ArtReview Magazine, December 2010

Issue 46 £5.00 ‘In the Western world people see the work as just pattern; if I show it in the Arab world the work changes totally’ Susan Hefuna

December 2010 Rasheed Araeen: The artist who came in from the cold Adrian Ghenie: His work may be haunted by history, but he ain’t no history painter Ignacio Uriarte: One man, four pens, eight sheets of paper

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Current exhibition: Fathi hassan, 12 november – 18 DeCember 2010, Leighton house museum, LonDon artists representeD inCLuDe: ayman baaLbaki, bita ghezeLayagh, Chant aveDissian, hassan hajjaj, khaLiL rabah, parastou Forouhar, raeDa saaDeh, susan heFuna, taraneh hemami anD WaLiD siti

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feb 26 – m a r 26, 2011 CALI FO R N IA D R E AM I N ’ M Y TH S AN D LEG E N DS O F LOS AN G E LE S a group show curated by hedi slimane

john baldessari , chris burden , aaron curry, mark grotjahn , patrick hill , dennis hopper ,

mike kelley, joel morrison , raymond pettibon ,

sterling ruby, ed ruscha , jim shaw, aaron young .

DIRK BELL MADE IN GERMANY Until 16 January 2011

Dirk Bell Revelation Big Sun, 2009 (detail). Photo: fubbi.com Courtesy: BQ, Cologne; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; The Modern Institute, Glasgow.

BAL373

IGNACIO URIARTE 22.10.10 - 04.12.10

THE WINTER SHOW 10.12.10 - 29.01.11

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 02.12.10 - 05.12.10 | artbasel.com

VIP ART FAIR 22.01.11 - 30.01.11 | vipartfair.com

Patience Is Beautiful, 2010, wood, ink, 170x170 cm, Courtesy Galerie Grita Insam, © Susan Hefuna

MAPPING WIEN: a project by SUSAN HEFUNA Nov 17, 2009 - Jan 8, 2011 GALERIE GRITA INSAM An der Huelben 3 / Seilerstaette 1010 Vienna Tel. +43 1 512 5330 www.galeriegritainsam.at Exhibition: HEFUNA @ WIEN 2010 GALERIE GRITA INSAM Nov 19, 2010 – Jan 8, 2011

Art Kabinett: Susan Hefuna / Booth # B 27 ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH Dec 2 – 5, 2010

ADRIAN GHENIE 3 December 2010 - 27 March 2011

Citadelpark 9000 Ghent Belgium www.smak.be

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY www.timvanlaeregallery.com

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Contents

on the cover: Susan Hefuna photographed by Robert Nethery

december 2010

DISPATCHES 25 Snapshot: Christian Patterson Now See This: Shanghai Biennale, Carey Young, Freedom of Speech, Hito Steyerl, Günther Förg, Anna Bjerger, Shadow Catchers: CameraLess Photography, Stephen Shore, Frances Stark, My City Columns: Paul Gravett on Mustashrik’s cross-cultural influences and newfound pickup technique; Joshua Mack watches as the Park Avenue Armory readies itself for the big time; Raimar Stange on Berlin’s vanishing political art; Marie Darrieussecq on the politics of exhibition nudity The Free Lance: Christian Viveros-Fauné takes a dim view of New York’s two-speed creative economy London Calling: J.J. Charlesworth questions the purpose of institutional surveys The Painted Word: Nigel Cooke sees the critic as superspectator The Shape of Things: What’s the social status of the tattoo? asks Sam Jacob Design: Hettie Judah takes on the Good Life-ers Top Five: The pick of shows to see this month as selected by Fiona Bradley A New Concise Refererence Dictionary: Daedalus to dystopia, defined by Neal Brown Consumed: John Latham’s DVD, Chrissie Abbott’s mug, Ari Marcopoulos’s camera bag, Manfred Kielnhofer’s neon chair, Lynda Benglis’s print portfolio, David Amar’s Raymond table, Oscar Niemeyer’s chocolate bar, Dom Pérignon and Absolut’s limited editions. Digested: Louis: Night Salad, John Pawson: Plain Space, Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe?, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, Sam Francis: Lesson of Darkness, Vanity Fair

New on ArtReview.com News International art, design and architecture news, updated every day, as it happens

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First View Oliver Basciano is thrilled by Forced Entertainment’s new touring production and reviews Alek O. at Gallery Vela, London; Joshua Mack sizes up John Baldessari’s Pure Beauty at the Met, New York; David Ulrichs visits the Kunsthalle Krems and reports on the latest round of Berlin openings, including Carsten Höller at Hamburger Bahnhof Video Oliver Basciano tours the British Art Show 7 and talks to curators Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton; J.J. Charlesworth and Oliver Basciano discuss the 2010 artist projects programme at Frieze Art Fair

52 Variables (Number 1) and (Number 13), 2010, mixed media on aluminum, 39 3/8 x 31 1/8" each. © Keith Tyson, courtesy The Pace Gallery

KEITH TYSON 52 Variables

December 10, 2010 – February 5, 2011

510 West 25th Street, New York City

8 8 85 ) & 1" $ & ( " - - & 3: $ 0 .

Contents

December 2010

FEATURES Susan Hefuna 58

Mark Rappolt explores the Egyptian-German artist’s wilfully slippery statements about identity and the self

adrian ghenie 66

Jane Neal looks at the influence of cinema, psychoanalysis and National Socialism on the Romanian painter’s evolving practice

Scott king 78

Oliver Basciano investigates the satirical work of the pop-loving graphic design marketeer turned artist agitator

biC Monochromes and BiC Stereochromes 85 In the first in a series of artist interventions in the pages of ArtReview, Ignacio Uriarte demonstrates his penmanship

Rasheed araeen 96

REAR VIEW Reviews 115

British Art Show 7, Pavel Büchler, Vicky Wright, WITH, Jennifer Tee, Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan, The Space Between Reference and Regret, Matthew Day Jackson, Tony Cox, Matthew Barney & Jonathan Bepler, Allen Ruppersberg, Alberto Burri, Takashi Murakami, La Carte d’Après Nature: An Artist’s Selection by Thomas Demand, Make Yourself at Home, New Realisms: 1957–1962, Guillermo Faivovich & Nicolás Goldberg, Media City Seoul 2010

BOOKS 134

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Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane; Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership; Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman; Working the Room

Richard Dyer looks at the whole story of an original British minimalist

THE STRIP 138

dan holdsworth 101

ON THE TOWN 140

Mark Rappolt navigates the lunarlike terrain of Iceland’s remote interior via a new series of images by the British photographer

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The smoky world of Mustashrik

The ArtReview party at Almada, London

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OFF THE RECORD 142

Gallery Girl discovers dystopia around a Mayfair corner

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Editorial

Art

Editor Mark Rappolt Executive Editor David Terrien Associate Editors J.J. Charlesworth Martin Herbert Editors at Large Laura McLean-Ferris Jonathan T.D. Neil Assistant Editor Oliver Basciano [email protected]

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Contributors Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, Hettie Judah, Axel Lapp, Joshua Mack, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers Neal Brown, James Clegg, Alex Coles, Nigel Cooke, Amanda Coulson, Marie Darrieussecq, Richard Dyer, Gallery Girl, Rebecca Geldard, Paul Gravett, Luke Heighton, David Everitt Howe, Sam Jacob, Jane Neal, Steve Pulimood, Ed Schad, Raimar Stange, Sam Steverlynk, Jennifer Thatcher, Jonathan Vickery, Christian Viveros-Fauné

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Contributing Artists / Photographers Mustashrik, Robert Nethery, Christian Patterson, Ian Pierce Interns Roisin McQueirns, Katie Bruce

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ConTRIBUTORS

December 2010

Sam Steverlynck

Besides being a correspondent for ArtReview, Brusselsbased freelance critic Sam Steverlynck is a regular contributor to Belgian and Dutch magazines ART, DAMn° and Kunstbeeld. He has also written for Art Papers, artpress and Gonzo (circus). Since he quit his activities as a nightlife critic for Brussels’s weekly The Bulletin, Steverlynck has appreciated filing copy without a bursting headache, bloodshot eyes and an awkward mix of self-loathing and self-pity. Sam shares his time between writing art reviews, trimming his beard and trying to get persistent wine stains out of his white suit.

Robert Nethery

Spending his youth in Miami surfing and skateboarding, Robert Nethery developed an interest in photography when he picked up a camera and set about capturing the laissez-faire attitude of his free-spirited friends. His passion eventually landed him assisting positions with Bruce Weber and Alasdair McLellan, where he gained further creative experience. Nethery creates perceptive images that convey an astute intimacy with his subjects, blurring the lines of fashion and portraiture. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Jane Neal

Independent art critic and curator Jane Neal has curated exhibitions in London, New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Zurich, Prague, Bucharest and Cluj, and contributes to a wide range of international art publications. Over the past five years Neal has become increasingly involved with the developing art scenes of Central and Eastern Europe, and has gained a reputation for profiling young artists from this region. Educated at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute, London, Neal continues to live and work between these two cities, although it’s starting to seem as though she spends most of her time in Wizz Air’s passenger cabins.

Neal Brown

An artist and writer, Neal Brown is the author of Tracey Emin (Tate Publishing 2006), Mat Collishaw (Other Criteria, 2006) and Billy Childish, A Short Study (L-13, 2008). In 2009 he published Nineteen Raptures (NB Publishing). He curated To the Glory of God: New Religious Art, presented at the second Liverpool Biennial, and in September he exhibited in Art Hate, at Galleria Art Hate, London.

Ignacio Uriarte

Ignacio Uriarte is a visual artist based in Berlin.

