Towards the end of the poem, Schjeldahl decides that he has no regrets, referring with some affection to the ‘tidy guild’ of art writers. On first reading, this idea of an ordered community felt about right, even comforting, though when I recently came across the line again it seemed less accurate. For one thing, critics – more than artists and curators – tend to work alone; while there are professional bodies, it’s mostly a solo pursuit, a lot of which takes place before any conversation with an editor. And, of course, few critics are only critics: writing is typically supplemented by curating, teaching, freelance editing, assisting artists, bar-tending, or whatever other work is around. I’ve met art critics who moonlight as anything from cricket correspondents to cheesemongers.

While professional hybridizations may be the norm today – try finding an art journal by-line that lists only one activity and one city of residence – working ‘between’ has often been the common mode for the art critic. From poet-critics (Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Frank O’Hara), dealer-critics (Félix Fénéon, Daniel Kahnweiler) and artist-critics (Donald Judd, Robert Smithson), criticism is rarely the sole province of those who best practice it. This continues today: as artist Hito Steyerl notes in her collected essays, she writes during (and between) a string of residencies and teaching positions, a writing environment shaped by flexibility and interruption. Criticism is genetically untidy.

What does the way in which critics define themselves today tell us about how they conceive of their relationship to art and to writing? A recent panel discussion at the ICA in London, titled ‘The Trouble With Art Criticism’ (has there been a writing panel in the last decade that hasn’t alluded to some crisis? Surely any crisis isn’t limited to the domain of criticism?), included writers, editors and curators, but only one of the five participants was identified as a critic. Of course, disavowing the term gets around the thorny issue of whether or not it’s the critic’s business to be dealing in judgements, but with what should it be replaced?

In recent years various contenders have emerged. One popular handle is ‘art writer’, suggestive of creativity rather than sniping, opting for a stance – frictionless and mobile – over a critical position. This is not to be confused with the expanding field of ‘art writing’, usefully ambiguous about whether the subject or the writing is the ‘art’. More cynically, Boris Groys once wrote that after judgement has melted away all that is left is commentary: he favours the epithet ‘art commentator’ over ‘critic’, one who protects the modesty of the art with a ‘textual bikini’. The late Stuart Morgan had no problems with the term critic, but – in a wonderful lecture titled ‘Homage to the Half-Truth’ (1991) – suggested that criticism, or ‘the act of shifting an experience from one language to another’, was closer to translation than to commentary. He perhaps had in mind Susan Sontag’s well-known argument, in ‘Against Interpretation’ (1966), for the impossibility of adequately translating the art work, though I think she would have supported Morgan’s insistence on a continuing attentiveness to language – something for which Groys has little time.

More recently, John Kelsey offered another alternative. Kelsey occupies an unusually multi-hyphenated position, in that as well as producing criticism he is a gallerist (at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York), one who sells the work he produces as an artist (as part of Bernadette Corporation), and is also an editor and professor. There have been occasions when, in a single magazine, he is simultaneously advertiser, reviewer and reviewed, a degree of entanglement he signals by labelling himself a ‘hack’, with its connotations of Grub Street drudgery. This half-serious suggestion, which Kelsey made during a 2007 lecture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, offers a replacement for the critic who is ‘not up to the task of reinventing himself to meet the conditions he’s working under today’ – call it critic 2.0. Tellingly, Kelsey’s strawman is referred to exclusively as a ‘he’, and the version of critical activity that he would rather do away with – dogmatic, predicated on good ‘taste’ – feels haunted by the masculine mandarins of the 1950s and ’60s. But when Rosenberg and Greenberg are invoked as emblematic of a certain kind of monolithic criticism, which they often are, it’s usually forgotten that the former started out as a poet and survived as a sometime ad man, and that the latter began as a customs official with a background in literature. They were both multi-taskers too.

Is there a connection between Schjeldahl’s farewell and Kelsey’s cheerful elegy? Whether implying a tidy guild or a critic who is impeccably disinterested, each account constructs a kind of figure that I’m not sure ever existed: one who is undistracted, part of a pure tradition and devoted to a single pursuit. But if criticism has often been characterized by a lack of codification, perhaps it’s better to think of it as a number of related practices with different goals rather than a uniform field of activity. This untidiness could be a virtue.

When I try to remember what has changed over the past two decades, I keep coming up with the same answer: memory itself. Of course, I have amassed 20 more years of experiences: from the joyful (a mini-pearl found in a mussel in Norway) to the tragic (two friends lost in aeroplane crashes). But I’m speaking here about collective memory, which is not to do with specific events but how we save, retrieve and share them.

Collective memory has often been divided into two categories: orality and literacy (societies without and with writing). Eric A. Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, Frances Yates and even Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), all reflected on the differences between these two modes in forging a link between the past and the present. It’s hard for us to imagine living without writing. But oral societies are not more forgetful, nor do they have poorer memories; they simply have different ways of recollecting, from telling stories to consulting elders.

A few examples may be helpful to understand not only orality and literacy but also their deep incompatibility. Storytellers in oral societies use a host of techniques – exaggeration, repetition, rhyme – to make stories easier for their listeners to recollect and to retell. An exaggerated fishing tale is more memorable than the dull facts of a modest catch; repetition drives any point home. Rhyme also helps: ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ sticks in your mind more readily than, ‘In the long run, consistent work is more productive than rushed efforts, in sewing and other tasks.’ Literacy makes such mnemonic techniques unnecessary because everything can be written down. Moreover, in a literate world, exaggerations can be errors or even lies; repetitions seen as redundancies; rhyming consigned to poetry alone.

