Rather than being shown in cubby-holes, the long-haired protagonists of Cheese are channeled in open-air corridors fashioned from wooden fences. Though the women interact directly, they are engrossed in their own bodies, as well as those of the goats they milk and the rudimentary structures surrounding them. Tossing about their long manes, they mimick the waterfalls that provide the water they use to make a certain kind of hair tonic, rinsing their hair with it in order to wring out its essence into funnels. What will come of the hair tonic, offered to the world through a cloister-like rotating screen, is unclear but also unimportant: it is but a remnant of engagement in active self-consciousness production. ‘Not an action arena, but an existence in stoic modesty’, John Bock pronounced in his lecture for Koppel op Kop (2000), ‘Axioms of the Self-Me-Abstraction exude’.

In Rottenberg’s work, the logorrhea of Bock’s lectures is silenced and his maniacal contraptions are simplified. For Rottenberg the body is protagonist rather than discourse. Rottenberg’s videos enact Judith Butler’s theory of the marginalized body as a site for subverting power dialectics, enriching its analysis of hegemony, language and the body with a Gramscian attention to the complex interplay between consent and coercion.

Emily Verla Bovino

Search For the Spirit

Scheppers Institute, Mechelen, Belgium

Recent exhibitions, such as last year’s ‘Traces du Sacré’ at the Pompidou Centre, have sought to examine a re-emergence of the spiritual as a theme in contemporary art, but few have managed to trace (with any sensitivity) a historiographic line between works that have addressed notions of ‘the spirit’ in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the activities of artists exploring similar ideas today.

‘Search For the Spirit’, one of five exhibitions organized by Muhka for Mechelen’s ‘City Visions Festival’, unites archival work and new commissions by four generations of artists whose work is – or has been – actively engaged with notions of the spirit.

Taking its title from a 1976 General Idea exhibition that took place in Geneva, ‘Search For the Spirit’ is based around projects by two artist groups once active in Vancouver and Toronto: Image Bank (1969-78) and General Idea (1969-94). With these works, as with others in the exhibition, curator Grant Watson performs the magic of reactivating archives, showing seminal pieces by both groups alongside documentation and ephemera related to their projects. General Idea’s ‘36 Showcards’ (1975-9), a series of highly theatrical and utterly camp images and texts featuring a motley assortment of wigged and costumed artist-muse types role-playing as characters on ‘set’, merge the cool, conceptual visual language of post-war administration with photographs mimicking Hollywood cinema.

Watson traces what connections may be made by searching through archives and settles on spectral research experiments and collective image bank projects that suggest the infinitely possible made manifest, as well as several projects that play with the illusion of reflections and the physics of light.

’Manipulating the Self File’ (1970–73), 23 photographic responses to a mail-art solicitation for image contributions made by General Idea, extols the hand as a mirror for the mind. It is exhibited here along with the original request as it appeared in FILE magazine in 1971, inviting active readers into acts of temporary re-composure: ‘Wrap your arm over your head, lodging your elbow behind and grabbing your chin with your hand. The act is complete. Held you are holding. You are object and viewer, subject and voyeur.’

Likewise, the exhibition includes two new configurations of Image Bank’s ‘Colour Research Project’ accompanied by a video of archival footage (Colour Bar Research, 1973-74) that documents Image Bank’s original experiments with colour in the landscape. The video captures the spirit of the times, the activities and interactions by an ensemble cast of naked performers with thousands of hand-painted colour bars that were floated on lakes, tossed into the air, and released down streams to randomly re-form – by the elements of nature and chance – into a series of endless paintings. As two bare bodies dive into the lake at Babyland (the woodland property owned by Image Bank artists Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov) Trasov narrates: ‘The object of this new aesthetic is touch. And record of the object’s touch. The materials are people and paintbrushes […] Transported by the art, we will attain life. Life, which is the opposite of Art.’

Further along in the exhibition, a selection of anonymous, 19th-century ‘Company Paintings’ (made-to-order illustrations commissioned by the Dutch East India Company for British employees, that meld traditional Indian painting techniques with European shading and perspectives) depicts ascetics arriving at transcendent states through great bodily efforts.

Needlework by early-20th-century psychiatric patient Johanna Natalie Wintsch is an unexpected but very welcome inclusion. Wintsch’s handiwork mixes enigmatic statements with theosophical symbolism, giving form to the inner thoughts of private and perceived worlds. In one work, text stitched in red and blue thread around the perimeter of the fabric forms a frame around an empty centre that reads, ‘Qui se mire bien se voit’ (He who mirrors himself well, sees well) and ‘Les Yeux Dans Les Yeux’ (The Eyes In the Eyes). The motif of mirroring and reflection extends to translations of other artists’ works as well.

Image Bank’s interpretation of General Idea’s Light On (1971), one of several very noteworthy inclusions in this exhibition, is an intimately composed black and white video of two men standing naked in the landscape, with only a creek between them, as they casually flash sunlight onto each other’s bodies with mirrors, small enough to be held by hand.

The theme of translation continues with Luis Jacob’s mysterious but elegant works on letter-size paper – seven Delphic, coded attempts to translate Mark Rothko paintings into typewritten arrangements of numbers and symbols that somehow manage to convey the incommunicable in Rothko’s paintings. In his newly commissioned video The Hand is Quicker Than the Eye (2009), Yael Davids treats a group of inmates at Mechelen city prison to workshops on magic. Equating criminality with the failure to maintain the illusion of innocence, Yael wryly offers the convicts a chance to better their skills.

The works in the exhibition are displayed on and around a graceful scenography of curved walls designed by Luca Frei. Observed from above on the balcony of the children’s school theatre, the exhibition can be viewed taking place in very subdued light and in the presence of an intriguing but impenetrable statement in the original architecture above the theatre’s stage that reads: Misericordi Beatis – a partial, grammatically incomplete statement in Latin that translates to ‘Pitiful happy’. 

Esperanza Rosales

Diana Thater

Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria

For her gorillagorillagorilla (2009) installation, Diana Thater has emptied the upper floor of the Graz Kunsthaus, save for several video walls, DVD players and projectors. But what truly lays the space bare is an eerie, visceral silence. Thater completely omits sound from these films, though one may not even notice it at first, since she juxtaposes wall-sized projections of gorillas with jungle brush and chicken wire to a visually rhythmic effect. Images unfold from the walls to the floors and ceilings and into each another, forming abstract, disembodied patterns that suspend visitors in a liquid, green jungle.

Commissioned by the Kunsthaus Graz and the Natural History Museum, London, Thater spent a week last October filming in Cameroon’s Mefou National Park lowland gorilla reserve, where the endangered species is protected from bushmeat hunters. It’s a new animal for Thater, who has previously worked with tamed zebras and wolves and wild dolphins in questioning the cultural construction of nature – both animal and human. Using film, video and still cameras, she spied on the gangly apes, tussling and swinging on double-bars, and, much of the time, sitting still. Except for one filmed double-exposure, there are no special effects but simple angle shots, zooming and panning to include close-ups of their hands, flattened nostrils and the fence. Melded together, the non-narrative images feel incidental and National Geographic-like.

The spatial aspects of Thater’s installation are less effective here than in her earlier work. At the Vienna Secession, for example, she twisted the spaces by projecting dolphins, liberated from the video frame, on a tilted ellipse (Delphine, 1999), dissolving corners by lighting entire rooms with saturated colours. At the Dia Center in New York, she projected images of bees based on the quantum mathematics of their flight patterns, creating a complex choreography for viewers, where images were only fully visible from specific points in the room (Knots + Surfaces, 2001).

But unlike both the Secession and Dia Center, the exhibition space of the Kunsthaus Graz challenges the conventions of minimal, white-cube architecture; corners and clear ceiling-to-floor delineations have been substituted for curved walls. Despite the similarity between Thater’s ideas and those of the Kunsthaus architect Peter Cook, the filmic volumes Thater usually creates feel punctured. 

Thater works by challenging common spatial perception in a disconcerting way. But since this amorphous space already calls attention to itself, it seems the architects have already done part of Thater’s job for her. The space remains neutral rather than providing a productive friction for the work. Thater does not achieve a baroque complexity with her projections; viewers congregate in the centre of the gallery instead of roving about the room to view the successive films. The spaces that she usually merges – the flat, video space, the space inside our heads, and the real space enclosed by architecture – remain separate. As immersive as her oversized projections are, space as a medium is never actualized.

But while the installation doesn’t fulfill the physical potential of the space, Thater still manages to pull us in psychologically. Through her avoidance of sound and playing on our resemblance to the gorilla, she taps into our consciousness and merges it with those of the gorillas. Her use of familiar-looking images, played without audio, are initially a source of irritation but then rouse viewers to actively participate in filling in the gap with their own narratives. Meanwhile, imagination and memory are conjured through Thater’s use of the home-video evoking qualities of grainy Super 8 film.