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ArtReview

fragrance takes to the wing

International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair

Contacts:

April 8/11, 2011

phone +39 02 48550.1 fax +39 02 48550420

Con il co-finanziamento di

Mimmo Jodice, Duomo, Milano, 2010

[email protected] www.miart.it

DISPATCHES DECEMBER

Snapshot Now See This The Free Lance London Calling The Painted Word The Shape of Things

25 26 32 34 36 38

Design Top 5 A New Concise Reference Dictionary Consumed Digested

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46 48 52

This ‘snapshot’ is of the planned site of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ in New York City, where an Islamic organisation is planning to construct a multifaith community centre and mosque, to be located about two blocks from the World Trade Center site. As an American, I am disappointed by the widespread opposition to the project and the ignorance and lack of respect for the First Amendment, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. My mentor William Eggleston once said, ‘Ignorance can always be covered by [the term] “snapshot”’. As an artist, I see much more in this image. I see how a photograph can allude to or portray the energy and presence of a place or thing. It’s this ‘otherness’ that fascinates me. 

snapshot

Christian Patterson ArtReview

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now see this words

Martin herbert

In a cultural moment characterised by lowered expectations, financial aftershocks and an artistic turn towards the performative, a biennial that styles itself as a ‘rehearsal’ rather than a polished and perfected affair makes total sense. Drawing all these impulses together, the organisers

Shanghai Biennale (various venues, Shanghai, to 23 January, www.shanghaibiennale.org) of the eighth

reckon that artists collectively went into a crisis at the same time as the banking system, in 2008: a feeling of being cogs in the system and of having

which has encompassed videos in which the invariably business-suit-wearing artist gives a skills workshop, art-as-legal-contract and recreations of classic performance artworks amid the blank corporate architecture of Dubai – get shown.

Freedom of Speech (Kunstverein Hamburg, 18 December – 13 March, www.kunstverein.de; Neue Berliner Kunstverein, 11 December – 30 January, www.nbk.org) considers the Politics, part III:

role of the titular concept within democracies, via assemblages of media reports and a somewhat mindbending list of artists that includes Norman Rockwell, Hans Haacke, Bruce Nauman, Sister Corita Kent and Mark Wallinger (whose State Britain, 2007, here gets its first showing in Germany). Meanwhile, because it’s the artworld circa 2010, the works will apparently be ‘examined on their truth’ by an institute for language research, and the show will come with its own iPhone app. And Politics, part IV:

nothing new to say. (You might think this happened earlier, but…) The response here is seemingly not so much a conventional exhibition as a multipart intellectual workshop aimed at working past habitual solutions, and includes a 40-artist main event comprising various interactive ‘scenes’; seminars, reading lists and a prefatory collaboration between Liam Gillick, Anton Vidokle and Performa that’s somehow connected to a soap opera; and an ‘India– China Summit on Social Thought’ with attendant exhibition. Let’s boldly predict that this will be marvellous, or a mess, or somewhere in between. Another way to confront art’s inextricability from the larger corporate world might be to burrow more deeply into the latter, to test and illuminate its potential relations to the artworld. Over the past decade, that’s been the approach of

Carey

Young (Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 26 November – 29 January, www.eastsideprojects.org).

Here, alongside a new film, Memento Park (2010), ten works from the British-American artist’s oeuvre – 26

ArtReview

Hito Steyerl (Chisenhale Gallery, London, to 19 December, www.chisenhale.org.uk), a In Free Fall (2010), by

film in which ‘various “crash” narratives’ unfold within the context of an aeroplane junkyard in the California desert, where specific retired planes

clockwise from left: Liu Xiaodong, Untitled, 2010; Carey Young, Memento Park (production still) 2010, video, courtesy the artist; Christoph Schlingensief, Ausländer Raus, 2000, photo: David Baltzer

DISPATCHES

from top: Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall (film still), 2010, film, commissioned by Picture This, Bristol, Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, with support from the Scottish Arts Council and Arts Council England; Günther Förg, Untitled, 2009, acrylic and oil on canvas, 120 x 160 cm, courtesy Galerie Lelong, Paris, New York & Zurich

Mustashrik Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1985 and currently based in London, Mustashrik is like the comics, films, art and design he makes: a fusion bestriding multiple cross-cultural influences. From South Asian cinema comes his fascination for choreography and sudden removals from reality into ornate, escapist sequences of song and dance. From Japan comes a passion for the sensory overload of manga and anime, and the ambiguity and suggestiveness of Haruki Murakami. And from living in various parts of Britain comes an empathy with the plight of others from all stretches of life. His first sustained graphic novel was a tour de force modernisation of Julius Caesar (1599) in 2008 for Londonbased publishers SelfMadeHero’s ‘Manga Shakespeare’ line. Let loose, Mustashrik’s inky brushmarks dance across the pages, the coalescing figures acting in grand, desertlike expanses, evoking recent memories of the Iraq War and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Next in development, in honour of his favourite sci-fi hero, the Japanese Ultraman, is Bigman, an open-ended, cross-platform project. According to Mustashrik, “it’s an unconventional love story in which a girl shows a giant creature how to dance to Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival”. Currently, he’s focusing on Smoke Outside Please, a combination of documentary, music, photography and illustration, inspired by a brief period of debauchery and experiences of ‘smirting’ (smoking and flirting mashed together), a new sexual phenomenon sparked by the ban on indoor public smoking. Mustashrik explains, “It’s picking someone out of a crowd, realising they smoke, waiting for the opportune moment, and then asking them for a light, even if you have your own lighter in your pocket. It’s opened up a whole new level of exploitation in the social scene and an even more evident divide between groups on nights out. You see hundreds of people outside bars smirting, and those who don’t, inside.” Nonsmokers have been known to carry fag packets and lighters to get in on the act. Now that he’s a casual smoker, Mustashrik’s successes with smirting and the people he encountered have inspired him to evolve them into characters in a stylised storyworld. Some have already been caught on camera in teaser trailers at www.mustashrik.com, while others are appearing in graphic form – in this issue’s Strip, for example – hazy with fumes and ashes, the women’s tresses, clothes, smoke and words sensuously billowing, forming an ephemeral sense of communal connection. His smirters’ latest incarnation fills a large digital composition as part of the London Print Studio exhibition That’s Novel: Lifting Comics from the Page!!! Of all his chosen media, comics appeal to him for “the unbridled expression you can create. Anything your mind conjures up can appear on a page within minutes. With comics you are only limited by your own constraints, and in that lies the beauty of it all.” That’s Novel: Lifting Comics from the Page!!! is at the London Print Studio Gallery until 18 December words

paul gravett

(such as the Boeing 4X-JYI Howard Hughes used to own, which ended up being blown up in Jan de Bont’s 1994 action movie Speed) become loci for cycles of capitalism. But enough bloody politics, you cry; let’s have some painting. And you’re in luck. Since his emergence

Günther Förg (Galerie Lelong, Paris, 25 November – 22 January, www.galerie-lelong.com) has in the 1980s,

seemingly done whatever the hell he liked, the freedom itself being the point: producing stonefaced responses to hard-edged American painting years after the fact, photographing fascist architecture and – these days – adopting a mellifluously lyrical ‘old man’ painting style whose singing swatches of chroma synthesise Guston and Matisse, before hanging it on rhapsodic exhibition titles such as (this time) Come, or the stellar tide will slip away. Improbably, the German artist’s stubborn past manages to make this feel almost

radical, though when those hues hit, you won’t care

Anna Bjerger (Paradise Row, London, to 23 December, www. paradiserow.com), meanwhile, starts from either way.

small beginnings – browsing an archive of old magazines and reference books – before effecting

New York Joining the celebrations this holiday season, the Park Avenue Armory – long known to the artworld as the venue for the annual Art Dealers Association fair – kicks off its first full year of cultural programming with the multimedia installation Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway. (More Easter than Christmas, and a bit heavy on ego for the season, but an extravaganza is an extravaganza.) Given New York’s sad lack of attention to its urban treasures, it’s something of a miracle that the Armory, which sits on a prime block in the Silk Stocking District, survived; but no surprise that, like many of our publicly owned treasures, its superb nineteenth-century interiors and 55,000 sq ft drill hall had fallen into disrepair. In 2006 ownership passed from New York State to a nonprofit conservancy which has been transforming the structure into an arts centre. To the tune of $200 million, with renovations by Herzog & de Meuron. After a few experimental seasons – an Aaron Young event with motorcycles and Christian Boltanski’s No Man’s Land (2010), first seen at Paris’s Grand Palais – the place is now ready for the big time. Planned events include an installation by Ryoji Ikeda, a six-week residency by the Royal Shakespeare Company and final performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s farewell tour. I love that the Armory is flexible enough to cover these bases, and that it places performance and installation in the centre of a residential neighbourhood – unlike the Whitney, which was forced by local opposition to build its expansion in the Meatpacking District, a gentrified construct at the fringe of Manhattan, rather than near the Breuer building on the Upper East Side. What I don’t like is how both projects play to the vein of festivalism rampant in our cultural life. True, the Whitney needed more space; but like the High Line, the old freight rail spur renovated to resemble an overgrown ruin, which the museum’s Renzo Piano facility will abut, it will offer tourists (requisite traffic, given the cost of the new digs) a grand monument to starchitecture and amusement-park-scale art. While the Armory is constrained by its size, now that the obvious choice to use it as an arts venue has been made, its challenge is to programme without reinforcing the idea that bigger is necessarily better. The problem is, its draw is its scale; and with clearly grand ambitions and commensurate costs, it needs to play whatever cards it can to attract visitors and donors in the competitive worlds of culture and fundraising. The inevitable consequence is a ramping up of the decibel levels in the ongoing ‘mine is bigger’ shouting match. Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway is on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from 2 December to 6 January words

JOSHUA MACK

a low-key kind of grandstanding: the found images she chooses to paint, through the looseness of handling and sedulous cropping, tend to hum with wild ambiguity in ways the originals never could.