One of the deepest incompatibilities is in the saving of past events. In orality, sharing – the telling and retelling of stories – is the key to preservation; any event taken out of circulation and stored away would be irreversibly consigned to oblivion. By contrast, literacy stores things that are supposed to last, whether in paper archives or digital ones – which brings us back to the transformation of collective memory over the last two decades. Is digitization oral or literate? When Havelock, Ong, McLuhan and Yates were writing – roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s – computers were generally understood to be an extension, if not an intensification, of literacy: more words and numbers to be stored on microchips instead of paper (although Ong glimpsed a ‘secondary orality’ in electronic technology). By the 1990s computers started to realize their full potential and developed from isolated databases into mobile handheld devices with amazing multi-tasking and communication abilities.
I believe that digitization is not only changing collective memory but also recombining orality and literacy in a new and often explosive manner. Despite their deep incompatibility, there were always traces of orality in literacy, long before computers were invented (think of jokes, which are funnier when told in person than read in a book). Orality lost its legitimacy for collective memory to literacy but never entirely disappeared. Now digitization – especially online social networking – creates novel hybrids, whereby literate elements suddenly appear in oral settings and vice versa.

For example, there is no such thing as authorship – or copyright – in orality because the tales are continually being retold by new tellers. There doesn’t seem to be much place for authorship and copyright online, where texts are continually being circulated by new users: not retold but recommended, re-tweeted or even plagiarized. The oral tales retold the most become the cornerstones of collective memory, just as the online sites with the most hits get the most attention, although the information can be as trivial as dog tricks. Oral societies don’t have the interiorized, private subjectivity proper to literacy; Facebook doesn’t either.

Such hybrids are explosive because they bring the constant circulation of orality to the eternal storage of literacy. Like orality, digitization shares; like literacy, digitization never forgets a single detail, however compromising it may come later in life. In a way online digitization subjects literacy to the rules of orality, despite the computer’s dependence on reading and writing skills. The move from typewriter-like keyboards to touchscreens may just reflect the end of literacy’s reign over orality as our primary way of saving, retrieving and sharing events.

frieze is a testimony to many changes over the last two decades, which are explored in this anniversary issue. But by hitting the news-stands at the dawn of online digitization, the magazine captures the transformation of collective memory: a seismic shift from a predominantly literate model to an infusion of orality into literacy. Just as classicists once read Homer not only for the poetry but also to grasp the shift from orality to literacy in ancient Greece, so art historians may some day read frieze not only for the art but also to grasp the impact of digitization on art writing and history. I’m no clairvoyant, but some characteristics already stand out, such as the equal value placed on a critic’s personal narrative (oral storytelling) and theory (philosophical literacy). Of course, the rest is for a columnist of the future to figure out.

What are you reading?
I don’t read anything besides the news.

What was the first piece of art that really mattered to you?
My early memory of art is of revolutionary posters. They had a very strong impact on me as a child.

If you could live with only one piece of art what would it be?
I have no favourite piece of art. I am more interested in the artist than in the work.

What should change?
What should stay the same?
Everything should change and everything should stay the same.

What could you imagine doing if you didn’t do what you do?
Imagination is part of what I do now. If I didn’t do what I am doing today I would have no imagination.

What is your favourite title of an art work?
Untitled.

What music are you listening to?
I never listen to music.

What do you like the look of?
I like the look of anything. Everything is interesting to me.

What images keep you company in the space where you work?
Normally we don’t have any images in our working space – with one exception: a list of the names and birthdates of 5,000 students who died in the earthquake in Sichuan in 2008 is posted on one wall.

The experience of visiting ‘Introspective’, Richard Hamilton’s extensive and - so he claims - final retrospective, is one of having visited the Science Museum of Pop - or a vision of how such a museum might appear in, say, 50 years time. The impact leaves you giddy for days, concussed by the sensation of having seen the modern world explained - the whole trip, from the vivacity of early Rock and Roll to the frozen, lunar stillness of a world cocooned in technology and media.

Now 81 and working on the second volume of his visual autobiography, Hamilton delivered a definition of Pop art back in 1957 that has yet to be improved on or updated - nothing less than the anatomy of Mass Age culture. His list of Pop’s defining adjectives - including ‘Transient (short-term solution)’, for instance, and ‘Expendable (easily forgotten)’ - comprise an understanding of both the symptoms and the consequences of an increasingly accelerated culture. He had already pronounced the ambient nature of the total Pop environment in his ‘Fun House’ installation created for the Independent Group’s 1956 exhibition ‘This Is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, London - a work that briefs the viewer with Hamilton’s vision of the post-1946 consumer age as a kind of unyielding bombardment of slick, gaudy, eroticized signifiers - at once seductive and disruptive.

It still feels as though this is tomorrow. Hamilton’s mixed-media work seems the product of a near future age - a post-art age, perhaps - when aesthetics, science, ethnography, satire, requiem, celebration and humanism have been merged without the self-consciousness of dogma into a living, philosophical survey of humankind’s relationship with the pleasures and perils of advanced technological consumerism. Hamilton’s art describes the tension between our appetite for the compensatory pleasures of modern living - our hunger for glamour, celebrity, and the sheer aesthetic gorgeousness of a refined, product-led culture - and the ways in which our desires are duped by those same obsessions. He both celebrates the fetishized surface of Mass Age culture, and is busily at work within its contradictions - creating an epic narrative of modern experience, the principal theme of which, perhaps, is the relation of technology to desire.

You can find this in such early work as Man, Machine and Motion (1956) - with its almost Kraftwerk-like, ‘mensch maschine’, interpolation of the machine becoming one with human beings - and in Hamilton’s reconstruction and mesmeric typographical interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23) - a body of work made between 1966 and 1999. There is in Hamilton’s fascination with the taut, almost erotic relationship between a notion of robotics and human physicality - sensuality, even - the foundation of his ultra-modernity as an artist. Like several of the other founding pioneers of Mass Age culture - Marshall McLuhan and Roland Barthes to name just two - he presents an acuity and an aesthetic which seems not only to have anticipated the flamboyance of much postmodernism, but already assigned such thinking to its place in a white, chilled museum of contemporary thought and culture.