One video wall plays footage of a sit-down interview with a Bristol Zoo Gardens zoologist, conducted by Thater. He speaks blankly into the camera – a staple scene on the Nature Channel – but because Thater forgoes audio, she flattens the difference between the scientist and the object of study. Our attention turns to the ape who sits neatly beside the expert, gamely imitating his gestures, and who has now entered into his own subjectivity.

On one video wall, a gorilla perches in a tree, knees drawn up. He stares into Thater’s camera, abruptly looks away, then back again. In between, he diverts himself with picking his toes. We could say he’s furtively curious, that he is similar to Thater herself, another voyeur perched on a nearby platform (as seen in another video). But the multiplicity of images Thater projects renders it difficult to interpret the gorillas’ behaviour – an impenetrability of the animal environment which Giorgio Agamben terms as being open, yet not revealed, or openable, and which puts into question any excessively anthropocentric interpretations of the apes. If anything, after studying the gorilla’s gaze, we begin to sense Thater’s presence on the other side of the lens, the gorilla as an eerie self-portrait of herself. 

In the final space of the exhibit – a narrow, glassed-in room above the exhibition space, offering panoramic views of the city – Thater has detached the green of the jungle and applied it to the outside world by covering the windows with Lee filters of the same hue. It’s a quiet ending to an immense show, an attempt to prolong the perspective through which we viewed the jungle, as well as a transformative experience where viewers, in transit between two worlds, find themselves belonging to neither. 

Helen Chang

Everything has a name…

Gasworks, London, UK

‘Everything has a name, or the potential to be named’ is a group exhibition that focuses on the fall-out following Europe’s colonial expropriation of the Americas. The show’s piqued critique is levied at the scientific adventurers of the 17th and 18th centuries – those early cartographers, botanists and engineers whose propensity for neat categories erased older, indigenous patterns – and finds resonances today in the continuing issues of land rights, cultural marginalisation and political disenfranchisement.

Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves traces the ghost of this shady imperialism in ‘This is Not an Apricot’ (2009), a series of 20 watercolours of various fruit that Amazonian peoples call ‘apricots’ (or, presumably, whatever the Portuguese equivalent is). Alves, an activist who helped found her country’s Green Party in 1986, undoubtedly has a great commitment to the rapidly disappearing Amazonian ecology. More elegiac is Matthew Buckingham’s 16mm film Muhheakantuck – Everything has a name (2003), which traces Henry Hudson’s 1609 mission up the river that now bears his name.

Plants and politics mix in Antonio Caro’s graphic logo of the corn plant (Maiz, 1972-2009), which is hung outside the gallery. Inside, in Gabriel Sierra’s Cola verde o verde refresco (2003-9), plants grow verdantly from the side of black-taped cartons. Nearby, Miler Lagos presents what appears to be a log, but is, in fact, a pile of sculpted re-prints of an engraving by Carl von Martius (a 19th-century botanist and Amazon explorer). More startling is Vasco Araujo’s video O Jardim (2005), which conflates images of muscular colonial statues of Africans with spoken snippets from Homer.

A witty riposte to vegetative imperialism is Jimmie Durham’s Black Walnut (2005), a text and set of carved sculptures that traces the migration of a species of tree from the mid-west of America to the icy steppes of Russia. However, the work that clinched the show for me was Alberto Baraya’s Herbario de plantos artificiales (Herbarium of Artificial Plants, 2001-present), a comic-yet-poignant photographic archive of plastic flowers. The categories, which indicate the place in which the plants were found, include: ‘eatery’, ‘toilets’ and ‘funeral homes’.

More urgent are Abraham Cruzvillegas’ lyrics, which, pencilled directly onto the gallery wall, seem both fresh and honest. Veteran Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer presents Amanaplanacanalpanama (1995), an installation that memorializes on brass plaques the construction of the Panama Canal by early-20th-century US industrialists (the canal was only finally ceded to Panama in 1999). Andrea Geyer’s Spiral Lands/Chapter 2 (2008) consists of a slideshow depicting images of the American West – breathtaking, big-sky country – with a recorded soundtrack spoken by the artist that incorporates quoted snippets from a range of famous cultural thinkers and anonymous indigenous speakers. It is also, however, a bathetic exercise in portentous hectoring: ‘Quiet now!’ she urges dramatically, ‘You will hear it breathing!’

Geyer’s ripostes come across as untimely; the old-fashioned scientific imperialists have left the scene. Instead, I’d suggest that scientists and sociologists are now more often the principal defenders of habitat, equality and land rights. Categories that once oppressed can, surely, also be used to protect.

Colin Perry

Several Silences

The Renaissance Society, Chicago, USA

It is tempting to suggest that the Renaissance Society’s spartan galleries were made for a show like ‘Several Silences’, curated by director of education Hamza Walker.  But it would be more apposite and indeed fair to say that this modest but powerful exhibition quietly imposes its will on the austerely vaulted space.  The title of the show is drawn from a 1979 essay by the late Jean-François Lyotard, but neither Walker’s essay nor the elegant installation belabours this point.  Quite simply, the exhibition explores – judiciously and with admirable restraint – the various social and aesthetic valences of silence in contemporary culture.  The peril here is obvious: how to lend provocative form to the most immaterial of phenomena while avoiding the pitfalls of heavy-handed literalism or the lure of romanticism.  How, in other words, to articulate silence without encroaching on the integrity of the concept itself?

The mute, ethereal character of the exhibition is established by Ryan Gander’s scatter-sculpture, A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor (2008).  Comprising 100 glass orbs, each of which contains a laser-etched image of a blank sheet of paper, and distributed throughout the gallery, like soundless musical notes punctuating the space with silence.  More than other works in the show, A sheet of paper... makes manifest a very particular instance of (near-) silence, namely the familiar experience of watching a piece of paper swaying calmly through the air before coming to rest.  Exploiting the fact that the motion of paper floating through space makes the sensation of silence strikingly literal – in fact, rendering one’s auditory awareness of silence visible – Gander’s work tests the capacity of one sense to embody another.

The conceptual whimsy and sculptural delicacy of Gander’s work is countered by the pointed political rhetoric of a photograph by the German collaborative duo Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, which shows a single wooden chair at the far end of a sinister concrete-clad room.  It helps to know that the photograph, personal kill # 13 (2007), is an image of a military facility used to teach close-range combat, but the image speaks volumes without this paratextual hint.  Although the photograph gives form to the eerie stillness that settles over a place in the aftermath of violence or trauma, Geissler and Sann seem more interested in the discursive silence that surrounds such training environments, and the broader public politics of war.

In addition to the austerity of the installation and the generally muted palette of the works, there is a faint air of melancholy that permeates ‘Several Silences’.  Two ready-mades by Harold Mendez typify this impulse: Nothing Prevents Anything and Better off then than when life was babble? (both 2007) propose silence as a property that marks the passage from utility to uselessness.  Mendez’s pendant works are discarded white signage boards salvaged from university campuses.  Worked over and denuded, these former announcement boards emerge as vernacular abstractions, the accidental elegance of which is not the result of design or contrivance, but of heavy use and eventual obsolescence.

If silence has a cultural application, it is as an elegiac device.  As the title suggests, Jonty Semper’s The one minute of silence from the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales (1997) is a recording of the minute’s silence held in Hyde Park, London, on 6 September 1997 to honour Princess Diana.  Alive with ambient noise, singing birds, occasional coughing and a crying baby, the audio-track is most remarkable and moving for its impurity, for the crowd’s failure to maintain utter silence.  The sum of this collective effort and related failure, Semper seems to suggest, constitutes one model of public respect. As if to demonstrate his claim, Semper follows this minute of what might be called ‘living silence’ with one minute of dead, clinical silence recorded in a studio, an astute and emotive reminder that memorializing silences are defined, in effect, by the impossibility of their aims.

The most accessible work in the exhibition is Harry Shearer’s remarkable The Silent Echo Chamber (2009).  Comprising seven flat-screen televisions of variable dimensions hung salon-style on the entrance wall, the installation shows video footage of numerous media personalities and politicians in the minutes before going on air.  Variously pensive, stoic, nervous, impatient, aggravated, good-humoured and distracted, Shearer’s work reveals a host of public figures – including Karl Rove, John McCain, Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama – in something close to an animal state, pacing in their figurative cages, hungry for release.  Denied a reason to hold forth, these politicians and pundits appear naked, temporarily alienated from their natural function.  Though most stare, fidget and putter, waiting for the recording to commence, one appears completely absorbed in his chosen activity.  President Obama sits casually, cross-legged, perusing USA Today with an impassive expression, rarely looking in the direction of the camera, apparently indifferent to the impending broadcast.  While Larry King and James Carville appear nothing short of imprisoned by this dead time, Obama is unflustered and content in what was for him, undoubtedly, a rare moment of respite and, perhaps, grace.

