jrg Heiser has described visiting Sehgals Brussels gallery in 2009, finding the gallery owner apparently depressed and unhappy about the direction Sehgals art had taken, discussing it lengthily and delicately with him, and only later realising that they were doing the Sehgal piece. At the Manchester International Festival last year, Sehgal presented Ann Lee (2011), the latest and surely the most tender in Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parrenos generative Annlee series: here, the manga character they purchased and freed is played by an eleven-yearold girl, who talks with escalating complexity

about her life being passed between artists. (At a previous MIF, hed shown Untitled, 2007, the one piece hes made not involving people, a whirling choreography for stage curtains.) Sehgals umbrella term for all this is deproduction, and it sits in stark opposition to a culture of consumption. But at the same time theres a fundamental lightness and graceful allusiveness to his projects that prevents them from looking like, say, dour eco-minded gesture politics, and a spaciousness that admits of all kinds of readings. Take their relationship to the idea that Web 2.0 has turned users into content providers for corporations; its possible to argue, and I put it to Sehgal, that his art perhaps both critically engages with that idea and offers a redemptive countermodel of working for free, and does something similar with regard to the traduced notion of the experience economy. I think thats reception; thats what Id call reception, replied Sehgal. If you make that connection its something Ive never thought about, but you say it and it starts convincing me. Thats not my point, yet I think its very valid. But its not my intentionality. Beyond this, though, what a Sehgalstructured situation does, when it really works, is make you question why art needs materiality. Not only do other things, such as visitors and performing bodies, become sculptural and imagistic in the absence of a focus for them (as was made very clear when every single artwork was removed from the Guggenheims rotunda), but words, dialogue, accrue a weight of their own as content, and theres an intangibility to them

that allows easy accumulation. A Sehgal show is the sum of its interactions: this is true, perhaps, of any artwork, yet its harder to look at a painting and visualise the thoughts that have passed before it, that it has inspired, than it is to stand in the Guggenheim and see dozens of invigilators conversing with dozens of visitors, each conversation flying in a different direction, the whole thing endlessly self-replenishing thanks to the wild vagaries of human subjectivity. To quote the title of Ed Ruschas 1977 painting of a blazing hearth, No End to the Things Made Out of Human Talk. (Although things, of course, arent what Sehgal is after.) The talk, the sociable and weightless making, is partly yours, and the result, arguably, is the most persuasive example thus far of an art that actually delivers on relational aestheticss promise of rebalancing composition between artist and audience. (If I remember rightly, my stating this led Sehgal to stare intently at his pumpkin salad.) The Turbine Hall, meanwhile, will comprise the artists largest and most dramatic stage to date. As for whats being presented there? Well, I asked, and Sehgal replied. But, to reiterate, this isnt about him.

ArtReview

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we were the talk of the town, Tino didnt want recordings, I was allowed to take pIctures of the outsIde of the museum, Espresso 77 in Jackson Heights, o! I wanted It, I wanted It badly, collecting and photographing things, I wanted mementos

words JennIfer uleman

ino didnt want recordings for any number of reasons, but one was this: a person who makes a recording, and a person who plays it back, even if its the same person, doesnt experience the piece as it is, in and for itself. He, or she, or they only experience it from the outside, as appearance, as it is for another. But then it isnt the piece any more. The piece is something you, the visitor, made together with us, the interpreters, and the piece is the experience of making the piece and of being in it together. You have to be in the piece in order to see it, or, as people quickly started saying, to do it. Intersubjectivity: this, Tino told a group of us, over wine and paperwork at the museum one night before rehearsals began (plate 1), was the underappreciated thing in which he was most interested here. If you were busy recording the piece, or if you only experienced a recording of the piece, you missed the piece. The piece, This Progress, went roughly like this. You came into the Guggenheim (in New York, in early 2010, the time and place of the pieces second exhibition). As you started up the ramp, a child of seven or eight would approach you and tell you that this was a piece by Tino Sehgal, and ask permission to ask a question, and
84 Tino Sehgal

if you said OK, youd be asked what you thought progress was. Youd say some things to the child, and the child would try to make sense of them, maybe asking for an example while you walked, and would then introduce you to a teenager, and tell the teenager what youd said, more or less. The teenager would take over, walking further on up the spiral ramp with you, asking you to clarify, or offering a response, drawing you out, and youd walk and talk. Then an adult would interrupt, saying something abrupt and perhaps provocative and perhaps related to the conversation youd just begun with the teenager, and the teenager (who knew to expect this) would politely introduce you. The adult would try to command your attention, and the teenager would fall away, and youd carry on, walking and talking, until the adult disappeared behind a column and you were greeted by an older adult, who shook your hand and told you something, an extended reflection or a story, and talked with you some more, and at the end told you the name of the piece. From there you could wander back down, noticing all the people walking and talking, or visit the gift shop, or go to one of the side galleries where there were paintings and sculptures, or you could take the elevator down and do the whole thing again. If you did, youd have different

conversations with different people youd make a different version of the piece. This was the idea, and it was thrilling, and it worked in ways that were thrilling, but for some of us it posed a kind of problem. I, we, the people for whom a problem was posed, wanted intersubjectivity O! I wanted it, I wanted it badly, I loved it. But because I loved it so much, I also wanted some way to record it. I wanted mementos. I started collecting and photographing things that werent the piece, but were evidence of the piece any and all material, perceptible, spatiotemporal traces and proofs of the pieces being: a talk abstract (not mine, but fellow Kant scholar Des Hogans) on which Id scribbled the address for my initial meeting with Tino; the piece of cardboard with the name and phone number of the museum contact (plate 2). I saved copies of all the workrelated forms contracts, releases, tax information, payroll schedule, pay stubs in an envelope the Guggenheim provided (plate 3). I saved my name tag from the wineand-paperwork night, and my firstday museum guest pass; I saved my exhibition staff ID. When it got me into other museums as other museum staff, I saved the ticket stubs (plate 4). I took pictures of the coffee/tea service in our break room (plates 5 and 6). I

Plate 1

Plate 2

Plate 3

Plate 4

Plate 5

Plate 6

Plate 7

Plate 8

Plate 9

Plate 10
ArtReview 85

saved the museum exhibition guide. I saved paper copies of reviews and notices in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine and Artforum (plates 710). It was, nonetheless and for all my efforts, a thin collection. I was an obsessive fan of something that refused easy scrapbooking. I was allowed to take pictures of the outside of the museum (plate 11), and of the hallways and staff rooms, but not of the rotunda when the piece was taking place. I could not make sound recordings. Not just me, of course: everyone visitors, press, museum personnel, all the other interpreters, anyone in the

museum for any reason could take notes but was prohibited from making any kind of audiovisual recording. (I personally found taking notes impossible during the piece, and I never felt like it afterwards.) A few bootleg pictures and recordings did show up on the web, but they quickly disappeared. There are no catalogues for Tinos shows, no press kits, no brochures, no DVDs (plate 12). Recordings, as per the points noted above, would have defeated Tinos purposes, turning eeting intersubjective events into permanent public objects. There wont be stills of people at the Guggenheim in 2010

talking about earthquakes or Chatroulette or neighbourhoods in New York or Avatar at any Sehgal retrospective; there wont be digital clips to show in art history classes. For some of us, being in the piece was like being in love; it was being in love. We were in love with the piece and with ourselves and with each other; we were in love with Tino, Louise, Asad, Nico, our exhaustion, the coffee, the stories and the weather (plate 13). We were the talk of the town (plate 14)! But it wasnt just the glamour it was a true love. We were yearning subjects, we were yearned-

Plate 11

Plate 12

Plate 13

Plate 14

Plate 15

Plate 16

Plate 17
86 Tino Sehgal

Plate 18

for objects, and we kept losing track of which was which. We had parties (plate 15), and when it was over, we took pictures of the museum and of each other in the museum (plates 16 and 17). As has been widely reported, Tino sells his work, but without benefit of a written contract. You buy the rights to mount the piece, but you dont get anything material, not even a piece of paper. The sale is nonetheless a legally binding agreement. Institutions that own Tino Sehgals include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Hamburger Bahnhof. Private collectors include Dakis Joannou and Marc and Jose Gensollens. Tino is represented by numerous galleries in numerous cities around the world. They can lease or sell rights to exhibit Tinos pieces (installation and exhibition to be overseen by Tino or one of his trained associates), that is, to have people move and act, often speaking or singing, in space and time in specific, if often also open-ended, ways. Tinos refusal to create objects was like having a teacher who refuses to give you answers. Of course there are answers, and of course there are objects, and nothing is going to really get rid of either, or anyway of your desire to have them. But refusing to provide them makes something different happen. You could not do the thing, which we so often do, of recording for later playback. You could not plan to look it up again later. In the piece, things had to be then and there, and faceto-face, and then just in memory. You could not halt the piece (though you could bail). You could try to remember details, but the more time you spent thinking about the piece while you were doing it, the less piece, probably, you got. If you asked us questions about the piece, wed try to turn the conversation away. (My tack was to say, You can read about it later, as you perhaps are doing now.) Early on, I took a picture of my copy of the 17 January 2010 New York Times Magazine lying open to the spread on Tino (Making Art Out of an Encounter, by Arthur

Lubow, plate 18). Id laid it open on a table at my local caf, Espresso 77, in Jackson Heights, Queens. It was early afternoon and I was there with my friend Marc, who was also in the piece. It was a week and a half before the opening. Wed drunk tea and eaten things, and I wanted to locate it all in space and time the article on Tino, the magazine itself, our giddy excitement, the empty plates, the cold tea bags, the light, everything physical that was there. Tinos eschewal of objects made me bring along, as a counterproposal, Leanne Shaptons brilliant book Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (2009), which is set up like an auction-house catalogue and tells the story of a love affair. It is full of captioned black-and-white pictures of postcards, tchotchkes, matchbooks, travel pillows, rocks, scarves, notes, keychains, ticket stubs, kitchen utensils, books, toiletry kits, photo strips, sunglasses, DVDs and other things accumulated by the couple and all now for sale. It takes a motto from Novalis: We seek the absolute everywhere, and only ever find things. Novalis is, of course, not quite right. Sometimes we find things that seem to be not only things, but also revelations of or connections to the absolute. As Kant appreciated only late, objects are rarely just objects, just as subjects cannot remain sheer subjects for long. Objects, however inanimate, frequently fail to be inert, and frequently go beyond their materiality. You are eating a tangerine, say, or you are looking at a stone; experiences, meanings, thoughts, recollections, insights even, come to be. Subjects, likewise and for their part, wont stay put for long as sheer subjects, but leave traces, arrangements, rearrangements and expressions in the physical world. Traffic between objects and subjects, between the material and the immaterial, the physical and the mental, if these distinctions even hold, is interminable and unpredictable. The world that is intersubjective and this is the world Im interested in too is made of

objects and subjects that wont stay put or keep to themselves, that constantly move and mean and signify all kinds of things to and through each other. My efforts to turn Tinos piece into a physical object or even to create a physical record failed, but the piece was and is real. It is real like memories are real, or meanings, or conversations. The piece was and is created and sustained in Tinos conception of it, in the shared making of it, in its retelling and in peoples memories of it. The piece, as it was in New York anyway, is just everything that happened and that people remember happening and that people ended up thinking and saying and feeling as a result of what happened at the Guggenheim from 29 January to 10 March 2010, or really a little before, if you count rehearsals and press day, which I do. Jennifer Uleman was an interpreter in Tino Sehgals This Progress, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, from 29 January to 10 March 2010 The Unilever Series: Tino Sehgal is at Tate Modern, London, from 24 July to 28 October

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29 September
2012 2013

TAIPEI BIENNIAL 2012

2012

28 September

Preview and Opening:

13 January

Organizer:

www.tfam.museum

TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM

info@taipeibiennial.org

The New Contemporary September 2023, 2012 Vienna International Art Fair www.viennafair.at

words AgnieszkA grAtzA

photography gus powell

salonista, a restitution lawyer by day, revolution soup, two men came to my assistance, protean phenomenon, longevity is rare, communal house in brooklyn, notoriously hard to penetrate, grandeur and romance, next to no budget, yet another ad hoc arrangement with the young and idealistic

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Feature

Patrick Meagher on the rooftop of Silvershed, built in the 1970s to house water tanks for the building

ew Yorks salons first came to my attention last 22 October, during the heady days of Occupy Wall Street. I had to make a sign for revolution soup to be served later that day at the Occupied kitchen. In the designated arts and culture enclave of Occupieds Zuccotti Park camp, two men came to my assistance. One of them extended an invitation to a series of informal gatherings he periodically hosted and, using a coloured pencil, wrote the following in my planner: Multispecies Salon / Eben Kirksey [Edible Companions]. A month or so later I found myself inveigled into playing the fiendishly complicated game of global futures (an exercise in imaginative storytelling) at said salon. It was then held at the CUNY Graduate Center in a seminar room doubling as a library, made less institutional by the artworks

cum curiosities displayed on the walls and shelves. Kirksey turned out to be a cultural anthropologist collaborating with artists on various projects, and multispecies a burgeoning field of ethnography. The salon later went underground and followed him, artworks in tow, to a communal house in Brooklyn, before resurfacing at the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room Proteus Gowanus. Roving salons such as the one hosted by Kirksey are by no means unusual, at least in New York, where square footage comes at a premium and longevity is rare. Salons of the sort Louise Bourgeois presided over every Sunday for 30 years in her Chelsea townhouse, open to all artists foolhardy enough to request an invitation, passed away with her. And yet, judging by the number of independent art and performance venues that have adopted the name in recent years roughly

since the start of the economic downturn the phenomenon appears to be enjoying something of a revival. In their present-day incarnation, salons are by necessity a protean phenomenon, and salon holders must avail themselves of such spaces as they can access, whether their own, those of their friends or those offered to them by benevolent patrons or institutions. Salon spaces range from the humble to the spectacular in a city that trades in the latter. For sheer grandeur and romance, few could rival the Chrysler Series, an ambitious programme of experimental music, performance and readings at least in part suggested by the venue, coorganised by curator Summer Guthery and artist Robert Snowden, on next to no budget. That the select group of artists, musicians, writers and interested bodies who attended these occasional evenings (timed to coincide with the
ArtReview 91

Salon host Eben Kirksey outside Proteus Gowanus, Brooklyn

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New York Salons

A Multispecies Salon gathering and discussion held in the reception room of Proteus Gowanus

sunset) managed to secure the use of a corner office on the 31st floor of one of Manhattans bestloved skyscrapers one thats notoriously hard to penetrate, which can only have added to the salons cachet amounted to nothing short of a curatorial coup. The office was loaned free of charge by a boutique investment firm that has since moved to another handsome building, with its own genius loci, downtown on Canal Street, giving rise to the follow-up Canal Series. The term salon, which comes from the French, originally referred to a large reception room. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it gradually came to designate a meeting of dazzling people (generally from literary or artistic circles) in the salon of an inspiring (generally female) host. But in its current New York incarnation, its more interesting to think of it as a series of events than as a space, bringing

like-minded people together, from time to time, in an intimate and convivial setting better suited to the exchange of ideas than, say, a bar. Among the avowed sources of inspiration behind the Chrysler/Canal Series its historical loins, as the manifesto for the series has it is Franciszka and Stefan Themersons Gaberbocchus Common Room. Set up in the basement office of the printing press the couple ran from their London home, the Gaberbocchus Common Room brought together a brilliant coterie of artists and scientists during the late 1950s. Each salonista (or host) comes at the notion of the salon with his or her own set of references and associations. The idea of starting her own salon first came to Pati Hertling, who is a restitution lawyer by day, while she was conducting historical research into the salon culture at the time of Dada on behalf of Jewish families trying to trace

artworks lost during the Holocaust. In 2005 she hosted the queer salon Evas Arche und der Feminist with Petr Kisur in Berlin, before it relocated, with Hertling, to New York, first to Gavin Browns Passerby, a bar next to his gallery (back when it was based in the Meatpacking District), and then to an apartment on Leroy Street, above the gallery. In a nod to the host guest dynamic on which salon culture is predicated, homemade bread and soup would be served at Hertlings monthly salon events, which would usually take as their focus the works of an artist and a performer. But as word of these events spread, some of the intimacy of the original gatherings was lost, and with it the possibility of having conversations about the works offered up for discussion. Thats what Hertling would like to recapture in her new salon series, the Bulletin Board, recently inaugurated
ArtReview 93

94

New York Salons

ArtReview

Chrysler/Canal Series curator Summer Guthery near her Greenpoint, Brooklyn, home

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Translator, poet, teacher, artist and Centotto salon host Paul DAgostino

96

New York Salons

at a location on the Bowery, in yet another ad hoc arrangement, this time with the young and idealistic Jack Chiles gallery. A youthful idealism underpins many salonlike initiatives. Silvershed in Chelsea was set up with the express aim of generating discussions about contemporary art values, ethics and aesthetics. What motivated Patrick Meagher to lease a rooftop flat with sweeping views of midtown Manhattan and turn it into an independent, artist-run project space was the perceived need for a thirdspace (with reference to Edward Sojas theories), one that was neither a commercial gallery nor a nonprofit artist space beholden to its board of trustees. At the time, in 2008, market, auction, money was all everyone was talking about, says Meagher. We wanted to start our own conversation and create our own values. The space then contained a fully

furnished living room, whose Hunter green walls made it feel like a billiard hall or a drawing room. Books and snacks would be left lying around to create an atmosphere conducive to discussion. At odds with the spare, neutral aesthetic and unrelenting uniformity of commercial gallery spaces of the kind you find in Chelsea, salons have plenty of character (reflected by equally imaginative names) and admit clutter. Are salons, then, nothing but apartment galleries with a fancy name? A New York and that much more urbane, snazzy and smart take on home galleries and apartment shows more widespread still in Chicago, San Francisco or Illinois, where living space is not so hard to come by? The word connotes a certain preciousness, reaching back to its distant origins as a sort of informal seventeenth-century French academy in which women in particular thrived.

Insofar as they cater to a self-selecting crowd and flaunt their intellectual aspirations, salons lay themselves open to accusations of pretentiousness and/or elitism that those who host them try to assume with grace or else deflate with humour. Summer Guthery is thus adamant that ideas need to be protected, and in her salon series she tackles such accusations head-on. A man of many talents, Paul DAgostino, who has turned his living room in Bushwick (a neighbourhood that boasts a higher concentration of salons than anywhere else in New York) into the congenial, stimulating and consequently well-attended Centotto salon, often gives haircuts to friends and acquaintances in the same room. Its that kind of salon as well, he told me when I last visited the place. I am tempted to book an appointment.

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unseen

a new photo fair

amsterdam 19-23 sept 2012 unseenamsterdam.com

Sun Set Series #7, 2011 Fleur van Dodewaard

DAIWA FOUNDATION ART PRIZE 2012

Introducing British artists to Japan 8 June 19 July 2012 Daiwa Foundation Japan House London NW1 TOM HAMMICK HAROON MIRZA JENNIFER E. PRICE Selected by: Martin Gayford Mami Kataoka Grayson Perry Masami Shiraishi Jonathan Watkins

www.parkerharris.co.uk

A r t E c o G a l l e r y
MANMADEGOD
3rd August - 1st September

photo Francesco Bolis

MAXXI

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF XXI CENTURY ARTS

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A projec t by Candi c e Jac obs and Fay Ni c olson produc ed i n c ol l aborati on w i th QUAD wi th Bec ky Beasl ey, Rac hel Loi s C l apham & Emma Co c ker, Ka ren Cunni ngham, Mi c hael Dean, Cy pri en Gai l l ard, Ryan Ga nd er, Pa ul Graham, Jonathan Monk, Rose OGal l i van, Edi t Oderbolz , Da n Rees, C l uni e Rei d, George Shaw and Ryszard Wasko.

A n ex hi bi ti on supported by a publ i c programme of ta lk s, performanc es, events and a web projec t: ww w.ac c i dental purpose. net 27 July 7 Oc tober 2012 QUAD, Market Pl ac e, Cathedral Quarter, Derby, D E1 3AS ww w.derbyquad.c o. uk

The Robin Hood of Wisdom

Raqs Media Collective

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102

Artist Project

GO to your nearest public library What does knowledge taste like ? The unsalted white of an egg. It asks for the garnish of betrayal. PREPARE yourself. Before setting off. Select a passage from a book that is dear to you. Write, or print it. With elegance, flair and affection on a quality piece of paper. The question remains: how to share that fullness of hunger that foreboding that foresight. SELECT a book, at random, from the librarys shelves. (Make sure that it is about something

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completely unrelated to the contents of the passage you have selected) You may have chosen to write or print a passage from a story in the Arabian Nights (Mardrus & Mathers), and the book in your hand could be A Treatise on Heat (Saha & Srivastava). Or vice versa. INSERT the paper bearing your selected passage, between the pages of this book. REPLACE the book in its place on the shelf, carefully. REPEAT the procedure as often as possible. INFECT knowledge with wisdom.