In Hamilton’s ‘Swingeing London 67’ series of oil on canvas screenprints (1968-9), for instance, we see the whole parade of celebrity and media - but as it might be reported from the 22nd century; such frozen images of modernity - his ‘Richard’-branded objects, Carafe (1978) and Ashtray (1979) share this chilled poise in relation to advertising - establish an aesthetic in Hamilton’s art in which we seem to see the present from the future. We are at once immersed in the contemporary experience of the world, and disengaged from its cultural baggage: rock stars and fashion models, hotel lobbies and domestic technology, turd-inhabited advert-style sunsets and pristine computers - they all achieve an eloquence in Hamilton’s art which speaks of the contract between our aspirations, empathy, and inner notion of an index of modern signifiers.

But Hamilton is also never still; a great artist in the classical tradition, he endlessly tests and refines his work. Even his work from the 1960s seems more modern - more in tune with tomorrow - than most of today’s ‘contemporary culture’. (His 1968 design for the sleeve of the so-called White Album by the Beatles remains one of the most aggressively modern artefacts ever produced - not unlike the music it housed.) Underpinned by the joyous intellectualism of his lifelong obsessions with James Joyce and Duchamp (pretty much the architects of Modernism) Hamilton’s career to date comprises a body of work created over 55 years that comes across as the diagrams, working models and machines that seem to define both the world we live in now and the one that we may yet live to inhabit.

It’s all there: the coming to terms with the supremacy and immediacy of surface; the conversion of the artist into an ambiguous brand; the identification of glamour as perhaps the most determined form of social energy; the usefulness of transgressive or absurd imagery, its potency increased by the meticulous punning on materials and contexts; the adaptation of technology to aesthetic purpose; the role of selective vision in a culture of information anxiety and visual stress; the rhetoric of irony; the seductions of colour and the erotics of form. Above all, Hamilton conjures with the power of absence (that which is hidden, obscured or removed) and the refined capacities of montage - a directive that may have been what led one of his former students, the singer Bryan Ferry, to remark in 1975 about his own conversion of Pop art into art Pop, ‘I am, you might say, a collagiste’.

Hamilton’s most iconic work - Interior 1 (1964) for instance, or the monolithic twin canvases of The Citizen (1982-3) - become a means of appreciating the force and generosity with which some of his lesser-known pieces become so compelling, and so articulate of the modern world, and how his ‘Lobby’ paintings from the late 1980s, as much as his ‘Fashion Plate (cosmetic study)’ series of mixed-media collages from 1969, maintain a creative chemistry that fuses the cold sheen of freshly minted machine parts with sumptuous painterly aesthetics. The dynamo of Hamilton’s art appears to be the maintained and controlled collision between the sensual and the mass-produced. As such Hamilton inhabits the pre-history of Postmodernism and convergence culture with an almost uncanny acuity, prophesying time and time again the devices and directions in which visual culture is most likely to proceed.

Ultimately, particularly through his profound relationship with the art and ideas of Duchamp Hamilton emerges as the great philosopher-scientist of the modern age: an artist inventor of undimming good humour, whose work provides the soul with strength to face a not too terrible hereafter.
 
 

Alejandro Cesarco’s exhibition ‘A Portrait, a Story, and an Ending’ at the Kunsthalle Zürich is the first in a series to test the institution’s library space. Since the Kunsthalle returned to the renovated rooms of the Löwenbräuareal last summer, this room has stood in limbo, a low-ceilinged area marking the end of the Kunsthalle’s lower storey following a chain of larger galleries, home to a few books and host to occasional talks. The main galleries currently house a retrospective exhibition of the work of Yang Fudong stuffed full of video, film and photography. Cescarco’s spare presentation is a welcome hiatus: as its title suggests, it consists of a portrait, a story and an ending.

The portrait is A Printed Portrait of Julie Ault (2013), in which glimpses of recent material written and published by Ault are visible behind the kind of a mount in which one might display a group of family photographs. Judging by the texts Cesarco has assembled, Ault has been thinking recently about the legacy of Group Material, the artist collective she co-founded; Sister Corita Kent; the use of archives; the exhibition ‘Cultural Economies’, which she curated at the Drawing Center on the alternative art movement in New York; and Felix Gonzales-Torres, fellow member of Group Material. Ault herself has been a subject of recent, well-earned attention in the German-speaking world, given her involvement in last year’s Documenta and the exhibition ‘Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault’ at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel. While nominally culled from her collection, this latter show forms another portrait of Ault and her diverse career, as the works were largely given to her as presents by artists with whom she collaborated. Cesarco himself is also represented in her collection, and his A Printed Portrait of Julie Ault refers to Gonzales-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Julie Ault) (1991), a large work using words and events supplied by Ault herself to document a moment in her life and practice.

Next to the portrait appears the story, or rather a pregnant moment within a narrative. The digitalized 16mm film Shortly After Breakfast She Received The News (2013) is seven minutes long, but effectively consists of one still image of a white tablecloth with crumbs and reading matter, abandoned after reception of the news. Dust and the grain of the film demonstrate that time is passing, but events have moved away from this setting.

The ending, to complete the show, is Index (An Orphan) (2012) – six sheets of photographic paper printed with the index of an unwritten book whose entries such as ‘Allen, Woody’; ‘bike, little green’; ‘Bergson, Henri’; ‘boredom’; ‘legacy’; ‘Oedipus’; ‘Wizard of Oz, The’; and ‘woes’ cover written works, films, emotions, the anecdotal and famous figures.

Alejandro Cesarco, installation view, 2013

A small printed booklet containing an interview between the artist and Beatrix Ruf accompanies the show, in which they muse on libraries, Jorge Luis Borges – of course – and portraits. As an opening gambit in the discussion of what the Kunsthalle’s library could be, Cesarco’s works suggest literary possibilities: the portrait immediately offers tangents that could be followed and is a starting point for the potential cross-referencing and exchange of ideas, albeit a privileged exchange for Cesarco as he knows the author. The film confirms the cliché of images being better in your head, providing a catalyst for the imagination rather than showing us the story. And the index, the latest in a series by the artist, uses references with which the viewer can generate another multifaceted impression.