Christopher Bedford

Event Horizon

Raster , Warsaw, Poland

The 1997 film Event Horizon, directed by Paul W. Anderson, was effectively The Shining (1980) set in space. Remaining within similarly Kubrickian precincts, the exhibition ‘Event Horizon’ at Raster, a group show curated by the Swiss duo Karma International, resembles the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which an astronaut wanders around a well-appointed set of rooms, before being reborn as a space baby.

The immediate product of this show is atmosphere. Because it is so finely balanced, none of the individual works seem at first remarkable, yet as a set they generate a surplus effect: an eerie but oddly friendly feeling, accentuated by the presence of beaten-up armchairs in each of the rooms and the peeling paint of the gallery walls. Raster is a sprawling space which spreads out through the top floor of an apartment block in central Warsaw, incorporating a sort of art shop and lounge, and was manned – when I visited – by a lone young art history student. The general model is Edward Krasiński’s legendary gesamtkunstwerk/apartment; arguably the work at the heart of the Warsaw contemporary art scene.

‘Event Horizon’ includes works from seven emerging Swiss artists, spread across three rooms, and for a short period featured a supplementary performance space, now defunct. Within the gallery itself the opening scene consists of David Hominal’s corridor-sculpture Through the Window (2009), an assemblage that comprises an armchair, a lighter, a packet of cigarettes and a Polish translation of Andrei Bely’s modernist novel Saint Petersburg (1913, revised 1922). Recounting the story of Russia in 1905, the paperback is one of a pair of literary references made by Hominal. In the large room, Le Troue (2009) comprises the collected works of Victor Hugo, a stake rammed through the middle of their pages. Little squares of paper, scraps displaced by the spike, hang on the wall in three collages. The works recall Marcel Duchamp’s instructions for a window-hung geometry book The Unhappy Readymade (1919). ‘It amused me,’ Duchamp later admitted, ‘to disparage the seriousness of a book full of principles.’

The room contains two other sculptures: Pamela Rosenkranz’s Room (2008), a reflecting, two-panel screen made out of dark wood and Plexiglas, and Tobias Madison’s B-movie-esque, alien-like plastic plant, Untitled/Haçienda/237 (2009), one of a pair to be found in the show. Also on the walls, Rosenkranz has two ‘spills’ (perhaps a reference to the slang term for stock film filler), Spill (Prospan) and Spill (Pascofeminin) (both 2008), and Fabian Marti has an Inkjet print called The Will (2008), which appears to have been made by etching photo-quality paper with a compass and ruler. A neat trick. The room is ‘signed’ by Valentin Carron’s mysterious scrawled graffiti: ‘Wasi prszyjaciele, wasi kochani, wasze klopoty’ (Your friends, your loved ones, your problems, 2009), which takes up most of one wall.

Minus the graffiti and the unhappy Hugos, the second room is otherwise similar to the first. Madison’s second tropical plant, Office Tropique/696/Dubai 2012 (2009), is here, along with three framed Inkjet prints of multi-coloured computer-generated toruses (Emanuel Rossetti’s Chopped & Screwed (3D), 2009). Marti’s second contribution hangs another a wall: another Inkjet print, entitled Another Future (2008).

A paper triangle by Annelise Coste, Don’t tell me everything is market (2008), occupies one wall of the art shop. Amongst the items on sale in is a CD of songs devoted to the Polish poet and soldier Wladyslaw Broniewski, the legacy of a previous exhibition devoted to the figure, which the assistant puts on after receiving instructions via SMS from her boss.

Another contemporary name associated with the idea of the ‘event’ is Alain Badiou, author of the mighty tome Being and Event (2006). Badiou’s influence is said to be growing in Poland, as it is peaking elsewhere, and his spare, mystagogical vocabulary of Events, Truths, Ones, Twos is gaining increasing prominence on the Internet. Not unrelatedly, ‘Event Horizon’ includes in its own vocabulary Lacanian toruses, ‘68-style slang, alien plants, a socialist realist soundtrack (for sale) and a classic story of revolution sitting in an empty chair.

Daniel Miller

The Actuality of the Idea

Modern Art, London, UK

Commercial galleries’ group shows often have the unpalatable taste of stockroom leftovers thrown together at random, less exhibitions than showroom displays, replete with sample works by all the represented artists. This state of affairs makes ‘The Actuality of the Idea’ at Modern Art all the more enjoyable. Gathering artists as different in renown and generation as the septuagenarian Carl Andre and the young Sara Barker, the thoughtfully curated exhibition is an engaging reflection on lines and their ability to define and create space. Curated by Stuart Shave, it’s also a healthy reminder that gallerists don’t necessarily need to call on a guest curator’s expertise (or prestige) to put on a decent show.

In the first room, Nasreen Mohamedi’s delicate drawings (all Untitled, c.1980s) seem to fight from within the regimented structure of their graph-paper support. They function like graphite Zen gardens, playing out the harmony of the unsymmetrical. Altogether buoyant and contained, Mohamedi’s oblique lines reconcile constructivism’s formal dynamism with conceptual art’s understated aesthetic. Agnes Martin, that other grid-making great, is represented with three double horizons crossing an A4 sheet of paper (Untitled, 1995). The artist famously said that her abstract works were an attempt to capture ‘not what is seen, but what is known forever in the mind.’ This somewhat elusive ideal may apply to the work of both Martin and Mohamedi, yet their juxtaposition deftly demonstrates how different in mood and energy their often compared practices were. Martin and Mohamedi are two poles apart – the infinite grid versus its perpetual disruption. 

Other works pull these flat, traced lines into the three-dimensional, fluidly connecting drawing with sculpting. Nina Canell’s twisted piping and neon floor-piece, Separate Members (2007), marks out bright, serpentine line, while the threaded brass sections of Leonor Antunes’ hanging rope (MMM, 2008) operate like pencil strokes that mark out the silhouette of an irregular ladder. If there is one artist whose work has most powerfully explored the idea of sculpture as ‘drawing in space’, it’s Fred Sandback, and one of his signature thread pieces, dividing the air with invisible panels, is clearly missing here. Instead (and probably for practical or commercial reasons), the gallery shows a three-coloured right triangle drawing, most likely a study for an installation. Untitled (1988) is not very evocative for someone who’s never experienced any of the artist’s works first hand, but thankfully the piece retains some of the architectonic strength of Sandback’s seminal pieces and manages in three lines to evoke their potent space-generating qualities.

In the second room, a white wooden structure is topped by a flimsy assemblage of cardboard, a ghostly extension or misshapen echo of the first composition. Entitled Unfolding Arms Behind My Back (2009), Barker’s precarious construction brings to the exhibition’s rather geometric ensemble a touching sense of fragility and potential failure. The title alludes to some sort of self-representation. The sculpture becomes mirror; it reflects the artist’s doubts and offers an engaging contrast with Andre’s sturdy Graphite Cube Sum of Eight (2006). This rich multiplicity of voices is at the nexus of the show’s success. ‘The Actuality of the Idea’ is richly diverse and coherent, allowing elaborated resonances to emerge between works too easily associated or alienated: a rare and satisfying experience. 

Coline Milliard

Diego Perrone

Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan, Italy

The title of Diego Perrone’s solo show at Galleria Massimo De Carlo, ‘Il Merda – parte prima (paesaggi)’ (The Shit – part one [landscapes]), has a long artistic lineage. Besides Piero Manzoni’s infamous cans (1961), merda is an Italian word with a noble literary tradition, first appearing in The Divine Comedy (1308-21), specifically in the eighth circle of Inferno, where sinners guilty of excessive flattery are immersed in a river of excrement. More recently, Pier Paolo Pasolini took the word almost directly from Dante in two late works, both of which appeared after his brutal murder in 1975. For example, in Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), he dressed the perpetrators of Sadian atrocities of the Girone della Merda in fascist uniforms. In his unfinished novel Petrolio (Oil, published in fragments in 1992), a visionary tale on the corruption of Italy in the ‘70s, Pasolini devotes a long chapter to the horrible misadventures of ‘Il Merda’ and his girlfriend Cinzia, on the hellish backdrop of 20 streets around Via di Torpignattara. In this last ‘hypernovel’, Pasolini plays with manifold viewpoints, split personalities and simultaneity, in a fluid mixture of time, space and language, where the only possible unifying principle (or way out) is the experience of the senses.