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Artist Project

ArtReview

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106

Artist Project

Jack Daniels a nd

Marlboros, ast ronauts dietary staples,

is the reativity c , e l a on al r ati i c o s a ent of iM D o b the eM

growing pop pies for a M artian heroin harvest, e

enemy,

xploring earths

only nat ur al sate llite,

orking to code, w y, n o M e r e c a , DIY shotguns, te the colour purple

Love Lett er

to Plywoo d, colle ctive c reatio n

words Jonathan t.D. neil

108

Feature

pace Program (200712), which the artist Tom Sachs and his studio first introduced at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, serves as a kind of magnum opus of the DIY and tinker-type workshopping of iconic examples of architecture, design and engineering that Sachs has made his own since the early 1990s. In that 2007 iteration, Sachs sent astronauts both women to the moon via an armoury of mock-NASA equipment, such as landers and life support systems and other bits of apparatus more or less connected to the project of exploring earths only natural satellite an example of more would be the lifesize recreation of NASAs Apollo 11 lunar module ( Apollo LEM , 2007); an example of less would be the NASA Champagne Fridge (2007) and the store of Jack Daniels and Marlboros that were on hand as the astronauts dietary staples. This May, in conjunction with Creative Time and the Park Avenue Armory, Sachs and his team are doing it again, only this time the astronauts are heading to Mars. Anyone who visits Sachss studio prior to the Mars mission takes his turn at the ID Station (2010), which produces for the visitor and for the studio a photo ID, replete with NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) logo. Other than ones name, the ID requires two pieces of information, which consist of answers to the questions Have you seen Ten Bullets ? and Have you seen Color ? Ten Bullets (2010) and Color (2011) are the first two films of a trilogy (the working title for the third is Love Letter to Plywood ) that Sachs has created in conjunction with former studio assistants John Ferguson and Van Neistat. At bottom, they are instructional films for people who work, or want to work, in Sachss studio. The lesson of Ten Bullets is how to work to Code. Indeed, the ten bullets, as in bullet points (illustrated in the film as hand-drawn rounds of ammunition) comprise the Code itself, which instructs one to do such things as keep a list (bullet seven); to use the phrase I understand (bullet five) when confirming instructions; to sacrifice to Leatherface (bullet nine), or pay a fine into a lock box adorned by a figurine of the villain of the cult horror flick The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) when failing to adhere to the studios safety or security procedures that is, when failing to work to Code; to always work to Code (bullet one) because creativity is the enemy (Sachss own credo); and to always be Knolling (bullet eight). If you dont know what Knolling is, watch the film; its on Vimeo. Color follows Ten Bullets s lead. Its purpose is to indoctrinate viewers into the studios highly standardised colour palette, which is based upon the many found objects and images and repurposed materials that have made their way into the studios work over the years. So, for example, the studios white is drawn from, among other things, copy-paper white, foamcore white and Tyveksuit white, which in terms of paint translates to Benjamin Moore Decorators White or Krylon Gloss White; the studios yellow is McDonalds Golden Arches yellow (Golden Acrylics C.P. Cadmium Yellow Medium #1130-6 Series 7) or Kodak film-packaging yellow (Golden Acrylics Diarylide Yellow 1147-6 Series 6); blue is Gulf Porsche blue, Tiffany blue or New York Police Department barricade blue (according to the studio, the
110 Tom Sachs

preceding page: Hot Nuts (detail), 2011, mixed media, 252 x 91 x 183 cm below, from top: Cup Used in Tea Service, 2012; Mars Excursion Roving Vehicle (MERV ), 201012, mixed media, 312 x 132 x 152 cm

NASA logos PMS 286 blue is dopey, so the studio instead uses Benjamin Moore Impervex Latex High Gloss Metal and Wood Enamel Classic Navy 309 35); and purple well, purple is forbidden. Purple is punishable by death. There is never an excuse for the colour purple. The tone, as one might guess, is mock serious, though with an emphasis on the latter. The authority of the studio, of the Code and its colour palette, are at every point affirmed without equivocation. The sense one gets is that there is an inside to the studio, a Code that is not easily cracked from the outside. More than merely a workplace, its a commitment, both to a way of working and to an aesthetic, to a way of working as an aesthetic. In the face of all the attention that gets paid to poststudio art practices, Ten Bullets and Color unabashedly attest to the power and importance of the studio itself, but the studio understood as the embodiment of a rigorous system and social rationale, one in which the words creativity is the enemy can be willingly embraced because everyone (who knows how to work to Code) understands that individual creativity, in the form of the impromptu choice, the undisciplined decision, is indeed the enemy of collective creation. It is with this perspective in mind that we might see how Sachss Space Program , in both its lunar and Martian iterations, can be understood as both self-reflexive and allegorical of the studio as well. It is selfreflexive insofar as what Space Program reproduces, in its simulations of all of those highly choreographed yet quotidian routines that receive such fanfare when they are broadcast live (on TV) and later dramatised (in books and movies) from donning space suits and eating dinner to collecting rock and soil samples (which consisted, in LA, of drilling into and digging up Gagosians highly polished concrete floor) is the seamless functioning of the studio, the assigning, monitoring and carrying out of operations on a checklist (bullet seven!) by people (and this is important) not just with training and expertise to perform those operations, but who are also individually committed to, and so hold themselves responsible for, seeing them through. The many stations of the Mars mission, from Red Beans & Rice (2011) to Hot Nuts (2011) to Biology Lab (2011; which is growing poppies for a Martian heroin harvest) to Bike Station (2012) and Journeyman (201012) are just so many reflections of the sacred space (bullet two!) of the studio the shop, office, welding booth, bunker, and kitchen so soberly detailed in Ten Bullets . Space Program is allegorical because if it represents anything at all it is this idea of commitment to a goal, this fidelity to a shared aim, to a target as distinct from a telos . Let me explain: early in his book Targets of

Opportunity (2005), Samuel Weber builds on a terminological distinction, first addressed by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, between two senses of end: telos and skopos . Where telos is understood as the fulfilment of an action or process, skopos is the target that one has in ones sights and at which one takes aim; it is the goal presently and clearly offered to an intention Skopos is the draw of the bow, telos , life and death. The metaphorical reach of skopos is important here, connecting as it does the implicit violence of targeting with the technological projection of our conscious attention (intentionality, in the language of the philosophical phenomenology in which Nancy was schooled). Skopos is already, tendentially, the tele-scope , Weber writes, since the one who aims is also the one who surveys. To survey, in this sense, is to command at a distance. However else we want to characterise research missions that land men on the moon and rovers on Mars, we must recognise that even our limited surveys of these other worlds are bound up with a ballistic sort of scopic knowledge that traces its genealogy right back to Nancys draw of the bow. What else is Curiosity , the Mars rover that is currently hurtling through space towards its target at 7,500 miles per hour, than the tip of the arrow? Why else would the engineers on the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) team at JPL, for which Sachs designed the mission patch and served as unofficial artist in residence, refer to these three final phases of Curiosity s flight as six minutes of terror? (Those six minutes will take place in early August.) Or for that matter, what possible reason would the astronauts on the Space Program lunar mission in 2007 have for securing their landing site with DIY shotguns ( Lem: ATF: MSA: Shotgun , 12 Gauge, Breech-loading, Handmade , 2007)? And why would the astronauts on the Mars mission need a mortar ( Mortar , 2011)? Because everywhere in Sachss work, targets abound. Despite betraying some boyhood fascinations with militarised gear, and beyond all its tongue-in-cheek fetishising of the arch seriousness of the military-industrial-academic-research complex, Sachss Space Program is just this targeting writ large not quite as large as NASA or JPL and the general intellect of which they are the cutting edge, but large enough to stand for it, to represent it, allegorically as it were. The one bit of equipment that stands out in this respect, both because of what it stands for and because of how out of place it is within the panoply of stations destined for Mars, is Tea House (2011 12), a full-scale building (Sachss first, despite starting out in architecture) designed to accommodate traditional Japanese tea ceremonies. The form of that ceremony (exactingly detailed, as with all of Space Program s procedures, in a set of accompanying instructions) distils the works and the studios targeting ethos. For as ritualised as the choreography of the tea ceremony may be, it is a dance that depends entirely upon subtle yet instrumental moments of feedback between host and guest(s). Every action the quarter-

clockwise turn of the tea bowl, the laying down of the tea scoop (bullet eight: always be Knolling) is also a cue for some subsequent action, such that all the players in the ceremony are highly attuned to and tracking targeting one another. They are bound together in a collective project, and the ceremony, the ritual, the Code, do the binding. It is in this sense that the tea ceremony like Space Program ; like the studio is not teleological. The point is not to fulfil it, to get to its end. It is scopic. The point is to see, to survey, to attend, to target to always, always work to Code.

Shoburo, 2011 (installation view), mixed media, 43 x 38 x 41 cm all images: Genevieve Hanson

Tom Sachss Space Program: Mars is at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, through 17 June
ArtReview 111

Everything can be done, in principle

A newly co-commissioned artwork by

VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art Carlow Local Authorities Arts Office & Carlow Arts Festival igse 2012
www.everythingcanbedone.com

june 9th to august 26th

2012

Everything can be done, in principle. An invitation to inhabit a story from 122 years ago of the cattlemens invasion of Wyoming, and its cinematic interpretation, Heavens gate.
For 11 weeks roller skating will be encouraged in the gallery.

Artist & Curators talk and tour Sat 9 th June 12pm Events, screenings and talks to be announced.
VISUAL Centre for C o n t e mp o r a ry A rt
Carlow
Open: Tues - Sat, 11am - 5.30pm, Sun 2 - 5pm, Old Dublin Road, Carlow, Ireland. T: 059 917 2400 www.visualcarlow.ie

Brian Duggan
curated by Helen Carey

THE ART COLLECTIVE EXHIBITION

07-23 June
Susie David Finn Dean Ben Gold Gina Hart Lance Hewison Maria Kuipers Patrick M Lee Celine Marchbank Pauline Richards

Gallery 40, 40 Gloucester Road, Brighton

The Art Collective supports exceptional emerging artists. We are now open for submissions from artists who would like our representation. Visit www.theartcollective.com to apply.

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JU MING (B.1938)
Born in Miaoli County, Taiwan, Ju Ming is a groundbreaking Master sculptor whose work has spanned three prolific series: the Nativist series, the Taichi Series and the Living World Series, all of which have received critical acclaim worldwide. He has exhibited internationally in galleries, museums, institutions and public spaces around Asia, USA, and Europe, including London's South Bank Centre, National Art Museum of China, Place Vendome, Paris and many more. Ju Ming was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Art by Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan, in 2003, and the 18th Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prize, in Japan, in 2007. In 2011, Ju Ming was conferred the prestigious title of Doctorate by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for his contributions to the world of Modern sculpting.

Taichi Series L:191.5 x195.5 x 158 cm, R: 237.5 x 210 x 173 cm, Bronze, 1996

GAO XINGJIAN

(B.1940)

Born in Jiangxi Province, eastern China, Gao Xingjian is one of the worlds most respected multidisciplinary artists. An acclaimed novelist, painter, playwright, poet and filmmaker, Gaos creations have been showcased worldwide, notably in cities including Vienna, New York, London, Stockholm, Malmo, Poznan, Luxembourg, Brussels, Hong Kong, Madrid, Barcelona, Mons, Berlin, Aachen, Baden-Baden, Taipei and Singapore. Gao was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 for his prodigious novel Soul Mountain, the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1992, and the Lions Award by the New York Public Library in 2006. In 2008, Gao Xingjian was awarded a special citation by Italys La Milanesiana, one of the worlds most celebrated international arts festivals.

La Meditation 240 x 300 cm, Ink on Canvas, 2009

Ju Ming | Gao Xingjian | Cheung Yee | Wucius Wong | Irene Chou | Lui Chun Kwong | Zhang Jian Jun| Milenko Prvacki | Ye Jian Qing | Jin Jie | Dodo Jin Ming Szeto Lap | Rosanna Li | Annie Wan | Tse Yim On | Hung Keung | Ho Yuen Leung | Au Ka Wai | Wong Wai Yin | Liu Hung | Ah Leon | Michael Chen Alfi Jumaldi | Budi Ubrux | Edo Pop | Riki Antoni | Rudi Mantofani | Samsul Arifin | Oohira Hiroshi | Shimizu Tomohiro | Makita Sohei | Natsumi Tomita
The Fullerton Hotel, 1 Fullerton Square, #01-08, Singapore 049178 T 65 6339 0678 F 65 6438 2080 enquiry@ipreciation.com Find us on Shop LG1-3, Jardine House, 1 Connaught Place, Central, Hong Kong T 852 2537 8869 F 852 2537 8386 www.ipreciation.com

Present Future
Vladimir Nabokov, dystopic fiction, DeLorean DMC-12, buried dreams of Modernism, nagasaki, The Last Man, Franco Berardi, CoMing Catastrophe, Fredric Jameson, Fortress aFriCa, postfuturistic, one big (neoliberal) narrative
words Brian Dillon utterly spurn and reject so-called science fiction. I have looked into it, and found it as boring as the mystery-story magazines the same sort of dismally pedestrian writing with oodles of dialogue and loads of commutational humour. Thus speaks the narrator of Vladimir Nabokovs 1952 short story Lance. The writer seems to have shared his creatures scorn for the genre though, predictably, Lance is also Nabokovs sole amateur stab at sci-fi. The tale is notable too as the source for a statement later quoted by Robert Smithson (who knew a thing or two about timescales) and which seems perfectly to describe the attitude to the future, and to futurisms, in much recent art. The future, writes Nabokov, is but the obsolete in reverse. Isnt that essentially the would-be paradox that animates a good deal of the future-oriented art of the last decade or two? To the extent, in truth, that it has become a clich on a par with the popular claim that science-fiction futures are only ever versions of the present in which they are imagined. Contemporary art seems to go further further back, that is and assert that the only futures we can conjure today are in fact those that belong to the past: a past in which technology, ideology and avant-garde brio meant that things to come were palpable, vivid, almost present, for much or most of the last century. To speak in terms of tense, the only future that seems to have mattered in the recent past has been the future anterior: what will have been, or more accurately what might have been. The future has belonged to others: possibly including if were old enough to recall, say, the digital thrills of the 1990s our own past selves. This is not to disparage any of the art made under a temporal regime of the backward look, only to say that until very (very) recently these
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lost futures seemed to manifest everywhere, in art that variously returned to the buried dreams of Modernism, the hubris of late-capitalist production and the fading lures of the big (really big) ideas. Consider, for instance, Gerard Byrnes video installation 1984 and Beyond (2005), based on a 1963 Playboy magazine roundtable, in which assembled sci-fi writers attempt to picture existence in the year of Orwells dystopic fiction. Whatever the risible lineaments of the efficient, eroticised pod-life they predict, at least they are imagining some future. Or the brace of works by Duncan Campbell and Sean Lynch concerning the doomed DeLorean DMC-12 car: a futuristic sliver manufactured in Belfast in the early 1980s and by 1985 fit only to be sniggered at in Back to the Future, where the 1950s seemed more modern. Campbells Make It New John was made in 2009, Lynchs DeLorean Progress Report shown in 2010 at Simon Starlings Camden Arts Centre show Never the Same River: an exhibition whose subtitle probably sums up best this entire recent adventure with temporal paradox and nostalgic divining: Possible Futures, Probable Pasts. The former, at least, were short-lived. Or so one reading would have it, in light of the economic crisis in the wake of which it became de rigueur to quote Fredric Jameson, writing in his Archaeologies of the Future in 2005: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If in the precrash era Jamesons statement skewered a collective imagination quite prepared to contemplate environmental catastrophe (or its sci-fi stand-ins of meteor strike and alien invasion) but unable to believe in alternative futures except as antique remnants of an ideologically or aesthetically gulled twentieth century, then postslump the aphorism could be wielded, a little too hastily, as a moral

admonition of the recent past and our own place in it. One could plausibly argue that once the unthinkable future actually arrived it became paradoxically possible to start imagining other futures again: the crisis functions oddly as the end of one big (neoliberal) narrative, with all the glamorous catastrophisms and premature pronouncements of revolution that that entails, and as year zero for other, maybe more modest futures. And contemporary art, having spent time contemplating obsolete futures from the past century, has in a way simply carried on reflecting on the same histories and the same possibilities, but with the nostalgia stripped away: invoking the future seems bizarrely less quaint now that it has diminished on many fronts. Think for example of Ben Riverss remarkable film Slow Action (2010), in which island utopias centuries hence are worked up from footage of such places as Lanzarote and Gunkanjima, the postindustrial battleship island off the coast of Nagasaki. For sure, Riverss film makes reference to some coming (or maybe present; I mean our present) catastrophe, but its utopias come from some genuinely fictive elsewhere, schooled on such texts as Francis Bacons The New Atlantis (1624) and Mary Shelleys The Last Man (1826) rather than the familiar futurisms of the past century. In short, the future has hardly gone away. A number of exhibitions this summer have courted its allure in more or less measured ways. In Limerick, Ireland, Eva International, a biennial curated this time by Annie Fletcher of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, is this year titled After the Future. Fletcher invokes the irony that after the end of the grand futures of the recent past and Irelands dreams grew very grand indeed it is both easier and more imperative to imagine

clockwise from top left:

Lszl Moholy-Nagy
Set design for Things to Come, 1936, archival print. Courtesy Hattula Moholy-Nagy

Omer Fast
Nostalgia, 2009, production still. Photo: Thierry Bal

Sean Lynch
DeLorean Progress Report, 200910, view of a DMC-12 tooling press and a swimming crab (Liocarcinus puber ) located 18 metres below sea level at 53.29938N & 9.76344W, 132 x 110 cm

Kiluanji Kia Henda

Astronomy Observatory, Namibe Desert, 2007, digital chromogenic print on matt paper, 80 x 120 cm

Naum Gabo
Model for Construction in Space, Suspended, 1965, plastic and nylon thread. Nina & Graham Williams/Tate, London 2012

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from top:

Mungo Thomson
Negative Space (STScIPRC2012-10a) (detail), 2012, photographic mural. Courtesy the artist

Ben Rivers
Still from Slow Action, 2010. Courtesy Kate MacGarry, London

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Present Future

Mark Titchner
And Waiting We Plunged into Dreams, 2012, digital print on vinyl. Courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold, London

modest and workable futures, futures conjured by theorist and activist Franco Berardi in his 2011 book After the Future: If we come to terms with this post-futuristic condition, we can renounce accumulation and growth and be happy sharing the wealth that comes from past industrial labor and present collective intelligence. Which is a restricted vision that actually sounds, of course, exorbitantly optimistic. Utopianism does not necessarily fade away in an era of postcrisis scaling down: at Firstsite in Colchester, the group show News from Nowhere (taking its title from William Morriss novel of 1890) mixes recent work by Mark Titchner and Mungo Thomson with frankly futuristic inventions of the past by Naum Gabo and Lszl Moholy-Nagy. Perhaps the most flagrantly nonnostalgic of futurisms canvassed this summer, though, is the Arnolfinis ambitious Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction, curated by Nav Haq and Al Cameron. This despite the title of one of the standout works: Omer Fasts three-part film installation Nostalgia (2009), which juxtaposes the fate of a contemporary child soldier from Nigeria, seeking asylum in Britain, with a future in which the geopolitical roles are reversed and

a British migrant seeks refuge in Fortress Africa. Haq and Cameron certainly acknowledge the familiar explanation for our visions of the future in the realities of the now SF may not really [be] giving us images of the future so much as a projection of the present, they write in their curatorial essay. And its true that there are remnants of familiar lost modernist futures in work such as Kiluanji Kia Hendas installation Icarus 13 (2008), which situates its absurdist scifi among the ruins of Soviet architecture in Angola. But the shift, if there is one, might have to do precisely with fiction itself, which courts the unprecedented rather than merely reminding us of future dreams recently abandoned. Thats to say, the archaeology of actually existing past visions of the future gives way to acts of ex nihilo invention or divination, because suddenly it looks necessary to invent a future again, however unlikely. In 2009, Haq and colleagues edited an issue of Arnolfinis biannual journal, Concept Store, devoted to Possible, Probable and Preferable Futures. That contains, among essays on past and present artistic futurisms, a work by Graham Gussin, Various Futures, that excerpts

blurbs from sci-fi paperback novels, their adventures condensed in prcis (sample sentence: At point zero the rigour of time would be like a mistaken memory), dense, abstract fragments that are hard to explain using the familiar framework of science fiction as projection of past or present urges or anxieties. Imagined futures are perhaps not, after all, mere ghosts of what has come before, which is one reason Nabokov found the genre so maddening to read and write, involving as it does (or ought) the purest of leaps into invention. As he put it in Ada (1969), a novel seeded with wry bits of counterfactual history, The present is only the top of the past, and the future does not exist. Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction is at Arnolfini, Bristol, until 1 July News from Nowhere is at First Site, Colchester, until 27 August Eva International: After the Future takes place across various venues in Limerick City, Ireland, through 12 August

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China Miville
hallucinatory diagnosis, Aesthetic despAir, concern for the near future, eAsier to think About the end of the world, There Is No Alternative-ism, the impossible is true, seAttle in 1999, weaponising the very lack of certainty
interview J.J. Charlesworth s an increasing number of artists begin invested apocalypses. to create speculative visions of Im not quite sure to what extent one can possible futures, ArtReview talks to generalise, however. Obviously if youre in a China Miville, writer of genre- moment in which there is a proliferation of bending stories that have made him represented apocalypses, at some level something a leading exponent of British science fictions is going on. This isnt coincidence; but I do wonder new weird. The Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning whether whats going on is actually less systematic author of Embassytown (2011), The City & the City than it might sometimes appear. I also get the (2009) and Perdido Street Station (2000) tells us sense that the great wave of fictional apocalypses hes no soothsayer; he just wants to suggest a is ebbing. There was a point a few years ago where radical otherness. that was the default currency of Hollywood, but I think thats now reached its peak. So, I think there are all kinds of ways one can speculate about J.J. Charlesworth Your books are not about a straightforward diagnostically reading the concern for the near relationship to the past and future, so I want to start future in fiction, but I am a little bit hesitant about by asking you what the use of the future in fiction is trying to coagulate them into a giant theory of for you. where we are now. China Miville I think thats probably partly a reflection of a kind of aesthetic political position I have which I share with a number of people that, despite all appearances to the contrary, SF is not about the future. Its essentially about now, and at its best its almost a hallucinatory diagnosis of a moment. SFs record of prognostication is very poor, which is fine I think. An interest in the future is obviously deeply embedded in SF, but its a mediated concern about now, much more than an actual futurology. In terms of the kind of general cultural dissemination of the idea of the near future and the economic crisis, its definitely the case that in the last few years theres been a kind of mainstreaming of anxieties about the future. Its become a clich, that iekian thing about it being impossible to think of the future that its actually easier to think about the end of the world than the future. So that gets reflected in a lot of cultural production, this kind of language of libidinally
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works in relation to the sublime. Im not trying to avoid theorisation, but I think it also probably had a more straightforward element than that; of course he was doing other stuff with it too, but whatever else, I suspect he was also just painting some of his favourite pictures from when he was a kid. This is the norm for cultural production and has been for the last 20 years. The geeks inherited the earth 20 years ago. Most of the people in the artworld, I am absolutely sure, when they werent reading Adorno and watching Bicycle Thieves, were watching Doctor Who. I wonder if SF has become so vernacular whether it has also lost some connection to a bigger vision or a bigger social horizon; whether it may have become disconnected from those social currents that necessarily adopted some kind of futurological perspective. SF isnt all about rocket ships its genre goes quite a way back to forms of Enlightenment fiction about what is possible its usually what is possible socially. So Im just curious about the ebb and flow of how fiction relates to a broader current. A broader sense of where this thing called today is going CM I think theres definitely the case for that line from Errico Malatesta: Everything depends on what the people are capable of wanting. I think thats true, and I think, in a playful way, SF depends on the impossible being true. And that isnt nothing: thats quite an interesting thing to do in a world thats still shaking off the rubble of Thatchers There Is No Alternative neoliberalism, though Im wary of extrapolating towards a political thing. But I do think theres an element there. Apart from the positive, generational reason