Cesarco’s version of a library is thus one open to collaboration and generous with his sources. But it is also problematic, as problematic as the idea of the library itself today. The folded periodicals that lie on the table in Cesarco’s film and the texts that surround us tell us that we’re amongst reading friends. Is this enough? The sucker punch of Borges’s stories like ‘The Library of Babel’ was the way he harnessed the notion of the unlimited potential of books and libraries, but now that the very mention of Borges operates as shorthand with which to piggyback on that effect, are we not in danger of forgetting the concentration and duration required for reading? Seen in isolation, these works are somewhat akin to lingering in an antique bookshop to enjoy the smell of the leather binding and expecting to absorb knowledge by osmosis.

In the interview Ruf eventually concedes that this library will not be the library of the publications that have been gathered and generated by shows in the Kunsthalle, but a space for a taster of it. The main archive will be elsewhere; the open library will be ‘the communal space or living room’ for browsing. In light of this, Cesarco’s work becomes interesting in terms of the attention given to what one sees in a gallery context – reading versus looking. But even if he generates books without the legwork of writing (as in his Indexes), libraries are hard work, whether they are places for research or for the discussions that research could trigger. Right now, given our shortening attention spans and access to so much information online, libraries are both essential and impossible. Cesarco – or Ruf, as curator – provides a whiff of a library fetish, but not a solution to the library problem.

Newspapers across the world have buzzed in recent months with updates on the trial of José Efraín Ríos Montt: the former army general, ex-dictator and mastermind of Guatemala’s state-sponsored annihilation of scores of its own citizens three decades ago. Centered on the country’s high plains inhabited by Mayan populations, his offensives against suspected Communist sympathizers entailed the murder, rape, and torture of the indigenous population. His self-imposed immunity to prosecution recently expired, Montt now stands accused of acts of genocide – an accusation extended, in recent days, even to Guatemala’s sitting president and his actions as a former general under Montt. As oral evidence, the prosecution has invoked the testimony of hundreds of Guatemalans, many of indigenous extraction.

It was thus with poignant timing that the first retrospective dedicated to Regina José Galindo unfurled in Spain (a country with its own recent history of holding former South American dictators to account). Born in Guatemala City in 1974, Galindo came of age during the country’s decades-long civil war. Turning her personal and political response to its horrors into a bodily practice, Galindo began performing publicly in 1999, bursting onto the scene definitively with the piece ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? (Who Can Erase the Footprints?) in 2003. Both a 37-minute video and photographic images record the artist’s walk – her feet dipped in human blood – from Guatemala City’s Constitutional Court to the steps on the National Palace, as a row of security guards looked on somewhat confusedly. In protest against Montt’s recently launched presidential candidacy, Galindo’s footprints literalized the stains of his military actions upon the nation, kept out of view or washed away in collective memory. Galindo’s larger practice has prefigured – and perhaps, in some small way, encouraged – the testimony of voices excluded from Guatemala’s national narrative.

Perra (Bitch), 2005, performance documentation

For all of its temerity, Who Can Erase the Footprints? did not push the artist’s body to the physical extremes to which her subsequent practice has submitted it – a submission that makes of physical pain a kind of raw material, or more ineffably, a method. Featuring the unruffled Galindo carving the word ‘dog’ into her own arm, Perra (Bitch, 2005) conjures up the violence wrought upon women’s bodies, whether expressly political or domestic. For 150,000 Volts (2007), Galindo submitted to an actual tasing, which rendered her temporarily immobile and unconscious. In a similar vein, the photographs of Confesión (Confession, 2007) find Galindo undergoing waterboarding at the hands of mock inquisitor, whose status as a volunteer in no way diminished the severity of his interrogation. The most obvious points of reference with regard to such performances are Gina Pane and Marina Abramovic – not simply for the use of the artist’s body, but the punishing rituals to which it is subjected. Galindo’s work, however, takes on a more pointedly political edge; its feminist dimensions are inextricable, in turn, from a specific historical and cultural matrix, inflected by questions of class and ethnicity.

In this vein, the short video Hermana (Sister, 2010), features Galindo – of ‘ladina’ (hispanized) descent – standing opposite an indigenous woman, who intermittently slaps her face and spits on her. The work evokes a politics of race endemic to Guatemalan (and more broadly, Central American) culture. Still, Galindo’s practice is not circumscribed solely to a Central American ambit. America’s Family Prison (2008) comprises a video, a photograph, eight architectural drawings, and a large key (presumably to the cell in question), the piece entailed Galindo’s voluntary confinement – with her husband and two children – to a tiny prison room for 24 hours. Galindo rented a model cell used in trade exhibits, and visitors could peer into the locked unit, placed in the middle of a large gallery. The piece calls attention to the United States’ multi-billion dollar private prison industry. It also conjures up the close intertwining of Guatemalan political economy with American policy. At the height of US complicity in Central America’s counter-Communist repression, Ronald Reagan declared Ríos Montt ‘a man of great personal integrity and commitment,’ and matched words with the channeling of arms and intelligence.

Hermana (Sister), 2010, performance documentation. Photograph: José Juárez

La Conquista (The Conquest, 2009) transcends national borders in a different sense, evoking the abjection of poverty, and the attempts of woman to escape it by means of their own bodies. Two wigs made of hair bought from poor women in Guatemala and India appeared in the gallery mounted on simple poles. The disembodied anonymity of these tresses underscored – through absence – the stories of the individuals that produced them. In another sense, the interweaving of strands bespoke a certain potential community. For Mientras ellos siguen libres(While they are still free, 2007) Galindo likewise used the body parts of others – in this case, actual umbilical cords – to have herself lashed to a bed, invoking the plight of women raped by the forces of state terror.

Not all of Galindo’s work proceeds along explicitly political lines. Performances like Punto Ciego (Blind spot, 2010) are more elliptical, even lyrical. Stripped bare, set up on a plinth, and isolated in a room filled with blind individuals, Galindo submits here to examining, inquisitive hands, which attempt to make sense of her presence, as well as its unexplained nakedness. To be sure, in the context of Galindo’s larger oeuvre, Punto Ciego’s poetics of blindness and revelation, solitude and community, evinces its own potentially ideological resonances, however allegorically.