Shadow Catchers: Camera-Less Photography (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, to 20 February, www.vam.ac.uk)

Reversing these terms, meanwhile,

spotlights five photographers – unencumbered by Hasselblads but virtuosic with photographic paper, light and physical objects – who turn their indexical medium radiantly painterly and near

abstract, from Garry Fabian Miller’s glowing, Josef Albers-meets-Tron inset squares to Adam Fuss’s softedged, spectral photograms. If we have no problem with colour in photography

Stephen Shore (Sprüth Magers, Berlin, to 8 January, www.spruethmagers.com), who (along with now, it’s partly thanks to

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from top: Anna Bjerger, Flannel, oil on aluminium, 50 x 40 cm, 2010, © the artist, courtesy Paradise Row, London; Garry Fabian Miller, The Night Cell, 2009–10, water, light, lightjet c-print from dye destruction print, © the artist, courtesy HackelBury Fine Art, London

DISPATCHES

from top: Stephen Shore, Stampeder Motel, Ontario, Oregon, July 19, 1973, 1973–2007, c-print, 51 x 61 cm, © the artist, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York, and Sprüth Magers, Berlin & London; Frances Stark, Toward a score for ‘Load every rift with ore’, 2010, paint and printed matter on paper, 220 x 201 cm, courtesy the artist and Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles

Berlin Berlin once had artists whose ideals were not purely aesthetic: artists who were also known for their political engagement. Witness Olaf Metzel’s legendary 13.4.1981 (referencing a riot sparked by the premature report of terrorist Sigurd Debus’s death in police custody), a sculpture which met with vigorous protest from people and politicians alike in West Berlin when it appeared outside the Café Kranzler in 1987. That things have changed is all too clear from the shortlist of contenders for the 2011 Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art: Cyprien Gaillard, Kitty Kraus, Klara Lidén and Andro Wekua. Once again, and now in its sixth edition, there is not a single artist with an explicitly political agenda among the potential winners of this prize (sponsored by BMW!). Not that it is surprising that there is barely any political art on show in the city’s commercial galleries. After all, the idea is that well-heeled collectors – not naturally left-leaning – should buy the works on display. But with the balance of power shifting to galleries and collectors, the overall situation is becoming increasingly problematic. In the mid-1990s, there were barely 50 galleries in newly reunified Berlin; nowadays there are close to 600. And the collectors are becoming ever more conspicuous. Instead of donating their collections to public institutions in the timehonoured fashion, major players – Boros, Hoffmann, Olbricht, Schürmann and Haubrok spring immediately to mind – are opening their own exhibition spaces. These magnates from the worlds of advertising and financial services are now in effect deciding what is ‘good art’, usurping the role of the independent art curators and historians of the past. And the perilous depoliticisation of the art scene in present-day Berlin is exacerbated by the distinctly surprising fact that a lot of ‘alternative’ art spaces are gaily joining in the game. A good-bad example is the locally not-unknown artists’ collective Stedefreund, currently presenting a three-part exhibition series in its premises in Berlin-Mitte. The aim of the series is ‘to articulate and simultaneously abandon historical antecedents such as Constructivism and Minimalism, along with their ideological instrumentalisation and the discursive debate concerning abstraction versus figuration’. Abstraction will be observed through a ‘magnifying glass’ and ‘subjected to contemporary scrutiny’, as we learn from the press release. An artistic reflection on abstract art – in other words, purely a matter of artistic form; a good seminar topic for secondyear undergraduates at art school – is deemed here to be an adequate curatorial concept, with not a whiff of political engagement. The only (lonely) voices in the wilderness are the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and the NGBK, both of which still concentrate on art as social criticism. Even so, it is worth noting that with its recent exhibition Goodbye London – Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies, the NGBK felt the need to provide us with a historical overview of what once was. words Raimar Stange translated from the German by Fiona Elliott

William Eggleston) took flak in the early 1970s when he produced his conceptualism-indebted serial 3x5s of vernacular America. His 1973 series Uncommon Places, showcased here, doubly demonstrates his being ahead of the curve. Shore was onto nonplaces such as intersections and petrol stations long before they became cultural-studies fodder, and his crisp 8x10 shots have a capacity to put us right amid them, leaving us to navigate not only the photographer’s prescience but our own reflex nostalgia for era-specific emptiness.

Tracing the trajectories of one’s own thought has, for the last decade, been the guiding principle for

Frances Stark (List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, to 2 January, http://listart.mit.edu). Aptly presented in a

hothouse of thinking, the California artist’s first US survey should find her text-based art, fine-boned drawings and crackerjack sculptures – giant telephones doubling as costumes, for example –

DISPATCHES

But enough bloody mental gymnastics, you cry; let’s have a tour of Turkey. And you’re in luck, because

My City (various venues and cities, Turkey, into 2011, www.mycity.eu.com),

coinciding with Istanbul’s year as European Capital of Culture and aimed at fostering dialogue between Turkey and Europe, finds five artists from five EU countries situating projects in five Turkish cities, including Germany’s Clemens von Wedemeyer in Mardin, Poland’s Joanna Rajkowska in Konya and (again) the UK’s Mark Wallinger in Canakkale. This last artist’s video installation, in a temporary cinema constructed for the project and facing onto the Dardanelles strait, offers a lifesize, time-delayed (by 24 hours) view of the liquid line between Europe and Asia outside it – layering recent and (symbolically) distant pasts onto present; fractious local history onto now. But enough bloody Turkey, you cry…

Paris At the entrance to Larry Clark’s exhibition Kiss the Past Hello, currently at Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, a sign reads: ‘Under-eighteens not admitted’. This was a surprising decision on the part of the socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, whose intention was to protect those responsible for the museum: ‘Times have changed’, he has said, evidently referring to the sinister affair of the CAPC Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art, where an association ‘for child protection’ has been harrying (legally) that museum’s director and two curators for ten years, following their exhibition of works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and others. Has the precautionary principle been taken too far? One of the CAPC curators, Marie-Laure Bernadac, told me she was dismayed to learn that Kiss the Past Hello has been closed to under-eighteens, because that’s precisely what the decency lobby that ranks art alongside pornography wants. Clark himself is distressed about the fact that pictures of teenagers are refused to teenagers, insisting on his models’ consent. City Hall defends its position by remarking that panels warning sensitive natures of explicit content now provide insufficient legal cover. The leftwing press speaks of censorship; the rightwing press takes advantage of the situation to question Clark’s work. It’s so crowded in the museum that the photos are barely visible. Two young Gus Van Sant-style skaters are turned away. They’re seventeen. A young woman with a newborn in a kangaroo sling has to talk her way in: “He’s only a month old!” The baby has been in very close contact with this young woman’s vagina not so long ago: what will the police do about that? The show starts with photos by Clark’s parents (Clark’s mother was a door-to-door baby photographer, as it happens) and continues with the screening of a 16mm film shot in Tulsa in 1968, showing the daily life of young junkies, one of whom is pregnant. “I’m the one who shouldn’t be seeing that”, the young mother says to me, looking rather pale. A wall is covered with a black-and-white series in which a teenager mimes suicide by hanging, revolver and razor blade. Further on, ecstatic faces, experimental coitus, a very beautiful take on Courbet’s Origin of the World (1866). Gangsters with children’s faces and adult-size genitals: bodies that shock precisely because of their adolescent state, that intermediate age Larry Clark has borne witness to from the 1960s till today. There’s a big difference between purposely choosing to visit an exhibition and being forced to see teenage bodies (particularly girls’) in advertising everywhere. Pornography is down the first street you take, on the first website. Larry Clark purifies our way of seeing by encouraging us to think, to remember who we are and recall our own first times. Larry Clark: Kiss the Past Hello is at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to 2 January words marie darrieussecq translated from the French by Emmelene Landon

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ArtReview

Clemens von Wedemeyer, Sun Cinema, 2010, My City project in Mardin

accruing into a beautiful babble of exposed mental wiring. A year ago, this author reviewed a Stark show and suggested that her invariable inwardness risked looking like a nervous shtick; since she’s now titled this exhibition This could become a gimick (sic) or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind – that deliberate misspelling being a sizeable logic problem in itself – either she reads her own press or, more likely, she’s deliberately and boldly painting herself into a corner to see where it leads.

the free lance

it was the best of times It was the worst of times

words

article, Godfrey Barker: ‘I phoned him up and told him: “Do you realize that in the present market we can get you $50 million for your Rothko?” There was a very long silence at the other end of the phone. Eventually he replied: “Well, Ms. Westphal, that sure is tremendous news. But what the hell would I do with $50 million in the bank?”’ It’s not surprising then that New York currently boasts Frankenstein-type sequels to resale boilerplate. November auction sales in the city flogged some 2,266 lots (up 39 percent from last year’s stingy offerings), plus Christie’s and Sotheby’s are back to hyping vanity catalogues and jetting prize artworks around like pushy debutantes. Phenomena that encapsulate the secondary market’s capacity to torpedo the rest of the artworld, they also highlight the chasm between this era’s haves (the mega-rich) and its significant have-nots (its increasingly impoverished artists). Ben Davis, writing on artnet.com, astutely describes the present situation as a ‘Tale of Two Art Worlds’. Consider, on the one hand, this year’s astounding $100 million auction sales ($104.3 million for Giacometti’s Walking Man I, 1960, and $106.5 million for Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932). Now think about the estimated 79,625 artists – 32

ArtReview

Christian Viveros-Fauné

according to Don Thompson, author of The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (2008) – that squeak by every month in New York and London. The social picture is of a banana republic populated unequally by oligarchs and social climbers. Crippled by art’s luxury status, this bifurcated economy has additionally made it doubly hard to justify awarding public monies to shore up the deepening creative crisis. The reality of the art crowd not facing up squarely to its split-screen existence becomes harder to bear when one considers this artworld’s enduring creative paradigm: the Janus-faced commodity critique. An artistic method perfected by Andy Warhol and filched by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, et al., this twin celebration and belittling of art as an endless evening sale of expensive tchotchkes long ago segued into what Fredric Jameson calls ‘the dominant cultural logic of late capitalism’. Put another way, yesterday’s commodity critique is today’s business as usual. Dickens’s famous opener has rarely rung truer than it does today: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. One feels anything might happen in the culture. But not in the artworld. Rich and not so much, we’ve got our heads straight up our own conned asses.