How might we make sense of the fact that ideas of the near future, futurology, alternative futures and a broader SF trope have started to appear more frequently in recent visual art? CM I think that there is, in part, a generational thing going on. The fact is that theres a generation of writers and, I suspect very strongly, artists as well, in their twenties to their mid-forties, who grew up with SF as a kind of default cultural vernacular. They may not be fans, but neither do they come to the field with any of the kind of cultural anxiety of snobbery that is associated with SF, and certainly was for an older generation. So I think a lot of that language of SF is quite unconcernedly bleeding into a wider sphere. Some years back, for example, the painter Glenn Brown was repainting science-fiction book covers by Chris Foss and others. There was a discussion at the time about those

Most of the people in the artworld, when they werent reading adorno and watching Bicycle Thieves, were watching DocTor Who
for a crop of writers, and artists, beginning to use these tropes, I think theres also a negative reason to be found in fiction, and the sclerosis of literary fiction. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, literary fiction internalised a lot of that kind of insularity and the sense of stasis concomitant on that idea that There Is No Alternative. So that notion, the kind of closing down of any sense of the alternative, bespeaks a closing down of political radicalism. Without any kind of overt fight against that, it reached a point where a generation of writers and artists, almost en passant, decided, Well, clearly thats nonsense. And a proliferation of crazy ideas, born out of the very lack of a blueprint offering, might also bespeak a rather cheerful opening up of a sense of alterity in general. I always thought that Seattle in 1999 [the site of major antiglobalisation protests] was a very important psychic moment. I think that was the point at which a certain kind of There Is No Alternative-ism was hugely undermined. There was a certain shaking off of embattlement within SF and I suspect outside as well. It is certainly true that SF writers used to operate under a debt to the idea of a bigger social futurological project, so that while it often looks like a prediction of what might happen, really what is still encased within it is the pleasure of fantasy. For example, your recent novel Embassytown was loaded with ideas about language what it means to have language, the theory of the mind, what it means to be an other all wrapped up in what appeared to be an SF adventure story. It seemed to offer a different, more expansive play of the imaginary and fiction, a more wide-ranging idea of what can possibly be discussed within the genre of science fiction or fantasy. CM There are absolutely no surprises to be gleaned from reading a putatively dystopian extrapolation of neoliberalism. Were already fucking there. Its perfectly obvious what neoliberal dystopia is. Writers arent investigative journalists. Margaret Atwoods Oryx and Crake uses, as its epigraph, a quote from Jonathan Swift, where he says, in Gullivers Travels, My object is not to entertain, but to warn you or educate you. Ive never been quite sure whether Atwood is playing that straight or not, because, to me, that line in Swift is a piss-take. I think Swift is needling at that notion. I think thats why this is not a counsel of aesthetic despair in saying that you cant read the future from SF. Its about not reading things narrowly at all. I like reading a lot of the dystopias and I like reading a lot of utopias, but I strongly question the notion of them as blueprints. One of the interesting things to me, and the reason utopias are exciting to read, is the extent to which they start to fail in a lot of their own stated projects, which is to envisage a serious and systematic alternative to the present. One starts to enjoy them most when they start chafing against the grounds of that. So I would always think of them as thought experiments in a much more open way than they may claim to be. Its not a thought experiment in the sense of: Well, how about if we organise society like this? Its more of a thought experiment in the sense of: Start from the presumption that the impossible is true. Once youve gone from that you start to realise how a ghost story might be politically exciting. Likewise a piece of surrealist poetry or something that similarly, very aggressively, enacts that estrangement affect. That always struck me as an interesting rebuke to the criticism that a lot of the old left makes of new types of activists, which is the grumpy idea that the latter dont know what they want, what theyre protesting for. Remember, one of the main slogans of the protest movement was Overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nicer, which I always thought was a bit twee, but theres something rather sweet about the fact that its actually weaponising the very lack of certainty that is sometimes used as a stick with which to beat utopianism. I agree that its interesting to attempt to find something truly other or to use another word for it, that is so often used in theoryspeak, but which has such a great theoretical legacy, alterity. CM This is where it gets down to this question of affect. I do think that there is something about the affect and the awe which is key here, and which is not an unpolitical issue. In SF, for many years, the term that was used to describe what those of us working in the genre really love about it was the Sense of Wonder, capital S, capital W. Then, as there was a kind of attempt to make SF theory more rigorous, Sense of Wonder became a denigrated term, because it seemed so woolly and vague. One of the things that Ive been interested in, in the last few years, is the creeping theoretical rapprochement between critical theory and this idea of the Sense of Wonder, and the obvious way into it is through the sublime. It seems to me that the sublime is absolutely the key term in SF; that SF and the fantastic literary field have their centres of gravity in the sublime. Its a sublime thats slightly different from the painterly sublime; its one thats groping to touch the Real, the capital R Real, the unsymbolisable. Its always failing to do so, of course, but failing fascinatingly. You know, its hardly a new thing to point out that the sublime is, among other things, a political category. So I think that this is where you get into that sense of sheer alterity, that sheer strangeness that unites science fiction with, say, the kind of ecstatic visionary tradition in religious writing. At the moment we are having a terrific resurgence of socially critical art or political art. I would make the same connections between the potentially disruptive value of the aesthetic again, not in order to harness it to a political project, but simply to note theres something about being human that understands that reality is not the way its always going to be. CM Yes. I feel the same about a lot of fictions. You know, I love art. I love writing. I think its a human good. But I think a lot of the claims made about its political effects or whatever are widely, absurdly overblown and there are certain words that I really think we should strike from the discourse. My bugbear at the moment is subversive. You know, when art is described as subversive I want to know, Well, subverting what? What was subverted at this point? Im very chary of making claims about concrete political effect in most artistic contexts. Railsea, China Mivilles new book for young adults, is published by Macmillan
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dormant cultural histories, a pencil moustache, pakistani models, hoodies on bikes, acid mothers temple, Beat dropouts, Rothko, District 9, a dream machine, bursts of colour

words J.J. Charlesworth

f something appears exotic, its because of where youre standing. My exotic is someone elses everyday normality. And you can bet that the humdrum, familiar place you inhabit will be fascinating to some other somebody, somewhere. Exotic: foreign, from elsewhere. Theres really no objective definition its always defined from a partial vantage point, and as long as you never come into contact or dialogue with the exotic thing, it remains, always, at a distance. Here, elsewhere; real, imagined; self, other. This is the loose network of ideas provoked by the work of Shezad Dawood, an artist who, for the last decade, has sought to bear witness to the complicated, unstable, rapidly evolving, multipoint perspective of art in an era of globalised cultural, ethnic and political dislocation. The dynamic of artistic development is no longer one of isolated local scenes, one supplanting another in historical significance. Today its a decentred map of localities, communicating with each other under the ubiquitous notion of the contemporary contemporary art from Britain, from America, from China, from India, from the Middle East contemporary art from x. And one of the effects of this new, global polity is for art to celebrate its cultural, national, ethnic locality, its x-ness, or else attempt to avoid this page, both images: Make It Big (Blow Up) (details), it, to efface it and adopt a kind of transnational 20023, production still, b/w visual vocabulary. So whats an artist to do? And series of 7 silver gelatin prints, 41 x 51 cm. Courtesy the artist what are artworks to do? Be from somewhere, or facing page, both images: from nowhere, or from everywhere at once? New Dream Machine Project, A decade ago, when multiculturalist 2011, film stills, super 16mm film transferred to HD (15 min loop). politics in Britain were still focused on domestic Courtesy the artist and Paradise realities before those were blown apart by the Row, London new world of post-9/11 and the economic rise of the East Dawood might have been called a British Asian artist. For Dawood, growing up in London, with Indian and Pakistani parents, simple definitions of cultural identity were hardly going to be an option. Nor could you ignore them, unless you wanted to be pigeonholed. So, satirising the predicament of cultural identity politics, Dawoods early works sought to short-circuit images of whiteness and Asianness, looping the markers of British cultural history onto a nonwhite, postWestern present: a photomontage of Dawood posing as British fascist leader Oswald Mosley (The Leader, 2002), black tunic, pencil moustache, posed heroically against a backdrop of the Union flag; or a photomontage of a good-looking young Asian man, dressed in the 1960s suit-and-tie of English comedian Peter Sellers, doubling up Sellerss brown-faced incarnation of a guileless Indian film extra cast adrift into the hedonism of Hollywood in Blake Edwards The Party (1968) (The Party, 1999); or Dawood again, restaging the photoshoot scene in Antonionis Blow-Up (1966), taking the role of David Hemmingss swinging London fashion photographer, with the action transposed to modern-day Karachi, where Pakistani models dressed in contemporary Asian fashion pose for film stills for a remake that never comes about (Make It Big, 20023). Navigating, digressing from and evading the mainstream account of cultural identity (and its preoccupation with what defines people in the present, rather than what they have been or might become) by reviving and reworking dormant cultural histories is the project that underpins Dawoods work. And in his newest filmworks and paintings, to be seen in his first major public exhibition tour in the UK, Piercing Brightness,

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Dawood sets himself the challenge of making this practice of dislocation ever more layered, multifarious and volatile. Trailer (2011), a 15-minute edit of an asyet-unfinished feature-length film, offers a fragmentary assemblage of scenes that suggests a sci-fi narrative. Its the story of a cadre of benign alien visitors sent, once upon a time, to earth to observe and assimilate undetected into human society: the narrative follows a group of their number who settled in the English city of Preston but are now attempting to make their homeward return. Trailer casts local people alongside conventional actors in the roles of the settled aliens a Muslim shopkeeper, a middle-aged white woman, a young Chinese couple. Theres also a gang of hoodies on bikes, always faceless, who may be aliens too, somehow related to the more benign assimilated visitors. Its the barest of narrative bones, a wellworn staple of science fiction and sci-fi cinema; the motif of the alien visitor as a metaphor for cultural or ethnic difference punctuates cinematic history, from John Sayless The Brother from Another Planet (1984) to Neill Blomkamps District 9 (2009). And yet, as narratives go, Trailer isnt simply reducible to the progress of its alien-human characters towards what seems to be a rendezvous point, Close Encounters-like, with a returning

mothership. Rather, as it remixes the urban, everyday world of Preston, it fractures the anticipatory style of the conventional film trailer with bursts of colour, flash-frames and drifting, out-of-focus lens effects, all set to the undulating, immersive music of Japanese psychedelic space-rockers Acid Mothers Temple. Dawoods use of film stock and analogue lens effects opens up a sense of historical depth within Trailer the traces of film within the digital video. Historical depth appears here as a loss of visual depth; in the flattened, kaleidoscopic abstractions, lens flares and film scratching that haze and dissolve through the image. If the content of Trailer weaves together disparate themes of ethnicity and cultural displacement, the mesmeric visual effects and music give it a hallucinatory aspect that points towards the history of both modernist experimental film and psychedelia, and what these combined elements suggest is that an art of disidentification might correspond to a desire to step beyond the fixed determinations of culture and identity. Dawoods other recent film, New Dream Machine Project (2011), addresses these problems head-on. In a sort-of documentary of a concert held in Tangiers Cinmathque de Tanger, Moroccan ensemble the Master Musicians of Jajouka jam alongside the more outlandish guitar of contemporary blues guitarist Duke Garwood, while a scaled-up version of Beat artist Brion Gysins Dream Machine revolves and illuminates the players and audience in the darkened auditorium. Its a straightforward combination, but the below: film condenses past and present, East and West, Inverse Pyramid, 2010, acrylic on vintage textile, 120 x 165 cm. art and spiritualism, to effectively reinvoke the Courtesy the artist and Paradise Row, London cultural tensions at the heart of a historic Western

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Shezad Dawood

avant-garde arts fascination with the exotic, spiritual, East. Gysins Dream Machine is now a sort of legendary symbol for a countercultural fascination with transcendental experience and altered states of mind, while it was in Tangier that Gysin and other Beat dropouts such as William Burroughs saw an escape from the conformism of postwar America. New Dream Machine Project has a strange tension at play in it. Initially one recognises the uncomfortable, old image of exoticism and a oneway cultural projection of extending from a hippie fascination with the mystic, spiritual Orient, while the Dream Machine produces the kind of psychedelic abstraction that reveals how much of modernitys conception of the abstract, from Mondrian to Rothko, touched on ideas of the spiritual rather than the rationalistic. Garwoods bearded face, under an unkempt mass of curly hair, would be just as much at home in the Tangier of 1968. And theres the occasional echo of ethnographic scrutiny in the cameras depiction of the Master Musicians, of the musical cultures of the Middle East kind familiar in postwar, postcolonial travelogues. So authentically does it appear to reproduce the trope of the exoticist, orientalist countercultural vision, and so convincing is its depiction of an event that looks like it should have happened 40 years ago, that its a shock to see this film for what it is: a staged musical collaboration in which these

individuals and artistic histories are being purposefully engineered by an artist, now, in the early twenty-first century. Dawoods art deploys parallax as a critical tool, generating situations in which a subjective point of view is combined with the recognition of another, equally valid, alternative perspective, and in which the artist assumes a multiplicity of identities, adopting alternate roles to make this happen. This trickster form of manipulation has been noted before in discussions of Dawoods work. Here and in other works, the question of the artists own belief becomes unanswerable Dawoods use of the iconography and thematics of Eastern religion and spirituality is consistently looped back through reference to Western Modernisms own appropriation of these. Yet it would be a mistake to see this as a form of fakery or imposture, as a kind of ironic citation. Instead it points to a latent, unresolved question in the old Western turn to the East for what it saw as the counter to its own rationalism the dissolution of difference, and of identity fixed by the norm of the present order. Looking to a fantasy project of the East was just a way for those in the West to project what was really its own problem with transcending the here-and-now of modernity which is why modernist abstraction is also the site for this longed-for escape from identity. But in the contemporary context, in which the balance of powers has shifted away from the West, an escape from identity takes on a different significance. If theres no more orientalist gaze of the West looking down on its exotic other, then theres only a flat landscape of different cultures all observing and encountering each other. And if thats the case, then all cultural identities and perspectives become relative so we can either privilege and pay respect to everyones endless cultural difference, or we might look to some common ground that transcends these. Dawoods work doesnt seek out some false resolution of this problem, but rather looks to construct a sort of meeting place where different cultural perspectives exist visibly simultaneously. Like his recent paintings, which deploy abstract motifs that intermingle Western geometric abstraction and the mystical geometries of Sufi Islam on patterned industrial textiles originally made in Pakistan in the 1970s, Dawoods films are platforms where multiple cultural perspectives and localities overlap and translate into each other. Rather than being windows onto the exotic, theyre turntables, or hinges; places where cultural perspectives coexist without fusing, presenting to each other the multiple, contingent meanings of their shared resources.

above, all images: Piercing Brightness, production still, 2011. Photo: Bartolomiej Sienkiewicz. Courtesy UBIK Productions Ltd, London

Shezad Dawood: Piercing Brightness is on view at Modern Art Oxford through 10 June and then, as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, at two sites in Penzance: Newlyn Art Gallery, from 24 June to 29 September; and the Exchange, 30 June to 15 September
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the Pace Gallery 32 East 57th Street, New York, NY T +212 421 3292 F +212 421 0835 info2@thepacegallery.com www.thepacegallery.com Robert Irwin: Dotting the is & Crossing the ts to 23 Jun Open 9:30-6, Tue-Fri; 10-6, Sat Summer hours (25 Jun - 2 Sep) 9:30-6, Mon-Thu; 9:30-4, Fri the Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY T +1 212 255 4044 info2@thepacegallery.com www.thepacegallery.com Pier Paolo Calzolar Open 10-6, Tue-Sat Summer hours (25 Jun - 2 Sep) 9:30-6 Mon Thu; 9:30-4, Fri the Pace Gallery 534 West 25th Street, New York, NY T +1 212 929 7000 info2@thepacegallery.com www.thepacegallery.com Loris Graud: TheUnplayed Notes to June 9 Wang Guangle 21 Jun - 18 Aug Open 10-6, Tue-Sat Summer hours (25 Jun - 2 Sep) 9.30-6, Mon-Thu; 9:30-4, Fri the Pace Gallery 545 West 22nd Street, New York, NY T +1 212.989 4258 info2@thepacegallery.com www.thepacegallery.com Claes Oldenburg / Coosje van Bruggen Theater and Installation 19851990: Il Corso del Coltello and The European Desktop to 23 Jun Open 10-6, Tue-Sat Summer hours (25 Jun - 2 Sep) 9:30-6, Mon-Thu; 9:30-4, Fri Salon 94 243 Bowery, New York, NY 10002 T +1 212 979 0001 info@salon94.com www.salon94.com Group show: Square Cave 6 Jun - 6 Jul Hennesey Youngman 10 Jul - 3 Aug Open 11-6, Mon-Fri tracy Williams Ltd. 521 West 23rd Street New York, NY 10011 T +1 212 229 2757 tracy@tracywilliamsltd.com www.tracywilliamsltd.com Simryn Gill / Nicole Cherubini 22 Jun - 10 Aug Open 11-6, Tue-Sat BRaZiL a Gentil Carioca Rua Goncalves Ledo, 17 Sobrado - centro - Rio de Janeiro T +55 21 2222 1651 correio@agentilcarioca.com.br www.agentilcarioca.com.br Open 12-7, Tue-Fri; 12-5, Sat Casa triangulo Rua Pais de Araujo, 77 04531-090 So Paolo T +55 11 3167 5621 info@casatriangulo.com www.casatriangulo.com Open 11-7, Tue-Sat Galeria Luisa Strina Rua Padre Joo Manuel, 755 - loja 02 Cerqueira Csar, So Paulo T +55 11 3088 2471 info@galerialuisastrina.com.br www.galerialuisastrina.com.br Open 10-7, Mon-Fri; 10-5, Sat Galeria Fortes Vilaa Rua Fradique Coutinho, 1500 05416-001 So Paulo T +55 11 3032 7066 galeria@fortesvilaca.com.br www.fortesvilaca.com.br Open 10-7, Tue-Fri; 10-6, Sat Galeria Leme Av. Valdemar Ferreira, 130 05501-000 So Paulo T +55 11 3093 8184 info@galerialeme.com www.galerialeme.com Open 10-7, Mon-Fri; 10-5, Sat Luciana Brito Galeria Rua Gomes de Carvalho, 842 Vila Olimpia 04547-003 So Paolo T +55 11 3842 0634 info@lucianabritogaleria.com.br www.lucianabritogaleria.com.br Open 10-7, Tue-Sat Mendes Wood Rua da Consolao, 3358, Jardins 01416-001 So Paulo T +55 11 3081 1735 info@mendeswood.com www.mendeswood.com Open 10-7, Mon-Fri; 10-5, Sat nara Roesler Avenida Europa, 655 01449-001 So Paulo T +55 (11) 3063 2344 info@nararoesler.com.br www.nararoesler.com.br Open 10-7, Mon-Fri; 11-3, Sat Vermelho Rua Mina Gerais, 350 01244-010 So Paolo T +55 11 3138 1520 info@galeriavermelho.com.br www.galeriavermelho.com.br Open 10-7, Tue-Fri; 11-5, Sat

United StateS 303 Gallery 547 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011 T +1 212 255 1121 info@303gallery.com www.303gallery.com Group show curated by Jens Hoffmann Marxism 19 Jun - 3 Aug Open 10-6, Tue-Sat andrew Kreps 525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011 T +1 212 741 8849 contact@andrewkreps.com www.andrewkreps.com Group show curated by Will Benedict Commercial Psycho 30 Jun -16 Aug Open 10-6, Tue-Sat Casey Kaplan 525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011 T +1 212 645 7335 info@caseykaplangallery.com www.caseykaplangallery.com No. 17: Group Exhibition of Gallery Artists Celebrating Our Seventeenth Year 28 Jun - 3 Aug Open 10-6, Mon-Thu; 10-5 Fri (summer) david Kordansky Gallery 3143 S. La Cienega Blvd., Unit A Los Angeles, CA 90016 T +1 310 558 3030 info@davidkordanskygallery.com www.davidkordanskygallery.com Ruby Neri: Sculpture 7 Jul-18 Aug Curated by Matthew Brannon and Jan Tumir Drawing a Blank (On Forgetting, Refusal, Censure and Impotence) 14 Jul - 18 Aug Open 11-6, Tue-Sat david Krut Projects 526 West 26th Street, Suite 816 New York, NY 10001 T +1 212 255 3094 info@davidkrut.com www.davidkrut.com Diane Victor: Reap and Sow to 30 Jun Open 10-6, Tue-Sat Kavi Gupta 835 W. Washington Blvd, Chicago IL 60607 T +1 312 432 0708 info@kavigupta.com www.kavigupta.com Scott Reeder Henning Strassburger: I Am A Girl to 28 Jul Open 10-6, Tue-Sat Marianne Boesky Gallery 509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011 T +1 212 680 9889 info@marianneboeskygallery.com www.marianneboeskygallery.com Group show curated by Dieter Buchhart The Nature of Disappearance 28 Jun - 10 Aug Open 10-6, Mon-Fri (summer)

