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.
 
 

Since its 1974 premiere, Roman Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece Chinatown has been interpreted, for better or for worse, as a meta-film of sorts – both an allegory of the cinematic valorization and corruption of Hollywood and an abreaction to the insidious trauma visited upon its director with the zeitgeist-defining murder of his wife, Sharon Tate.  Mythologized as the artistic climax of Robert Evans-era Paramount, the film’s success was also indebted to the self-congratulatory role given to the setting of Los Angeles itself, re-envisioned during the louche post-1960s era as a gilded soundstage. Like the film’s titular neighbourhood, which doesn’t actually appear until the closing minutes, Polanski’s LA was more of an idea than a physical location, a sweeping 20th-century eschatology that yoked the covenant of Manifest Destiny to the messianism of Charles Manson. 

In true LA fashion, Singaporean artist Ming Wong has refurbished Polanski’s original cinematic simulacrum of the city by digitally rendering it as a second-stage simulacrum of a Baudrillardian noir, where identity, place and ethnicity become fluid categories. Wong, known principally for his filmic restagings of European art classics like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), wherein he films key scenes with himself as the primary characters, creates a similarly parallax Chinatown, filled with duplicates of Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, all performed according to the original script (with a few exceptions) by Ming Wong. 

Though his stylish re-dramatizations, complete with period wardrobe – from zoot suits and fedoras to coiffed wig and pearls – and digitally transferred backdrops, initially resemble the kind of film parodies now prevalent on award and sketch comedy shows, the effect of the artist’s serial duplication on each screen ranges from campish to heartfelt to grotesque. Summarized in six key scenes, which play on video loops distributed chronologically throughout a darkened labyrinth of theatrically crafted backdrops, the artist’s pastiche emphasizes the Mélièsian whimsy of ‘movie-going’ while subtly thumbing its nose at Polanski’s flagrant, and occasionally offensive, melodrama. The first sequence, in which Nicholson’s Jake Gittes regales his office cronies with a dirty ‘Chinamen’ quip, becomes, in Wong’s video, a visual détournement of LA’s Asian stereotypes. ‘Then the guy says, “Well the Chinese, first they screw a little bit then they stop and they go and, uh, read a little Confucius, come back, screw a little bit more and then they stop again, go back and they screw a little bit more…”’, Wong jokes, while another iteration of the artist, this time transformed into Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray stands quietly behind. Wong’s gender-bending portrayal of Mulwray and superannuated take on Huston’s Noah Cross – one of the great villains of cinema – are particularly affecting, showcasing the artist’s versatility at mimicry and acting. The tri-part performance also transforms the incestuous love triangle, which stands as Chinatown’s narrative cliffhanger, into an exercise in reflexive semiosis – Wong appears ‘dolled up’ as Katherine, the innocent love-child of Cross and Mulwray.

Part of the reward of Making Chinatown is also in its immersive pleasure, an atmosphere intricately plotted along a horseshoe pattern that forces the viewer to move from video to video through a simulated studio back lot, so that each sequence is experienced as a dimensional extension of the screen – a hyperreal rupture of conventional cinematic visuality. This mutability of design also allows for aleatory recombinations of various audio and video snippets, depending on the viewer’s position and pace. Classic lines of dialogue – ‘You are a very nosey fellow, kitty cat’, ‘Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough’ and ‘Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown’ – impinge upon one another, recontextualizing the narrative’s hardboiled storyline into the kind of synchronic cut-up once celebrated by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Coupled with the countless facsimiles of the artist on screen, the sensorium is a perfect miniature of the classic Hollywood dream factory digitized. Moreover, Making Chinatown is a playful and diligent encomium to the city whose sense of place is commonly determined by the dis-placed fantasies of the image.

A hypnotizing sound overwhelmed the gallery, as if heralding an ominous event that never occurred. The source of the noise was a record player, looping in the final grooves of an old vinyl record by the famous Mexican folk singer José Alfredo Jiménez. With the Nietzchean title The Eternal Return (16 éxitos) (The Eternal Return, 16 Hits, 2012), this small, tight show by the Mexican artist Gonzalo Lebrija comprised four works that appeared so intricately linked they could have been read as a single installation.

The title of the exhibition, ‘La vida no vale nada’ (Life Isn’t Worth a Thing), was borrowed from one of the most memorable folk songs (or ‘rancheras’) that Jiménez wrote and sang in the 1950s. The song combines a nihilistic message (‘life isn’t worth a thing. It always begins with crying, and with crying it ends’) with an uplifting melody. In recent years, Lebrija has been concerned with the passing of time and the futility of life, but he examines them with a mixture of melancholy and humour that echoes the self-effacing and occasionally demotic tone of Jiménez’s song.