Perrone, who titled one of his first videos The Suburbs Go into Battle (1998), and whose more recent sculptures probe the possibilities of shape-shifting, compressing each different phase of the production process into a single work-in-progress, must have felt at home with Petrolio. But it’s from the paintings of another great Italian master of doom, Mario Sironi, that Perrone takes his visual cues.

At Massimo De Carlo, Perrone has isolated some details from Sironi’s industrial landscapes and peripheries, then photographed, drawn or printed them. He then turned them into three-dimensional objects. The exhibition groups four works (all Untitled, 2009): a large, shiny ‘collage’ of folded aluminium sheets, hanging on high and thin iron legs, like dark sketches on a white page; a black modernist knot of graphite, iron and resin, protruding from the wall like a bullet stopped in mid-air; and two drawings on photographic paper, one framed, the other almost free-standing, with only one corner attached to the wall. The exhibition thus moves from a bi-dimensional plan to a three-dimensional one, and back again, with striking lightness. It is an exercise in what Italo Calvino called a ‘hermeneutics of multiple solutions’. The clean, well-lit, orderly white cube of the gallery overcomes all shadows, and seems to keep at bay the dark, stinking and often scary underbelly of the Bel Paese, so dear to Perrone. 

Barbara Casavecchia

Can Altay & Jeremiah Day

Arcade, London, UK

An exhibition as a work-in-progress is unusual in a commercial gallery, though this is the impression left by Can Altay and Jeremiah Day’s show at young London space Arcade. Comprising a collection of photographs and scribblings, the show is an assemblage of ongoing thoughts and ideas that may change even over the course of its stay at the gallery. Newspaper clippings are pinned up in one corner, while a small television set placed on the floor shows a looped piece of film of a man’s hands manipulating a mussel out of its shell. A conversation in Turkish plays out from the speakers overhead. The overall effect is confusing and intriguing in equal measure.

The exhibition has come out of a shared residency that Altay and Day recently completed at Platform Garanti, the non-profit arts centre in Istanbul. The duo first met at the Cork Caucus in 2005, a meeting of more than 60 international artists and writers that took place as part of the city’s tenure as European Capital of Culture. The caucus explored the ways in which contemporary art may impact upon society and politics, themes that are pertinent to both Altay’s and Day’s individual practices, as well as their work at Arcade.

Here the artists present an investigation of the city of Istanbul, in part via its trade in stuffed mussels. A symbol of the city, a transcription of the Turkish conversation playing in the space reveals that the shellfish also has a political resonance. The fisherman complains of being filmed without permission and being misrepresented by the media. ‘But when people come, they don’t come with good intentions, they had secret camera, shooting me, I did not know, you see what I mean,’ he says. ‘He’s shooting me on a secret camera and all I say is true actually, but the way they show it, and there’s no worth left of me once I’m on the TV like that.’

The fisherman’s story blends with the other narratives hinted at in the exhibition. The newspaper clippings refer to fugitive vessels used to travel to the Greek islands as well as to the ‘Ergenekon’ case, an ongoing police probe that has seen hundreds of prominent citizens, including retired army generals, put on trial and accused of planning a coup. These political tales of contemporary Istanbul merge with Day and Altay’s own documentation, which comprises photographs taken of street scenes and shots of life on the waterfront alongside flow-charts of words that link the themes of the exhibition together. It is unclear what is true and what is fake, both in what is documented by the ‘real’ media – for, as the fisherman says, can it be trusted? – and what is presented by the artists.

On the opening night of the exhibition, Day added to these ideas and stories with a performance piece (pictured above), supposedly decided upon only days before. In it he crawled across the gallery space while talking of his and Altay’s experiences – both physical and mental – of living in the city and of the numerous ideas they had during the residency, some that were used and some not. At one stage, Day mentioned a discussion where they questioned how to show the stark variations in wealth and living conditions they witnessed and explained their difficulty with this. His return to these ideas in the performance reiterated the sense in which the exhibition remains an ongoing process, and a clear evocation of Istanbul remains elusive in this show. Instead the artists give us a series of fragmented ideas, an experience perhaps akin to flicking through stations on a radio and picking up currents of stories before moving on. Nothing is quite complete or certain and we are left to discover (or make up) the end of the narratives by ourselves. 

Eliza Williams

Artur Żmijewski

Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, Poland

Polish artist Artur Żmijewski has had a good 12 months: the subject of monographs in several high-profile art magazines, he recently won a commission that is due to open at MoMA in September. For much of this time, the artist himself was on the road, filming mass public actions from Belfast to Gaza, thanks to the funding provided by the German government’s DAAD cultural exchange programme.

The result is ‘Democracies’ (2009), a series of originally 16, then 20, and eventually 23 short documentary films (the numbers keep growing as Żmijewski finds new events), focused on the political use of social space, which is currently showing at both the DAAD Galerie in Berlin and the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw. There is footage from controversial Austrian politician Jörg Haider’s funeral in Vienna, an anti-NATO rally in Strasbourg, separate protests against the Gaza War in both Israel and Palestine, and military reenactments in Warsaw, recently brought into the calendar by conservative Polish politicians the Kaczyński twins to mark Poland’s glorious 1920 ‘Miracle at the Vistula’ victory over the Soviet Union.

Żmijewski’s gaze is anthropological, distanced and occasionally passive-aggressive. In Belfast, a girl at a unionist festival speaks into the camera to tell the artist to ‘fuck off back to Poland.’ Żmijewski says nothing, but follows her down the street, the girl turning around and repeating her message, becoming more confused each time. ‘Do you not understand? Fuck off back to where you came from.’ The discussion ends after Żmijewski’s camera catches sight of a young boy standing in the middle of the street, listlessly hitting a drum, one beat at a time.

A church in Vienna, a church in Warsaw, protesters in Palestine, pilgrims in Poland… The west comes to seem riven by ritual actions all pulling in different directions. At a demonstration of Palestinian mothers in Israel, one says, in English, ‘Three hundred children killed – why?’; at a military parade in Poland, a column of gleaming new tanks.

In Berlin, the films are being shown simultaneously, on a series of plasma screen monitors. In Warsaw, the footage is being projected in sequence onto a screen stretched in front of a window, the Palace of Culture visible in the background. The image framed a dichotomy which recurs through these all films: turbulence and stasis, royal order and pagan energy. Anarchist demonstrators beat drums and dance as they blockade a highway in Israel, and seem to panic the soldiers charged with dispersing them. In Vienna, as Haider is buried, the pageantry is filed and ordered.

Żmijewski is an active member of the Polish political movement Krytyka Polityczna, and the artistic director of their self-titled magazine. His new work appears more realist and more directly political than some of his work from the past, yet in other ways might be read as less engaged. In ‘Democracies’, Żmijewski no longer appears interested in constructing situations, as he was in his confrontation-staging video Them (2007), but instead simply in recording them. Time will tell whether this is a permanent change of direction, or a tactical detour.

Daniel Miller

JJ PEET

On Stellar Rays, New York, USA

Few exhibitions reward careful scrutiny and repeat visits as much as JJ PEET’s ‘The TV Show’ at On Stellar Rays does, where the dozen sculptures that occupy the main gallery are just the tip of the iceberg. His smallish assemblages of found items and repurposed materials resemble an apocalyptic strain of folk art, and are constructed in a provisional manner, stacked or held together with rubber bands or caulking as if to assure maximum flexibility for future disassembly and reuse. Many bear anthropomorphic touches, like Luxury Leader Voodoo Doll (2009), a meager little character with a crudely drawn pair of glasses for a face and a withered carrot for a body, attached with a black shoestring to a scrap of wood.

Several works have changed incrementally from one day to the next – a square of fabric cut away from one work, a bit of text added to another. That oddity, along with particulars in the works’ list of materials (horse hair, a stolen doorknob, a silver spoon, a vulture feather), indicates that their status as artworks is secondary to some more pressing purpose. They are the most public, static element of PEET’s first New York solo show, which also includes a series of small, untitled paintings (2009) – available only by barter – and the titular TV series. Magpie sculptor, would-be pirate of the airwaves, and possible secessionist, with a dash of The Wizard of Oz thrown in for good measure, PEET is at work creating a complex narrative system through which he regularly conveys his utter dismay with modern times.

PEET is surely an artist worth keeping an eye on; it’s only fair, since he may well be keeping an eye on us. Each Saturday throughout the show, an audience gathers to watch PEET’s latest video installment, which he produces live from a clandestine nearby location, dovetailing real-time visuals into prerecorded footage. Dubbed media clips of the past week’s political and economic news begin each segment; Gordon Brown’s G-20 speech and Obama’s Prague address on nuclear proliferation figured in the first two episodes. Using close-ups, voiceovers, establishing shots of unpopulated urban and bucolic vistas, and scores of oblique visual signifiers, the videos chart the activities of an unseen renegade force, ‘The Resistants’, in their struggle against the ‘Luxury Leader’, a corrupt power figure. (References to Dick Cheney suggest he may be the closest real-world parallel.)