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HONG KONG Asia Art Archive 11/F, Hollywood Centre 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan T +852 2815 1112 info@aaa.org.hk www.aaa.org.hk Open 10-6, Mon-Sat iPreciation Shop LG 1-3 Jardine House 1 Connaught Place, Central, HK T +852 2537 8869 enquiry@ipreciation.com www.ipreciation.com Open 10-7, Mon-Fri; 11-3, Sat TAIWAN MOT/ARTS 3F., No.22, Sec. 1, Fuxing S. Rd., Taipei 104 T +886 2 2751 8088 ext 5 motarts@motstyle.com.tw www.MOTstyle.com.tw Zhou Chunya + Jaime Hayon ALIVE AND KICKING 4 May - 17 June Open 11.30- 8, Mon-Sun Taipei Fine Arts Museum 181, Sec.3, ZhongShan N. Rd., Taipei T +886 2 2585 7656 www.tfam.museum Formless Form - Taiwanese Abstract Art 7 Jul-2 Aug Open Tue-Sun SOUTH KOREA Kiaf (Korea International Art Fair) 102-407, 461, Samil-daero Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-776, T +82 2 734 2505 info@kiaf.org www.kiaf.org 13-17 Sep Open 11-8, Thu-Mon SINGAPORE iPreciation Singapore The Fullerton Hotel One Fullerton Square #01-08, 049178 T +65 6339 0678 enquiry@ipreciation.com www.ipreciation.com Open 11-7, Mon-Sat; 11-3, Sat AUSTRIA Galerie Hubert Winter Breite Gasse 17, 1070 Vienna T +43 1 5240976 office@galeriewinter.at www.galeriewinter.at Group Show including Lawrence Weiner, Hans Richter, Birgit Juergenssen etc. The Sound and the Fury 5 Jul - 8 Sep Open 11-18, Tue-Fri; 11-15, Sat Secession Association of Visual Artists Friedrichstrae 12, A-1010 Vienna T +43-1-587 53 07 office@secession.at www.secession.at Babak Afrassiabi, Edgar Arceneaux... Mutatis Mutandis 29 Jun - 2 Sep Open 10-6, Tue-Sun Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg Halle, Vilniusstrasse 13, 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 876 246 Wolfgang Laib: Passageway Inside - Downside to 14 Jul Open 10-6, Tue-Fri; 10-2, Sat Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 881 393 office@ropac.at www.ropac.net Ali Banisadr: We havent landed on earth yet to 7 Jul Open 10-6, Tue-Fri; 10-2, Sat BELGIUM Almine Rech 20 Rue de lAbbaye Abdijstraat B-1050 Brussels T +32 (0)2 648 5684 brussels@alminerech.com www.alminerech.com Aaron Curry: White Out to 22 Jul Open 11-7, Tue-Sat Tim Van Laere Verlatstraat 23-25, 2000 Antwerp T +32 (0)3 257 1417 info@timvanlaeregallery.com www.timvanlaeregallery.com Open 1-6, Tue-Sat DENMARK Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Gl. Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebk T +45 4919 0719 mail@louisiana.dk www.louisiana.dk Major works by Asger Jorn and Poul Gernes, Roni Horn, Erwin Wurm and Thomas Struth PINK CAVIAR to 19 Aug Open 11-10, Tue-Fri; 11-6, Sat-Sun FRANCE Almine Rech 19 Rue Saintonge, 75003 Paris T +33 (0)1 45 83 71 90 paris@alminerech.com www.alminerech.com Taryn Simon A living Man declared dead and other chapters to 28 Jul Open 11-7, Tue-Sat

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Emmanuel Perrotin 76 Rue de Turenne & 10 Impasse St Claude 75003 Paris T +33 (0)1 42 16 79 79 info@perrotin.com www.perrotin.com Aya Takano: To Lose is to Gain 23 Jun - 28 Jul Open 11-7, Tue-Sat Galleria Continua Le Moulin 46 Rue de la Fert Gaucher 77169 Boissy-le-Chtel (Seine-et-Marne) T +33 (0)1 64 20 39 50 lemoulin@galleriacontinua.com www.galleriacontinua.com Sislej Xhafa: Unpoetic Bride 30 Jun - 7 Oct Open 12-6, Fri-Sun Thaddaeus Ropac 7, Rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris T +33 (0)1 42 72 99 00 galerie@ropac.net www.ropac.net Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Recent Paintings to 30 Jun Donald Baechler: Head Sculptures to 30 Jun Open 10-7, Tue-Sat GERMANY Deutsche Guggenheim Unter den Linden 13/15, 10117 Berlin T +49 (0)30 2020 930 berlin.guggenheim@db.com www.deutsche-guggenheim.de Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms From 6 Jul Open 10-8 Sprth Magers Berlin Oranienburger Strae 18, D-10178 Berlin T +49 (0)30 2888 4030 info@spruethmagers.com www.spruethmagers.com Jean-Luc Mylayne 28 Jun - 25 Aug Open 11-6, Tue-Sat ITALY Brand New Gallery Via Farini 32, 20159 Milan T +39 02 8905 3083 info@brandnew-gallery.com www.brandnew-gallery.com Changing States of Matter to 28 July Open 11-1, 2.30-7, Tue-Sat Cardi Black Box Corso di Porta Nuova 38, 20121 Milan T +39 02 4547 8189 gallery@cardiblackbox.com www.cardiblackbox.com Ashley Bickerton: The Women 5 Jun - 27 Jul Open 10-7, Mon-Sat Collezione Maramotti Via Fratelli Cervi 66, 42124 Reggio Emilia T +39 0522 382484 info@collezionemaramotti.org www.collezionemaramotti.org Massimo Antonaci: Ipotenusa to 31 Jul Open 2.30-6.30, Thu-Fri; 10.30-6.30, Sat-Sun

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T +34 987 09 00 00 musac@musac.es www.musac.es Feminist Geneologies in Spanish Art, 1960-2010 23 Jun - 6 Jan 2013 Open 10-3; 5-8, Tue-Fri; 11-3; 5-9, Sat-Sun SWEDEN Bonniers Konsthall Torsgatan 19, Stockholm T +46 8 736 42 48 info@bonnierskonsthall.se www.bonnierskonsthall.se Klara Kristalova 25 Apr - 29 Jul Open 12-7, Wed-Fri; 11-5, Sat-Sun SWITZERLAND Migros Museum fr Gegenwartskunst Albisriederstrasse 199A, CH-8047 Zrich T +41 44 277 20 50 info@migrosmuseum.ch www.migrosmuseum.ch Ragnar Kjartansson 1 Sep - 28 Oct Opening & Inauguration of the new museum space - 31 Aug UNITED KINGDOM All Visual Arts 2 Omega Place, Kings Cross, London, N1 9DR T +44 (0)20 7843 0412 info@allvisualarts.org www.allvisualarts.org Polly Morgan: Endless Plains 8 Jun - 31 Jul Open 10-6, Tue-Fri Caf Gallery Projects CGP London, Southwark Park, London SE16 2UA T +44 (0)20 7237 1230 admin@cgplondon.org www.cpglondon.org Group show: Richard Drucker, nooshin Farhid and Lucy Reynolds... Polictics of Amnesia 13 Jun - 15 Jul Open 12-6, Wed-Sun Camden Arts Centre Arkwright Road, London, NW3 6DG T +44 (0)20 7472 5500 info@camdenartscentre.org www.camdenartscentre.org Bruce Lacey (co-curated by Jeremy Dellar and David Alan Mellor) The Bruce Lacey Experience 7 Jul - 16 Sep Open 10-6, Tue-Sun; 10-9, Wed Carroll/Fletcher Gallery 56-57 Eastcastle St London, W1W 8EQ T +44 (0)20 7323 6111 info@carrollfletcher.com www.carrollfletcher.com Natascha Sadr Haghighian 20 Jul - 14 Sep Open 11-7, Tue-Fri; 11-6, Sat, 12-4, Sun Cell Project Space 258 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA T +44 (0)20 7241 3600 info@cellprojects.org www.cellprojects.org Angelo Plessas The Twilight Of The Idols 15 Jun - 22 Jul Open 12-6, Fri-Sun Collective 22-28 Cockburn Street , Edinburgh T +44(0)131 220 1260 mail@collectivegallery.net www.collectivegallery.net Simon Martin: Louis Ghost Chair 9 Jun - 22 Jul Mick Peter and B.S.Johnson: Lying and Liars 2 Aug - 30 Sept Open 11-5, Tue-Sun (Aug 10-6) Hatfield House Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL9 5NQ T +44 (0)1707 287010 info@hatfield-house.co.uk www.hatfield-house.co.uk Xavier Veilhan at Hatfield: Promenade to 30 Sep Open 10-5, Tue-Sun & BH Mon Jerwood Gallery Rock-a-Nore Road, Hastings TN34 3DW 01424 728377 info@jerwoodgallery.org www.jerwoodgallery.org Gary Hume: Flashback 14 Jul - 23 Sep Open 11-4, Tue-Fri and 11-6 Sat-Sun Modern Art 23/25 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8DF T +44 20 7299 7950 info@modernart.net www.modernart.net Sarah Barker 29 Jun - 4 Aug Open 11-6, Tue-Sat Pippy Houldsworth Gallery 6 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BT T +44 (0)20 77347 760 gallery@houldsworth.co.uk www.houldsworth.co.uk Ai Weiwei: A Living Sculpture 27 Apr - 30 Jun Open 10-6, Mon-Fri and 10-4 Sat Platform A Gallery Middlesbrough Railway Station, Zetland Road, Middlesbrough T +44 (0)1642 252061 info@platformagallery.net www.platformagallery.net Alexis Harding Fill-Line 14 Jun - 30 Jul Open 10-4, Tue-Sat Pump House Gallery Battersea Park, London London, SW11 4NJ T +44 (0)20 8871 7572 info@pumphousegallery.org.uk www.pumphousegallery.org.uk Interdisciplinary project by post-graduate students of the RCA: Departure Lounge 5 - 08 Jul Ope 10-6, Tue-Fri

Fondazione Prada Ca Corner della Regina, Calle de Ca Corner Santa Croce 2215, Vaporetto San Stae 30135 Venice T +39 04 1810 9161 info@fondazioneprada.org www.fondazioneprada.com The Small Utopia Ars Multiplicata 4 Jun - 2 Oct Open 10-6, Closed Tue Galleria Continua San Gimignano Via del Castello 11, 53037 San Gimignano (SI) T +39 05 7794 3134 info@galleriacontinua.com www.galleriacontinua.com Antony Gormley: Vessel to 20 Aug Nikhil Chopra: inside out to 20 Aug Open 2-7, Tue-Sat Hangar Bicocca Via Chiese 2, 20126 Milano T +39 02 6611 1573 info@hangarbicocca.org www.hangarbicocca.com Wilfredo Prieto: Equilibrando la Curva 22 Jun - 2 Sep Ilia and Emilia Kabakov: The Happiest Man 22 Jun - 2 Sep Open 11-11, Thu-Sun Massimo De Carlo Via Giovanni Ventura 5, 20134 Milan T +39 02 7000 3987 info@massimodecarlo.it www.massimodecarlo.it Roberto Cuoghi, Zoloto to 6 Jul Open 11.30-7.30, Tue-Sat MAXXI Via Guido Reni, 4A, 00196 Rome T +39 06 3996 7350 info@fondazionemaxxi.it www.fondazionemaxxi.it Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda to 24 Jun Kaarina Kaikkonen, Towards Tomorrow to 15 Jul Open 11-7, Tue-Fri, Sun; 11-10, Sat NETHERLANDS Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Museumpark 18-20, 3015 CX Rotterdam T +31 (0)10 44 19 400 info@boijmans.nl www.boijmans.nl Sarkis: Submarine Wharf 2 Jun - 30 Sep Open 11-5, TueSun SPAIN Helga de Alvear C/Doctor Fourquet 12, 28012 Madrid T +34 (0)91 468 05 06 galeria@helgadealvear.com www.helgadealvear.com Jrgen Klauke: Schlachtfelder to 30 Jun Open 11-2;4.30-8.30, Tue-Sat MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporneo de Castilla y Len Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24, 24008 Len

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GABRIEL CLARK-BROWN
June 1217, 2012
Opening Reception Monday June 11, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Open Hours Tuesday to Saturday, 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. Burgweg 15, CH 4058 Basel info@liste.ch, www.liste.ch A project in the workshop community Warteck pp Main Sponsor since 1997 E. GUTZWILLER & CIE, BANQUIERS, Basel

living, loving & killing

The South African Print Gallery
Woodstock, Cape Town www.printgallery.co.za
Angel over Piet Retief (detail), Etching 2012

Listings

Europe, South Africa

Takashi Murakami New Arrivals to 31 Aug Open 10.34-4.34, Tue-Fri, 10.34-1.34, Sat Brundyn + Gonsalves 71 Loop Street, Cape Town T +27 21 424 5150 info@brundyngonsalves.com www.brundyngonsalves.com Sanell Aggenbach, Roger Ballen, Zander Blom, Alex Emsley, Matthew Hindley, Andrew Putter, Karin Preller, Matty Roodt and Chad Rossouw: SEEINGEYE 27 Jun - 15 Aug Open 10-5, Mon-Fri; 10-2, Sat CIRCA Gallery 2 Jellicoe Ave, Rosebank, Johannesburg T +27 11 788 4805 info@circagallery.co.za www.circagallery.co.za Wilma Cruise 2 Aug - 8 Sep Open 9-6, Tue-Fri, 9-1, Sat Iziko South African National Gallery Government Avenue, Companys Garden, Cape Town T +27 (0)21 481 3970 info@iziko.org.za www.iziko.org.za Candice Breitz: Extra! to 22 Jul Open 10-5 SMAC 1st Floor, De Wet Centre Church Street, Stellenbosch T +27 21 887 3607 info@smacgallery.com www.smacgallery.com Richard Long: Works On Paper (in collaboration with Haunch of Venison) 14 June - 2 Sep Open 9-5, Mon-Fri; 9-3.30, Sat SMAC In-Fin-Art Building, Buitengracht Street, Cape Town T +27 21 422 5100 info@smacgallery.com www.smacgallery.com Anton Karstel: Youth Day 28 Jun - 11 Aug Open 9-5, Mon-Fri; 9-3, Sat Whatiftheworld 1 Argyle St Woodstock, Cape Town T +27 21 8023111 info@whatiftheworld.com www.whatiftheworld.com Pierre Fouche: These Waves 13 Sep - 20 Oct Open 10-5, Tue - Fri; 10-2, Sat

Ronchini Gallery 22 Dering Street, London W1S 1AN T +44 (0)20 7629 9188 info@ronchinigallery.com www.ronchinigallery.com Jacob Hashimoto to 28 Aug Open 10-6, Mon-Sat Richard Long, Luke Fowler Artist Rooms: Richard Long New film commission: Luke Fowler 23 Jun - 14 Oct Open 10-5, Tue-Sun Turner Contemporary Rendezvous, Margate T +44 (0) 1843 233000 info@turnercontemporary.org www.turnercontemporary.org Mark Wallinger: Sinema Amnesia 7 Jul - 5 Aug Lindsay Seers: Entangled 7 Jul - 5 Aug Open 10-6, Tue-Fri SOUTH AFRICA 34 Fine Art 2nd Floor, The Hills Building, Buchanan Sq., 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town T +27 21 461 1863 info@34fineart.com www.34fineart.com Group Exhibition, inc William Kentridge and

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130

Listings

Reviewed
Exhibitions/UK
Roger Hiorns, Corvi-Mora, London Sam Griffin, Gallery Vela, London Michael Portnoy, Ibid Projects, London Roee Rosen, Iniva, London Marco Chiandetti & Rudolf Polanszky, Ancient & Modern, London Elizabeth Price, Baltic, Gateshead

Exhibitions/USA
Laura Parnes, The Kitchen, New York Gilbert & George, Lehmann Maupin, New York Alejandra Prieto, Y Gallery, New York Ralph Lemon, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Brice Marden, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York Mickalene Thomas, Santa Monica Museum of Art Jeffry Mitchell, Ambach & Rice, Los Angeles

Exhibitions/Europe & Rest of the World

Urs Fischer, Palazzo Grassi, Venice Antony Gormley, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano Ryoji Ikeda, LABoral, Gijn Haim Steinbach, Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris Mona Hatoum, Arter, Istanbul David Zink Yi, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin Guillaume Bijl, Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna 1964, Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna Kishio Suga, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo

On the Town
Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art Willie Doherty & Nathaniel Mellors, Matts Gallery, London

Books
Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader The Lives of Things, by Jos Saramago The Time Machine, by Alex Cecchetti, Mark Geffriaud and Kit Poulson Rebel Cities, by David Harvey The Sleepwalkers Box, by Doug Aitken The Space Between, by Michael Bracewell Luigi Ghirri: Project Prints The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard

Off the Record

Suddenly curators are hot again; Gallery Girl blames Documenta

ArtReview

131

Roger Hiorns
Untitled, 2012, mixed media, 25 x 76 x 50 cm. Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

Sam Griffin
Stroop, 2012, Argos computer workstation, chrome plate, stucco marmorino, 60 x 170 x 60 cm. Courtesy Gallery Vela, London

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Exhibition Reviews

Rogers Hiorns Corvi-Mora, London 2 March 21 April

Ive been sifting through a dirty sink full of exam papers, completed in French by one Lusende Bruno-Malanda of the Tyrannus Bible College in Deptford, for some time now. He has taken a test on La rbellion et ses consquences dans lglise (rebellion and its consequences in the church) and another titled Sur le leadership. They have been marked, ticked, corrected. I imagine that he is a teenage boy. This sink is in the introductory space to Roger Hiornss exhibition at Corvi-Mora; beyond, in the large gallery space, are several sheets of white plastic, hung like small paintings (all works Untitled, 2012), streaked and smeared with a sticky substance the shade of dirty marigold, which turns out to be cows brain matter. Its fair to say that, aesthetically, theres little difference in looking at one of these brain panels as opposed to another its rather like looking at dirty chopping boards and that glossing the relationship between these and the sink piece is something of a stretch, albeit a rewarding one. Those exam papers, however, are a surprisingly powerful way of looking at indoctrination in process. One can imagine BrunoMalandas mind being moulded into the shape of the faith (Im going to take a stab and say that its Pentecostal, based on the test subjects): there are right answers and wrong answers here. In the end, its impossible not to relate this constructed religious mind to the smeared brains in the rather churchlike gallery space, with its vaulted ceiling and hallowed atmosphere, next door. How can grey-gold gunk hold such a huge structural belief system within it, when Im not even sure that my brain can hold onto the thought that these lumpy smears are in fact brains? Im aware that when Im looking at these things, I am saying brains brains brains brains to myself, to try and make it sink in. Or to put it another way, the only thing that can transform these things into brains in my brain is my brain. Follow? Its often the case with Hiornss work that strange, nasty and wonderful things are happening behind your eyes rather than dancing before them. We end up fixating on a pile of metal dust while saying jet engine, jet engine (Untitled, 2008) or looking at a lightbulb smeared with the artistss

sperm (Untitled, 2006, etc) and well, thats a bit different, but suffice it to say that the drama is often taking place away from the exhibition space and must be recreated, invoked even, by the person looking at the work. This involves belief, too, a particular kind of faith in those materials, which is like a minor version of transubstantiation. Hiornss work is often very beautiful (those copper sulphate crystals, foaming spouts, powders and sudden fires), and this exhibition is far more stripped back. But the point at which Hiornss work always transcended that beauty was the moment that required that you summon those great grand themes and presences before you: god, sex, death, violence, the unstoppable raid of time and natural processes over everything. Because while he may be an artist in the business of transforming materials, he is also interested how those materials can transform us. LauRa mcLean-feRRIs

Sam Griffin: Looking Busy Gallery Vela, London 22 March 21 April

In Japanese mythology, theres a legend of a carp that leapt up a waterfall and was transformed into a dragon; in Japanese garden design, a style of waterfall known as a ryumon no taki commemorates the feat. Sam Griffins Ryumon No Taki (all works 2012) doesnt feel quite so exalted, though it might gesture towards an idea of heroism in itself. Its a brushed-metal table covered with a field of granulated Welsh coal, brushed into neat ridges and punctuated with rocky chunks of aluminium and nickel-plated desk organisers, those clusters of varisized tubes one stores pens in. If you squint, the shimmering reflections in the latter, and their flowing verticals, might just suggest an ersatz liquid cascade; though its notable that as the tubes distortedly reflect each other in their polished surfaces, they also resemble clusters of warheads. Griffin is a British artist interested in how species of spaces (and the ideologies built into them) inform subjectivity, and the potential

consequences of same, and Looking Busy is clearly about one particular type of environment. Stroop, seemingly named for a psychological reaction test and set in a black-painted alcove, is a chrome-plated, four-tiered Argos computer workstation containing, instead of computers, two further works, RWR and MHT, a pair of red roses in brushed-aluminium Rubin vases, which model psychologist Edgar Rubins famous reversible-figure-ground experiment. Look into the negative space that their sides create, and youre meant to recognise the profiles (and the initials) of Ronald Wilson Reagan and Margaret Hilda Thatcher, at which point the classically 1980s black-red-and-metal aesthetic of the whole makes sense, and the whole turns, icily, into a heavily muted affirmation of neoliberalism. Given this suggestion of mental colonisation, its tempting to read the intricate drawings on show as produced by some kind of fictive entranced office worker on his lunch hour. Murphys Law features a perspicacious pencil rendering of the geometric logo for Omni Consumer Products, the fictional megacorp that, in Paul Verhoevens RoboCop (1987) has expanded to serve every kind of consumer need and is aiming to completely privatise the films future Detroit. RoboCop is by now a bit of a tired signifier in contemporary art (Tris Vonna-Michell, for one, has used it quite extensively), and its arguable that Griffins quietly fearful attention to corporate stealth is familiar territory too. Another gripe might be the mid-1980s aesthetics, which feels slightly too easy as a shorthand for advanced capitalism. (Were not going to get a copy of Sun Tzus businessmans bible, The Art of War, but we are going to get a Zen garden with missiles in it.) But Griffin does have to supply some handholds, because hes doing a lot of deliberate withholding elsewhere. The most valuable commodity I know of is information, says Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987), and the artist leverages that perspective. None of the information about the works above, which would seem to unlock them, is given in the press release: you have to go looking, or chasing modest clues (like, say, a former leaders initials). Its only once theyve unveiled themselves that you may wonder how these sleek, sour artworks might operate subliminally and, additionally, picture them punctuating smooth corporate spaces: silent votive emblems reinforcing the secular faith of our day. maRtIn HeRbeRt