In front of the record player was a large black and white photograph of Mexican cowboy on a magnificent white horse, encircled by his lasso. As is usual in Lebrija’s work, the image, despite its depiction of action, is static, airless even. Although a moment is frozen in time you can somehow feel the dizzying movement of the lasso, its force surrounding both the human and the animal. The title of the work, Trou Noir (Black Hole, 2012), alludes to this sense of vertigo. The ghostly background of the scene – the ruins of a stone arcade – contributes to the detachment of the image from any particular moment in time.

The image of the entropic lasso was transubstantiated into a real rope next to the photograph (Lazo, 2012). It loomed ominously, and appeared to be mysteriously unsupported. At first I wondered how this thin rope could stand on its own but a closer look revealed it to be cast in iron.

At the far end of the gallery was a minimal wall clock, its hands like spider legs, so impossibly long and thin that they seemed to be on the brink of dematerialization. The clock – which was only visible thanks to a bright spotlight – again references Lebrija’s preoccupation with the slippage of time. With its Nietzschean chimes and anxiety over the inevitability of death, his treatment of the subject is rooted in the kind of bathos exemplified by Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). In the film, the hypochondriac genius roams the streets of New York wondering about the meaning of life: ‘Millions of books written by all these great minds and, in the end, none of them know anything more about the big questions of life than I do… […] And then Nietzsche and his theory of eternal recurrence… He said that the life we live, we’re going to live over and over again the exact same way for eternity. Great… That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. It’s not worth it.’

It’s not worth it, says Allen. And it might not be worth for Lebrija either, whose dark Mexican humour and metaphysical bent continues a great tradition of artists and writers. Bittersweet and lucid nihilists, who, despite the impending shadow of failure, never cease in their quest to find the answers to those questions.

Some people say that extraordinary names can influence the course of a life. A common name like Peter is less likely to be predetermining. The material Johannes Wohnseifer presents at Linn Lühn in his solo show, ‘More in Common Than a Given Name’, suggests a curious tie between two men with no obvious connection except for their first names – English racecar driver Peter Revson and German artist Peter Brüning. Though Wohnseifer is known for his paintings that deal with mass media, none of his painting can be found in the show. Instead, the material in the exhibition stems from Wohnseifer’s personal archive: a series of press photographs recounting the short but glamorous biography of racecar driver and ladies man Peter Revson, paired with graphic works, ephemera and books by artist Peter Brüning.

Personal collections often reveal more about their collector than about the collected objects, which seems to be true here. Wohnseifer’s selection, acquired mainly through eBay, shows how the act of image browsing, searching, purchasing and collecting is not merely research but part of the process of making. As with any worthwhile collection, the search is as important as the final acquisition. Wohnseifer’s pursuit is fuelled by an ongoing fascination with Revson. Displayed here are two editions of the sportsman’s biography, Speed with Style, published in 1974, which has also featured in Wohnseifer’s earlier works. In archival images, we see that Revson, the charismatic heir to the Revlon cosmetic dynasty, is not shy in assuming the well-tread iconography of the racecar driver. We can observe him concentrating before the race, in the race stall with his mechanics, or on the way to a party with his Miss America girlfriend, Marjorie Wallace. Delivering every pose in the handbook, his life is traced in paparazzi shots until his premature death in a practice run for the 1974 South African Grand Prix in Kyalami. Many of the photographs bear the markings of the red pen of the picture editor, spotting crop lines and notes added during the publishing process.

A similar pattern of lines and edits can be found in the works of Peter Brüning. Especially the late work of the artist, dedicated to the grammar of modern traffic, is satiated with such markings. Brüning’s work embarked on a concentrated engagement with the vocabulary of traffic and its ramifications on the German landscape in the 1960s, a genre that he coined as the ‘trafficscape’. By stripping traffic down to the fundamental outlines of its signage, cartography and pictograms, he discovered a language that complied with his desire to rise above the dialectic between the abstract and the concrete. In the years before his early death in 1970, he translated this ‘semantic art’ into spatial arrangements, most famously in his memorial for the motorway from 1967 at the A1 in Wuppertal. One of his iconic images, Kölner Schule des 20.Jahrhunderts (1969), is an edited motorway sign in which the lanes on the sign have been crossed out with red markings to inform the passing driver about the revisions to the system road. They reveal traffic as an organism in constant flux, a language that continuously reformulates itself alongside the rapid expansion of modern transport infrastructure as we know it.

Wohnseifer’s show presents less a cohesive argument about why these two men should be considered in comparison and more of a glimpse into the artist’s own head and the pattern of his interests and inspirations. It is a study that relies on free association and the seemingly random connections that emerge from it. Wohnseifer’s own work is the missing link: in works like Kapelle (2004), Peter and Peter’s influence becomes patent. The poster for ‘More in Common Than a Given Name’ is a digitally altered screen grab from Wohnseifer’s desktop that depicts him on eBay, searching for the name Peter. The search engine’s suggestive memory prompts two Peters, Revson and Brüning, confirming that the link is not in the Peters but in the determined focus of Wohnseifer’s universe.