Tantalizing and nonlinear, The TV Show is filled with so many self-referential layers that it flirts with inscrutability. But as television series like Twin Peaks and Lost have demonstrated, providing narrative satisfaction isn’t such a critical factor, or any help at all really, when it comes to keeping viewers glued to the box week after week. Either by personal obsession or deft artifice (likely some of each), PEET draws viewers in by using visual repetition and a multitude of small mysteries. Props from the video have a totemic tendency to appear in the sculptures; one wonders how he will cope with their eventual sale, since they seem integrally involved in his ongoing, enigmatic activism. 

Anne Wehr

Ida Ekblad

Gaudel de Stampa, Paris, France

‘Febermalerier’, Ida Ekblad’s first solo show in Paris, is something of a departure for the young artist. Instead of satirical appropriations of American youth and gangster cultures (an example of which, Untitled (M), 2008, is in the New Museum’s current ‘Younger than Jesus’ survey), Ekblad offers seven densely expressionistic oil paintings, three colourful welded metal sculptures and a poem. There is a whiff of northern romanticism to the exhibition: the paintings are reminiscent of Asger Jorn, and the poem Ekblad penned in place of a press release, Feberdikt (2009), takes its title from Knut Hamsun. And yet one registers no disjunction from her earlier practice - even though on paper one probably should.

The largest, most obviously (or apparently) heroic painting, Hyberborea (2009), the title of which comes from a 1983 Tangerine Dream album, is more than eight feet across and presents a range of expressionist gestures, from stains and scratches to various loops and knots, and occasional patches of thicker, built-up paint. The colour is acidic but lovely. There are a lot of blues, with browns and near-blacks punctuated by coruscating yellows, whites, oranges and greens. Ekblad has left a significant amount of the unprimed canvas showing, especially along the edges, which re-asserts the figure-ground relationship, intensifying the colour by providing a tonal background, against which it explodes.

Of particular interest is the way aspects of Hyberborea are reiterated, and frequently modulated, throughout the exhibition. There is, for example, a recurring linear element, a looping, twisting line that gropes or knots itself throughout the picture. This mode of drawing is repeated, in three dimensions, in each of the three sculptures, which have been assembled from scraps of furniture. Note also the careful installation of the sculptures: Sham King, King of Sham (2009), the title of which references Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of Jean Genet, rests on the gallery floor, almost like an accident, or found detritus; Charlatan (2009) is mounted on two wooden planks, seeming to be rather more traditional, or ‘presented’; Bring this modern classic into your home (2009) hangs from the ceiling. Each sculptural effort, however lyrical or unique, is at the same time a grammatical unit in an exhibition-wide investigation called ‘sculpture’.

The painting When she was hit by spacejunk (2009) again isolates this linear motif, in this case in blue against a black ground. The line here is faster and lighter. The arabesque is at once rather feminine - lunar, undersea, gliding - and also very clearly phallic. Ekblad picks up on this phallic aspect, and perhaps the macho heroics of expressionist painting more generally, in Messthetics (2009; this title comes from semantic poet Stefan Themerson). The unframed, unstretched canvas features only one gesture, an echo of the formal-erotic frenzies of Jackson Pollock, or Duchamp’s Paysage Fautif (1946), or Warhol’s piss- and oxidation-paintings from the ‘70s: splattered drops of white paint against a dark ground.

Why, though, does Ekblad’s expressionism seem so much of a piece with her previous graffiti-vandal detourné, and in no way mannered or contrived? Maybe because, in spite of its built-in irony, Ekblad’s practice is at bottom always generative, affirmative, in the full, hard sense of the word: regardless of what she touches, what mode she adopts, one feels that Ekblad aims to say yes, ultimately - to cross beyond negation. In Feberdikt she posits a mantra: ‘décorer – poser – changer – brancher – rempalcer – assembler.’ Mere criticality does not feature in Ekblad’s tool-kit. Art is synonymous with superabundance. While Ekblad is not alone in this understanding, it is not every day that one comes across so expansive a talent, and so apparently unacquainted with slyness or revenge. 

David Lewis

Michelle Lopez

Simon Preston Gallery, New York, USA

Dynamite may well have exploded in the bowels of Simon Preston Gallery, because the objects Michelle Lopez is presenting upstairs seem to be stalled in flight. A bough of a sycamore is sticking through a partition wall facing the entrance; behind it the tree’s branches fan out across another gallery. The compressed wreck of a car is pushed up against a wall. A small black object resembling flames from a small campfire sits on the floor, and two sandbags weigh down ropes that disappear into the ceiling as if they were trying to secure a hot air balloon.

Maybe the explosion is appropriate, because Lopez has been relatively quiet in recent years: this is the 39-year-old Brooklyn-based artist’s first New York show since her exhibition at Deitch Projects in 2001. At first glance, ‘The Violent Bear It Away’ might remind one of Janis Kounellis: there is something of his theatre in the appearance of arrested violence, though the variety of elemental materials (the flame-like object is fabricated from soot) is most reminiscent of the Greek artist’s work. All of the works are, however, hybridized oddities: the flying bough, Southern Trees/ Black September (all works 2009), contains a branch that has been spliced with a white, resinous phantom limb. The car, Woadsonner (edit), is partially clad in soft leather: it’s a crushed version of a leather-skinned Honda that Lopez made in 2000. And that ball of flames, Portrait of Artist as Special Mission Project/ Akira Revisited, is a wig, a reference to Takashi Murakami’s Special Mission Project Ko2 (1997), in which cyborg women are transformed into planes.

All of these objects are marvellously poised between being one strange thing and something stranger still. They have an energy borne of single images or ideas clashing together suddenly: Woadsonner suggests a human and a mechanical carapace, fused and then collapsed. Yet Lopez has found her way to these objects by circuitous routes, and the forms can’t hope to support all her intentions. A catalogue essay by J. Uslip tells us that, on its own, Southern Trees/ Black September is meant to suggest Billie Holiday, aeroplane hijackings, Palestinian terrorists, 9/11 and maybe the artist’s birthday. But the objects alone have to do the work alone, without any tacked-on ideas – and here they do. 

Morgan Falconer

Mythologies

Haunch of Venison, London, UK

Six Burlington Gardens is a hugely impressive building. Designed in 1867 by Sir James Pennethorne, also responsible for East London’s Victoria Park and the ballroom at Buckingham Palace, it served as the Museum of Mankind between 1970 and 1997, an outpost of the British Museum holding its extensive ethnographic collections. In 2005 it was taken over by the Royal Academy of Arts, and has since been occupied by temporary exhibitions and events such as Zoo Art Fair and the wannabe-funky ‘GSK Contemporary’ season. Now Haunch of Venison, seemingly oblivious to the existence of a recession, has moved into what are probably the grandest premises of any commercial gallery in the world.

Acknowledging the building’s history, the opening exhibition wisely passes over the building’s more recent incarnations and casts back to the days of the Museum of Mankind, an institution that, like the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, was a rich source of imaginative nourishment for the city’s artists. As an anachronistic attempt to collect and interpret icons of indigenous cultures of four continents, it had the paradoxical effect of making the world seem stranger, more arcane and unknowable. ‘Mythologies’ sets out to explore and, in some part, to recreate that cabinet of curiosities.

Accordingly, ‘wonder’ is the keynote response that the exhibition tries to invoke. Unfortunately, both the installation of the work, the flummery – including the quasi-encyclopaedic catalogue that shuffles entries for Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss, ritual and unicorns with those for the artists – and most of the art itself attempt to invoke said wonder by trying to impress, and in doing so gets it dead wrong. What is compelling about ethnographic artefacts is that they don’t care about you, the viewer in a western museum. They weren’t made for you – their role is in some distant and now mysterious world from which they were ripped and which you can never hope to comprehend.

By and large, ‘Mythologies’ forgoes this aura of authenticity for a phony and overwrought performance of the spectacular, the spooky or the uncanny. London’s most persistently tedious provocateurs Tim Noble and Sue Webster have installed steel cut-outs of dragonflies and genitalia near the show’s entrance, creating a wall of shadows that, like Christian Boltanksi’s Théâtre d’ombres (Shadow Theatre, 1986), reminds us of the Indonesian shadow plays once shown in the Museum of Mankind. Jennifer Wen Ma’s stone sculptures of hands hold miniature projections of the mythical Chinese figure of the Monkey King, magically cavorting in clouds of steam. While I know that the work connects to a complex folklore of which I am ignorant, I was reminded of the kitsch table-top fountains sold in garden centres. It was not a huge surprise to see work by Bill Viola (pseudo-spiritual plasma-screen portraits titled Incarnation and Small Saints, both 2008) and two massive, pointless photographs of Damien Hirst’s diamond skull upstairs.