R H og Io e R R n s

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which plays alongside a particularly skinny carrot, is introduced with the comment that this carrot joke has very narrow focus. It ends, after much tangential nonsense, with the assertion that the patient asks the doctor to take his fragment, a funny way to say his constitutional fundament, or foot, out of her vagrant, which is an even funnier way to refer to the vagoona electra. Within the measured analysis, the humour of the original joke gets lost (if it ever actually existed, which seems doubtful), but the act of critically analysing the comedy is comic in itself. The laughter lies in the idea that the laugh is, as Michael Portnoy: Im Back Fore Ground! Freud would have it, a visceral reaction an Ibid Projects, London uncontrolled rupture in ones conscious veneer, 17 March 5 May instigated by a linguistic double meaning but to investigate the cause of that laugh eviscerates the rupture. Through this nicely plotted, punning Doctor to patient: Deep breathing kills germs. interplay between the joke and the art object, the Patient to doctor: Yes, but how do you make them question Portnoy seems to be posing is whether breathe deeply? the destructiveness of deconstruction also applies No? Oh, OK to art. Is this very act of critical interaction the The jokes in Michael Portnoys odd but review whose punchline youre about to reach endearing exhibition arent necessarily amusing, a joke too, as comically absurd a task as attempting but they are pervasive, seeded throughout the to explain why the phrase vagoona electra three bodies of work here. There are sight gags is funny? and sound gags, one-liners and conceptual jokes, yet what humour they convey isnt to be found oliver basciano in the formal setup but in the context of comedy and art rubbing together. On the ground floor Portnoy exhibits three almost identical tall, slender canvases, oil depictions of a rabbi (identified in the press release as Israel Sarug, a sixteenth-century kabbalist) holding a door slightly ajar and peeping through. Each painting differs in only one detail: the rabbi is holding a different object in his cupped hand. Its hard to tell what some of these are. Though one is definitely, and incongruously, a deflated American football (Sarug. The Intransitive Spiral, all works 2012), and another could be a turd. Their very inappropriateness raises a wry smile and eases the viewer into the cloud of Roee Rosen: Vile, Evil Veil bafflement the artist purposely wafts over the Iniva, London 21 March 5 May next two gallery spaces. Upstairs are five of Portnoys carrot joke works: hyperdetailed photographic images of five carrots on white backgrounds (there are also five empathy can be subversive, so what about a pencil-on-paper studies of the carrots textured little empathy for the devil, asks Israeli artist Roee surfaces on the floor above). Each photo is Rosen. What about someone like Israels ultrapresented in a white frame, on the bottom of rightwing minister of foreign affairs, Avigdor which is a button that, when pressed, sets off an Lieberman, or even the archetypal demon of audio recording. An East Coast drawl, presumably recent times, Hitler? Vile, Evil Veil is Rosens first the artists, starts with a tangential descriptive solo exhibition in the UK, but with just two works reference to the image it narrates, before it provides a stunted glimpse of his practice as a introducing a characteristically surreal and writer, illustrator, painter and filmmaker who convoluted joke, then dissecting its history and uses historys sacred cows as fodder for over-theexplaining why the wisecrack is so droll. The top parody voiced through problematised audio track for The Market, for example, a carrot ventriloquism. Rosens infamous installation Live and Die which has naturally split along its length, starts by stating that there are two competing versions as Eva Braun (19957) is a set of ten short textual of this carrot joke, before going on to outline episodes accompanied by over 50 black-andand comment on two impossible-to-follow white illustrations. The viewer is set up as a alternative narratives about horses at market. customer for an entertainment system like that The aforementioned doctor-to-patient joke, in Kathryn Bigelows trashy cyberpunk-noir

Strange Days (1995): you become Hitlers beau, admiring and screwing the dictator in a bunker in the last days of the Second World War. With its drawings of frolicking children spurting blood and semen, and everyone from teddy bears to monkeys to Jesus on the cross sporting erections, Eva Braun has caused quite a stir when its been shown in the past, at Jerusalems Israel Museum in 1997 and at the Jewish Museum of New York in 2002, both institutions that claim custodianship for a certain identity. Unsurprisingly, theres been no such uproar in London, where its not that out of place alongside, say, the Chapman Brothers sodomising Nazi zombies. Rosens short film Out (Tse) (2010) also makes a show of being naughty, casting Minister Lieberman as a demon to be exorcised via a BDSM session between two women. It starts off like a documentary: we meet Ela, twenty-five, a computer science student with conservative views, and Yoana, thirty-two, a leftwing feminist peace activist. Both casually discuss how they got into the BDSM scene, until suddenly were in more metaphysical territory. Yoana is to be the dominant, beating the spirit of Lieberman out of Ela. As we watch the welts redden on Elas backside, she begins to yelp and growl Liebermans words: We have no intention of resigning. At climax we cut to a performance by two musicians who have appeared in the room singing a slow, lamenting song in Russian. Were not told if the demon has left, but the pleading tune harks back to Liebermans Moldovan roots and hints that the demon is there in the room with them, albeit as something mournful, yearning, someone we can empathise with. As Yoana claims, Lieberman resides, in fact, at the heart of our collective body The real demon belongs to us all. With images like urinating in Hitlers mouth, Rosens heavy-handed provocations feel like theyre trying to deal with scenes of moral outrage by creating more moral outrage. His attempts at scatological catharsis do succeed in highlighting the boundaries surrounding some solemn debates, but theres something about the work that fits together too neatly. His layered protagonists go some small way towards destabilising this, whether by co-opting the viewer in Eva Braun or by mapping intimate sexual politics onto social politics in Out. But here the artist is hovering over the work, in the role of salesman for a role-play machine or the initiator of an inverse political witch-hunt ritual. However orgiastic the ordeal theyve been subjected to, Rosens already overdetermined stereotypes (whether detested political figures or token representatives of the right and left) fail to transcend the rigid structure theyve been placed within. For Rosen, it seems art is a way of exposing the ties that bind us, and making a show of tying the knots even tighter. chris Fite-Wassilak

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Exhibition Reviews

Michael Portnoy
The Market, 2012, Epson aquarel print, wood, glass, electronics, sound recording, 100 x 80 x 8 cm. Courtesy Ibid Projects, London

Roee Rosen
Out (Tse), 2010. Courtesy the artist

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Roger Hiorns
Untitled, 2012 Mixed media, 25 x 76 x 50 cm Courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London

Rudolf Polanszky
Koma, Night and Sleep Drawing, 1983, paint, ink, crayon on paper, 252 x 181 cm. Courtesy Ancient & Modern, London

Elizabeth Price
Choir (Part 3), 2011, production still. Courtesy the artist and MOT International, London & Brussels

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the resulting work (also a Super-8 film, called Koma, 1983) is a storm of swabbed, swiped and dragged colours. Like Robert Rauschenbergs Bed (1955), Polanszkys roiled surface implies an erotic release of fluids as well as the unwilled motion of the dreaming mind. And yet Polanzskys colour scheme, each pegged to a different body part during different bouts of sleeping, suggests an attempt, if quixotic, to make sense of the bodys erratic motion. As in his earlier film Zu einer Semiologie der Sinner (1976) in which the artist films his own descent into drunkenness, hand-colouring the film reel according to the gestures (smoking, drinking, vomiting) he makes theres a theme of the mind making sense of the body. In both artists works, matter becomes a Marco Chiandetti & Rudolf Polanszky receptacle for a diagnostic analysis of the bodys Ancient & Modern, London oddness. And in their awkwardness the heavy 22 March 28 April chunks of metal, the light skein of charcoal dust, the clods of paint on frayed surface they enact bodily metaphors that retain currency as long as There are far fewer gestures in the world than minds remain incarnate. there are individuals, says Milan Kundera in Immortality (1990), and it follows that there are ben sTreeT far fewer gestures in the history of art than there are artists. Gesture in art the bodily engagement with physical matter, lets say is drawn from a narrowing repertoire of strategies, like a gradually refined recipe. Yet we remain bodies in space, and the unique ability of objects to be metonymic of their makers allows them to remain emotive markers of somatic absence. Those very limitations, in fact, enable works of art to collapse historical distance through the re-treading of known roads. Ancient & Moderns series of dialogues between artists of divergent generations continues in their show of Marco Chiandetti (b. 1973) and Rudolf Polanszky (b. 1951), both of Elizabeth Price: Here whom address Bruce Naumans legacy of the Baltic, Gateshead body caught in traces and objects. Take 3 February 27 May Chiandettis six bright aluminium casts (all Untitled, 2012) of pliable matter, thumped and stretched into small tsunamis. Like saintly relics, do we live in a world drowning in objects? Are each acts as a witness to physical actuality, their we manipulated and seduced by our possessions? gouged surfaces calling up the heels of spectral Deyan Sudjic, writing of his complicity as a hands, the dents of distant knuckles. In consumer of goods with built-in obsolescence, Chiandettis charcoal works on paper (all Untitled, concludes: They are our toys: consolations for 2012), explosions of dark matter, like mushroom the unremitting pressures of acquiring the means clouds in negative, give testament to a body in to buy them and which infantilise us in our pursuit heightened stress. Made by hurling material of them. Elizabeth Prices videoworks User Group against a surface, Chiandettis works recast the Disco (2009) and West Hinder (2012) bring us into studio as boxing ring: violence recollected in a similar encounter with the language of things, though they do far more than offer up another tranquillity. Where Chiandettis works figure the cautionary tale of the accursed share or our creative body as taut and assertive, channelling seduction by design. More than anything, the Richard Serras tough-guy late-1960s interplay in Prices work is between who, or what, performances, Polanszkys 1983 Koma, Night and has greater agency, us or them. Like the Sleep Drawing engages with an alternative Surrealists, her interest in objects is complex and tradition of markmaking: the automatic. In a kind ambivalent, registering both hostility and of slacker retread of Carolee Schneemanns Up affection in a fetishistic relationship. But while To and Including Her Limits (19736), the artist Prices objects are mobile, they are never, like attached paint-dipped brushes and crayons to Giacomettis Disagreeable Objects, mute. In all of his body and tried to fall asleep on a paper surface. her works, the text that appears onscreen seems Made over four sessions of extended seminapping, to be the voice of the objects themselves,

addressing us directly. Beyond their shiny appearance, these creatures have their rhetorical devices down pat, appropriating the language of advertising, avant-garde manifesto and critical theory to further pull us into the deep end. The words themselves revel in their own stylistic excess. In West Hinder, Price uses the sinking of a container ship carrying luxury cars across the English Channel in 2002 as the basis for her juxtaposition of sexualised, anthropomorphic turns of phrase and images of the submerged cars swirling and floating. The texts and images combine to form a kind of scifi fantasy in which the cars develop consciousness, memory and desire, and demonstrate their elegance and prowess at synchronised swimming. Choir (2012) also revels in wordplay, both in terms of the dual meaning of the title as the area of a church or an ensemble of singers, and in the formal qualities of obscure or unusual words, in this case a glossary of terms drawn from essays on ecclesiastical architecture in the first section of the film. Prices interest in specialist terminology is apparent in all three works in Here. The use of precise language words developed and chosen for their sound, their emotional impact and the ideology they encapsulate variously blends and clashes with the images it accompanies or overwrites. The words and music used in each video are bold, bombastic and witty, and avoid an illustrative, didactic or po-faced essay on things. The use of A-has Take on Me (1985) in User Group Disco, for example, somehow underscores the absurdity of the branding of some of the objects, but also emphasises the pleasure, sensuality and abandonment we might feel in the glossy surface of things this is, after all, a disco. The pulsating, spinning closeups of kitsch ornaments, utensils and artefacts in the video often render these objects abstract, almost exploded, and the images seem to morph with a soundtrack which mimics the visual rhythm. The effect, similarly, alternates between pathos and bathos, the elevated and commonplace. Beyond the works themselves, the entire arrangement of the exhibition seems orchestrated to force us into a reenactment of the complex, fraught engagement we have with the material world. The mere act of walking into the first of the three interconnected rooms, for example, elicits a heady, heightened sense of drama and occasion that veers between alarm and excitement. Even in this initial, physical approach to the screen, visitors are ushered into the kind of disorientating blackness that makes the heart beat faster and slows movement. Inching forward towards seating you cannot see, concerned about who or what you might stumble over, your approach is anxious, self-conscious and utterly immersive. Its a good strategy. Theres no opportunity here to wander at will or disengage. The audience is captive. susannah ThomPson
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Laura Parnes: County Down The Kitchen, New York 30 April LAXART, Los Angeles 21 April 19 May

For American pop culture at present, the prime time of nostalgia is 40 years ago, a trend noted by the cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn in his musings on the television series Mad Men and its quixotic depiction of the 1960s. In the case of Laura Parness County Down, a multiplatform project that revolves around a 70-minute feature film, the lag is only about ten years. The film set in a gated world of McMansions, where a teenage entrepreneur named Angel (played by Stephanie Vella) invents a designer drug, Quix, which is so destructive that the entire community devolves into a hallucinogen-fuelled, ravelike zombieland has a distinctly late-1990s feel. Conceived right after the first technology bubble popped, the project took Parnes over a decade to bring to fruition. Although it attempts to be contemporaneous with the present, the film, perhaps unwittingly, feels like a product of the past, given that it is an optimistic homage to the redemptive powers of narcissism and greed. Twelve years ago, Americans believed that even as we accumulated crushing debt, our ambition, self-reliance, and faith in capitalism would keep our economy strong. Today, in the wake of a major recession, the notion that a rich girl like Angel, who creates the ultimate consumer substance Quix is cheap to produce and highly addictive, even though it causes psychosis and gangrene but is, like, fine in the end, feels dated to the point of irrelevance. The film is, as Parnes describes, videogame-ised, which means that it looks like a cartoon. To save money, she shot it in art galleries against a green screen, filling in the background details in postproduction. The effect allows for a certain distance from reality, while also heightening the feeling of nostalgia, given that it looks (and reads) like Daria, an MTV show that aired from 1997 to 2001. To play her privileged white characters, Parnes cast an excellent (and subversive) mix of friends, artists, performers
138 Exhibition Reviews

and actors, including Chloe Bass, who plays Angels best friend; Stephane Magloire, a black man who plays the disaffected product of a shrink and a flesh-eating anorexic; and Sacha Yanow, the feminist performer who channels a dumb male jock. Together and initially immune to the side effects of Quix, which causes a loss of the ability to communicate and a propensity for selfmutilation they condescendingly watch as the adult world around them crumbles. Eventually, even the teenagers start to have bad trips, succumbing to withdrawal-induced delusions. By the end, Angel, now a homicidal maniac, is the last one standing. Though County Down feels out of touch, its still fun to watch, especially if youve ever had one of those nights out with friends when, rolling on ecstasy, you marvel at how connected you feel. The next morning, you wake up with a mega dry mouth, a shady dude in bed beside you and a sense of impending doom, but in the moment, you feel like the world is pretty wonderful. Some people never stop chasing the feeling, no matter how much it eludes them. brienne WALsH

Gilbert and George: London Pictures Lehmann Maupin, New York 26 April 23 June Sonnabend, New York 26 April 23 June

tabloid newspaper posters, do go on. But why? Because of their self-professed love for and obsession with East London, the city and the area that the two have made their home and workplace since emerging from St Martins School of Art in the late 1960s? Because we, the innocent audience, keepers of our own dark urges and perversions, need to be confronted with this textual cataloguing of human cruelty and pain? Because the poetics of the tabloid headline just havent been given their due? Because isnt life just misery, and its oh so nice to be reminded that its likely more miserable for someone else, like that Hackney girl, or that cricket coach, or Jesus? With no offence to London, what Gilbert & Georges London Pictures are is tiresome at best and cynical at worst. After a career predicated upon needling the soft flesh of perceived social refinement, including aping the latter with their own arch politesse, what the pair have served up is one giant finger wag (tsk-tsk). The London Pictures no more make art out of the abyss of humanity, which the artists claim could always be found right outside their Spitalfields studio door, than Glenn Beck makes programming aimed at mobilizing the global left. Like Beck, though, Gilbert & George have perfected the camera-ready glower; and in these pictures, its made all the more goofily sinister by what looks like too much television makeup and the pairs overly whitened ie, bloodless eyes. In the past, the artists self-portraits were gestures at their own implication within the great social carnival; in the London Pictures, they look like spectres of self-righteousness. What are we to take away from it all? From the murders and rapes and hangings and stabbings and beatings and burglaries, from the boys and girls and men and women and drunks and thugs and playboys and police? Is this London? Is this humanity? No doubt it is. Then how should one respond? Exactly as one is expected to when confronted with the gruesome headline or shocking tabloid poster. Mutter what the fuck? and move on. JonAtHAn t.D. neiL

LA

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G G iL e b o e r rt G e &
Hunt for serial rapist. Jet bomb plotter jailed. Man, 81, dies in blaze. Teen gunman caged. Pair accused of boys torture. Royal gay sex blackmail plot. Evil woman stalker jailed. Mum killed tot with pills. Junkie murderer attacked 100-year-old woman. Bullied girl, 15, stabbed in head. Sex beast attacks woman in her home. Man died after sex act went wrong. Cricket coach strangler mystery. Woman missing on date is dead. Drugs batch laced with glass. Hackney girl killed by heroin. Elderly die alone: shock figures. Play portrays Jesus as drunk womaniser. Man goes mising [sic] at shopping centre. One could and indeed Gilbert & Georges new London Pictures, 292 of the pairs signature multipanelled prints, these reproducing London

Laura Parnes
County Down Ephemera (detail), 2012, mixed media. Photo: Heber Rodriguez. Courtesy LA><ART, Los Angeles, and Participant Inc, London

Gilbert & George

Boys, 2011, 151 x 190 cm. Courtesy Sonnabend, New York

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Roger Hiorns
Untitled, 2012 Mixed media, 25 x 76 x 50 cm Courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London

Alejandra Prieto
Concave Coal Mirror, 2012, coal, 183 cm diameter

Ralph Lemon
Untitled, 2010, archival pigment print from original film. Courtesy the artist

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Exhibition Reviews

Alejandra Prieto: Invisible Dust Y Gallery, New York 1131 April

Coal is the hot-button, and topical, material of choice for Alejandra Prietos solo exhibition Invisible Dust. As such, coals familiar, loaded connotations of class and economic exploitation implicitly pervade the works here, no matter how polished and pictorial they may be. With Ornamental Dust (Chita) and Ornamental Dust (Laberinto) (all works 2012), coal dust is applied directly to dark brown, nearly black stretched silk canvases, so that the coals almost glossy surface contrasts with the deep, matt background of the silk, forming ghostly patterns best viewed from an angle. Chita features a repeating geometric textile design that begs to extend beyond its frame, while Laberinto portrays a preColumbian motif of collared leopards, an allegory for colonial plunder. Prieto keeps such provocative issues in the background, literally and figuratively, and the most interesting aspect of Invisible Dust is the way the artist sidesteps didacticism, preferring instead to subsume her politics into understated, formal play though sometimes, as with Prietos two canvases, this has the unintended consequence of deadening the work entirely: their patterns dont seem particularly suited to painting, and thus they are the least interesting pieces here. More successful, precisely because its such an ambiguous object, is Concave Coal Mirror. At 183cm in diameter, this piece practically fills an entire wall at Y Gallery, which is a modestly sized space. Its made entirely of thick, unprocessed chunks of Chilean coal, which Prieto glued to a concave wood form before polishing it to a glossy, nearly reflective shine. The dust this process created was eventually used for the canvases and an adjacent videowork, Cloud on Coal Screen, which depicts billows of the fine grains projected onto a wall-mounted shelf of coal. As the origin of the other works, Concave Coal Mirror has an appropriately outsize presence and seems to suck the energy out of the others, like some oversize black talisman. Its productive tension between individuated raw material and polished gestalt recalls Martin Puryears sculptures, if a little simpler in form.