Mientras ellos siguen libres (While they are still free), 2007, performance documentation. Photograph: David Pérez

Other objects in the exhibition, meanwhile, not only attest to Galindo’s specific actions, but set into relief the predicament of how to display performance art. The question of its parasitical reliance upon other media gains complexity and density by virtue of the human rights abuses alluded to in Galindo’s oeuvre. Abu Ghraib notwithstanding, such acts are not usually recorded by video or photography. In some instances, the exhibition attempted to lend a kind of material facticity to Galindo’s work. For Peso (Weight, 2006), the artist spent four days shackled in 25-kilo manacles, which were exhibited here as a kind of evidence, gaining a brute poignancy even in the absence of the artist’s body.

Twenty years ago the Cold War was only just over, AIDS wasn’t ‘cured’ and Bill Clinton had just been inaugurated as US president. In smaller news, museum admission badges created a mini-crisis in New York. The pins were emblazoned with the words ‘ever wanting’, ‘imagine’ and ‘white’, though one of them put the words together: ‘I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.’ Two decades on, I wonder what all the fuss was about. Whose delicate sentiments were really offended, or was the backlash latent racism? These badges were pinned to visitors’ chests, the museum in question was the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the exhibition was the 1993 edition of the biennial, a show that was scorned for nearly 20 years: The New York Times called it ‘arid’; in the Village Voice Peter Schjeldahl complained about its ‘politicking’; The New Yorker ran a satirical piece mocking the survey’s pieties. The biennial – curated by Thelma Golden, John G. Hanhardt, Lisa Phillips and Elisabeth Sussman – was deemed sanctimonious, ruled by critical theory and words like ‘identity’ and ‘transgressive’ (Microsoft Office’s spell-check still doesn’t acknowledge the latter).

Now, however, that moment is being re-examined in ‘NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star’ – the subtitle borrowed from Sonic Youth’s eponymous 1994 album. The album, the band’s eighth, doesn’t appear in the show, though the badges – Museum Tags (1993) by Daniel Joseph Martinez – do. They’re affixed to cardboard and framed behind glass, like mounted butterflies. Picture what might have been, had they been pinned onto New Museum visitors who might wear them as they wandered the neighbouring streets of the Lower East Side, an area that was for years largely Latino. As it is, the badges function like a metaphor for how work in ‘NYC 1993’ has been tamed.

Don’t get me wrong; the show – which is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Jenny Moore and Margot Norton – is largely great. I could list numerous pieces I love (yes, that simple, uncritical word ‘love’), from Gabriel Orozco’s Yielding Stone (1992), for which the artist – who was then only 30 – rolled his weight in sculpting clay from his studio to a show at the New Museum; or his photo Isla en la Isla (Island within an Island, 1993); to David Hammons’ In the Hood (1993). The latter, a piece of fabric ripped from a sweatshirt, is fierce, suggestive of a hanging, and is still forceful in an age of the New York Police Department’s racial-profiling stop-and-frisk programme. But what’s new to me, seeing it now, is that In the Hood is also a visual pun on the appropriation of ghetto culture.

Hung next to the works by Orozco, In the Hood is in the same gallery as Rachel Harrison’s Green (1992/2011), a playful red-painted assemblage built with everything from a mop handle to a record cover, resin, phone cords, rope, a sock and a key ring. The curators’ insinuation here seems to be that pieces like Hammons’, with its acutely felt anger, would lead to Harrison’s anti-monumentalism. There is a lot of excellent work by women (who make up more than half of the artists in the show), which takes sexuality in a frank and funny way, such as Cheryl Donegan’s video Head (1993), in which she suggestively slurps milk spilling from a juice carton, or Sue Williams’ Are You Pro-Porn or Anti-Porn (1992), an R. Crumb-style drawing that riffs and rages about sexual politics.

Twenty years ago, I was in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and Williams was included in ‘The Subject of Rape’, an exhibition I helped curate. Originally dismissed as academic and theoretical, the show is (to my surprise) name-checked prominently in the wall texts at the New Museum. Lutz Bacher’s video sculpture My Penis (1992) was also in that exhibition: a recording of JFK’s nephew, William Kennedy Smith, ripped from Court TV, plays on a loop; he repeats, ‘I did put my penis,’ wincing before finally saying, ‘in her mouth.’ Charged with rape, Smith was eventually acquitted on all charges. In our time of 24-hour news cycles and Internet celebrities, Bacher’s work now looks prophetic, though the way she created a readymade of that moment also remains powerful, appropriating and shifting the meaning of a man talking uncomfortably about his penis.

Patricia Cronin’s two series of Polaroids, ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ (both 1993), have a sweet playfulness, though the girls appear to have sex with a poster of Madonna, the boys with a televised George H.W. Bush. Janine Antoni crossed durational performance and portraiture in Lick and Lather (1993), taking 14 neoclassical portrait busts of herself, each made of chocolate or soap, and then eating and washing them. The early 1990s was a moment when women were pushing boundaries even as they revisited more traditional techniques, as Nicole Eisenman did, and – seeing them here in the New Museum – the work all seems less ‘arid’ than I recalled. Perhaps that’s the softening of time?

Even in death there was humour, as in Gregg Bordowitz’s video Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993), with its dark cackling and forthright discussion of dying at a moment before there was a viable treatment for AIDS. Death is the theme of Derek Jarman’s moving film meditation Blue (1993), completed a year before the artist died, and Andres Serrano’s AIDS morgue shots (‘The Morgue’, 1992). The latter are hung across from paintings by John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton. In this manner ‘NYC 1993’ partly attempts to point to where art was going, but Currin’s sick women in bed (both titled Girl in Bed, 1993) serve only to domesticate the men in the morgue.