Other examples of ornamental kitsch were to be seen in the recurrent use of taxidermy, in works by artists Jochem Hendricks (pictured above) and Polly Morgan. Taxidermy has become an especially vapid and voguish medium; the use of dead animals offers a thrilling frisson of repulsion, a momento mori that still manages to look aristocratically louche in the contemporary home. The combination of existential horror and desirability attempted by Morgan’s boutique trinkets is particularly cynical.

It was not all dreadful however. The more successful work kept itself to itself, retaining some dignity amongst the spotlighting, coloured walls and the pretentious wall quotes. Egyptian artist Tarek Zaki’s collection of mysterious round objects (The History of O, 2009), Guy Tillim’s photographs of Mai Mai militia, and figurative sculptures by Jean Hérard Celeur and Guyodo, both artists from Haiti, all achieved the double-whammy of enigma and familiarity that the show seemed to be pitching at. Sophie Calle’s haunting photographs of the defaced faces of Christian statues wormed themselves unpleasantly into one’s consciousness, and Heather and Ivan Morison, artists whose work is consistently intriguing, hung two huge kites in the main stairwell, physical echoes of the floating CGI crystal that turns in an Arizona desert sky in their nearby video Dark Star (2007). One kite – in silver mylar – was titled Kind, Wise and Loving; the other, which was black and larger, was called The Opposite of All Those Things (both works 2008). I have no idea why. These are artists who are not toying with ethnographic or museological tropes, but who create genuinely mysterious images and objects that are wholly indifferent to the foppish affectations with which ‘Mythologies’ surrounds them. 

Jonathan Griffin

William Scott

White Columns, New York, USA

William Scott is one of a number of artists to emerge Oakland’s Creative Growth Center, an institution in California mentoring artists with mental and physical disabilities.  Over the past four years, White Columns has brought several these artists into direct dialogue with the contemporary art world; notably, it has done so without any direct emphasis on their outsider status. The result has been a series of intriguing, impressive, and inevitably thought-provoking exhibitions.  In that this work can initially appear to be excessively knowing or naïve, the exhibitions question the role of authorial intention and contextual knowledge in the production of art.  But, above all, the series has presented a range of forcefully idiosyncratic work that stages a complex matrix of socially inscribed ideas.

Scott’s paintings are infused with sci-fi paranoia and psychic claustrophobia; his figures are often hunched and squeezed into the frame.  Touching on everything from education and religion to race and family, the key theme running through this work is the basic relationship between the individual and society.

Scott’s highly stylized portraits of Black America include a series of mask-like faces painted on foamcore, and a selection of these, along with an outsized papier-mâché head, form the first part of the exhibition.  Other works freely absorb the language of black church groups, high-school yearbooks, alien invasions and citizenship.  These disparate fragments tessellate to form a mosaic representing race and identity in America, and a deep sense of interlocking social worlds.

One of the central pillars of Scott’s creative world is a highly politicized vision for a new San Francisco, which comprises razing the city and rebuilding it for a utopian future. Real-world politics is always present in Scott’s work, but presented without the distance of irony or theoretical speculation; for Scott, they are real proposals rather than conceptual propositions.

Scott is preoccupied with figures of authority and his own role within various structures of social order, and it is this more personal work that is featured in this exhibition (his drawings for the San Francisco urban planning project were included in his 2006 White Columns show).  That is apparent in his portraits of figures from the worlds of church, the police and the school, characters that are both real and imagined, and which often share the frame with figures representing Scott himself.

Scott’s work is wrapped up in the idea of what it means to be a citizen, to be interpellated within the social order.  That is probably most memorably captured in an untitled series of sci-fi infused works from 2006.  These are populated with a lovely switch and change of language - ‘citi-fi’ and ‘inner limits’ and ‘whole some citizen’ - and a series of wide-eyed future citizens of the world, about to depart on airport shuttles into space.

In the most direct way, Scott communicates the way in which being part of any social order relates to pop cultural paranoia and conspiracy theories.  But he also captures the deeper suspicion that we are sometimes possessed by forces beyond our comprehension. This speaks to a universal experience that has nothing to do with the categories of disability or social marginalization.

Katie Kitamura

Raad o Baargh: 16 Artists From Iran

Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Paris, France

In a recent episode of Marketplace Middle East on CNN, the names of top-selling Middle Eastern artists and the prices of their most lucrative sales at auction jazzed across the screen to synthesized background music. ‘Oil revenue prices dropping from US$140 to circa US$40 is having an impact clearly in some sectors of the Middle East but there is huge disposable wealth still there’, insisted the Fine Art Fund’s CEO Philip Hoffman.  ‘I see the art market in the Middle East, growing quite substantially.’ Like Charles Saatchi, whose exhibition ‘Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East’ is currently on at the Saatchi Gallery in London, Thaddeus Ropac insists that interest in organizing a similar survey show, though considerably smaller, stems from the desire to defy clichés and testify to the cultural heterogeneity of a region saddled with misconceptions. However, the enduring market around socio-political exoticism and the potential to dip into new pockets of wealth cannot be denied. 

The exhibition title, ‘Raad o Bargh’ (’Thunder and lightning’), immediately calls to mind the RAAD missiles Iran has allegedly provided Hezbollah and the media’s misinformation campaign on the ‘Axis of Evil”.  Aside from its very evident allusion to Sturm und Drang , it also evokes the political call to revolution ’esteghlal o azadi’ (independence and liberty), used in 1979 by the ideologically disparate liberal, Marxist and Islamist opponents to the pro-American, British-backed Shah.

These references introduce a triumvirate of recurrent issues – the interplay between place, time and the individual; the relationship between the personal and the political; the dialectic of ‘global’ and ‘fringe’ – which are addressed either pointedly or indirectly by all 16 artists in the exhibition. Ala Dehgan’s neoexpressionist works on paper (2008-9) are diagrams for a new mythology whose pantheon of ambiguous gods, indistinguishable as good or bad forces, intervene mischievously to upset the hermeticism of all those who attempt to avoid the junction between personal and political. Behrouz Rae’s Study for Reconfiguration Number 3 (2008) and his series of small mixed media compositions, ‘In Bimester We Trust’ (2008), trace the absence of the individual through a suspended wandering in and out of space and place.  Ali Banisdar’s The Charlatans (2009), an abstract expressionist reiteration of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-4), is similar in approach to Cecily Brown’s rabbit paintings (1997-2002) but rooted in the tradition of Persian miniatures.

In an exhibition that brings artists together for their national origins, it is impossible to avoid threading a common spirit that unites their practices. In Shahab Fotouhi’s video, Direct Negotiation (2008), a cat paws at the screen of a back door, yet it is unclear if it is desperate to be let in or simply sharpening its claws in readiness for its prey. Like a playful prod on the shoulder whose source only vanishes upon turning around, all of the works in ‘Raad o Baargh’ emit a distinct aloofness that feigns indifference and disengagement.

Emily Verla Bovino

Thomas Schroeren

Galerie Sandra Bürgel, Berlin, Germany

‘Jetzt kaufe ich mir Freizeit’ (’Now let me buy some free time’) is a difficult show that demands a lot of patience. Thomas Schroeren is a young artist from Hessen, in central Germany, who initially trained as a painter in Frankfurt though now describes himself as an object-maker. The early phase of his career seems to have ended in rebellion; amongst the works in Sandra Bürgel’s storage room is a hideous combine entitled Ich hasse Malerei (I Hate Painting, 2005). According to Bürgel, Schroeren became increasingly dissatisfied with the material mastery he came to feel painting demanded. The artist currently maintains a website suggestively entitled Counterworks and has avoided setting up a studio in an effort to sidestep some of the institutional baggage involved.

The second room features an open suitcase containing a battleship turned on its side in a landscape entitled Vorwarnung zur Ankuft der A.L.F. (Lass mich schnell ueberlegen ob ich noch kurze Pappe da hab) (Premonition to the arrival of extraterrestial life form [Let me think if I have short cardboard here], 2009) and three cardboard cut-outs of trains, ascending and descending on imaginary tracks (Elf Dimensionen up and down, 2009) and two small prints: Rockstar (2009) and the partially pixellated M&M reprint (2009) - on each of which a mysterious coin is held in place by a magnet. (The latter is apparently a reference to an earlier work.)

In general, Schroeren embraces a do-it-yourself, found-object collage-aesthetic (the simplest point of comparison are the rhythmless combines of Robert Rauschenberg). To Ronald McDonald (2009) features computer parts amongst its panels, along with an old painting by Schroeren himself. Elsewhere the two-part Alptraum in meinem Zimmer (Nightmare in my room, 2009) features a doll turned on its side. The general proposition is an art of sculptural collage, vague with a hermeticism that shades into opacity.