Though not on display, a photograph of Concave Coal Mirrors production brings it all to a head, showing the object still on its armature in the studio and surrounded by clouds of thick, stifling dust that covered every surface very, very messy work that is starkly absent from the very, very clean gallery installation. Prieto is interested in this difference: how an exchanged product disguises its own production process and, consequently, how the worker is alienated from his or her own toil. Viewing the exhibition within this old-school Marxist framework cited as such in the press release I would have liked, at least for certain works, to see more blood, sweat and tears, which would have lent a bit more frisson to what was otherwise an overly cool display. But the strange, magnetic mirror is another story entirely; it seems to contain the work of a thousand men. dAvid everitt howe

Ralph Lemon: 1856 Cessna Road Studio Museum in Harlem, New York 29 March 27 May

Since dissolving his repertoire-based company in 1995, Ralph Lemon has sought to redefine performance beyond the studio, the stage and the pedigreed canon of modern dance. His goal is a kind of movement of which he says: at its best, it sits in shit, non fiction. And poor. His pursuit has included the counter memorials, private rituals in which he reenacts simple acts of defiance like sitting on bus station benches across the once-segregated American South, and multimedia considerations of loss informed by the death in 2007 of his companion, the dancer Asako Takami, and of his friend Walter Carter in 2010. Lemon met Carter, a former sharecropper, in 2002 while researching the blues in the Mississippi Delta, and the two spent eight years developing and performing scores together. Their last collaboration forms the basis of the three works a video, eight still photographs and an animation derived from Lemons facile line drawings in 1856 Cessna Road, which is

titled, in a gesture of intimacy, after Carters home address. Loosely based on Tarkovskys Solaris (1972) and Godards Alphaville (1965), science fiction films that explore the transcendent force of love and the unbridgeable gap between the self and others a divide Lemon attempts to understand and subvert the works show Carter engaged in a supposed interplanetary journey. We see him wearing a sparkly spacesuit and steering a welded cage strung with a clear plastic shower curtain around a derelict cotton mill or up and down a mist-shrouded dirt road. In other scenes Carter and his wife, Edna, pass their hands over each others faces and twist down a hallway. In the animation, giraffes, hyenas and African cattle appear encumbered by electric cables. In the way that the counter memorials suggest that history endures not in its monuments but in the meanings and repetitions of small daily actions, such images seem to render Carter a vessel of personal and racial histories linked by his impending mortality. While such clichs effect an Alec Soth-like romanticising of an artificially rendered other the very mythologising Lemon is trying to undermine by making memory individual and palpable through movement the contrast between these imposed fictions and Carters preternatural lack of self-consciousness reveals the formers absurdity. Carter and his wife move with such internalised familiarity and solicitous resignation that their motions are affection and respect. By communicating the substance of their dignity, these passages establish that loss, for the living, is the impossibility of fulfilling the emotions that gave that movement meaning. The affect is achieved not by eliciting empathy in the viewer, but in somehow leveraging the impossibility of comprehending anothers passing, a separation complemented by the distance implicit in watching a recorded performance. This is as simple, poor and profound as movement can be. It seems a lesson Ralph Lemon missed, although it was in front of his camera. joShuA mACk

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Brice Marden: New Paintings Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 21 April 23 June

Brice Mardens new paintings one series of compositions in oil and graphite on fragmented slabs of marble and another series of nine modestly sized monochrome canvases are not so much paintings as are exercises, the kind of thing (good) painters do when trying to shake out old habits and awaken some dormant muscles. In the case of the monochromes, Marden is doing memory work. Marden painted the nine canvases that make up the Ru Ware Project (200712), each one a subtly differentiated shade of grey or blue or beige, from his memory of the glazing on this rare Song Dynasty pottery, an exhibition of which he saw in Taipei in 2007. In the case of the marble works, Marden is testing his mettle against grounds that are already rich with incident. But how can a painter compete with marble? Since antiquity at least, imitating it has been the challenge. The tromp loeil vistas that once dissolved the villa walls of Pompeii offer good examples of the way the spider-veined stone could be conjured from wet plaster and pigment. The latter was cheap compared to the former, hence the patrons motivation and the painters challenge. Yes, the Ancient Greeks painted their marble statues and temples. But when the stone proved decorative enough on its own, they let it be, just as Adolf Loos and Mies van der Rohe would some 2,000 years later. It was in the 1980s that Marden, then sojourning in Greece, first decided to substitute canvas for fragments of marble slab. With washes of thinned-out oil, and sometimes thicker linear applications, he turned his painting practice into a conversation with the history of carbonate flow and crystallisation that is revealed in any crosssectioned bit of the rock. Think of it as painting jump-started by geology. It brings to mind what Gilles Deleuze once wrote about the painters task being one of excavation, of getting through the layers upon layers of historical precedent that exist in every so-called blank canvas. In other words, no canvas, just like no page, is ever truly blank.
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The ghosts of these women move and dwell in the show and charge its spaces with eroticism. The portraits, domestic interiors and landscapes cumulatively become a field of sexual potential, with the female sex, both its interior spaces and external manifestations, being the centre point. This centre is bluntly asserted twice: Courbets The Origin of the World is retooled once using Thomass own body articulated with black rhinestones, in Origin of the Universe 1, and then again in the last gallery using a white body with brown beads, in Origin of the Universe 2. Though Origin of the World is the centre, Thomass version of The Sleepers, titled Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, depicts the ultimate objective of the show: two female lovers finally locked together. A massive plane, the work is an assemblage of broken pieces, splintering the JonaThan T.d. neil pictorial reality of an idyllic scene. Each crack in the surface is highlighted with punchy neon orange that binds the picture in a sort of web. Of similar ambition to Thomass breakout commission for MoMA in 2010, Le Djeuner sur lHerbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, Thomass Sleep is the exhibitions final statement and the one depiction of consummation. The conceptual rigour of the show, its linear and simple unfolding, is mimicked in the sharp lines and pristine surfaces of the works: impressive but intimidating rushes of colour, design swatches and attitude. Though the thematic content has the potential to be hot, bothered and open to anything, the paintings themselves are resistant, wearing a fashionable armour not unlike that of the models Thomas favours women who exist somewhere behind a veneer of combative posturing. Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe There are no vulnerable access points, no Santa Monica Museum of Art imperfections, no personality clues in this heavily 14 April 19 August designed space. Even the occasional loose drip of paint on the canvas seems planned. One wonders what such works can really show about Mickalene Thomas organises her exhibition of these women or the lives they lead. And that new works at the Santa Monica Museum of Art locked-down content, which can often seem around erotic touchstones of art history, stilted and stuffy, prevents Thomas from entering specifically Gustave Courbets The Origin of the the sort of psychological depths that are needed World and The Sleepers (both 1866), and Marcel to enrich the proceedings. They, the works and Duchamps tant Donns (194666). These the women, are as inscrutable at the beginning infamous cases of voyeurism in art Thomas resets as they are at the end. on her own terms by filtering them through her ed schad identity as a gay African American woman. Entering the museum, the viewer confronts the keyhole of Thomass installation Take All the Time You Need (all works 2012). Here is the famous entry of tant Donns, only instead of a splayed female body one spies the funky enclave of a 1970s apartment, the type of place Pam Grier might occupy in one of her films. During the opening, a model did occupy Thomass space, and viewers could observe her without themselves being observed. The model was joined in the main space by large painted portraits of strong and assertive women, all exquisitely dressed and none of whom seem to suffer fools. Mardens works from the 1980s, and now this new series, put one in mind of some idyllic art school, a class held in a sun-drenched courtyard with plaster casts and stone fragments lying about. There are the students, taking up their shards of marble for a session on learning to speak the language of liquid materials, the underlying lesson being that, at large enough time scales, stone is liquid too. The task of the day is to mix the two, stone and paint, with their respective times, in order to feel out their balance. And there is Marden, pacing the yard, watching the young time-travellers work. The camera pulls back now, through a window that looks out onto the courtyard, and inside we see a shaded room, where the teachers own few but successful mixtures line the walls.

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Brice Marden
Formal Marble, 2011, oil and graphite on marble, 72 x 64 cm. Brice Marden / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Mickalene Thomas
Origin of the Universe 1, 2012, rhinestones, acrylic, oil and enamel on wood panel, 152 x 122 cm. Courtesy and the artist, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

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Jeffry Mitchell
Shamrock Edelweiss Seaweed, 2012 (installation view). Photo: Heather Rasmussen. Courtesy Ambach & Rice, Los Angeles

Urs Fischer
Old Pain, 2007. Photo: Stefan Altenburger. the artist. Courtesy the artist and Palazzo Grassi, Venice

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Jeffry Mitchell: Shamrock Edelweiss Seaweed Ambach & Rice, Los Angeles 7 April 12 May

ive never met Jeffry Mitchell, but having seen his art, Id imagine him to be a chunky fellow. Not fat, just well built. Id also imagine him to be extravagantly hairy. Google reveals my hunches to be correct in the first instance, wrong in the second. Is this even relevant? Id say that in the case of Mitchells gorgeously sensual and emotionally tender earthenware sculptures, it is. These objects seem so obviously indebted to the physicality of their maker that body and mind, heart and soul, are practically inseparable. The deftness of the male fingers that pressed soft, wet clay into chubby flowers and sturdy chains, the strength of the arms that raised coils into vessels and heaved them onto rough wooden plinths both are evident in the sculptures and are themselves evidence of the love (the clean and the dirty), humour and pathos that is poured into them. Mitchells work has been well known in his hometown of Seattle for over two decades now, but it hasnt been shown in Los Angeles since 2001. Aside from ceramic works, he also makes ornate drawings, prints and architectural sculptures. This is his first solo exhibition with Ambach & Rice, which relocated to Los Angeles from Seattle last year. Shamrock Edelweiss Seaweed is a group of sculptures bound by a unified palette of brown glazes which, on closer inspection, thin into greens, blues and oranges and rough-hewn wooden plinths cut from packing crates. The objects themselves are so thick with adornment that it is sometimes hard to see what (jars? stacks of bowls?) lies beneath. Symbolic motifs and innuendos recur throughout: nails, holes, Disneyesque, fat-petalled flowers with lolling stamens, shamrocks, big fingers, flowers whose petals turn out to be fingers. Oversize beads and chains are also strung about them, so that, when paired with the thick rings that pierce them in places, one is put in mind of beefcake male jewellery.

effaced. Now its easy to circulate around the piano nobile in two directions: at the top of the stairs dangle two identical versions of abC (2007), a sculpture in aluminium and steel of a bird (and its rock) hanging from a heavy chain. A double welcome to the unorthodox physics and dark humour of Fischers cosmos. A plethora of works seem, via various devices, to float in midair, including the fleshy Old Pain (2007, an upturned fragment of a chin resting on a hand); Untitled (Holes) (2006, body orifices modelled in polyurethane); two polystyrene Clouds (2002) bathed in pink light; A Thing Called Gearbox (2004), where a cannon is attached to an office chair by a string, like a balloon. Still lifes abound too. One is literal: Necrophonia (2011) displays a live nude model, whose poses echo those of the sketchy bronze JonaThan GriFFin sculptures scattered around her. Its a collaboration between Fischer and his ex-teacher Georg Herold, created for their joint show at the Modern Institute last summer (in Venice, the piece is slightly modified by the inclusion of metal casts of the furniture used in Glasgow). The duo also produced one of the funniest works on show, Neon (2009), where a carrot, a cucumber and a sausage are fixed to a plaster ceiling as if they were neon lights. The obvious eye candy, however, is Untitled, 2011 (concurrently exhibited at Kunsthalle Wien), a lifesize self-portrait of the artist in coloured wax, which slowly melts away alongside the doppelgnger candle of his friend Rudolf Stingel. Fischer is not a newcomer to this venue: when it opened, he flooded the stairs with 1,700 raindrops in red plaster, while in 2007 he filled the atrium with Jet Set Lady (20005), a gigantic Christmas tree in metal adorned with 2,000 prints, drawings and paintings. The same spot is Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher now taken by Madame Fisscher (19992000), Palazzo Grassi, Venice which gives this show its title: a large walk-in 15 April 15 July installation best seen from the upper floor. It manically reproduces the artists former studio in London, including a heap of rubbish pouring The best things in life come in small packages, over the window, as a byproduct of the they say. Maybe Franois Pinault doesnt agree: uncontainable drive to produce art. And also to his collection specialises in huge sizes, wow collect it? Behind a column, the animatronic rear effects, XL figures (after all, he bought Christies). half of a dog (Keep It Going Is a Private Thing, 2001) Even the canal on which his two Venetian outposts wags his synthetic-fur tail next to Jeff Koonss stand is Grande. So, since Urs Fischer is not shy Balloon Dog (Magenta) (19942006), a central either when it comes to scale, his solo show at piece of bling in the Pinault Collection, as if to Palazzo Grassi could have been a tour de force poke mildly abject fun at the pet artworks and, of massiveness. It isnt: instead, the exhibition famously with Koons, pets as artworks with including over 30 works from 1999 to 2012, from which collectors love to surround themselves. both Pinaults collection and those of other lenders revels in light touches, a careful layout BarBara casavecchia and the artists freewheeling pleasure in sculpting with all sorts of techniques, objects and images, which are perpetually pinned to physicality. (Fischer has turned 2D images into 3D ones, and even his 2D works feel tactile.) The feeling of lightness is enhanced by reopening some passages and unveiling windows overlooking the Grand Canal, which Tadao Andos architectural intervention in 2005 had This formal fuzz accounts for my misdiagnosis of Mitchells hairiness. In fact two sculptures, Hello Hello and Pad Pad (all works 2012), actually are hairy, one bearded and tonsured, and one dreadlocked. They evoke those famously gauche Staffordshire dog figurines, but also incorporate drawings of a bunny, a sunrise and an eagle, along with a peace sign and Robert Crumbs bearded cartoon character, Mr Natural. Mitchell is profoundly nonjudgemental about the high and low references he piles into his work; a separate shelf of smaller figurines includes biblical scenes such as Jesus Kissing Judas as well as the rather more suggestively titled Animal Lover. It is not clear where the artist stands on any of this, except to acknowledge that it is all part of him, whether he likes it or not.

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Antony Gormley: Vessel Galleria Continua, San Gimignano 28 April 20 August

What naked impulse drives a man to plant his likeness in the world? Caesar Augustus scattered his across the Roman Empire. Lenin and Stalin sowed theirs over the entire Soviet Union. Yet these despotic crops are small potatoes compared to Antony Gormleys ever-growing plantation. Only Buddha and the Virgin Mary surpass the British sculptors universal presence, a selfportraying dominion extending across cities, countrysides and continents, from tidal shore to alpine crest to rooftop precipice. Machine-made multiples in iron, steel, marble, bronze, fibreglass or wire, lifesize or Ozymandian in scale, anatomically correct or geometrically pixelated, these gormless forms, self-described in an interview as dumb, stupid blobs that are not art, are, paradoxically, among the most iconic and omnipresent artforms of our day. Not art, not body, not landscape, not architecture, not instrument of self-expression, not original, not copy, not kitsch, not not kitsch each Gormley figure aspires to be an indexical stand-in for the entire history of sculpture. More specifically, it aims to deliver a body blow to high modernist abstraction, and at the same time reanimate the moribund corpus of public art by restoring to it the unsurpassable potency of the timeless human form. An aesthetically deficient talisman of collective identity the Everystatue of Everyman mass-produced and motored by monumental pathos, a Gormley figure circles the peripheries of the heroic and the sacred, grinding gears as it powers through the transcendent trajectories of being and time; then, full throttle, it hits the A1 motorway near Tyneside, past the outstretched arms of its most colossal incarnation, the giant Angel of the North (1998), before screeching to a halt in a museum niche, or the parlour of a collectors home. The most ubiquitous figures, up to a hundred at a time, sentinel Gormleys Event Horizon (2007), Time Horizon (2006) and Horizon Field (2010). In this tiny Tuscan hilltop town, the unlikely home of one of the most ambitious contemporary art galleries in the world, the number is necessarily scaled back. One graces a medieval tower, five more stand in the touristmobbed streets. Placed on a London bridge or the Manhattan skyline, Gormleys call attention
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to the heterogeneity of scale and frame. The effect can be pleasantly surprising. Here, however, where the architecture requires no unifying built volumes and landscape cohere uniformly in the same planned cultural space the famous expanded field in which postmodernist sculpture is said to reside retracts into a homogenous whole. The Gormleys do not transcend into art; their presence does not stand out or stand for; the logic of the monument remains a failure. Much more spectacular is Vessel (2012), which fills Continuas main exhibition space, a 1930s cinema. Here Gormley takes a swing at Modernism as incarnated by Richard Serras Tilted Arc, the large-scale artwork installed in New Yorks Federal Square in 1981, then dismantled and scrapped in 1989, after much public debate. Gormleys version is made of the same Corten steel and comparably scaled. Not surprisingly, however, he has cleverly anthropomorphised it, creating a giant mans reclining body out of 39 interconnecting boxes. Serras destabilising tilt is in place; getting under it is as daunting an experience as it was in Federal Plaza. But the humanoidal shape serves to, well, humanise it, render it safer, less threatening. More sensible. Gormleys work, here as in general, is populist. It strives for what the artist describes as social responsibility. To have meaning and purpose. To inspire. Failing that, it settles for a more modest status: to be liked. cHristopHer mooney

Ryoji Ikeda: data.tecture [5 SXGA+ Version] LABoral, Gijn 2 March 21 January

most artists work evolves in fits and starts, with periods of inspiration followed by phases of consolidation. By contrast, Ryoji Ikedas datamatics [ver.2.0] (2006) project a hypermodern son et lumire, usually presented as a sit-down concert of electronic sound accompanied by projected streams of data moving at phenomenal speed runs in sync with Moores law. (Gordon E. Moore predicted in 1965 that the speed of computing, or the number of transistors a chip could hold, would double every 18 months.) So this gallery-adapted version of datamatics, which is streamed downward via five projectors

onto a 27m x 7.2m area of floorspace, and into which one walks to be bathed in data-flow, is likely slightly pacier than the last one I saw, in an auditorium at Londons Barbican in 2011. But the principles remain the same. Ikeda, whos effectively minted his own artistic category as an acclaimed composer/musician and visual artist, is a purist. The sound you hear is an audio translation, via bespoke software, of the columns of numbers and computer code scrolling quickly and relentlessly beneath ones feet: the data becomes a frenetic, chattering score for sine waves, white noise and sonar pings. Describing it that way, though, doesnt do justice to the paradoxical effect of data.tecture [5 SXGA+ Version] (2012), which is like being crushed by something weightless, something that doesnt know you exist. The gallery staffer who accompanied me took off her shoes at the edge and said, Im going in, and that felt apposite: its an utterly immersive experience, designed to overwhelm. Stand at one end, and narrow monochromatic columns of tiny numbers, or sometimes tiled screen-grabs of statistics, rush at you in perspective: its like being inside the Star Gate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) while also mainlining a data set that includes, were told, the human genome, the astronomical coordinates of stars, the molecular structures of proteins and, cannibalistically, earlier versions of datamatics itself. If theres anything old-fashioned about datamatics, its that it tends to build towards a modernist version of an orchestral climax. Here Ikeda (whos said he likes to push the frame-rate capacity of his computers until they squeal) does something slightly different. Certainly theres an accelerating feel to the stacks of moving digits that suddenly reverse direction under ones feet, lightning flashes that obliterate grids of data and coloured horizontal bars that move like scanners up and down the floorspace. (The audios deep tones and rhythmic midrange chatter, meanwhile, being only translations of what we see, keep pace.) But at the point where the info-gush cant get any more hectic, theres a peremptory chime and everything freezes on a single, impossibly vast number millions of digits that one has a heartstopping second to realise is a real number before it moves forward, then freezes again, on another impossible integer; then moves forward, then stops again. At this point the work loops back, and if it has done its work, your head is fully wrecked, though happily so. What Ikeda is after, it would appear, is a contemporary sublime: an evocation of the adamantine beauty of pure mathematics, but also of the ravishing potentials in the wired hemisphere we live in. The presiding virtue of data.tecture [5 SXGA+ Version] is that it doesnt simply place that inhuman and ungraspable world in front of us but drops us, thrillingly, right inside it. mArtin Herbert

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Antony Gormley
Vessel, 2012, Corten steel, M16 countersunk steel screws, 370 x 2200 x 480 cm. Photo: Ela Bialkowska, Okno Studio. the artist. Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing & Le Moulin

Ryoji Ikeda
data.tecture [5 SXGA+ version], 2012 (installation view). Photo: Marcos Morilla/LABoral, Gijn. the artist

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Haim Steinbach
Avocado, 2012, plastic laminated wood shelf, metal and glass vitrine, 22 papier mch fruit models, wood headrest, 112 x 105 x 58 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris

Mona Hatoum
Grater Divide, 2002, mild steel, 204 x 4 cm. Photo: Iain Dickens. Courtesy White Cube, London

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Haim Steinbach: Navy Legacy Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris 13 April 26 May

back in the nineteenth century, the still life may have been to the discipline of the fine arts what a Chinese headrest was to smoking in an opium den. Both carried the promise of wider visions: stylistic masterplans in the case of artists who tested their capabilities on a bowl of fruit, and dreams for those intoxicated sleepers who laid their heads on those hard pillows. Such, at least, is one analogy that suggests itself in the vestibule of Laurent Godin, where the journey through Navy Legacy, Haim Steinbachs second solo show here, begins with Avocado 1 (all works but one, 2012): two dozen papier mch fruits in a glass vitrine and an antique wooden headrest, arranged on a green shelf. Next to this incongruous display is a massive, angled white rampart, Untitled (Leaning Wall), which obstructs the narrow lobby, leaving just enough room on its right side for visitors to pass clumsily through. Still standing at the doorway, if you bend your head slightly over the Chinese pillow, youll notice on the left of the obstacle the final part of an enlarged wall text, which reads ants in emboldened black. The rest of it is concealed, the sightline blocked by the architectural intervention. So you have to lower your body and playfully make your way under the leaning wall to access the main space of the gallerys first floor, and the bigger picture. When the complete phrase no elephants is fully apprehensible on the other side, the idiom an elephant in the room comes to mind. That said, the unsuspected transition from the miniature (ants) to the mammoth informs not only the transition from the foyer to the white cube but also the overall concept of the show. Indeed, according to the artist, the navy is metonymic for the broader ocean, and Steinbachs entire exhibition is structured via extreme and whimsical scalar leaps, whether created by the formal correspondences between the artworks or by your imagination. Untitled (Ball), an enormous and coarse papier-mch sphere that almost fills the main room from floor to ceiling, engages in dialogue with seven bocce balls and the round fists of a Hulk figurine arrayed on a yellow shelf, Untitled (7 Bocci Balls, Hulk), as well as a Lego toy,

Coles Tread Assault, a midget ninja vehicle locked inside a glass box. While these three last compositions are a collection of items any child would fancy for a game of make-believe, Steinbach has been known since the late 1970s for gleaning from markets, from relatives diverse curiosities that he later precisely, yet puzzlingly, redistributes within display devices of his own design. His cabinets of wonders, if you will, are constellations of heterogeneous finds: each and every one of them, whether familiar or odd, having the power to trigger your memory like Prousts evocative madeleine. As the exhibition continues in the basement with Canonical Status, another shelf supporting an eighth bocce ball with two watering cans, and Prototype for a Gate Valve (2011), a plastic miniaturised replica of a mastodon vertebra in a glass bell jar, a final phrase on a framed sheet wonderfully resumes the artists poetics: tant quil y aura des petits creux. The expression, literally as long as there will be little hollows, stands for the small cravings of a peckish child who is always up for one more treat. In other words, memory and imagination, since theyre constantly being sparked, are never nearly close to being replete. Violaine boutet de monVel