Pablo Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, oil on canvas, painted on 9 March 1932. Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd. 2010

Stepping out into the New York artworld today is a study in déjà vu. A For Sale sign hangs outside what was once the Max Lang Gallery on 10th Avenue, while on 24th Street Mary Boone advertises the red dots scoring her sold-out show. The Chelsea Art Museum’s building has filed for bankruptcy protection, but the Whitney Museum is breaking ground 13 blocks below. The primary market remains sluggish, yet big collectors are flocking to auction houses, despite the generally higher cost of doing business there. The art market is at once tanking and thriving – normally an irreconcilable set of circumstances. It’s as if the artworld time-travelled to 1988 and saw a black cat cross its path not once but twice. The last major art-market slump – we’ll conveniently ignore the present recession’s 30 percent drop in prices (reached in mid-2009), since reportedly these remain 87 percent higher than 2005 levels – was in 1989, about 18 months after ‘Black Monday’ – 19 October 1987 – when stock markets crashed worldwide. An art-market lag of 12 to 18 months behind the economy has since become an article of faith, yet some reports from the first half of 2010 – such as total worldwide figures for artworks sold and record-breaking prices at auction – suggest that the art market has recovered well ahead of our general economic woes. At least for now. Once again, the artworld’s wealthier players are back to benefiting from what The Wall Street Journal called ‘a flight into tangibles’. As the WSJ goes on to say, investors presently distrust equities and are looking to sink money into blue-chip art. To quote one prominent dealer, buyers ‘are terrified of cash that pays 0% at the bank and is threatened by the “great inflation” lying one to two years ahead’. The current preference among the cultured superrich for blue-chip art over liquidity is summed up by an exchange Cheyenne Westphal, head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s, had with a Los Angeles collector, a conversation reported by the author of the WSJ

Gary Simmons, Holiday, 2010, pigment, oil paint & cold wax on canvas

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london calling

empty vessels

Here in London it’s the post-art fair lull, and I’m exchanging idle gossip with one of our Scottish writers. He’s wondering who I think will win the Turner Prize, but I keep getting stuck on odd bits of minor institutional criticism: does Dexter Dalwood squeak past the under-fifty rule (born 1960, you see)? Is it appropriate to shortlist an artist (Dalwood again) for a solo show he’s been given at another branch of the Tate galleries? And don’t get me started on that business of the Otolith Group being an Arts Council ‘regularly funded organisation’ that will receive almost three times the Turner

have gathered 50 or more (the anomaly was the fourth, in 1995, made up of only 24 artists, but that edition was special, a triumphant crowning of the then-emerging stars of Young British Art – Hirst, Hume, Ofili, Wallinger, Taylor-Wood, to name only the most famous). BAS1 was born out of the strife and controversy that characterised much of the public debate on art during the 1970s. Its job was to reassert some sense of coherence and consensus about Britain and art in Britain, by establishing something that might be representative of what was going on in ‘British art’ in the broadest sense. By contrast, Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff (the British Art Show is organised by Hayward Touring) was able to joke at the press briefing that BAS7 could more modestly be called just ‘a’ British art show. Such hesitance and uncertainty says something about how our big national institutions understand their role at the moment: they’re pretty confused. At their inception, events like the Turner Prize (set up in 1984) and the British Art Show were attempts to reclaim some legitimacy for contemporary art in Britain at a time when both government and public were either indifferent or downright hostile towards it. Paradoxically, as the public attitude towards contemporary art has softened and as the political boostering of arts and culture has become orthodoxy, the sense of purpose that these events once set out with feels like it has slowly seeped away. Just another Turner Prize. Just another British Art Show… words

Prize money in grants anyway. Although, intriguingly, Andrew Nairne, executive director for arts strategy at the Arts Council, is one of the Turner Prize judges… Let’s just say it’s a cynical, demoralising conversation. It’s not that I find it unsavoury, but rather that it brings out a creeping weariness in me: what is the cultural purpose of the Tate’s annual prize jamboree? How is that purpose, whatever it is, reflected in the decisions the institution makes? And how should we, on the outside of the institution, respond? Are we all just going through the motions? Does no one ask why? Later I get an email from an artist who’s in the British Art Show 7, now open in Nottingham. One of their works has been rejected, on the grounds that it would be far too controversial and generate bad publicity, which would overshadow the show (which tours Britain) on its inaugural outing. It seems to be a case of nervous bureaucrats not wanting anything to go wrong, not wanting any pseudo-scandal headlines, not right now, not when public funding for the arts is being put through the wringer by the new coalition. As Martin Herbert notes in this issue’s review of BAS7, the first British Art Show, in 1979, presented more than 100 artists. This edition features fewer than 40. Most of the shows 34

ArtReview

J.J. Charlesworth

Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe there’s a good reason for continuing to put on national-level shows of art being made today. Maybe these artists are really very good (and of course, many of them really are). Or maybe such events are now dead men walking, giving shape to little more than the self-justifying logic that career ladders always need a top rung. In his review of BAS7, the Guardian’s Adrian Searle mused that ‘the coming economic cuts might mean that big shows like this no longer even happen, let alone tour’. But however good BAS7 is, it’s nothing if not a very partial account of current British art, even if that partiality attempts, covertly, to insinuate that these artists have a certain indescribable, cutabove-the-rest je ne sais quoi. Conversely, the Turner’s opaque selection procedure now appears arbitrary and incapable of accurately reflecting the most innovative, the most interesting developments in current work. Big shows need good reasons to exist, and there was a time when neither the Turner nor the BAS took place. Regardless of cuts, it’s time to rethink the purpose of these big institutional events. Things break down. Things get remade.

Dexter Dalwood, Lennie, 2008, oil on canvas. Photo: Sam Drake and Lucy Dawkins, Tate Photography. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery, London

Do the British Art Show and Turner Prize still make the most noise?

the painted word

Shipwreck the viewer Why art criticism is all at sea – and why, for artists, that’s a good thing

words

the long association of the RA with marine art washed into the viewing experience, connecting works separated by lacunae of medium, period, scale and intention. The metaphorics of the sea bound these disparate shows together more than the arbitrary indictments of the art press ratings system that had initially coupled them, with the ocean haunting the shows as an ancient and unreckonable elsewhere. I was put in mind of philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s seminal 1979 essay ‘Shipwreck with Spectator’, which identifies the centrality of the seafaring metaphor in human attempts to make sense of the passage of existence. We talk of sea changes, of being all at sea, cut adrift, etc. Blumenberg’s thesis invokes the presence of a theoretical spectator throughout the history of these watery metaphors – from the Ionian natural philosophers through to the twentieth century – who observes the metaphor of the perilous sea voyage from shifting vantage points. Sometimes they are on dry land, at other times right in the drink with the hapless sailors. In fact, the word ‘theory’ itself

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ArtReview

Nigel Cooke

derives from the Greek word theoria, a term used in fourthcentury Greece to describe an overseas journey undertaken by an individual (known as the theoros, meaning ‘spectator’) whose task was to report back from some remote oracular centre (maybe a religious festival, art fair or biennial), sharing and spreading knowledge of what lay beyond the shore with whatever art journal or listings magazine had commissioned him/her. Importantly, the theoros was transformed into a kind of stranger upon returning home, freshly endowed with a wise impartiality as a result of the voyage, a skill useful in grading an exhibition on a scale of one to five stars. On making the trip to this island of polarised shows replete with storms and giant crustaceans, the vision and attention of this sea-bound critic – the spectator at the intellectual shipwreck of the art experience – forged a testy dialogue with my own responses. The fact that artgoers – especially artists – have this unknown spectator keeps knowledge bracingly at sea, permanently on the brink of being lost to the deep. And as Blumenberg points out, a sailor prefers anything to still waters, even a storm. The value of criticism is that it gives one a push to get out onto bigger waves: whether you make it to dry land, or share anything valuable when you get there, is up to you.

Joana Vasconcelos, Doroteia, 2007. Photo: Atelier Joana Vasconcelos. Courtesy Haunch of Venison, London, New York & Berlin

In an artist’s more paranoid moments, the art press can seem like the work of one panoptic super-spectator, speaking from a distant land of critical judgement. The artist may never venture there in person (except perhaps in a monthly column), nor meet this über-viewer, but can consult the charts when looking for decent shows around town. Time Out serves them up weekly – it even offers a star-rating system to help you work out the hot from the not. In one recent issue, two reviews – the bestand worst-rated shows – were yoked together on the page. The twist was that the galleries were Central London neighbours. As a result, the spectrum of the rating system was suddenly a little island you could journey to after all, with the two extremes of the super-spectator’s judgement captured on one site. The locale: Piccadilly, with the back-to-back arrangement of the Royal Academy and Haunch of Venison. The ‘exhibition of the week’ honour and four stars went to Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos at the latter gallery, while at the RA, poor old John Singer Sargent’s sea paintings fared rather worse, managing only one star. Reservations about the Sargent and the Sea exhibition – the bourgeois tourism of the subject, the mediocrity of the treatment when devoid of the human figure – were transformed by the fact that the Vasconcelos show next door appeared to have a maritime theme, too. It was embedded marginally, however, and in much more surreal objects – gargantuan glazed ceramics of lobsters and crabs covered with netlike crochet. The Sargent seascapes began to feel like the setting for these monsters, the beauty of the scenes now feeling ominous, like the calm before a storm. Female figures in the alcoves of Haunch of Venison appeared more like recently netted mermaids or sirens than a rethink of statuary. Did they seem so because of the Sargent show? The super-spectator may have polarised these two qualitatively; conceptually, ‘theme creep’ was inexorable too, as

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The Shape of Things

Tattoos A pernicious, nagging quality of late capitalism is the way it continually suggests that you should be yourself – that there is something inside you which is different from what is inside anybody else and which makes you you. I’ve been thinking about this recently because I’ve started going to the gym. And in the changing rooms I can’t help noticing people who’ve decided to try and get a bit of that interior identity on their exterior by wearing a tattoo. I’m especially puzzled by the tattoos that are discreet enough to be hidden in normal life – small designs on a calf, a shoulder blade, a buttock. What’s the point? So, just as I do when I’m puzzled by any kind of design, I turn to Adolf Loos to find a name for my pain. Loos’s essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908) is an angry, funny, vicious, hopeful, depressed tirade against nineteenthcentury bourgeois culture. In it, the Austrian architect canters through topics including the eroticism of the crucifix, the relationship of economics to labour, the choice of boots by the Austrian army, toilet-door graffiti as the measure of culture and the following bizarre fusion of ethnography, ophthalmology and paediatrics: ‘At the age of two, [a child] sees like a Papuan, at four, like a Teuton, at six like Socrates, at eight like Voltaire. When he is eight years old, he becomes aware of violet.’ All of this Loos marshals into a call for an unembellished design of stark morality and absolute truth that, Loos declares, could deliver emancipation on an epic scale: ‘Soon the streets of the cities will glow like white walls! Like Zion, the Holy City, the capital of heaven. It is then that fulfillment will have come.’

corporate design languages and so on. They become another language, as far from – and as unable to deliver – ‘truth’ as anything that Loos battered with his text. Which doesn’t stop us believing that some sort of aesthetic of truth is out there. Take, for example, one of the central targets in Loos’s essay: the tattoo. He writes, ‘The Papuan tattoos his skin… He is no criminal [because he is primitive]. The modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate’. Loos goes on to say that ‘those who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats’ and, extrapolating from this amorality, that ‘if a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder’. The contemporary return of the tattoo spread from subculture to mass culture with amazing speed. From Hells Angels and the freaks of the underground to the innocent flesh of boy and girl groups, the tattoo has leaped from the margins to the high street. Perhaps the tattoo has achieved this cultural ubiquity as a response to the very conditions – of the untruth and unreality of culture – that Loos claimed it to be a symptom of in 1908. The contemporary tattoo explicitly revives words