In another gallery (which I nicknamed ‘the death room’), the installation is beautiful and moving, with Rudolf Stingel’s orange carpet (Untitled, 1991/2012), Robert Gober’s Prison Window (1992) and Kristin Oppenheim’s haunting Sail On Sailor (1993), a chanted line from a Beach Boys song that twists it to sound like a dirge for a death at sea. Félix González-Torres’ grainy photos of birds in flight dominate two walls, and his string of lights dangles from the ceiling. The work all goes together so well, it looks like one piece – and like too much curatorial intervention. Originally designed as billboards, the birds seem caged in the museum; at the very least, their meaning is altered. Some of their power would perhaps have been lost on the city streets, but it would have been more fitting. So, too, with the posters In Honor of Allen R. Schindler (1993) by Bureau (Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett), which are named for a gay man who was beaten to death by a fellow Navy shipmate a year earlier. They were originally wheat-pasted illegally on 42nd Street; in today’s sanitized and upscale New York, wheat-pasting them is still apt. Gays may be allowed in the military, but sexual violence remains a rampant problem.

Why this exhibition now? Do we run in 20-year cycles, recuperating the past? Has the art world veered so far towards money that people crave the meaning and politics of the early 1990s? The 1993 Whitney Biennial was lauded in many reviews of last year’s edition and, in that weird reprise of tragedy as farce, ACT UP’s saga is to become a mini-series on US network television, while many Republicans now support gay marriage. You can almost look at ‘NYC 1993’ as a marker of how far we’ve come. There’s also a decided feeling of nostalgia to the show, for a mythic New York that never really existed. Or, if it did, brought with it its share of pain. That’s what I thought seeing the inclusion of Larry Clark, whose work in the show partly bends the curators’ own rules by including stills from Kids (released in 1995 not 1993) as well as later skateboard decks paired with Clark’s own steel door from his apartment, emblazoned with stickers and exhibited in 1993 at Luhring Augustine. The show seems a kind of dying gasp for New York’s role as the presumed centre of the art world, hinted at here by the inclusion of artists like Jason Rhoades from Los Angeles and Sarah Lucas and Gillian Wearing from London.

Something else still rankles. The New Museum lobby is emblazoned with Martinez’s slogan – ‘In the rich man’s house the only place to spit is in his face’ – which was offered as an alternative to the 1993 biennial. Here it is installed as script on the café’s interior glass wall. What would it have meant for it to be on the exterior of the museum, an institution that has been instrumental in gentrifying the Bowery? Or, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (1271) (1993), his canoe with noodles? They’re being served up for lunch here, each day by the bookshop, on the same Bowery that was once home to so many soup kitchens and flophouses. Most poignant is the exhibition’s best piece, Nari Ward’s Amazing Grace (1993). It’s in a raw space next door where more than 300 soiled strollers found on the street are roped together in the shape of an ark, over which gospel singer and civil rights activist Mahalia Jackson sings the hymn for which the piece is named, a hymn written about slavery. The installation touches on birth, renewal and the homeless. But step outside into the bright light of day, and men spill out of the Bowery Mission. I am sure the curators were aware of the proximity. How could they not be? They also must have been aware that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Bergoglio’s demonstration of humility and compassion comes, however, with arch-conservative baggage: in 2009, he described same-sex marriage as a ‘machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God’; in 2007, he called abortion a ‘death penalty for the unborn’. In his first speech to the cardinals, quoting the French writer Léon Bloy, Bergoglio declared that, ‘He who does not pray to God prays to the Devil.’ (I didn’t know it was that easy to become a Satanist!)

Perhaps Bergoglio’s obsession with the devil stems from the years of Argentina’s Dirty War – waged by the military junta that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983 – when he was head of the Argentinian Jesuit Order (1973–80). Allegations that the new Pope was somehow complicit in the military’s abduction and torture of two Jesuit priests working in the favelas in 1976 have been refuted by one of the victims, Father Francisco Jalics, who after Bergoglio’s election stated: ‘I am reconciled to the events.’ (Although not, it would seem, with Bergoglio.) According to a 1997 testimony by the other priest, Orlando Yorio (who died in 2000), Bergoglio expelled them at the time from the Jesuit Order, thus effectively making them fair game for the junta’s crackdown on resistance in the favelas. In March, The New York Times reported that, ‘even as the head of the Argentine Conference of Bishops from 2005 to 2011, Bergoglio resisted issuing a formal apology for the church’s actions during the Dirty War’. Symbolic spectacles – such as a pope named Francis humbly kissing the tattooed feet of prisoners, with the cameras running – are inevitably overshadowed by a failure to come clean about the events in Argentina which, ironically, involved a Jesuit called Francisco living with the poor and being imprisoned. Is Bergoglio involved in a guilt-ridden re-enactment routine? Despite his demonstrations of humility, he still needs to prove whether he can live up to his chosen name. Papal musings on the significance of the Turin Shroud, broadcast on Italian television on Holy Saturday, will not suffice.

I’m not suggesting that the art world is equivalent to the Vatican, even though – with its loafers, elaborate liturgies, sermons and behind-the-scene power plays – it can sometimes feel like it. But the art world does share the Vatican’s taste for symbolic gestures and demonstrative acts of naming. Take, for example, the forthcoming Venice Biennale and, in particular, the German Pavilion. Transformed into a church at the last Biennale with the work of the late Christoph Schlingensief (a devoted, though decidedly unorthodox, Catholic), this year curator Susanne Gaensheimer and her French counterpart Christine Marcel have opted for a more secular act of re-dedication: the German and French Pavilions – which face each other in the Giardini – will swap.

I’m looking forward to the confusions that might occur with Anri Sala – who was born in Albania, is Paris-based, but has also lived in Berlin – showing in the demanding German Pavilion as France’s representative. (Is this Germany or France, and does it matter?) With Gaensheimer’s nomination of four artists, however, it’s even more complicated. Out of the four – the filmmaker Romuald Karmakar, the photographers Santu Mofokeng and Dayanita Singh, and artist and activist Ai Weiwei – Karmakar is the only one who is a resident of Germany. All of these are good artists and their nomination is obviously meant to send out a bold signal to go beyond self-referential chauvinism. But the question is how precisely this plays out: as an actual exhibition, and as a statement about national identities.