The first piece on display, Erste Vision, First vision, 2009), is a print of the artist looking at an image of himself in a window - though the reflected image is in fact a different image. Similarly, one panel of To Ronald McDonald consists of an image of a German department store model holding a beach ball; his head has been covered with a black sticker bearing the Motorola logo, along with the obscure inscription ‘denkt Gott’. This is perhaps a reference to Bertolt Brecht’s proverb ‘Der mensch denkt, Gott lenkt’ (Man proposes, God disposes). So there is Man, and God, and consumerism, and technology - and some kind of relationship holding between them.

What this relationship consists of is difficult to appreciate. Schroeren seems for the moment unable to clearly articulate his ideas, and there is a mystical element to what he does say. His statement in the press release reads: ‘This exhibition, the word literally taken, is a haze. The mathematics nature of things meets with our lyrical reception of the world.’ The struggle, claims Schroeren, is between ‘feeling and intellect, Nature and Man, or even logical reasoning against all spiritual.’ Disregarding the difficult translation, these abstractions remain vast and unwieldy in any language. Schroeren speaks of an invitation to face nature ‘pure hearted.’ I sympathize with his sincerity, though am uncertain that this strategy offers enough.

The doctrine of pure-heartedness, conceived as innocence, recurs through this show. There is something cargo-cultish about Heresy (2009), a sort of book made from metal, paper, acrylic glass, a found shopping list, a post card and an electric cable. Elsewhere the geometrical form of Chaise Longue (2009) recalls a child’s high-chair and Ragdan (2009) is a door made from what looks like children’s building blocks. Geboren am 2. Maerz (Born on the 2nd of March, 2009) references birth more directly.

A lot of the pieces are oddly shaped; bulging, sprawling, asymmetric, many of them hang from the ceiling. In general they seem to lack rigour and precision. The work which made me the most unhappy was Wirst du mich mit lieben mit all meinen Felhlern (Will you love me with all my flaws, 2009). The piece consists of four golden loops made out of cardboard hanging down from a rack. Bürgel suggested this defence: ‘The question “Will you love me with all my flaws” is a good one. Many people who have come into the gallery have said that the form reminds them of golden tears.’ The question is good, but this association seems clichéd.

But perhaps this is partly the point. In almost every respect, I found this show frustrating: many of the compositions seem wilful and arbitrary, difficult to understand and unrewarding; confused and incomplete. But then ‘the exhibition, the word literally taken’ also harbours these features. In this respect, Schroeren is perhaps doing something ambitious, pitting a flawed art of flaws against the tyranny of the perfect, and the idea that art should supply an escape-valve from the frustrations of the world.

Daniel Miller

Luke Frost

Tate St Ives, St Ives, UK

Luke Frost’s curiously alluring paintings are austerely reductive, minimal and hard-edged. Indeed, they evince an aesthetic more consonant with his grandfather Sir Terry Frost’s generation than with his young contemporaries. Comprising saturated fields of colour intersected by vertical bands, Frost’s works on canvas and aluminium are ostensibly indebted to Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. Closer inspection reveals these bands – or ‘volts’ to use Frost’s term – to be composed of several thinner, variegated stripes, often with only the slightest variations in hue.

Volts no. 20 (all works 2008) is a large horizontal rectangle of intense red. It is bisected by a vertical volt containing a pair of blue and mauve bands running either side of two slightly differently coloured red bands. Frost’s paintings draw you in with their optical buzz, but his colours, built up from a dozen or so layers of acrylic paint, are unpleasantly synthetic. Unlike Newman’s rich, resonant palette of earthy, organic hues, Frost’s intense, artificial chroma sets up a dichotomy of attraction and repulsion that resists resolution.

The work in this modest exhibition at Tate St Ives is the result of a year-long residency in the neighboring Porthmeor Studios, for which Frost occupied the historic Studio Number 5 – previously used by Borlase Smart, Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron. For the past five years the museum’s Artist Residency programme has played host to several young artists, including Ged Quinn, Kerstin Kartscher and Jonty Lees, offering them exclusive use of the ramshackle, weather-beaten studio along with a hefty stipend to encourage the production of new work that raises the scale of ambition in their practice.

A notable development emerging from Frost’s residency has been his aluminium corner pieces, several of which are included here. Consisting of two equally sized rectangular panels welded at right angles, Volts no. 21 hangs flush in the corner of the gallery. Painted with an intense, seductive shade of electric blue, the work has a striking red volt running through its centre. Moving closer, the expansive field of blue starts to envelop you, although any illusion of depth is interrupted by the volt, which returns your eye repeatedly to the work’s impeccably flat surface.

Seriality is explored in the two Supervolts triptychs shown here, where letterbox-shaped canvases with volts running through their centres are hung in vertical configurations recalling Donald Judd’s stacks. Here Frost has positioned two Supervolts close together, creating a stack of six panels, but this strategy seems overbearing and out of place. More successful is the large Volts no. 18.3, hanging opposite: a quiescent ashen square with red volts running down either edge. Staring into its expansive monochromatic plane you let your eyes relax and your focus drift until one of its bright red volts jolts you from your reverie. The colours are no less artificial but Frost’s combination here is far more satisfying.

Significantly, not one of Tate St Ives’ galleries is larger than any of the spaces in Porthmeor Studios; the setting in which Frost’s work is displayed implies a replication of the conditions of its production. But the hang feels claustrophobic and the paintings jostle for attention. Far worse than this though are the incongruous grey lines on the floor intended to deter visitors from touching the works. The formal similarity of these lines to Frost’s geometry sets up an unfortunate visual relationship which you can’t help but read as part of the work.

Unsurprisingly, Tate’s decision to award Frost with this residency has been locally contentious ‒ although considering his artistic pedigree, accusations of nepotism will probably always plague this artist’s career. More germane however is the issue of the work itself. Despite their technical proficiency its hard to see how Frost’s paintings move beyond the formal evocation of a past art historical moment. ‘Why do this look now?’ asks Matthew Collings in his catalogue essay; it’s a question that neither he or Frost seem able to provide any convincing answers to.

David Trigg

Darren Sylvester

sullivan+strumpf, Sydney, Australia

It may seem a little perverse to describe Darren Sylvester’s exhibition at sullivan+strumpf, his fifteenth solo show in ten years, by a definition of a Pantone category, but bear with me.  In 2008, Pantone, global purveyor of colour trends, declared Pantone 18-3943 (’Blue Iris’) to be the colour of the year, claiming that, ‘the stable and calming aspects of blue with the mystical and spiritual qualities of purple [...] satisfies the need of reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement.’

It would seem that the Melbourne-based photographer / sculptor / part-time designer / pop musician / producer is not just the maestro of ‘slash vocations’, but a wily observer of trends – from fashion to music to popular culture. The scattering of gaudy purple detail in the latest collection of clean, ultra-glossy digital photographs – namely a woman’s dress, a pair of bed sheets and an eye-splitting backdrop – are a subtle reminder that the referencing of trends has been a regular feature in Sylvester’s repertoire.  This was most recently seen in I Care for You (2008), a large acrylic painting featuring 12 blocks of colour that perfectly match that of a Clinique ‘Colour Surge’ eye shadow compact. 

Over the last five years Sylvester has developed a reputation for producing highly stylized photographs that render the nuances of mass media advertising palpable. He does so by presenting and embracing the dynamic tools of the industry.  Painstakingly constructing each photograph like a commercial shoot, Sylvester starts with a ‘pitch’ (or rather a line from one of his short stories), moving on to a sketched story board, test shots, casting of actors (or friends), set constructions, wardrobe fittings, prop hunting, hair, make-up and finally digital re-working.  Nothing is left to chance. 

Announcing Sylvester’s fascination with the pop industry, the first photographs you encounter in sullivan+strumpf are doppelgänger portraits of Grace Jones and Brian Ferry. They provoke a moment’s hesitation as one looks for details to confirm the subjects’ identities. But the photographs are constructed along the lines of Sylvester’s advertising-inspired images.  The backgrounds – a graduating mauve for Jones, in Take me to you (2009), and a luminous Mediterranean blue for Ferry, in Take me to you again (2009) – suggest a longing for an era of care-free, glittery disco-pop, but are refuted by the tired, waxy looking protagonists, who would likely stumble across the floor rather than glide.