In fact, Loos argues that fulfillment should have come already, if only the world had taken him seriously: ‘I had thought to introduce a new joy into the world: but it has not thanked me for it’. Indeed, his modern-life-is-rubbish rant is shot through with self-pity at his own failure to transform Austrian culture and anger at the institutions he despises for their conservatism – the ‘hobgoblins who will not allow it to happen’. Reading it now, it’s the thrust and vector of Loos’s polemic that’s significant, rather than the examples he cites, or indeed the main target of his diatribe: ornament. In the century since ‘Ornament and Crime’, the economics and politics of aesthetics have changed. And while the kind of unadorned modernist aesthetics Loos championed have become central to high-design culture, they have not delivered the Travis Bickleesque rain to wash the trash from the streets that the architect predicted. In fact, those aesthetics lost their revolutionary impetus as they were dissolved into broader taste cultures,

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SAM JACOB

primitivism as an attempt to recuperate truth through the authenticity of the primitive, the criminal and the degenerate. Set against the smooth skin of corporate culture, it is a way of conjuring a sensation of truth – of realness. In this strange condition, Loosian sentiment is expressed through an antiLoosian technique – a perfect explication of the complexity of meaning within contemporary design. If we follow this strange feedback loop of the primitive, industrial, postindustrial tattoo, we might find its current conclusion in the texts, patterns and symbols inked into David Beckham’s skin. Here tattoos act as a form of self-branding in both the primitive and the postindustrial sense. Beckham’s skin is the place where his body becomes corporatised – turned back into the unreality of image rather than its ‘real’ biology. Truth is always slippery, and even more so when addressed though the language of objects, whose meaning cannot always be fixed or trusted. Loos’s ‘Ornament and Crime’ might not be the roadmap he intended it to be, but it continues to alert us to the fact that objects and environments are means of feeling our way through the complex moralities of culture.

Guerra Vanzetti, Loos Tribal project, 2010, from Design Criminals: Or a New Joy into the World, 2010, MAK Vienna

Ornament or crime?

Terry Allen Tony Berlant Tony Bevan Deborah Butterfield Rebecca Campbell Richard Deacon Mark di Suvero Gajin Fujita Charles Garabedian David Hockney Ben Jackel Nancy Reddin Kienholz Per Kirkeby Imi Knoebel Leon Kossoff Guillermo Kuitca Jonathan Lasker Jason Martin Enrique Martínez Celaya Michael C. McMillen Gwynn Murrill Alice Neel Ken Price Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin Alison Saar Sean Scully Joel Shapiro Peter Shelton Don Suggs Tom Wudl Juan Uslé Rogue Wave Artists William Brice Estate Frederick Hammersley Estate Kienholz Estate Fred Williams Estate

Alice Neel, Joey Scaggs 19 67, oil on canvas 8 0 1 ⁄ 8 x 35 7⁄ 8 in. ( 203.5 x 91.1 cm ) Copyright The Estate of A lice Neel

Walid Raad Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut) (detail), 1987-present. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; and Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Beirut.

Walid Raad Whitechapel Gallery

Miraculous Beginnings 14 October 2010 – 2 January 2011

whitechapelgallery.org

design

Coop de Ville

For an increasing number of people, urban life isn’t complete without a designer henhouse. But what are these ‘performance smallholders’ really playing at?

urbanites seems to be a misty, romantic one. Even if it does produce real carrots, it coexists quite happily with an appetite for expensively sourced rusticanalia (trugs, apple crates, besom brooms) and distrust for the necessarily less picturesque realities of the contemporary countryside. “Looking at villages and people who live in the countryside, you find both an appreciation of the minutiae of daily lives and an understanding that a nostalgia for lost methods is not sustainable”, explains Veronica Sekules, director of the Culture of the Countryside project, based at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. The project has used world artefacts from the centre’s collection to promote discussion at a local level, in the process drawing as broad as possible a portrait of contemporary rural culture, taking in everything from anaerobic digester words

partner – built an allotment for a school on Arnold Circus in East London. Since graduating, his focus has been on finding realistic ways to help people grow vegetables in a city – he’s wired racks of plants up to automatic irrigation systems using rainwater from the guttering, and built ambulatory greenhouses small enough for a terrace and self-sufficient enough to compensate for the most apathetic urban gardener. Photos of his research projects shown during September’s London Design Festival generated a notebook full of enthusiastic feedback. Just as the apparently insatiable appetite for cookery books and shows seems to have done nothing to calm either the obesity crisis or the market for ready meals, it’s hard not to wonder what, exactly, the real impact of all this city mudshovelling will be. The vision of the country that so enthrals the

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Hettie Judah

systems to interpretations of the weather by surfing fanatics, performance art and the question of how to help coastal communities cope with dramatic erosion. Sekules is philosophical about rural evolution: “Cultural change is a given – humankind is good at adapting. We have an idea of what we’re going to lose; but there might equally be a lot of things we’ll gain.” Against this pragmatic vision of the changing countryside, the design products that cater to the new urban rusticity seem like props for a mythologised retelling of rustic culture, one repackaged to accommodate ninehour workdays, environmental guilt and two foreign holidays a year. It’s performance smallholding – and in repackaging the rustic experience in containable chunks, it rather quaintly permits urbanites to suspect that they are somehow better at doing the countryside than the country-dwellers are themselves.

Jochem Faudet, Grow Your Own. Photo: Angela Moore

The reappropriation of the tag ‘homegrown’ to refer to any crop that isn’t distributed in miniature Ziploc bags seems to have tipped the balance on the city-goes-country craze, marking its transition from a whim on the part of post-KateMoss-at-Glastonbury wellie-wearing North Londoners into a full-on cultural phenomenon. Fruit picking, butchery, tweed fetishism, chutney making, guerrilla gardening, chicken husbandry, apple juicing, vegetable growing, beekeeping, the wearing of waxed jackets outside the confines of Fulham, barter, harvest festivals and unironic Women’s Institute references – it seems that our inner cities are being consumed by a tide of naturally composted organic filth. The design world is busy popping out more-or-less serious propositions that cater to the new Good Life-ers. Last year Omlet, the people behind the Eglu chicken houses, launched the Beehaus, a hive with modernist pretensions aimed at urban apiarists. Higher-rolling chicken fanciers can roost their feathered friends in an ovoid ‘garden sculpture’ called the Nogg, carved out of cedarwood and boasting fox-proof locks and an adjustable skylight. Nogg’s producers are promoting the coop – which accommodates a maximum of three hens – at a price considerably north of £1,000. One assumes that their target consumer is not chasing the chooks just to save on their egg budget. It’s not only the fogeys and the faddists who are getting in on the act. I was cooked a vivid lunch recently by RCA design graduate Jochem Faudet, who – together with his studio

What to see this month by

FIONA BRADLEY

Director, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

1 Tacita Dean Common Guild, Glasgow 20 November – 5 February www.thecommonguild.org.uk Katrina Brown has been running this great project – small shows by big artists – in Douglas Gordon’s house in Glasgow for the past four years. She’s worked with Tacita Dean before, and I think this exhibition will focus on photographs and drawings. Film is what we associate Dean with, but the works she makes which aren’t filmic speak so lucidly to those that are. I’m interested in seeing an artist who’s at the top of her game showing in such an intimate setting, as well my first opportunity to see Dean’s Craneway Event (2009), which will be screened at Scottish Ballet on 17 and 18 December as part of the exhibition.

2 Never the Same 4 Vija Celmins: River (Possible Television and Futures, Disaster, 1964–66 Probable Pasts) Camden Arts Centre, London 16 December – 20 February www.camdenartscentre.org Artist-curated group shows often manage to speak of what’s happening in the present in an idiosyncratic but uncommonly clear way. This one is curated by Simon Starling, an artist I’ve long been interested in, whose plan is to reinstall works from previous Camden exhibitions alongside, we’re told, ‘images, ideas and forms projected as a possible future programme: the probable past and possible future of Camden Arts Centre momentarily coming together in an unstable present.’ This seems to speak very eloquently of how Starling makes his own work, while using that of others.

I’m fascinated by the idea of seeing these early Celmins works: 20 paintings and two sculptures, relating to found objects and television. In particular, it’s an interesting time to look at how the media shapes our response to war, to compare how it operates now with how it looked in the 1960s. Plus the Menil is a great venue, and I look forward to seeing Celmins, whom I know primarily through her star and ocean works, in a more political mode.

3 Massimo Bartolini: COR South London Gallery To 12 December www.southlondongallery.org Bartolini is an artist whose eclectic, wideranging practice I like very much. Here he’s working in collaboration with choreographer Siobhan Davies on what’s being called a ‘performative sculpture’ involving lamps: it exists on its own and then, every so often, is animated by a performer. I’m looking forward to seeing him working outdoors and in the new Fox Garden: the redevelopment of the SLG has been astonishing, I think, and exemplary in how to retain character while building new functions into a gallery space.