Though this is certainly the first time national pavilions in the Giardini have been swapped, in recent years a few countries have chosen foreigners to represent them: in 1993, for example, Andrea Fraser, who is American, and Christian Philipp Müller, who is Swiss, were selected for the Austrian Pavilion; in 2009, the British artist Liam Gillick was chosen to represent Germany; in 2011, Yael Bartana, who is Israeli, represented Poland; and, in the same year, Greek curator Katerina Gregos organized an international group show, ‘Speech Matters’, about freedom of speech for the Danish Pavilion. Aside from the obvious intention of deconstructing national stereotypes, one would hope that these choices reflect on the actual politics and realities of a respective country. ‘Speech Matters’, for example, touched on the neuralgic point of a nation that went through a crisis in the wake of the Muhammad cartoon controversy, and Bartana, amongst other issues, tackled Polish anti-Semitism.

Of the four artists nominated by Gaensheimer, only Karmakar has a history of in-depth engagement with German history. Why should Ai be so inclined to reflect upon Germany, when his main concern as a dissident in China is obviously to confront his own country’s political oppression and censorship? And what does that tell us about Germany’s highly restrictive policies on immigration and citizenship, or its economic interests in China, which are routinely flanked by a few warm words about ‘humanitarian’ causes? Perhaps Ai will tackle these issues, but the optimistic statement made in the German Pavilion’s press release – that ‘an art world in which the dialogue between cultural spheres has much greater influence than the impermeability of national borders’ – strikes a bitter note, considering that Ai is still forbidden to leave China. As the artists are expected – to quote again from the press release – ‘to expand our perspectives and give us access to the view of the other’, one starts to wonder who is supposed to play the ‘other’ to whose ‘self’.

What I find disconcerting is the way Gaensheimer’s nomination of the four artists covers ground: one artist is from South Africa, one from India, one from China, and one is French-Iranian, yet – despite their lack of relationship – they’ve all been thrown together, as if curating a national pavilion is akin to casting a pop group. It’s as though demonstrative transnationality should be about having delegates from different regions picked and arranged like flowers for a bouquet. These artists have been reduced to acting as representatives of a respective otherness, which seems ironic given that the intention, one would assume, is to transcend defining art by supposed geographical or ‘ethnic’ identities. This may provoke the artists to make great work confronting these very problems, but the nomination itself will still smack of guilt-ridden window-dressing, as if to say: ‘Look how tolerant and altruistic Germany has become!’

All of which brings me back to Pope Francis. I’m not trying to draw any direct parallels between his views and those of the curators of the German and French Pavilions this year. But there is a correlation between how nomination, naming and demonstrative acts of altruism can be deceptive, and deserve to be backed up by real, structural change. After all – to quote a phrase said to have originated with Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian order – the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Each morning, a group of neighbours assembles to dance in the small courtyard below my Beijing apartment – one of the many self-organized troupes that meet every day in plazas and parks throughout the city. I watch them sometimes as I drink coffee, admiring their dedication and lack of inhibition. Since January, however, it’s often been difficult to make them out from my 17th-storey window. A thick haze of pollution obscures the view. The US Embassy’s air-quality monitor, updated online hourly, currently reads ‘Hazardous’, the highest level on the index. In such conditions, the website warns, ‘Everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors.’ Yet my neighbours continue their two-step workout, calling to mind allegorical images of the danse macabre: skeletons holding hands, exhausting themselves in a manic, futile effort to cling to life.

There are days, too, when the waltzing outside evokes for me another kind of dance in Beijing. I am thinking of the ceaseless activity of the arts professionals who, lacking any true vocation except the will to keep dancing, spin like tops. And yet, despite the difficult conditions this can produce, Beijing remains home to a thriving creative scene, one filled with talented artists and a strong contingent of gallerists, writers and collectors who nurture, present, interpret and support their work.
Curatorial practice remains lacklustre in most of our non-profit venues. For this reason, the best way to see contemporary art in Beijing is often to visit commercial galleries – ones such as Beijing Commune, Galleria Continua, Galerie Urs Meile and Pékin Fine Arts, where hardworking directors and staff ensure that their spaces are clean and well-lit; signage is present, accurate and makes sense; electronic equipment is operational; and attention is paid to the arrangement of the art works in the space. Institutions with larger ambitions would do better to focus first on these basics before claiming importance by virtue of their curatorial rigour, square footage or their degree of autonomy from the marketplace.

One exception to this situation is Taikang Space, a not-for-profit platform whose programme regularly features well-organized exhibitions such as the 2012–13 show ‘Rural North China: 1947–1948’, the latest instalment in Taikang’s ongoing investigation into China’s rich documentary photographic history. The jury remains out on the Today Art Museum, China’s first non-profit privately owned contemporary art museum, now under the new leadership of Xie Suzhen. But tam’s Wang Guangyi retrospective last winter (guest-curated by Huang Zhuan and accompanied by a thorough, scholarly publication) and their more recent exhibition of Liu Xiaodong’s 2013 Hotan Project (again guest-curated, this time by Hou Hanru and Ou Ning) suggests there is reason to keep an open mind.