In the streets of Shanghai, the evolution of male identity is apparent. Tapered jeans and asymmetric haircuts, smart shades and toned biceps: the possibilities of body image and fashion, once denied under the uniformed rules of Mao, are opened into the space of capital.

Curator Leo Xu has spent several years collecting and commissioning works that interrogate the development of male identity according to local, but also global, contexts. The recent group exhibition ‘Boy: A Contemporary Portrait’ represented versions of what it is to be a young man, through a series of purposefully single-sexed works. Female self-image, Xu felt, has received attention, while the male identity – in his home country at least – is taken as a silent given. Inside an old lane house, now converted into a white-walled gallery, one found an array of represented identities, as heterogeneous as the styles on the streets outside.

But it is the contemplative nature of the male inner world that was studied by three major video works. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Faith (2006) places man within the whirring chambers of a space vessel. Protected by the environment of his spacesuit, an astronaut exists in a bubble of oxygen and thought, while the viewer is drawn into the airlocked space of the film. French dancer and choreographer Jérome Bel’s Cédric Andrieux (2009) narrates the process of dance to consider the fine relationship between the cerebral and the physical. Cheng Ran’s Prospect Cottage (2012), an homage to the life, work and garden of Derek Jarman, features Taiwanese artist Michael Lin driving through a Shanghai blurred at the edges by nighttime. Excerpts from Jarman’s journals Modern Nature (1992), read by Xu, enumerate ‘alyssum, ageratum, cornflowers, candy tuft’; a florid catalogue that contrasts with the concrete views through the windscreen. We see a romantic version of the city space and its inhabitants, who long for ‘lobelia, love-in-the-mist’.

Wolfgang Tillmans’s wall montage of photographs (2002–10), whose portions of lithe limbs bask in libidinal glow, were typical of the sentiments of the show. Never was the male shown in relation to the female; he stands alone, an aestheticized Narcissus or wandering misanthrope. We meet signs of metro-sexuality and homosexuality, but bisexual reference points remain absent – again perhaps because this would require the portrayal of female form. ‘Boy…’ necessarily wore this limitation on its shirtsleeves.

Another bias of focus was that of the city dweller: these are representations that keep up with the pace of the art scene and the metropolis, and thus do not engage with more sensitive depictions of those who still need more than want. The impact of consumerism on self-representation is thus evident in Liu Chang’s Buying Everything On You (2007), a taxonomical spread of a the possessions of passersby. The brands, form and typography of these objects offered an itemized layout of modern Chinese culture, and its desire to emulate the stuff of the West.

Elsewhere in the street, the body appears as a weapon of propaganda. A documentary photograph of a 1950 governmental parade showed the Shanghai youth baring chests for a celebration of post-war liberation. The government’s use of athletic physiques to convey national strength – a corporal ideology that spells sinister power – concerned the curator. Beijing-based artist Guo Hongwei playfully depicted Xu’s anxieties in Upper Body (2012), a collage that pastes a cutout of his head over a mass of buff, disembodied limbs.

If the theme of ‘Boy: A Contemporary Portrait’ held personal import for the curator, it was not to the detriment of a broader politics. The critique provided by this collection of works chimed with clarity in the Asian context, to expose a conflicted cosmopolitanism at the core of the city in which ‘Boy…’ resided.

On entering the large space taken up by John Wynne’s new installation, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer physical impact of low frequencies as they make the windows rattle and the floor tremble, and by the elusiveness of high frequencies that flutter around the ears and intermittently create an odd sense of aural déjà vu. Swarming filaments of sounds turn my hearing inside out; changing patterns of sharp tones nail me to the room until I don’t know how long I’ve been listening. As I move around, I begin to single out a barely there but lucid shuffling, a slightly familiar yet hard-to-categorize rhythm. Are these sounds seeping into the room from the outside, or are they generated by these very frequencies? Are they vaguely echoing something I’ve just heard, or am I aware of this intricate sonic tapestry for the first time?