44 ArtReview

Menil Collection, Houston 19 November – 20 February www.menil.org

5 Miroslaw Balka Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, and Abadía de Santo Domingo, Silos 26 November – 25 April www.museoreinasofia.es Balka’s work is always both intensely political and intensely beautiful; for me, he never seems to put a foot wrong. And I like the idea of inviting him to do a show at this monastery, as well as in the institution. He makes such resonant work in a white cube, so focused on the body and aware of space and how it interacts with art, that whatever he does in such a charged environment is likely to be really interesting.

from left: Tacita Dean, Painted Kotzsch Tree Series (detail), 2008, paint, six damaged August Kotzsch albumen prints, c. 1875, courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London; Vija Celmins, Burning Man, 1966, oil on canvas, 51 x 57 cm, private collection, New York, photo: Eric Baum, New York, © the artist

top five

A New Concise Reference Dictionary

Dd Daedalus to dystopia

Daedalus Contemporary Greek artist. Known for his skilful creation of a wooden cow in which his patron, Pasiphaë (the wife of a Greek shipping magnate), concealed herself so as to be sexually penetrated by a real bull. daffodil A beautiful flower with a primal yellow form. Painted by Vincent van Gogh, who also painted irises and sunflowers. dance See dance of death. dance of death Many high social functions, held in both state and private art institutions, may be (privately) described by the use of this term. darkness The absence of light has metaphorical significance in many cultures, and is therefore the means to create a locused emotional discourse in respect of either a metarelational stasis unity or an unbecoming praxis disunity. The showing of artists’ videos in near darkness is a summary process of this index of represence; a locusment of technology redundancy which exists, with teleological significance, for exaggerated theatrical effect only. Thus it is a strident presentational affectation of locus causality with the likelihood of some handbag theft occurring. Davy’s grey A greenish-grey pigment, made from powdered slate, iron oxide and carbon black. Granular and transparent, it is sometimes difficult to handle because of its tendency to clump. death Although artists often kill themselves, each other or other people, it remains unusual for them to be actually killed for making bad art. The conclusion to be drawn from this, that art is not actually that important, tends to be an insulting one to artists. Historically artists have gained dignity by being disallowed to practice, and thus perish through loss of livelihood. See cuts. deconstruction See pun. delirium See dementia. dementia See delirium. demons Evil spirits, or the servants of Satan. See cuts. demonstrative rhetoric Coded or uncoded signalling imploration behaviours intended to draw attention to the artist being erudite, learned and so cognisant with theory tendencies as to expect reciprocating critical approval responses. See Byzantine, vulgarity, rhetoric, theoryorgyism. deposition The taking down of Jesus Christ from the cross. derision Term used in respect of certain cultural imprecation contexts, in which derisive insults are a value norm. Common on the Web, but also in (popular) newspapers and 46

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(unpopular) magazines. Includes, paradoxically, important publications and broadcasters who claim a status interest in the values of high culture. For example, instead of saying that ‘X’s installations are, perhaps, indeterminate in respect of their theoretical positionings’, they might, with dry intention, say that ‘X is a twat’. The matter is complicated because, certainly in respect of X, the universal consensus is that her work definitely is that of a complete twat. See degenerationism, dumbing down, Modernism, hypocrisy, fascism. détournement See dance of death. deviance Deviancies in contemporary art tend to be omissive; that is, they are made conspicuous in the same way that it is deviant not to have a tattoo on one’s body. diary A common art installation trope, referencing approved validation formulas. diorama A common art installation trope, referencing approved validation formulas. disbelief See cuts. disco A common art installation trope, referencing approved validation formulas. dissociation An abnormal mental state in which the subject’s perception of phenomena may differ remarkably from that of others. See film critic. documentary A common art installation trope, referencing approved validation formulas. dominance Aggressive behaviour, often ritualised. Usually ceases when the threatened individual is seen to submit and agree that the art previously stated as disliked is in fact excellent (or even wonderful). Domination occurs through clothing ostentation, symbolic meals, etc. donor A patron or benefactor of gifts, bequests or sponsorships. By these means donors gain delivery from the plague, enjoy victory in war and achieve release from captivity in military defeat, etc. drawing Sophisticated and intelligent conceptual art practice in which marked lines on flat paper are made to correspond with a visually perceived external reality. Duchamp American artist. Transvestite. Known for the conflicted hypersexuality of his art practice; its emphasis on hairless genital partialism and compulsive autoeroticism has made him popular. Played chess, a game with an intense psychological quality of deception and introspectiveness which in some respects is analogous to the intimate identity displacings of autoerotic transvestism. Duchamp also employed the recursive pun, by which he compounded his genderings and regenderings of dissociative sociosexuality. Paradoxically, although Duchamp has many followers, very few of them are transvestite or play chess, and consequently they lack proper understanding of his work. Academic followers are invariably sexually inactive, and thus lack any understanding whatsoever. See erotica, parnomasia. dumbing down See cuts. dysfunctional The opposite of functional. Dysfunctional is generally regarded as the more interesting. dystopia See cuts.

words

Neal Brown

dispatches

Consumed

03

$199.95

The pick of things you didn’t know you really needed. Words Oliver Basciano

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£20

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£20 01 This DVD anthology of six films by John Latham from the 1960s and 70s makes one appreciate the monographic practicalities of the medium. Beyond the films – characterised by a 16mm stop-motion technique that instils a freneticism to various static materials, from coloured paper to the pages of Lisson Gallery director Nicholas Logsdail’s childhood set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – there is also production footage, documentation of archive performances and a series of personal commentaries from the likes of musician David Toop and the artist’s two sons. www.lissongallery.com 48

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€4,990 05

02 Graphic designer Chrissie Abbott’s collages represent the stuff that dreams are made of. Innocent dreams, not sexy fantasies: dreams about armies of weirdo cats nuzzling up to each other in crystal-flecked landscapes. Yep, those kinds of dreams. More important (for her), it’s also led to commissions ranging from art direction for singer Little Boots’s releases to illustration work on New York Magazine and the Guardian. For the Jaguar Shoes collective she has image-Googled long and hard to deliver this rather fanciful mug. www.jaguarshoes.bigcartel. com

03 Occassional AR contributor Ari Marcopoulos’s photos are characterised by their lack of artifice. He describes his work as something that ‘just stands for life lived’. For Marcopoulos, that life has included the 1970s New York art scene and, in more recent times, those of rappers and skateboarders. Now he’s sharing his knowhow by collaborating on the production of a camera carrier with Incase. Coming with a limited-edition book of previously unpublished images, it’s apparently designed to ‘allow Ari to access his equipment as quickly as possible, never missing a shot’.

04 My first thought was: wouldn’t your arms get hot? And then: who cares? I’m always hot. Particularly when it looks like my chair is travelling at the speed of light. Combining Plexiglas tubing and neon, this model is designed by Manfred Kielnhofer, an Austrian artist whose practice deals with the performative possibilities of light. While it may not be the most comfortable place to have your Arctic Kiss (see no. 08) at the end of a long day’s work, it certainly makes a statement. Not sure what kind of statement. ‘I’m in charge of the Death Star’? www.kielnhofer.at

www.goincase.com

Consumed

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Price 05 on request

07

Price on request

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£120 05

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£1,598 05 This portfolio of nine prints, in an edition of 25 from Cheim & Read, centres on Lynda Benglis’s performative photographic portraits, parodying images of the 1970s female pinup. Included, for example, is the infamous self-portrait of the artist, naked bar a pair of sunglasses, wielding a flesh-coloured dildo; an image that Benglis distributed by booking advertising space in a 1974 issue of Artforum. This image – like all the photographs included here – has a serious, strongly realised political intent, while simultaneously maintaining a cheeky irreverence. www.cheimread.com 50

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£22.99 05

06 Each sentence of the ten sonnets found within Raymond Queneau’s 1961 work Hundred Thousand Billion Poems can be swapped for any other, allowing myriad (the title gives away the exact number) poems to be presented in just ten pages (each line is printed on a separate strip). This table by recent Royal College of Art design graduate David Amar takes its influence – and name, Raymond – from the sometime surrealist poet, but doesn’t have quite that many variations in the potential arrangements of its aluminium and tulipwood flatpack components.

07 If you’ve ever been to the Auditório Ibirapuera in São Paulo, this curvaceous slab of chocolate may look familiar. That’s because both were designed by modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer. For the brown stuff, Niemeyer collaborated with chocolatier Samantha Aquim, who comes from a wellknown Brazilian family of restaurateurs, to give form to this 77-percent blend of cocoa beans, sourced from the country’s eastern Bahia region, the end product of which comes in its own presentation box and holdall. Sweet.

08 Financial pains in your arts? Christmas round the corner? Either way a drink would be handy. What with Dom Pérignon and Absolut both releasing limitededition bottles – the former a collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation, the latter a new faceted design – it would be rude not to. AR will be having the best of both worlds with an Arctic Kiss. No, you don’t have to behave unhygienically with Bjork – just mix 2oz vodka and 3oz of Dom Pérignon’s very fine Champagne, raise a toast to this year’s Absolut Art laureate Rirkrit Tiravanija and drink. Then repeat.

www.aquimgastronomia.com.br designproductscollection. rca.ac.uk

www.domperignon.com www.absolut.com

dispatches

digested

It’s what we think you should swallow, or spit out

John Pawson: Plain Space By Alison Morris

Louis: Night Salad By Metaphrog Although he looks innocent enough – in fact, with his round featureless and hairless head atop a Plasticine-sausage body, he probably couldn’t look any more like the guileless babyman hero of numerous children’s books (Bod in particular springs to mind) – the titular hero of this graphic novel lives in the land of the weird. Louis’s ‘job’ appears to involve doing something unpleasant to pineapples using the effluent from a chemical works in his back garden, and Night Salad (the fifth Louis book) begins when our hero accidentally poisons his companion – a sort of robot bird – and sets out to find a cure. Once he gets going, we’re off on a voyage that flickers between Louis’s unreal world and a realm of even stranger dreams. These days we’re bombarded with animations or graphic novels that claim to amuse kids while offering a metanarrative to please adults. But few actually fulfil these promises as effectively as this Scottish duo’s hand-painted book. Mark Rappolt Metaphrog, £9.99/$14.99 (hardcover)

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In some ways, this monograph on John Pawson, published on the occasion of a retrospective at London’s Design Museum, comes as a bit of a disappointment to those who admire the English architect’s ultraminimalist practice. The book, you see, has stuff in it – pictures, plans and illustrations that serve as ornamentation to words (of which there are a decent amount – four essays’ worth). Pawson, however, doesn’t really do ‘stuff ’: his buildings offer no accommodation to decoration or objects, preferring clean blank surfaces and carefully spaced fittings. (To be fair, a book of immaculate empty pages might not be as informative.) Pawson’s approach has won him commissions varying from Calvin Klein’s flagship stores to the Monastery of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic (the Cistercian monks were apparently inspired to hire Pawson by a visit to the CK store on Madison Avenue). That said, and as evidenced by the book’s abundant photographic documentation (the architect insists on recording buildings at every possible angle inside and out, and in every possible light, as a way of understanding the consequences of design decisions), Pawson’s work is not sparse or inhuman, but, rather, emits an unexpected intimacy by offering an empty stage (though not a totally neutral space) that happily foregrounds the human users of his designs. Oliver Basciano Phaidon, £45 (hardcover)