Among the most inspiring artists working and exhibiting in China’s capital are those who critically engage the world outside the gallery. As Okwui Enwezor rightly observed in the summer 2011 issue of Artforum, shortly after Ai Weiwei’s detention: ‘Everyone has been feeding at the trough of surplus capital emanating from regions where consumption of art is tolerated so long as artists steer clear of political and ideological pronouncements and keep their swords of critical relevance safely in their sheaths.’ But many artists are making critical gestures. Chen Shaoxiong’s most recent ink paintings and related videos transform images of global protest culled from social media websites, while Dongguan-based installation and video artist Li Jinghu’s most recent collaborative project with artist Gong Jian, the Urban-Rural Fringe Group, calls attention to the waste and chemical run-off associated with factory production, the dispossessed peasants, abandoned animals and other undesirables that gather in China’s no-man’s land. Similarly socially engaged artists include newcomer Li Liao, whose Consumption (2012) documented the 45 days the artist spent working on an iPad assembly line in Shenzhen; Sun Xun, whose animations investigate pivotal moments in modern Chinese history; Yang Shaobing’s paintings and video installation addressing coal mining conditions in rural China; and the artist and film director Zhao Liang, whose documentaries have examined the fault lines in China’s legal system and the social stigma of living here with HIV/AIDS.

Formal innovation is also on the rise. Some of the most interesting painting happening today deploys abstraction, occasionally nudging the medium into the arenas of sculpture and installation. The work of artists as diverse as Li Shurui, Wang Guangle and Xie Molin are notable in this regard, as are the recent, experimental paintings of Xie Nanxing. There is also a lean, new aesthetic shared by some of the best recent sculpture, including elegant, witty works in marble and wood by Hu Qingyan.

Oddly, several artists in Beijing are now attempting to position their work as a critique of ‘the art system’, but it is not. It is a completely uncritical reflection of professional ambition and the desire for recognition within the international art world, dressed up with some half-understood buzzwords borrowed from e-flux journal (which, to be clear, I enjoy reading). These artists are wallowing in their own ca-reerism and inviting us to watch. Do the sensible thing and look away. There are plenty of other talented artists here whose positions and creative approaches will challenge you to reconsider everything you thought you knew about contemporary Chinese art.

In work and love, people get boxed in, edged out, ruined; others find acceptance, win prizes and are vied for. A few are venerated, even adulated. True meritocracies are rare. Talent aside, whatever it is, human beings, like other animals, favour their own, cautiously adopting outsiders, especially those who will keep treasure close. A sociologist once told me that the only outcome your college statistically and reliably predicts is your marriage partner.

Our aggressive species has its survival methods, which usually relate to competition. Class, race, ethnicity, religion, sex: these categories for exclusion and inclusion were long ago transformed into naturalized or so-called civilized mechanisms. Snobbery persists based on these dubious categories. Self-described snobs, necessarily deluded, sit on top of this survivalist heap, priding themselves on their taste. ‘Taste’, in this instance, connotes ‘good’ but everyone has taste or preferences. ‘I prefer not to,’ declared Bartleby. He had no taste for copying anymore.

Calvin Tomkins’s new book, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (Badlands Unlimited, 2013), is my latest friend. Tomkins met Duchamp in 1959 to interview him for Newsweek magazine; over time, the art critic and artist became friends. Of Tomkins’s many books, two earlier publications are on Duchamp: The Bride and The Bachelors (1965) and Duchamp: A Biography (1996).

Duchamp talked to Tomkins about taste: ‘Taste is an experience that I try not to let into my life. Bad, good or indifferent, it doesn’t come in. I’m so against interior decorators … You don’t have to be happy or unhappy about it, you see? … Taste can’t help you understand what art can be.’

Taste is a five-letter word no one discusses. Mentioning it, I notice friends and colleagues look at their menus or their nails. Mumbling begins, then silence. I’m not kidding, completely. People like to believe their sensibilities, approaches or attitudes have been educated, nurtured or expanded beyond mere taste, ‘bad, good or indifferent’. It is also a matter of taste not to appreciate taste.

Duchamp distinguishes between the ‘onlooker’ and the artist. ‘The priority of the connoisseur or whatever you call him isn’t to speak the same language as the artist […] But don’t say the artist is a great thinker because he produces it. The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, “You have produced something marvelous.” The onlooker has the last word on it.’ Duchamp holds that these formations – artist and onlooker – perceive the same object differently, having very different aims. But the onlooker will determine the worth and fate of the art(ist).

Conversations among artists and writers about work often centre on ‘how to make it work’. Craft, materials and considerations of space regularly come into discussion – work talk. Periodontists see diseased gums, wherever they are, just as musicians and composers hear with other ears.

I regularly question my preferences. Why I like or dislike writing, a photograph. I don’t trust experience, even if it has shaped me; I don’t fervently trust what I think or believe, while I believe it still. A pox on absolutes! I could trace a genealogy of what I think and like, which is, to some extent, what I was exposed to, taught, made conscious of, and decided not to be or accept. Tendrils of difference and objections sprouting rebellions and self-discoveries – I could list them. But I couldn’t create an order for my character, and hold it/me to a neat line. (When I learned to write, I wrote fast, not on the lines, only below or above.)

My preferences change and change again. Once I believed, doing studio painting with Ron Gorchov and Doug Ohlson, that the figure would never return. Once, involved in showing and making experimental films, I believed Hollywood movies were uninteresting. One night, watching a structuralist-materialist black-and-white film of its celluloid grain, I asked myself: ‘Why am I watching this?’ Like Bartleby, I preferred not to, anymore. Whatever I’ve ‘renounced’ resides somewhere, pinging and ponging, because ideas live on, more or less alive in different moments. Being for or against something now is less interesting to me than understanding what it does, how it does it, and why it’s being done.

Which brings me to the art world’s obsession with decade-ism. The so-called literary world stores much less faith on periods of emergence. The new is treasured more in visual art than in writing; the literary world is backward in so many ways, and I will not count them. But a first book comes out in 1991, say, and the year stops being of interest, with the next book, whenever it comes out, which counts more, and then the next. A writer is thought to mature, even to write better and know more. The actual age of the writer matters today as a form of ‘branding’, but the brand becomes old, just as the writer will.

Artists get pinned to a decade. It’s as if time had stopped, the artist suspended in it. Artists think in and through their work, during all the decades after the one in which they debuted. If humans weren’t perverse, in Postmodernity the ‘post’ would become valuable.

People now live so long, many past 100. Extended middle and old-age pushes youth further and further back in time, making being young really a thing of the past. Something interesting could emerge from that.