Mona Hatoum: You Are Still Here Arter, Istanbul 17 March 27 May

Rather than fixing our position on a map with a steadying you are here, Mona Hatoum etches those words into a mirror, with the discomfiting temporal addition of the word still: you are still here. You havent disappeared yet? Havent died? But if we are supposed to be locating ourselves here, where are we? Given the artists Palestinian parentage and upbringing in Beirut, which have made diaspora, exile and conceptions of home the leitmotifs of her practice, its worth asking what kind of place Hatoums work, seen here in a midsize survey, creates for itself. As one might expect, several maps are on show, but they dont offer topographical security; rather the opposite. Maps of Beirut, Baghdad and Kabul are perforated with fine sets of latticelike circular cuts, recessed or raised, suggesting new structures or large craters in the land. Shift (2012),

a carpet featuring an image of the world map, has been divided into sections that are then misaligned, as though tectonic plates have slipped in a particularly neat earthquake. In Present Tense (1996), red beads suspended in a grid of small soap cubes are arranged in the shape of the territories meant to be returned to Palestine under the 1993 Oslo Accords. Their portionlike nature indicates that slices can simply be removed from this picture at any time. The world and its borders are flickering, roiling, slippery as soap. And then there are Hatoums domestically rooted nightmares, into which we might fall, lulled to sleep by Misbah (20067), a light whose slowly spinning metal shade features cutouts of armed soldiers parading around the room among the shades stars. Part glitterball, part traditional lamp, part babys nightlight, it economically conveys the encroachment of violent figures into the real and imagined spaces of childhood: the cot, the nightlight, the fairytale, bedtime dreams. And where else but a nightmare (or an undiscovered Kafka novel) might we find a human-size cheese grater (2002s Grater Divide), and who would operate such a thing? Moving on, we can sit at a table for dinner, only to find that on the plate in front of us is a video screen displaying a horrendously visceral endoscopic trip down the throat into the artists intestines (Deep Throat, 1996). For all these gestures towards fear and unsettlement, however, the best and strangest work here is still Hatoums video Measures of Distance (1988), images of her mother naked in the shower superimposed with lines from correspondence her mother has written, the Arabic script as sharp as barbed wire. As Hatoum reads out, in English, these letters from Beirut (which she fled during the civil war; her mother stayed), the family drama between mother, father and daughter, including the struggle for ownership of these very images, is revealed, the translation and jump between languages accentuating their estrangement from one another. Recent works, such as Bunker (2011), milled steel tubes arranged so that they look like ravaged housing blocks, or Kapan (2012), metal, bodysize cage structures accompanied by blown red glass shapes resembling lungs and stomachs that sit at the bottom of their cages, frequently look smart and communicate their messages cleanly. But perhaps too cleanly. They settle easily into the genre of political/minimal that has lately been marked out in Klaus Biesenbachs Political/ Minimal at Berlins KW Institute for Contemporary Art in 2009, or in Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosas 12th Istanbul Biennial as a distinctive art-historical territory. But curatorial trends come and go. The problem with Hatoums latest work is that, for all its emphasis on discomfort and the unheimlich, it looks as though it was always destined for a bright white gallery space such as this. In fact, here it looks quite at home. lauRa mclean-FeRRiS
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David Zink Yi Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin 3 March 29 April

in reverse from one side but also that their atmosphere changes in different light conditions. The photographs show a series of nighttime views of a deserted public park in Havana. The colonial architecture surrounding the park, the ghostly lawns, elongated shadows, cool white walls and dry fountain, communicate, from different perspectives, a poetic yet precise commentary on social conditions in Cuba today and will, as it happens, one day also serve as the set for the horror movie that Zink Yi is currently working on. RaimaR Stange

David Zink Yi has two room-size installations in his compelling solo exhibition at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; the two works, very different to each other, also complement each other. Rhythmically tapping feet appear on one of the screens of the two-channel video installation Horror Vacui (2009), then, after a cut, the camera suddenly pans across to concentrated yet relaxed faces, finally focusing on hands beating drums: the film documents the Latin band De Adentro y Afuera in rehearsal. The band was founded by Zink Yi, who lives in Berlin, and through his work with these Cuban musicians he also came into contact with their families and daily lives. This in turn led to his interest in the time-honoured religious rituals that these Latin American families still observe. Zink Yi was even allowed to film some of the rituals, and these intimate scenes of very different kinds are seen side by side in the second part of the dual projection. There is an implicit comparison here between present-day music production and ritual practices, and this comparison makes perfect sense, since there are obvious structural parallels both are about reinforcing collective identity and both constitute a creative response to centuries-old traditions. The productive tension between individual musicians and the collective is palpable in Horror Vacui, as is its transformation into a repetitive rhythm, which, in the context of this kind of Latin music, ultimately leads to a trancelike state. A similar trance is also the goal of the Afro-Cuban rituals performed here. But the footage comes to an abrupt end precisely at the point where this holy condition is reached. A preoccupation with Afro-Cuban culture, its history and present status quo somewhere between tradition, Communist utopia and the worrying reality of daily life in Cuba today is seen again in the second installation in the exhibition, a presentation of the photographic series Twilight Images (2011). Unlike Horror Vacui, however, Twilight Images draws the viewer in with its calm, almost reserved demeanour. For this installation, thin wooden partition walls have been constructed in the exhibition space, creating a labyrinth of small passages and rooms. In these spaces, photographs are set into the thin walls like windows, so that they are visible from both sides. This not only means that the images are seen
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Guillaume Bijl Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna 24 March 4 May

guillaume is an artists artist, gallerist Hubert Winter said to me softly at the opening of Guillaume Bijls solo exhibition in Vienna. Indeed, the Belgian installation artist walking (almost lumbering) through his own show that night seemed bemused by his audience. Viewers including some local eminences, among them one of the guys from Gelitin watched him watching them and turned back to the art, creating a gamelike circle of bemusement, before everyone, artist included, started talking about what they were seeing. And a mind game this show is, of sorts. Along the side walls of the elongated storefront gallery are Bijls wacky assemblages of objects some that the artist titles Compositions Trouves (sketches or archaeological still lifes); others from his Sorry work series (in the words of the artist, absurd extensions of my oeuvre). Composition Trouve (2011), a lifesize horse covered in taped cardboard, is grouped with a suited male mannequin, an Ionic column and oversize letters on the wall spelling PAARD (Prada, transposed). Twelve LP records, all displaying eye-popping photographic images a tigers face, a tropical sunset, a disco ball, a puppy are made into clocks showing different times in a 3 x 4 grid affixed to a wall (Composition Trouve, 2012). A female mannequin covered in tiny

stickers and dressed as a dominatrix stands over several headless black torsos under a sign indicating, in French, that the carpet fair is on the fourth floor (Composition Trouve, 2008). Strangest of all is Sorry (2010), the head of a white bison mounted on the wall, under a photograph of a mountain range and above a broom and dustpan. The bisons head hangs like a hunters trophy, yet its features are sinister, a little human, and very artificial. The absurdities culminate in the Transformation Installation in the gallerys rear alcove (Bijl began transforming spaces in the 1980s, installing, for example, a space resembling a lamp store in an Art Basel booth or, in 2003, a fake supermarket at Tate Liverpool). Here, behind a velvet curtain separating it from the rest of the exhibition, is a small museum entitled Die Geschichte der Erotik (19962012), tracing the history of eroticism, with completely fictitious explanatory texts and sexy artefacts (such as rather unappetising fake body parts) displayed in vitrines on deep-green walls. All of this tragicomic use of everyday objects should be terribly and perhaps repellently kitschy, but it somehow isnt. It rather evokes oldschool Surrealism and a little Dada; the junkyard readymades arc back, of course, to Duchamp and other forebears. At the same time one sees that this artists artist has clearly influenced, crossinfluenced or inspired contemporaries and successors, like Maurizio Cattelan, Fischli/Weiss and Elmgreen & Dragset (who curated Bijl into the Danish and Nordic pavilions via their work The Collectors at the 2009 Venice Biennale). Winter worked with Bijl once before, in 1991, when the artist created a death chamber for composer Johannes Vogl in Winters former gallery. Bijl fooled people not only into thinking it was a real memorial (and not just an installation) but also that this composer had existed (he hadnt). The artists long career of thoughtprovoking leg-pulling, as well as his intermittent appearances in high-profile shows, make me wonder why the Antwerp native hasnt found broader acceptance. Now that Cattelan has retired, maybe its Bijls turn to take a bit more credit as a contemporary joker, one who, for the past 40 years and unlike Cattelan has refreshingly steered clear of careerism and followed his own path. kimBeRlY BRaDleY

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and feelings of social inadequacy. The exemplar here is Laing himself, whose bouts of mental illness and, as he aged, predilection for drugs and the composition of offbeat ditties clouded his earlier eloquence and rendered his ideas suspect. If the counterculture figures and unstable individuals in Fowlers earlier films have often seemed a world apart, All Divided Selves strongly implicates its viewers as both agents and objects of the judgements and pressures that underlie such marginalisation. Several scenes of squalid windowsills and kitchens in treatment facilities, for example, force us to confront our natural Luke Fowler: All Divided Selves Anthology Film Archives, New York propensity for disgust while also evoking the 3 November oppressive reality of deprivation. In analysing such emotional dichotomies, and in following CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson the films looping structure, viewers become like 9 November 16 December the medical students who, in several clips, listen as psychiatrists interview patients. Asked to respond to what they have heard, these interns In his longest and most complex film to date, seem torn between the detached conclusions of Luke Fowler returns to the life and thought of the attendant experts and the empathy they R.D. Laing (19271989), the visionary Glaswegian clearly feel for the desperately needy. If we choose psychiatrist whose belief that mental illness was judgement over empathy, Fowler implies, we caused less by individual psychoses than social marginalise aspects of ourselves in favour of alienation and interfamilial trauma challenged social conformity we cannot control. the dogmas of contemporary psychiatry, and whose interest in associative thinking and Joshua Mack empathetic, redemptive therapy informs the shape and content of Fowlers work. From What You See Is Where Youre At, his 2001 study of Kingsley Hall, a Laingian residence facility at which psychotic reactions were treated as valid lived experiences, to Bogman Palmjaguar (2008), a meditation on one mans failing efforts to quash a diagnosis of mental illness, Fowler has probed the tension between society and the misfit, querying the ethics behind the marginalisation effected by so-called progressive Western societies on the economically, socially and mentally disadvantaged. These tensions are again the crux of All Divided Selves. Here, as in his other films, loops through archival footage culled from documentaries and interviews present a collagelike portrait a structure reflecting Laings belief that the disturbed were in fact hypersane travelers conducting an inner voyage through aeonic time of a postwar Britain debilitated by urban rot, economic exigency and sexual puritanism. That these pressures spawned a plague of depression and schizophrenia, and a consequent reliance on mind-numbing drugs clinical and recreational seems obvious and tragic. As the latter failed to address the roots of both the psychic and social discontent, the growing sense of societal chaos made repressive power seem justified. But despite graphic footage of fetid tenements and scenes of psychiatrists callously hectoring their spiritually bruised patients, Fowler tags no one Guillaume Bijl as wholly good or evil. Rather, he Composition Trouve, 2011, implies, especially given the works title, that all mixed media. Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter, people areVienna haunted by self-destructive tendencies
ArtReview

David Zink Yi
Untitled, 2012 (installation view). photo: Jens Ziehe/Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

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1964: Ein Stimmungsbild

Installation view. Courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna

Back in the nineteenth century, the still life may have been to the discipline of the fine arts what a Chinese headrest was to smoking in an opium den. Both carried the promise of wider visions: stylistic masterplans in the case of artists who tested their capabilities on a bowl of fruit, and dreams for those intoxicated sleepers who laid their heads on those hard pillows. Such, at least, is one analogy that suggests itself in the vestibule of Laurent Godin, where the journey through Navy Legacy, Haim Steinbachs second solo show here, begins with Avocado 1 (all works but one, 2012): two dozen papier mch fruits in a glass vitrine and an antique wooden headrest, arranged on a green shelf. Next to this incongruous display is a massive, angled white rampart, Untitled (Leaning Wall), which obstructs the narrow lobby, leaving just enough room on its right side for visitors to pass clumsily through. Still standing at the doorway, if you bend your head slightly over the Chinese pillow, youll notice on the left of the obstacle the final part of an enlarged wall text, which reads ants in emboldened black. The rest of it is concealed, the sightline blocked by the architectural intervention. So you have to lower your body and playfully make your way under the leaning wall to access the main space of the gallerys first floor, and the bigger picture. When the complete phrase no elephants is fully apprehensible on the other side, the idiom an elephant in the room comes to mind. That said, the unsuspected

Kishio Suga
Placement of the Hidden Currents, 2012 (installation view). Photo: Keizo Kioku. the artist. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo & Kyoto

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Exhibition Reviews

1964: Ein Stimmungsbild Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna 23 March 28 April

Use the retrospectoscope on the twentieth century, and what grab your lapels and shout now lookie here! are the revolutionary years, whether political or cultural: 1956, 1968, 1989. The wrinklies remind us constantly that stuff happened: you should have been there. And sure, 1969 was a very fine year too, but what about 1964? What about those in-between, connectivetissue years, when plots in the great soap opera of life are being developed? If you were a baby boomer living then in Queens, you would probably shout loudly 1964, hell yeah! Why? Because in 1964 Queens was the site of the New York Worlds Fair, the optimistic storefront for all that was good about America at the time. This was the year when LBJ proudly signed the Civil Rights Act, the Fab Four had the top five slots on the Billboard chart and Goldfinger was released. This was America before it became mired in Vietnam, before the end of innocence. Subtitled Ein Stimmungsbild (an atmospheric picture), 1964 offers a cool, detached glimpse of a time when the world of tomorrow meant flying cars and houses on Mars. Here artworks from that time mingle gnomically with display cabinets and artefacts from the Worlds Fair. Vienna-born architect Victor Gruen, pioneer of the shopping mall, helped prepare the feasibility studies for the fair. There was a space park sponsored by NASA with a Gemini capsule and the first stage of a Saturn V rocket. Philip Johnson designed a pavilion called the Tent of Tomorrow with high observation towers. Charles and Ray Eames showed the workings of computer logic in a film. There are archive shots here of armchair rides through wondrous visions supplied by Kodak and Ford. Wisconsin exhibited the Worlds Largest Cheese and Walt Disney unveiled animatronics that annoyingly, insistently, reminded us that its a small world after all The fair lost money, and whats to show for all that boosterism, whats left? Space junk and the Unisphere, a 12-storey stainless-steel representation of the globe, at rest in Flushing Meadows. This is planet earth then, a heap of stylishly useless metal. Here in shrunken model form is Gilmore D. Clarkes design for it. This is the architecture that, in 1964, inspired Britains Thunderbirds television series its makers world, and now ours, is a supermarionated world fit for puppets (us) who have their strings pulled and then get blown up. If only the Americans had let the wit of Claes Oldenburg loose on Queens. And what of the art that quietly surrounds this archive?

We get a photograph of Gnter Brus predictably pouring stuff over himself, some Richard Artschwager structures, a nonsensical certificate signed by Marcel Duchamp, a mute Warhol Jackie. The nonjudgemental character of the art here recalls Audens imperturbable dogs in his Musee des Beaux Arts (1938). Artworks and artists go on with their arty life. Musing on a more catastrophic year, 1914, Rebecca West, writing in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), offers a stab at the meaning of life which is loose and purposeless, which weaves a close pattern and doggedly pursues its ends, which is unpredictable and illogical, which follows a straight line from cause to effect, which is bad, which is good. Those words capture the forensic, gimlet-eyed, God-like take on 1964 offered here: a take that saddens. Where is our promised better world? john qUin

Kishio Suga: Placement of the Hidden Currents Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo 10 March 14 April

as we continue to work our way through the space of relational aesthetics while navigating the clutter of art fairs, Im finding poetic justice in the powerful return of Mono-ha to the international stage. It may well be that another look at a Japanese art movement from the late 1960s/early 70s that was named a School of Things is just what we need right now. A recent (and stunning) historical group exhibition at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles supported this conclusion, but it is this solo show of early and recent work by one of the movements most important artists, Kishio Suga, that confirms them. Most importantly, however, Sugas exhibition demonstrates that his focus remains as approachable as it is still sharp. Twelve black-and-white photographs serve as an introduction to the exhibition by documenting several of Sugas early interventions, ranging, for example, from Related Appearance (1969) to Appearing Space (1982). All of these works were arranged outdoors, clearly provisional yet anchored by the specifics of their situation as well as by what he considers to be the concepts

that exist in his simple materials prior to his use of them, concepts that are to his mind made visible first in the form of the materials themselves, and then in his re-presentation of them. This, of course, may be hard to convey in a photograph (as in Appearing Space) of four rocks arranged on the corners of a sheet of paper placed on the ground, with one corner suggestively torn away, and it could be said that the look of these rather aesthetically pleasing examples seems to align Sugas early activities too closely with contemporaneous art activities from other parts of the world, including Postminimalism, Arte Povera and Supports/Surfaces. Therefore, it is not surprising that the more recent work exerts an almost gravitational pull from within the main space of the gallery, where, after all, everything in it is fully present. Surrounding and Connected Scenery (1998) does just what its title claims. A large multipart wall work made of irregularly shaped wood panels that are painted orange and connected at varying right angles by aluminium rods, it was first shown at the Yamaguchi Prefectural Art Museum the year it was made. Here it has been rearranged so that it starts in the hallway, leads us into the main gallery and then travels aggressively around its entire perimeter, reiterating its material simplicity and complicating what could be called its structural integrity, even though its the pure opposite of unstable. In the end, its the work from the past year that brings all of Sugas concepts and materials to a place of absolute beauty, somewhere resolutely sculptural and relational and so very much here. Made from substantial sections of square timber or logs, all of these works (seven are included, all from 2011) incorporate numerous stones that have been loosely embedded in their surfaces. This, surprisingly, doesnt come across as embellishment; rather, it reads as inevitable, as bound to happen as the circumstances identified in their titles (Emerging Stone, Still Space, Remaining Stone, etc), conditions that continue to provide Suga with plenty of room to keep his convictions as agile as ever. Terry r. Myers

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On the Town
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GlasGow InternatIonal festIval of vIsual art, 1921 aprIl photography dan coopey 1 Artist Wolfgang Tillmans 2 Gallerist Kendall Koppe and former Black Panther Party minister of culture Emory Douglas 3 Artists Jeremy Deller and Richard Wright 4 The Modern Institutes Simon Gowing and artist Michael Wilkinson 5 Artist Susan Philipsz and Modern Art Oxford director Michael Stanley 6 Critic Steven Cairns 7 Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts Charlotte Day, Modern Institute director Toby Webster and Common Guild and GI director Katrina Brown 8 Mary Mary director Hannah Robinson and the BBCs Lindsey Hanlon 9 Artist Mick Peter and daughter Nina 10 Eastside Projectss Gavin Wade 11 Artists Oliver Braid and Ellie Harrison 12 Artist and curator Matthew Higgs
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Willie Doherty anD nathaniel mellors, matts gallery, 12 april photography ian pierce 1 Graphic designer Phil Baines and Willie Doherty 2 Film and Video Umbrellas Steven Bode and Camden Arts Centres Ben Roberts 3 Artists Jordan Baseman and Brian Catling 4 Artist Tala Madani and Nathaniel Mellors 5 Curator David Thorpe, Matts Gallerys Holly Slingsby and the British Councils Richard Riley 6 Gallerist Anthony Reynolds and producer Jacqui Davies 7 Artists Richard Wilson and Miyako Narita with the British Councils Richard Riley 8 Artists Alison Turnbull and Jananne Al-Ani 9 Timothy Taylor Gallerys Emma Dexter 10 Artists Brian Catling and David Osbaldeston 11 Matts Gallery director Robin Klassnik and Camden Arts Centres Ben Roberts 12 Writer Sally OReilly and Nathaniel Mellors
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Books

Collected Writings

Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader

Edited by Susan Morgan East of Borneo Books, $34.95 (softcover) If the GI Bill, passed in the US in 1944, facilitated a route into architecture for thousands of young men who would never otherwise have become architects, it didnt do a lot for women. The intention to give demobbed soldiers the opportunity of a university education created a real jump in social equality, putting a temporary end to the tradition of architecture being a vocation for those who could afford to work in offices for a pittance while studying the equivalent of todays internships (Frank Lloyd Wright used to charge students for the privilege of working in his office). But the rush to give exsoldiers places on architecture courses meant that women who wanted to study didnt have a chance. And that was the case with Esther McCoy. Born in Arkansas in 1904, McCoy studied in Michigan, worked in New York and moved to Los Angeles in 1932 to recover from a bout of pneumonia. There, over a lifetime of writing, she was responsible for early attempts to define West Coast architecture as a phenomenon, creating a cultural shift that presaged the westwards transfer of influence from the East Coast, which took place later in art and jazz, as the harshness of Abstract Expressionism and hard bop gave way to laidback LA and the cool school during the 1950s. McCoy spent the war working in a draughting office drawing aeroplane wings, and that experience stood her in good stead when she went to get a job with Viennese migr architect Rudolph Schindler. From then on McCoy
156 Book Reviews

immersed herself in the odd world of a California architecture that came from elsewhere yet somehow gelled to become something recognisable. Back in New York, she had worked as assistant to the novelist Theodore Dreiser and had written short stories and articles for leftwing literary magazines, so she was able to blend this knowledge of the emerging California school with an ability to write. It seems extraordinary that McCoys Five California Architects the first book in the field to acknowledge a distinctive local architecture only appeared in 1960. By then Schindler and his Viennese contemporary Richard Neutra had set the scene with a series of houses that blended elements of Wrights horizontal, landscapefocused romanticism with the severe, modernist legacy of Adolf Loos. John Entenzas Case Study Houses (including works by Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Eero Saarinen, Craig Ellwood and Neutra himself ) had become the most influential dwellings since the glory years of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. The glassy boxes, shimmering pools and seductive lifestyle of the California hills had replaced the Manhattan apartment as the zenith of style. Los Angeles became the worlds pattern book. Included in McCoys Five are Irving Gill, Bernard Maybeck, Greene & Greene (counting as two) and Schindler, a group that spans the leap from Arts and Crafts to Modernism in a few short years. Piecing Together Los Angeles includes essays and reminiscences about her time with Dreiser and Schindler as well as correspondence (including a tetchy exchange with science-fiction author Ray Bradbury), and shows her identifying emerging figures on the LA scene, most notably Frank Gehry, whose Ordinary Joe shtick and packaging-materials palette she catches perfectly. But the text really comes to life all too briefly in a poignant short story entitled The Important House. Reminiscent of Carver in its cool dissection of a moment, it relates the story of an architect returning with a photographer and dismantling the beloved interior landscape of his creation for the shot, removing the items of sentimental value that make the house a home for its owner. The rest of McCoys writing is, frankly, not as good. Rather its importance lies in its persistent attempts to begin to define a particular landscape of architectural culture that could embrace the Watts Towers and the Lovell Health House: eccentric extremes. If Julius Shulman captured this world through irresistibly glamorous photos of cocktails on the terrace and loungers by the modernist pool, McCoy captured it in words. Shulmans images will, I think, last longer, but McCoys doggedness in defining a world has meant that the idea of California architecture has become an archetype, a lifestyle to which, no matter how much we may dislike LA, we cant help but aspire to a little. EdWIn HEatHCotE