Is It Safe? By Luc Tuymans Luc Tuymans isn’t necessarily a painter’s painter. He’s not one for obsessing over his medium’s history or the lineage and semiotics of a particular style of paint handling or juxtaposition of colours: indeed, the five series documented in this hefty monograph – made between 2004 and 2008, and each introduced by the artist himself – demonstrate his lack of interest in diverging from the muted, washed-out aesthetic he’s made his own. Instead, as essays by Pablo Stigg and Gerrit Vermeiren, and an interview between Tuymans and his assistant Tommy Simoens concisely outline, the artist’s real interest lies in the esoteric subjects he homes in on, from Condoleezza Rice to ballroom dancing. Tuymans has spoken of his interest in falsely representing the world, citing inspiration from Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), and his use of cinematic references (the book’s title is a line from the 1976 film Marathon Man) and low-resolution Polaroid and, latterly, iPhone photos as sources emphasise a practice that celebrates the impossibility and falsity of representation, painterly and otherwise. OB Phaidon, £39.95 (hardcover)

digested Vanity Fair By William Makepeace Thackeray Art by Donald Urquhart

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary By David Sedaris Through his regular contributions to The New Yorker and National Public Radio, and collected writings such as Barrel Fever (1995), Naked (1997) and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), David Sedaris long ago established himself as one of the most deft and humorous observers of man as a social animal. More important, he’s one of few contemporary writers who use humour as a tool for social critique, while producing writing that is genuinely funny and genuinely revealing about how people react to the world. In this collection Sedaris tackles familiar territory, though this time he’s observing animals as though they were social men and women. Presumably he’s doing this so that, like Aesop, he can present subjects that have to overcome their natures (and a reader’s preconceptions about their natures) as well as the stuff that society throws at them. And so we are treated to lessons on the social implications of combining an owl, a family of singing leeches and a hippopotamus’ rectum, on things an alcoholic mink will do for a drink and on why you should beware a rabbit with a stick and a newfound sense of authority. Despite that last, this is no Animal Farm (1945). Indeed, Orwell would have hated it. It’s probably safe to assume that he would have regurgitated his infamous disapproval of Rabelais – ‘an exceptionally perverse, morbid writer, a case for psychoanalysis’ – had he been around to read Sedaris. Ironically he would also have been listing the very secrets to the American writer’s success. At his best, by revealing and (passively) analysing himself, Sedaris encourages his readers to perform a similar operation on themselves. Squirrel Seeks… is set up to facilitate the same, but the animals, while amusing, seem as though they’re getting in the way a bit. Mark Rappolt Little, Brown, £12.99/$21.99 (hardcover)

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Sam Francis: Lesson of Darkness By Jean-François Lyotard Notions of blindness or darkness would appear to be antithetical to the bright, lushly abstract paintings of Sam Francis. These, however, are precisely the themes developed by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in a poem responding to 42 paintings by the American artist. First published in British magazine Blank Page in 1993, the poem is republished, alongside the previously unseen French original, in an elegantly designed volume that offers both a singular response to an artist’s work and a contribution to a critical rethinking of painters – such as Francis’s friend and fellow American in Paris Joan Mitchell – who were working in the immediate fallout of Abstract Expressionism, outside of New York. Faced with Francis’s Blue Center (1953), Lyotard imagines a man gazing at the light on the ocean from a San Francisco hospital room, before encouraging us to witness the blank white spaces creeping all over Francis’s canvases in the years to come. On 1978’s Dynamic Symmetry: ‘You come too late, after the party. The event of colours is over, the lights are going out over the great abandoned tables’. Laura McLean-Ferris Leuven University Press, £35/€39.50 (hardcover)

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), a satire featuring a cast of pleasure-seeking individuals, contains a rather lovely example of the medium being the message. Rawdon Crawley, imprisoned for debt, waits to be rescued and bailed out by his wife, the novel’s antiheroine, Becky Sharp. He finally receives word from her: ‘he opened the letter rather tremulously. It was a beautiful letter, highly scented, on a pink paper, and with a light green seal.’ Inside there is nothing but trivia, excuses and vapid selfishness. She won’t be coming to save him. Four Corners continues its Familiars series – new editions of classic literature designed by artists – with Donald Urquhart’s take on Vanity Fair, and it is Becky’s stationery which is the inspiration for the book’s luxuriant cover. In our age of Kindles, iPads and suchlike, books such as these are a reminder of the tactile, sensuous elements of reading, and inside Urquhart has created several illustrations that focus solely on Becky (nearly all of the illustrations feature a bow), stylistically informed by 1930s Hollywood. Becky, rendered in Urquhart’s distinctive illustrative black linedrawing style and loopy text, is a dark-mouthed femme fatale in the vein of Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo. In one illustration, we see her central flaw as a total image: a mopey madam dramatically sulking as the words she utters float above her in girlish black script: ‘Oh how much gayer it would be to wear spangles and trousers, and dance before a booth at a fair’. Wishing you all an excellent time in Miami! LMF Four Corners Books, £16.99 (hardcover)

MEDITATIONS ON ART HATE SERIES No 1. The Proximity of Buchenwald to Weimar, and Picasso to Burger King By Neal Brown The city of Weimar was the focus of the German Enlightenment and is where the writers Goethe and Schiller developed the literary movement now known as Weimar Classicism. The city was also the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement, founded by Walter Gropius. The artists Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Lyonel Feininger all taught in Weimar’s Bauhaus School. Weimar has thus been, historically, a renowned centre of the highest of high culture. In 1937, the Nazis constructed the Buchenwald concentration camp, only five miles, point to point, from Weimar’s city center. Between 1938 and 1945, the Nazis imprisoned some 240,000 people in Buchenwald. Although not an extermination camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka, at least 56,000 Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and prisoners-of-war were starved, tortured or worked to death as slaves in the camp. In early 1938 a metal sign stating Jedem das Seine was placed over Buchenwald’s main entrance gate. It literally means ‘to each his own”, but figuratively ‘everyone gets what he deserves.’ It was designed by Franz Ehrlich, a former master pupil at the Dessau Bauhaus, and a Buchenwald inmate. Ehrlich, who had studied with Moholy-Nagy, Klee, Kandinsky and Josef Albers, designed the letters in the manner of his teacher, Joost Schmidt, and the Bauhaus masters. The camp commander ordered it to be installed in the camp gate so as to be readable from the inside. Jedem das Seine was a typical propaganda phrase of the time. The saying is two thousand years old and its origins can be traced back to Roman times. The Nazi SS interpreted ‘to each his own’ as legitimising a perceived right to humiliate and destroy others. It is similar to Arbeit macht frei, the slogan placed above the entrances at other Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen and the Theresienstadt. In German, Arbeit macht frei means ‘work brings freedom.’ The phrase Jedem das Seine is still used commonly as a proverb in German-speaking countries. Several modern advertising campaigns in the German language, including advertisements for Nokia, REWE grocery stores, Burger King, and Merkur Bank have caused controversy after using the phrase Jedem das Seine or Jedem den Seinen. An ExxonMobil campaign in 2009 (ExxonMobil is the brand owner of Esso, Exxon and Mobil), advertised Tchibo coffee drinks at the company’s Esso stores with the slogan ‘Jedem den Seinen!’ These advertisements were withdrawn after protest, and Esso said its advertisers had been unaware of the association with Nazism. Tchibo – one of Germany’s biggest chains – said the ‘unfortunate’ slogan would be removed from 700 petrol stations and that the company had ‘never intended to hurt feelings’. Esso said the advertising company that devised the campaign were ignorant of the phrase’s historical significance. In 2010 an art exhibition entitled Art Hate was presented at Galleria Art Hate London, England, comprising work by a number of artists, including Billy Childish, Jimmy Cauty, Neal Brown, Harry Adams, Jamie Reid and Charlotte C. Young. A central work was a metal sign that made reference to the Auschwitz version of Arbeit macht frei. A spokesperson for the artists said that they used it in full knowledge of its historical significance, and that they ‘appropriated its use as a pristine example of dishonest sloganeering, without intending any kind of disrespect to those who had perished or suffered as a consequence of Nazi atrocities.’ The spokesperson said that the artists ‘did not seek to attempt to understand everything about other’s pain – that it is not possible to do so.’ The spokesperson went on to say that ‘it is the artists’ intention to use humankind’s most absolutist examples of human cruelty as a reference point from which to extrapolate other meanings which, by definition,

must be lesser ones. One of the meanings they wish to explore is the feeling, or emotion, of hatred. Art Hate’s silence on genocidal suffering, with regard to Arbeit macht frei, is a form of respect.’ The Art Hate spokesperson said that the artists were ‘interested in the literal and metaphorical proximity of Buchenwald to Weimar, and the implications of this for understanding the many expressions of hatred relative to the practice of art, and the relationship of this with institutional power.’ The spokesperson added that, ‘These artists are interested in the historical context of hatred, such as the relationship of art (especially modernism) with fascism, the history of advertising and the history of propaganda, and how these are governed by the interplay of social, commercial and political directiveness, resulting in deception and confusion. Art Hate artists are interested in the complicit relationships people and institutions may have with forms of hatred, and the abuse of language, and the near universality of hatred (and its various related sub-categories such as anger, stigmatised exclusion, triumphalist revenge, jealousy, etc), in the making and presentation of art. Certain conclusions may drawn from this in respect of contemporary art.’ The spokesperson said that the artists practice ‘an extreme sincerity of purpose, using the presentational devices of wild play, and about which they are fearlessly unashamed.’ The artists were quoted as comparing their work with Picasso’s Guernica, and saying that ‘in our opinion Guernica is a bad, stupid painting, which is so much more about Picasso than about anyone else’s suffering as to constitute an alienation. We wish to avoid such a psychology in our dealings with this very serious subject. We prefer the approach taken by Francisco Goya in his Disasters of War series and their humorous texts, and we have enormous respect for Hans Haacke. But we do, of course, wish to follow our own path, not anyone else’s.’ They also described their fascination with the intimate relationship of art to weaponry, as seen in what they called ‘the ornate murder weapons’ in the Wallace Collection, as well as certain displays at the Imperial War Museum. In 2010 a notable art critic discussed Art Hate in a private letter to one of the artists, Billy Childish. Publication of the text was allowed on condition that the critic’s identity was not revealed, as an association with Art Hate could be misconstrued. It seems to me that you allow yourselves a heartening idealism in respect of ideals of truth in art. Your sincerity is commendable. The misunderstanding and obstacles you have, and will, encounter are a proof of the significance of what you are trying to achieve, although in due course your efforts will surely be acknowledged. In the context of increasingly desperate debates about the value of art, and ‘regeneration through culture’, it seems to be lost that essential prerequisites for artistic value are qualities like valor and nobility of spiritual purpose. The epitome of spiritual purpose - and the opposite of hate – is, of course, love, which seems to be a quality you have in abundance, and indicates a bright hope for the future. I thank you. [citation needed] NOTE: This article may not meet the general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (September 2010)

*Subject to availability

CASS ART gifT vouCheRS Now AvAilAble iN A limiTed ediTioN box SeT (iNCludeS fRee gifT*) viSiT ANy CASS ART SToRe iSliNgToN | hAmpSTeAd | Soho | KeNSiNgToN | ChARiNg CRoSS

www.CASSART.Co.uK

The DOOSAN Artist in Residence program is pleased to present DOOSAN Residency Artists for the first half of 2011 : Kira Kim, Song sik Min, Yoon Young Park. This program was launched in 2009 along with DOOSAN Gallery New York, a non-profit gallery managed by DOOSAN in South Korea. The residence program provides living quarters and studios for a six-month period. The DOOSAN Gallery and the Artist in Residence program in New York are dedicated to the discovery and support of young Korean artists with the goal of giving artists an opportunity to share their work with a broader audience.