Eight tweeters are scattered around the floor, while two subwoofers face each other from both ends of the longitudinal axis of the room. Over the course of a looped 20-minute cycle, they emanate high and low frequencies that act on the acoustic properties of the room, and let sound be perceived as a physical entity rather than a solely aural one – on the boundary between what is heard by the ears and what is perceived as vibration by the body. Technical explanations of the acoustic laws employed by Wynne would not be enough to encompass the effect of the perceptual phenomena at play: this installation is not about pure frequencies as such, but about the way they bounce off and through the walls, ceiling, floor, windows – inextricably tied to the fabric of this building – and encircle and engross whoever enters the room.
In his installations Wynne never displays any elements beyond what is necessary to propagate sounds. Nevertheless, the sparse arrangement of speakers does not imply this piece is just functional: it touches instead on something fundamental. This work appears as the physical projection of an otherwise concealed, yet primary force that underlies the activity of listening – not only spatially but also culturally and temporally. Sound waves propagate and bounce around this room according to the same laws that make them bounce and propagate anywhere else in the world, at any time. Sounds exist in this installation ‘as they are’. Or do they? Frequencies are perceived here as a hidden yet founding element of everyday life: like the change of light during the day, the flow of water, the shifts in the weather. And yet this is not a demonstration of acoustic laws: it puts each listener in a heightened relationship with the aural phenomena and inevitably – like all the forms of sound-making focused on the environment, on the passing and reverberations of time – it prompts deep considerations on how we relate to what moves us and in spite of us; to the shape of what we hear, to how this shape changes and melts with the everyday, how it anchors each listener to the here and now of their listening. Rooted in timeless physical laws, this work nonetheless gains resonance in the contingent, changing laws of individual perception.

As I listen to the uncanny high-pitched tones in the room, other high-pitched tones echo in my mind: those which radiate across an interview that Robert Ashley did with Alvin Lucier, for his seminal TV series Music with Roots in the Aether (1976). At some point Lucier says that instead of supplying feelings, he makes pieces about natural acoustical phenomena, embracing feelings that are already there. Likewise, Wynne does not consider eliciting any specific emotional responses from the listener and prefers to leave his works open, not prescriptive. And yet, rather than only employing tones acting on the resonant frequencies of the room, Wynne also mixed in newly-synthesised frequencies reflecting specific sounds from the outside, that he heard while preparing the piece. ‘The effect is to make the walls of the space seem acoustically translucent’, he says. The critical shift in this installation is from apparent mimesis to a subtly unfolded artifice: permeable and open, prompting hesitation, the space created by Wynne does not display the purity of acoustic phenomena but points to the singular, changing engagement with sound that occurs at different times for different listeners. And so does Installation no. 2 for High and Low Frequencies appear: a complex block of raw vibrational forces, slowly eroded by a sfumato of elusive reverberations, on the frayed edge between abstraction and contingency, between knowledge and experience.

‘Black is the New White’ features six new works by Nadia Kaabi-Linke; it’s her first solo show since winning the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2011. The idea of the ‘trap’ is the artist’s main point of inspiration in these new works, focusing on how society can become entrapped by social, cultural, political and economic ideologies; in all of these pieces, a distinct regional context abounds.

The most literal reflection of entrapment is apparent in Smooth Criminal (2012) a sculpture made from a white, spherical lobster trap, which is commonly found in the UAE. The pattern of the Star of David develops naturally in the wire weavings of the trap; the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an obvious reference here, suggesting deception and perpetual entrapment by historical patterns and political policies.

The show also includes a light-box photograph, Black is the New White (2012) of a handsome man in a black kandoura and ghutra (traditional Gulf Arab male attire), set in front of the Dubai skyline; it’s an ‘advertisement’ for a fictitious, Western fashion house. Touching upon both the power of glossy advertisements and dress and gender relations (black, an uncomfortable colour in the Arab sun, is commonly worn by women, whereas men wear white), the flamboyance and subject matter of this piece feels out of place amongst Kaabi-Linke’s more subtle work which is unified through its sensitivity to the momentous events taking place in the Arab world.

Incorporating everyday elements and objects, Kaabi-Linke’s Ministry of Tourism (2011) and Bara’a yadawiya(Arts and Crafts) (2009–12) evoke walls in Tunis through a process using silk and wax impressions which have been stretched onto canvas and covered in varnish. The former is a large image of a wall from the Tunisian Tourism Ministry, located where most protests occurred in Tunis, which lead to the fall of Ben Ali’s regime. It’s also a reflection on the economic aftermath of the revolution: Tunisia has seen an enormous drop in tourism, a vital livelihood in the country. The latter is an ode to Tunisia’s youth, with impressions taken from the graffiti found on a wall from a high school. Displayed as a single piece, yet comprised from 15 canvases of different sizes, it celebrates youth’s potential for creativity.

Highlighting the impact of political and social developments in the Arab world, Kaabi-Linke avoids sensationalized or tired imagery. With its minimalist aesthetic ‘Black is the New White’ is a bold show that represents a stark contrast to the usual fare of many Dubai galleries, which tend to show easily digestible images and ideas. Recently there has been much discussion about how the lack of non-profit structures in Dubai has led to commercial galleries and Art Dubai stepping in to fill the space. Lawrie Shabibi does just that with this show.