Fiction

The Lives of Things

By Jos Saramago Verso, 12.99/$23.95 (hardcover) Originally published in 1978 but here collected in English for the first time, these six early stories by Portugals late Nobel laureate (best known for the 1995 novel Blindness) take as their subject precisely nothing. Or to be even more precise and this is fitting, because an extreme precision of both language and narrative is one of Saramagos trademarks the things in these stories are no things at all: a chair generates a study of entomology that morphs into an intense political and social meditation; a car displays a will of its own, enslaving its driver; a settee requires medical treatment for a fever; and a postbox decides to just leg it and go. In short, Saramagos things are everything things are not: living, specific and animate. Its tempting at this point to deploy some clich about acorns and oak trees or small creeks and mighty rivers, but that wouldnt do justice to this authors transformations of nothings into

somethings. Better to say that Saramago (who died in 2010) takes the microscopic, the mundane the objects and incidents we overlook by hiding them under the carpet of whats commonly termed the everyday and, operating like some black hole, funnels these weightless subjects into a situation in which they acquire almost infinite mass. Which, of course, is also the way that we are encouraged and inclined to treat works of art. The first thing to receive this treatment is that nondescript wooden chair. To which we are introduced as it stands on the point of collapse. We all know whats going to happen next: a fall. Indeed, Saramago dispatches the story in his first sentence: The chair started to fall, to come crashing down, to topple, but not strictly speaking to come to bits. Which leaves him free to launch into digressions on the types of wood from which the chair may or may not be constructed and the activities of the bugs that tunnelled through a wooden leg to trigger the collapse. All of which parallels the incident (falling out of a deck chair) that caused the brain haemorrhage that led to the death of Portugals infamous fascist dictator, Antnio de Oliveira Salazar. Although unless youre familiar with Portuguese history, youre only going to know this from translator Giovanni Pontieros introduction. Still, such is the storys power that even the uninitiated can trace the

slow, natural, inexorable creep of revolution through Saramagos prose. Sometimes a chair would serve as a fulcrum to lever the earth, the author writes. Other stories tend more towards the surreal, revealing the inherent comedy in Saramagos attempts to place things at the centre of the world. In Embargo a salesman becomes trapped bonded to the drivers seat by his cars endless thirst for petrol, during a shortage; he only gains release when the town and the car finally run dry. Similarly, in The Centaur we are offered firsthand experience from the problematic existence of a man who is bonded to a horse and subject to both human and animal impulses. While such stories may not offer us Saramago at his best (they are sometimes a bit too redolent of the odour of peers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garca Mrquez), his ability to tame the bizarre and improbable within a pseudologic and free-flowing prose that makes even the ridiculous seem plausible nevertheless shines through. However Things, the central and longest story of this collection, is something of a masterpiece. Set in a totalitarian state, in which citizens are divided into alphabetical categories of status (affecting, among other things, the quality of goods they are allowed to buy), it concerns a revolution by the OUMIs (object, utensil, machine or installation), all of which gradually start to disappear: first postboxes, then steps and jugs, and finally entire buildings. The prose, of course, suggests that there is little difference between an X-, Y- or Z-class citizen and an OUMI, and when the missing OUMIs reappear in human form to massacre their old masters, it seems (almost) natural for the author to sign off with the words never again will men be treated as things. Which, in the end, is the perfect mirror of this collections epigraph, borrowed from Marx and Engelss The Holy Family (1845): If man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human. This, of course, is a laudable sentiment, but what Saramago ultimately demonstrates is that any attempt to humanise the things around us comes with the risk of our losing track of what made us specifically human in the first place. Mark rappOlt

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Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
By David Harvey Verso, 9.99/$16.95 (hardcover) If, in the traditional communist view, the revolution was to be led by the industrial proletariat, then how do we explain the recent wave of urban protests? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new revolutionary force made up not of factory workers but of urbanites more generally? With the political awakening last year of a protest generation and military strategists turning to questions of handling urban insurrection, it is a timely moment for David Harveys Rebel Cities. In it, the eminent geographer, social theorist and Marxist minces no words in the expression of his goal, which is collectively to build the socialist city on the ruins of destructive capitalist urbanisation. His polemic is persuasive and at times rousing, even if he is more tentative on how the revolution will be achieved. It has to be said that while Rebel Cities is a response to recent events, it is not about them. Most of these essays were published previously and are appended here with a couple of much thinner, though no less trenchant, reckonings on last years London riots and the Occupy Wall Street protests. The results are mixed, but the first two chapters alone are essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the economic and social crises facing the modern metropolis. Harvey opens with Henri Lefebvres notion of the right to the city, a catchall concept that upholds citizens access to public space, to the street, to jobs and to everything that urban culture affords. That may sound trite, but the history of modern urbanisation proves that the right to the city is most often the preserve of oppressive or neoliberal governments and rapacious developers. From Haussmanns Paris to Robert Moses and the suburbanisation of America, Harvey argues, the city has been a primary mechanism for the extraction of surplus value. In other words, cities march to capitalisms drumbeat and there is no capitalism, in the Marxian view, without exploitation of the proletariat. Harvey is very good on the role that urbanisation, and property speculation in particular, has played in the history of economic crises. From the end of the construction boom in America in 1928 (heralding the Wall Street crash of 1929) to the roots of the current recession in

Manifesto

Artist Books

The Time Machine

By Alex Cecchetti, Mark Geffriaud and Kit Poulson Edited by Francesco Pedraglio Book Works, three books, 8 each (softcover) Things disappear fast now, dissolving one into another, becoming other. We need to be quicker than the ever-elusive present. We need to anticipate the past, forecast possible histories, revisit alternative futures. While these words seem appropriate to the present, they were in fact written in 1895, by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine, and were the binding principle for curator Francesco Pedraglio in commissioning three experimental books, each an artists treatment of temporality constructed with words and structured around different conceptions of times passing. The Curve of Forgotten Things, by Mark Geffriaud, uses two parallel columns of text representing the structure of conversation the natural interruptions and talking-over to relay the artists interview with an anthropologist on the subject of an ancient ritual in which visitors and tribal leaders shout over one another in greeting, in a performance of simultaneity. In Alex Cecchettis A Society That Breathes Once a Year, a narrative featuring a couple caught in the midst
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of an apocalyptic, death-mired future landscape (ironically resembling a more feral past), begins at the painful disintegration of the pairs relationship before looping back to convey their optimistic, pioneering spirit early on. The fragmented, conversational dialogues, like shattered philosophical texts, in Kit Poulsons The Ice Cream Empire, are based around a seaside town and its mirrored ice-cream parlour, where its baroque wafers, glitter and too-bright ice-cream shades are conceived as an accumulation of attempts to distribute a more democratic joy, an experience which tends towards dissolution. This sense of dissolving, of time melting like ice cream, is something reflected in the entire series.
LAurA McLeAn-FerrIs

the subprime mortgage fiasco, the greedy extraction of surplus value ends up hurting the urban poor most. Foreclosures and repossessions are the result of bankers, speculators and politicians playing at what Marx called fictitious capital and what Harvey dubs unreal estate. The lessons are there, and Harvey insinuates that there may be more to come if China, which is experiencing speculative urbanisation on a scale the world has never seen, follows suit. What is to be done, then? Picking up the Lefebvrian gauntlet, Harveys call is for citizens to remake the city more after their own hearts desire. There are precedents, albeit short-lived ones. The most important is the Paris Commune of 1871, which was not an uprising of the working class but drew on broader social alliances. This, he argues, is the key, the rising up of a new proletariat not comprising factory workers but urban dwellers across the board. A more recent example is the El Alto rebellion in Bolivia in 2003, when the city challenged the privatisation of the gas industry and brought down the president. The new revolts, in Harveys view, cannot be mere class warfare but will rely on cross-sector alliances and a sense of place. In other words, the city itself is the battleground, and the quality of urban life is what can unite a divided left in the anticapitalist struggle. The problem is that protest movements are ephemeral things, which often fail to achieve a critical mass or are undermined from within (because horizontal politics are a leftist fetish). Harvey gives last years global protest movement rather short shrift. There is nothing on Cairo. He attacks the Daily Mails feral rioters epithet, and turns it back on a feral capitalism but we know this is not the revolt hes waiting for. Occupy Wall Street fares better less of a Lefebvrian bacchanal and more socially diverse. More righteous anger here: They [the police and the mayor] claim they are taking action in the public interest (and cite laws to prove it), but it is we who are the public! And by the way, is it not our money that the banks and financiers so blatantly use to accumulate their bonuses? The solution to undermining the forces of capital appears to be not merely a politics of defiance but one of reorganisation. How does one organise a city? That is the question. Justin McGuirk

Multimedia Edition

The Sleepwalkers Box

By Doug Aitken Princeton Architectural Press, $300/200 (boxset) Comprising a poster, a picture book, two flipbooks, a vinyl picture disk, a CD and a DVD, this lavish boxset represents something of a history of twentiethcentury media (or at least the bit of it thats widely playable no eight-tracks, video or audio cassettes here), or as the publishers would have it, a kaleidoscopic multimedia experience documenting Aitkens Sleepwalkers (2007), a film installation featuring eight large moving images projected on the walls of New Yorks MoMA. The vinyl and CD feature a soundtrack (largely by British electronic band Broadcast), as well as a recording of Aitkens brilliant The Handle Comes Up, The Hammer Comes Down (2009), a chorus of auctioneers performing an opera consisting of a series of escalating bids. The DVD features a walkthrough of the original installation and an edited version of the eight movies. Aitken is something of a pioneer when it comes to making his work available to a popular audience (last years Altered Earth is available as an app artwork), and The Sleepwalkers Box continues that drive, providing those who might not have seen the installation with the nearest thing to the immersive experience of the original. The price may be steep, but the box is limited to 1,000 numbered copies, each including a signed authentication card, and its a much more sophisticated and genuine attempt to document the experience of an artwork than any catalogue could ever be.
Mark rappolt

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Collected Writings

The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art

By Michael Bracewell Ridinghouse, 20/$35 (softcover) Michael Bracewell envelops the reader with his erudition. At a surprisingly measured pace, the critic carefully mingles one cultural reference with another, weaving them together in the reviews, catalogue essays and features that make up the bulk of this collection with enviable, brilliant skill. An essay written in 2004 concerning the work of Richard Wentworth, for example, ambles through references to The Wizard of Oz (1939), Roland Barthes, the Who and Sren Kierkegaard without so much as a falter in Bracewells stride, building a delightful cultural milieu with which to surround the British artists practice. When Bracewells writing is anthologised, however, the conservatism that has always bubbled under it becomes more apparent. The authors refusal to state any explicit agenda is marked when one considers just how much his subjective cultural interests inform his writing. Certain references recur with such frequency that, were one to be cruel, itd be possible to play a game of Bracewell bingo: the writing of Tom Wolfe is given the nod in six separate texts, for example on Patrick Caulfield, Peter Saville, Keith Coventry, Jim Lambie, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, and the impact of the Turner Prize. The repetition infers less that Wolfe has had tangible impact on all these subjects, more that the American writer is a preoccupation of Bracewells.
160 Book Reviews

The self-acknowledged high romanticism and repeated bouts of nostalgia evoked in Bracewells prose verge on pure aestheticism, with the artists and their work seeming oblivious to wider social concerns. Few of the artists selected in this collection have overtly political practices (with the notable exceptions of Rita Donagh, Richard Hamilton and Leigh Bowery) and more often than not theyre individuals whose careers existed in a bohemian coterie yet what obvious social points might be derived from, say, George Shaws renditions of working class suburbia simply arent made. In a more extreme case, the manner in which Bracewell shies away from the tangled politics inherent in Hamiltons painting The Citizen (19813) a diptych depicting an Irish Republican prisoner in a faeces-smeared cell by preferring to describe, in a 2011 essay, the dirty protester as an otherworldly figure with ambiguous mysticism, who could be mistaken for a rock star, is somewhat shocking. If this stubborn aestheticism is troublesome, then the writer himself seems to recognise it as such. The last series of essays are collected under the title Germany Is Your America, which derives from a dream Bracewell had in which Brian Eno appeared to him and uttered the idiosyncratic proclamation. Reference to this visitation is apt, as these essays seem to represent a Damascene conversion in relation to his earlier writing (especially as Bracewell notes

that this project was instigated while he was recovering from heart surgery). He admits he harboured a hateful snobbishness and insecurity as a child and notes that his writing comes not from political conscience but as a means of owning work. Writing is a shopping spree, Bracewell rather wonderfully concedes. It is these later texts, and their honest analysis of Bracewells own writing practice, that manage to erase any niggles that develop during the course of reading his earlier copy. His avoidance of political realism isnt the result of a conservative standpoint; rather, it is an attempt to create an oddly infectious brand of critical, magical realism. Bracewell offers an intoxicating escape from the squalor of political reality, with art as its conduit, to somewhere more exotic. And it seems ungenerous to judge him too harshly for that. Oliver BasCianO

Collected Writings

The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard

Monograph

Luigi Ghirri: Project Prints

Edited by Elena Re JRP Ringier, 39/32/$55 (hardcover) In 1980, just over a decade before his death, the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri began working with a large-format camera which produced large negatives, and used these to make small images project prints, as he termed them to construct collections gathered in a single structure: pictures of the sky taken every day, for example, arranged like a calendar, or several images of the same site taken over a number of years approaches that recall Hans-Peter Feldmanns archives or Gerhard Richters ongoing Atlas project. This publication reprints many of these small images at 1:1 scale, as well as documenting some of the ways in which Ghirri put them to use in objects, boxes and books, together with his many found images and postcards. His interest in homes for images can be seen here in his pictures of people looking at artworks in museums, which not only prefigure Thomas Struths treatment of the same subject but also create a more intimate, rather humble depiction of the experience of looking. Ghirris softly lit landscapes have the subtle wit and warmth that one associates with American contemporaries such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston: billboards, gas stations, vehicles and street signs are as intrinsic to Ghirris Italian landscapes as Venetian canals, churches, villas and flowers. Capturing common life in Italy, rather than the edited-highlights imagery via which his country preferred to sell itself to tourists, was crucial to the photographer; Ghirri saw the unwillingness to term a suburb a landscape as a form of unutterability that reveals our total inability to transform into something acceptable the place and time we inhabit.
Laura McLean-Ferris

Edited by Ron Padgett Library of America, $35 (hardcover) Joe Brainard is best remembered, aptly enough, for I Remember (1975), the extended piece of prosody my only major work, as the American artist modestly put it in one interview that spills over this compendiums first 136 pages. Reading it, one can easily wax hyperbolic: by prefacing 1,500 textual fragments with I remember and following each with a splinter of his past, Brainard created a rationalised yet affecting and very American parallel to Proust: a rolling conveyor belt of details framing his childhood in Oklahoma and adulthood in New York in terms of both preservation and loss. I remember rummage sales. Ice cream socials. White gravy. I remember the outhouse and a Sears and Roebuck catalogue to wipe off with. I remember glimpses of activity in orange windows at night. I remember eating tunnels and cities out of a watermelon. I remember Christmas tree lights reflected on the ceiling. Also: sexual fumbles, rainbow-toned grease in puddles, realising he was gay, his collection of ceramic monkeys Brainard is congenial, unflinching, and his past has enough overlapping details with anyones that I Remember feels at points like a time machine, at others like a sanctioned invasion of privacy. The rest of Collected Writings is primarily devoted to Self-Portrait, a 350-page chronological medley of Brainards other writings, melding into a warmly flickering life. We begin with the artist, age nineteen, on Christmas night in 1961, delivering a lengthy, single-paragraph blurt that, while tipsy on the overflowing spontaneity hallmarked by Jack Kerouac (I Remember, for all its cleanness, is also marked by Beat-patented exultance in lifes tiniest gradations), is also an articulate portrait of a young idealist, loving art yet suspicious of being an artist, whos already alienated most of his friends. We end in approximately 1980 with a lovely thumbnail sketch: Brainard alone with Mozart and Campari, snow falling outside against a translucent sky of deep lavender. A few more details, and its as simple as this, what I want to tell you about: if perhaps not much, everything. Painting the moment for you tonight. As in his visual art which was wildly divergent, taking in realistic oil paintings and comic-book imagery allied to confessional writing, but best typified by intricate Pop-flavoured collages that turn ordinary details into a gnostic code Brainard began, and ended, as a celebratory intimist for whom mere life, as it moved by in high colour, was often enough.

The midsection of the book reflects his disinterest in categories: its hard to say what a lot of these pieces are, which is part of their screwball readability, though they use levity to stash away gravity. There are downbeat diaries, descriptions of impossible women, an autobiographical fragment whose second sentence declares the first to be a lie and the touching note-to-self, How to Be Alone Again (Read/Drink/Dont think too much/Or else think a lot). There are poems like I Like (pink nuns and salty peanuts / and Renoir who bores me / But most of all I like shoe polish) that rehearse the tricky enthusiasms of Frank OHaras contemporaneous Lunch Poems (1964). (OHara was a friend and occasional lover, and this book offers, among other things, a slantwise portrait of the New York Schools poets, many of them Brainards friends.) People of the World: Relax! is perhaps the closest thing here to Brainards visual art, a comic strip that allows characters from the funny papers to ventriloquise things like Take it easy and smoke a lot and Make all the noise you want to on the toilet: other people will hear you but it does not matter. It doesnt matter either, finally, what you call Brainards writing. Writing about Richard Brautigan, a reviewer once noted that the author had invented a new category of books, Brautigans. Here are some Brainards, around 100 of them, to be read now and, surely, remembered later. Martin HerBert

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Tuesday, May 1, 2012 02:14 Subject: off the record Date: Tuesday, May 1, 2012 15:39 From: gallerygirl@artreview.com To: <office@artreview.com> Conversation: off the record

They hired Andrea Schlieker! I shake my head sadly. Of course I have known for weeks that White Cube has hired the glossy-haired curator of the Folkestone Triennial, the British Art Show 6 and other such worthy shows. But Marco, my former boss and the director of leading emerging-art dealers Visual Arts Now! (Inc), has just heard the news. He slumps back into his Russell Pinch Riley club chair, the blood just starting to dry on his upper lip. I dont get it, GG. Curators were totally superfluous last year. And now White Cubes got the Schlieker-Freaker. Lisson fronted up the India Art Fair with Greg Hilty. Dont know how well that went, but still, a powerful message to our Indian chums. And us? What were they telling us? He leaps to his feet, and for a moment his lithe form stretches not unattractively against the contours of his Viktor & Rolf warm terracotta slim-fit washed-cotton suit. Youre right, I reply. Curators were nobodies. But this year theyre somebodies. Its the Documenta effect. Documentaries? Shit, I love them. Jeremy Paxman, Jeremy Clarkson, the whole kaboodle. Documenta. You know, the five-yearly curator clusterfuck that nobody else visits? Combine a Documenta year with a Manifesta year, and you know what youve got? Documanfest? Omnidocimanufest? Dan Mocafesta? Cuauhtmoc Medina? Thats right. You get Cuauhtmoc Medina, Raimundas Malaauskas, Chus Martnez, Andrea Villani and thats just for starters. Fuck! You mean the entire Portuguese football team are coming to play? Marco looks over his shoulder, clearly worried. No, curators. Theyre all curators. And this is their time. Because as Jerry Saltz recently wrote: For nearly 10 years, starting in the late nineties, art and money had sex in public. Jerry wrote that? The guy from reality television? What did he mean? What does it all mean? What it means, Marco, is that you need to get yourself a curator. Or youll find yourself doing a Giti Nourbakhsch-style valedictory dance on YouTube, my friend. The blood drains out of Marcos face. Not one of those German wig-outs. Christ. You must think, GG! Who? Who will come and be my curatorial muscle at the host of international art fairs I participate in? How about a dashing fella like Tom Morton? Too obvious, Marco. You need somebody who doesnt look like a commercial dealer, somebody whose very presence on your extra-large stand at SCOPE Basel will stop the crowds in their tracks. Youre right, Mortons too well dressed. He could work in H&M menswear. You mean someone whose dress sense shows a crazily independent streak? I know where youre coming from, but theres no way I can afford the Biesenbach. The Biesenbach is the right direction, though. Someone who says things like Theaster knows very well the traditions of Minimalism or who can quote Susan Sontag to Lady Gaga. That can work wonders at an art fair. Forget Biesenbach. Blighty is stuffed with intelligent curators. How about that clever chap running Milton Keynes Gallery? Or Lisa Le Feuvre at the Henry Moore Institute? Surely they must be sick of living miles out in the sticks and never seeing the hustle and bustle of London. Well, quite Polly Staple! Achim Borchardt-Hume! Sarah McCrory! Joe La Placa! Joey Barton! Where do we go from here? Slow down, Marco. I grab his palm, heavy with sweat, and guide him to his Barber Osgerby Loop desk, where serendipitously a small pile of Mexxy awaits untouched. Twenty minutes later, Marco is zoned out in the Foersom & Hiort-Lorenzen Blow armchair. Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death, can erase our good deeds, GG. I show a bunch of artists, each of whose work looks nothing like that of the others. Who on earth could master that and flog it at a fair through the sheer surprise of their presence? And then in addled minds a vision appears, like the wind coming over a distant ridge and gathering itself into a tornado, the vision of a stormy evening in Kassel just 15 short years ago. Catherine David! GG
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Modernists
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A single journey can change the course of a life. Cambodia, May 2011.
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