Top Kira Kim Super heroes as Monster 2009 painted wooden sculpture installation view 19.7x19.7x11.8 in/ 50x50x30 cm each

Bottom Left Song sik Min A Carpenter’s House 2007 Oil on Canvas 51.3x76.4 in/ 130.3x194 cm

Bottom Right Yoon Young Park Until the end of the World 2006 installation view size variable

110 ArtReview

feature:

As ever y motivational speaker knows, there is no ‘I ’ in ‘team’. There are, however, plent y of ‘ I ’s in

Susan Hefuna

’s

ar tworks. But that doesn’t mean it’s all about her.

wo r ds : m A R K R A PP O LT p o r t r ait : ro b e rt n e t h e r y

has spent the past two decades producing a large number of works that feature the word ‘I’ – normally in its Arabic incarnation, ana – at their centre, Susan Hefuna is an artist whose identity is surprisingly tricky to locate. For if that love of the personal pronoun might at first suggest a form of narcissism, it’s absolutely not the kind of reflexive narcissism Narcissus knew. Take her monograph Pars Pro Toto (2008); at almost exactly the midpoint, it features an interview between Hans Ulrich Obrist and the late Senegalese writer Tayeb Salih, who had built a reputation as one of the masters of contemporary Arabic literature. While there’s no doubt that Hefuna has a strong interest in literature, at no point in Obrist and Salih’s conversation – which appears to start in the middle rather than the beginning (Q. So who are they, the architects?) – does either party make any direct reference to Hefuna’s work. Similarly generous, the artist’s Manafesto (2008), produced for the Serpentine Gallery’s Manifesto Marathon of that year, consists of a series of 200 postcards, branded on one side with a Manafesto logo, onto which she invited random passersby selected at various London locations to write a word or sentence that they thought might make the world a better place. These range from matters of local interest – ‘We need more Tubes’ and ‘No student fees!’ – to matters of more universal interest – ‘Everyone should help people in need’ – to utopian sentimentalism – ‘Always sunshine and green trees’ – and statements of a more personal nature – ‘Need to change myself’. Although given that there are no clues as to who this ‘self’ might be, the last is only personal in a limited sense, particularly since the accumulated statements were finally read out as a call and echo by a pair of actors. Given that Hefuna’s initial contribution to this project was to propose that it should enshrine the ‘I’ (by embedding ana in the title), it’s somewhat surprising to find that it tells us little or nothing about Hefuna herself. So here are some facts: Hefuna was born to a German mother and Egyptian father. She leads something of an itinerant life that encompasses Germany, America, Egypt and, more recently, Japan. Her work spans drawing, sculpture, photography, video, costume-making and performance, and has been exhibited at the Louvre (2004), the Sharjah Biennial (2007), New York’s ArtReview

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Hefuna has managed to transform the basic logic of grammar – to make the first person singular stand for a first person plural New Museum (2008) and the Venice Biennale (2009), as well as in a number of commercial gallery spaces. But even now, all you really know about her is that her parents were born on different continents, that this might account for her interest in identity, that she likes to travel (perhaps because of her mixed ethnicity) and that she is not in the habit of expressing herself via a single medium (perhaps she’s indecisive). Although she has said that all her work comes down to drawing of one sort of another. Take Manafesto, for example. While it may appear random and chaotic, to Hefuna’s eyes it reveals a structure through which one might understand a community. Partly because, according to the artist, the kinds of wishes people expressed seemed to correspond to the area in which they were interviewed, and partly because the work allows a city, via its inhabitants, to express itself. But above all because the postcards gave a certain structure to the city, even if that structure was developed by the artist as an individual, through the decisions she made about where to stand and who to stop. Like much of Hefuna’s work (take the video ANA/ICH, 2006, in which 81 people from the streets of Cairo say “ana , for instance), Manafesto executes a delicate operation of simultaneous molecularisation and atomisation – in social terms, of the group and the individual. This dynamic is nowhere more present than in Hefuna’s drawings. Earlier this year, in both a group show at the Kunstmuseum Thun (in which Hefuna exhibited alongside Bharti Kher and Fred Tomaselli), and a solo show at London’s Rose Issa Projects, Hefuna presented a collection of works on tracing paper, each one of which is titled either Cityscape or Building, which seemed to represent a series of abstracted grids, or molecular structures, in forms distorted to varying degrees. It was clear, from the arrangements of points (objects without dimension) and lines (accumulations of points given a dimension), that the works were about connections, but they gave no clue (beyond their titles) as to what was being connected with what. But the sheer volume of such works, which Hefuna creates almost obsessively in regular retreats each year (often in New York), appears to represent an essential desire to connect, to map the world around her and thus to communicate a given state of affairs. Although the fact that Hefuna draws, redraws and then draws again suggests a state of affairs that is contingent at best.

This will to structure finds its most obvious articulation in an ongoing series of works that take the mashrabiya – a decorative wooden screen used in traditional Islamic architecture to regulate the light coming through windows while also hiding the interior life of a building (including its unveiled women) from the exterior life of the street. The ongoing Woman Cairo series features a mashrabiya in which the words of the title, together with the year of the work’s manufacture, as registered in both the Islamic and Gregorian calendars (1429 and 2008, for example), are featured through a series of clever twists and rotations of the hand-turned dowels that form the screen. It’s as if a wall had been genetically modified to produce its own graffiti. Furthermore, if you’re unfamiliar with non-Western forms of measuring time, the assertion of presence (or the present date) seems to evoke the past (what happened in 1429, you might wonder), particularly since the mashrabiya, and the nonindustrial nature of its manufacture, so strongly evoke another age. It’s a cultural slippage of which Hefuna is acutely aware. Where she reads Arabic, I see little more than a pattern. Similarly, a mashrabiya might seem a charmingly decorative object to me, while to an Arab woman it might seem a boundary or limit of expression. When I first saw the word ana embedded in one of Hefuna’s screens, I wondered who this woman that the artist

feature: Susan Hefuna

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feature: scott king feature: Susan Hefuna

appeared so obsessed with might be. And even though it seems to refer to Hefuna, should I pronounce the word, it instantly refers to me. Through some strange alchemy, Hefuna has managed to transform the basic logic of grammar – to make the first person singular stand for a first person plural. In the face of these particular screens, everyone is I. But that’s not to say that Hefuna is some sort of straightforwardly radical socialist; indeed, it’s difficult to prove that she has a particular politics at all. Recalling a workshop she conduced at the all-female Zayed University in Abu Dhabi in 2004, Hefuna states that the primary differentiation between the various abaya-clad students was which designer bags accompanied them. As a result, the workshop culminated in the production of a series of exaggeratedly idiosyncratic bags. If this was designed to highlight a certain limit on the ability of the Emirate’s women to express themselves, the project wasn’t a campaign for self-expression without any limits at all; it was instead merely extrapolating from the status quo. Crucially, rather than creating a bag for themselves, each student was instructed to design a bag for someone else. As much as the project was about self-assertion, it was also about denying the self in order to allow someone else to be revealed. Pushed to its limits, of course, and contrary to its initial appearance, such a scheme means that no one reveals herself. It becomes a kind of daisy chain in which everyone reveals someone else. There’s a similar kind of blind generosity at work in the Vitrines of Afaf (2007), exhibited at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery. The sculpture features a series of personally significant objects – flags, car badges, trays, ornaments, etc – donated by the wives, sisters and mothers of local workers (Afaf is a name given to women whose identities are not made public) and exhibited in the kind of portable glass and aluminium vitrine used in shops all over the Egyptian capital. And like earlier projects, it both reveals and conceals its participants.

Perhaps this strikes to the core of Hefuna’s work. Yes, it revolves around the ego of the artist, historical clichés about the male gaze and the lonely life of the misunderstood creative genius. Perhaps there’s even an übermenschlich strain. But if, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Hefuna seems to be saying that ‘man is something which ought to be overcome’, it’s only in order to foster a more open and generous spirit, one in which the individual and the collective can be happy in a shared economy of me, me and me. Susan Hefuna is in residence at the Serpentine Gallery’s Centre for Possible Studies, London, and her work is included in Contemporary Eye: Crossovers, at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 6 March. The exhibition 7 x ANA is on view at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, until 13 March, and Mapping Wien: A Project by Susan Hefuna, is on show at Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna, until 8 January. The gallery will also host a solo presentation of Hefuna’s work in the Art Kabinet section of Art Basel Miami Beach, 2–5 December

works (in order of appearance) Postcards from Manafesto, 2008, produced on the occasion of the Manifesto Marathon, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2008 Cityscape, 2004 (installation view, Fare Mondi, Venice Biennale, 2009), watercolour on paper, each 45 x 4 x 38 cm. Photo: Claudio Franzini. Courtesy Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin Woman Cairo, 2008 (installation view, Kunstmuseum Thun, 2010), ink, wood, 261 x 212 cm. Courtesy Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin Dream, 2009 (installation view, Art Dubai, 2009), wood, gouache, 200 x 500 x 500 cm. Photo: Russ Kientsch. Courtesy Third Line, Dubai

ArtReview

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