Two additional portraits, again stage-managed productions, show a blonde, toothy starlet posing with hand on hip, elbow crooked and adorned with a purple silk dress and a turquoise crocodile clutch in front of a backdrop of logos: UNICEF; Malawi Orphan Care Initiative; and Gucci.  We have seen countless images like these in the weekly gossip mags. (Perhaps literally in this case, given that the photographs re-stage PR snaps of Rihanna and Jessica Alba taken during a Madonna-hosted, Gucci-funded fundraising event at the UN headquarters in 2008 for orphaned Malawian children.) Any consideration of how genuine a starlet’s investment in a cause, not to mention the intentions behind a collaboration between two diametrically opposed organisations, is overshadowed by our desire to see what the starlet is wearing, who she came with to the charity event and whether she’s lost weight, or gained it.  Such images reference pop-culture’s spectator sport: the game of B-list celebrities boosting brand visibility.  It also hints at the fact that sales pitches come at us from many sources, whether it be ‘humanitarianism or handbags’, as Anthony Carew points out in the accompanying catalogue.

These highly contrived works hint at Sylvester’s fascination with hero adoration. However, the additional pieces in the show – highlights of which include a video titled I Was The Last In The Carpenters’ Garden (2008); a turntable playing Sylvester’s self-titled pop album (currently available on vinyl, but due for CD release by Unstable Ape in June 2009); and a fully functioning replica of the Simmons Suitcase Kit (a drum kit made briefly famous by New Order) – suggest that the exhibition is neither simply a critique of fan culture nor a moment of nostalgia.  The fact Sylvester never once set foot in the Carpenters’ back garden -– which featured as a recreated sound-stage set for the artist to walk through in the video – means he’s not so much nostalgic (in the sense of desiring a return to a time or place he once knew) but rather, amusingly, trying to prove he is the archetypal fan, or perhaps even a borderline stalker.  He knows every detail of the garden, or the drum kit, despite having owned neither.

This point is most obvious in Sylvester’s first attempt at a pop album. The record plays on perpetual loop, casting a soft melodic blanket over the gallery.  As a background noise it is smooth and joyous, a perfect complement to the photographs, but if you take the time to listen to it in full there is a slight grate in the constant appropriation.  It’s almost as if Sylvester is trying to gauge whether the level of musician worship among his listeners is more refined than his; asking who can hear the highest number of references to beats, riffs and lyrics. Nonetheless it’s worth a spin, because really, isn’t pop always layered with self-gratifying referentiality? Coupled with Sylvester’s sentimental imagery the album gives the exhibition a light and entertaining value, with just a ‘hint of mystery’, as Pantone would put it, to top it off. 

Nicola Harvey

Swetlana Heger

Thierry Goldberg Projects, New York, USA

The Czech-born, Berlin-based artist Swetlana Heger began her ‘Playtime’ project in 2002, for which she initiated collaborations with brands like Hermès and Adidas, and devised a series of self-portraits-cum-fashion shoots using the brands’ clothing. That Heger managed to find partners at all is remarkable given her ambivalence about the market. It’s less surprising that she’s on her own for her latest exhibition, ‘Lipstick Economy’. Borrowing from the idea of the ‘lipstick index’, chairman of Estée Lauder Leonard Lauder’s observation that lipstick sales rise as the economy sinks, Heger has mounted a show that is both a tribute to the woman who can smile on through and a satire of how the market must lower its sights as times demand.

The most covetable object is a black and white self-portrait photograph, tinged with Weimar glamour, which Heger has used as the basis of two works, Lipstick Economy (YSL in Red Taboo) (all works 2009) and Lipstick Economy (Dior Addict in Gipsy Red). The former is framed in gold, the latter in silver, but the key difference lies in the fact that Heger has used a different lipstick to ‘sign’ each piece in the bottom-left with a single kiss. Each picture is thus ‘unique’ in its way, but as there would be no profit without mounds of the stuff, Heger has produced each in an edition of 150. Like the art dealer who never worried about hiding excess stock, she displays six of each here in rows (seriality is surely more essential to the market than to the artist).

Alternative versions of the same schtick appear in a series of three similarly titled works on high-class paper, which bear nothing more than a single kiss from a pair of lipsticked lips. And, completing the ensemble – slightly too inevitably – is a wall-piece comprising a panel of small mirrors adorned in more lipstick with the title of the show (and the work itself). It’s all slyly appealing – and of course timely – yet these days, artists seeking to take on the behemoth capital have to look less like crafters working in an old economy, and more like chameleon hot-deskers. For all her class and comedy, Heger looks like she’s just lining up to sell her wares. At US$150 a pop for the prints – a price-point not immaterial to the purpose of the work – she may have some luck. 

Morgan Falconer

Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa

Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, USA

A number of recent exhibitions have taken it upon themselves to complicate prevailing conceptions of Africa as a monolithic culture or ‘global problem’. Shows like the traveling ‘Africa Remix’ (2005) and last year’s ‘Flow’ at the Studio Museum in Harlem sought to combat misplaced generalizations with a barrage of specificities, bringing together large numbers of artists from across the continent in a celebratory display of Africa’s teeming heterogeneity. Such an approach largely reiterates a view of the continent as a singular whole – albeit one now appreciated for its diversity.

‘Continental Rifts’ smartly takes five artists who are cited as ‘deeply connected’ to Africa, yet who are positioned in, outside and around the continent in such a way that they can hardly be seen as part of an equation ‘adding up’ to an African whole. Alfredo Jaar, Berni Searle, Yto Barrada, Cláudia Crostóvão and Georgia Papageorge were born in Chile, South Africa, France and Angola, often to parents of different nationalities (Moroccan, Portuguese); they live and work in equally diverse locations. The artists’ repeated distancing from and returns to Africa have led to their common conviction that the place is fundamentally elusive, impossible to pin down.

The loose and allegorical video sequences of Searle and Papageorge benefit from company. The presence of other videos – that engage more explicitly with myths of family and media – show Searle’s and Papageorge’s works to be mythifying endeavours too. Home and Away (2003) shows Searle floating quietly in the Mediterranean strait between Morocco and Spain, embodying the fluidity of national identity; Papageorge’s Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire: Namibia/Brazil (2001) documents long strips of red cloth – indicated as symbols of ‘both rupture and reconciliation’ in the exhibition text – as they flap loudly in the wind along the Brazilian and Namibian coasts.

Africa consistently appears as the object of entangled fiction and fact. In Crostóvão’s short, two-screen video, The Imaginary Journey (2008), a young man wistfully recites an imagined trip to his birthplace, where his parents buried a family treasure before being forced to flee the country. He reminisces in the future tense: ‘To be able to say, “I was there, your house is still standing...’’.’ The accompanying video of city streets is punctuated with poignant images of an empty house which has filled almost entirely with sand. In contrast, in Fata Morgana (2005-6), Crostóvão interviews individuals born in Africa though who left as children. The documentary slides quickly into humour as people express the most ardent and incongruous of opinions regarding a place that they hardly remember.

Alfredo Jaar’s ten-chapter film Muxima (2005) takes on African histories of war, AIDS and the church – issues that the media routinely brings into distorted focus for a global audience. If the traditional Bantu song chosen by Jaar invigorates some scenes – a motor boat carrying five stoic men staring straight ahead seems to be driven forward by the music itself – it is completely unmemorable in others: a heart-in-mouth sequence which follows a young man as he hunts land mines in dense undergrowth is so riveting that the music hardly matters. In a similarly documentary vein, Barrada records an amicable garden meal in Tangiers (The Botanist, 2007); colour photographs trace the contest between iris tingitana (Moroccan iris) and encroaching commercial developments outside of the city (’Iris Tingitana’, 2007).

The real strength of ‘Continental Rifts’ is its curatorial model. If each artist suggests that myth (both personal and public) is one way of understanding place, curator Mary Nooter Roberts utilizes myth to productively re-specify old disciplinary ‘spaces’ – the over-generalized concepts of both ‘Africa’ and ‘African art’.

Sarah-Neel Smith

Psychometry (II)

ARRATIA, BEER, Berlin, Germany

According to ARRATIA, BEER’s press release, ‘psychometry’ refers to ‘the divination of facts concerning an object or its owner through contact with or proximity to the object.’ ‘(II)’ implies an earlier attempt. Or perhaps the number two, which repeats through this group show – curated by the San Francisco emigrant and conceptual artist D-L Alvarez – in pairs. Or perhaps some idea of mirrored identity.

In the first room, Benjamin Alexander Huseby (a professional fashion photographer) supplies two monumental stone plinths, if you could call them that: DIY and unfixed, on them are mounted glossy Lambda print photographs on card. The look of the plinths suggest Greek temples, or in other words, the cult of the body. Patrick (2009) shows a male torso and Anja (2009) shows a female. Anja wears jeans, unbuttoned, and seems somehow masculine. Patrick seems feminine. Both bodies are missing their eyes and lips. Huseby also contributes a frame for these pictures, a blue-and-yellow folding screen, which he calls MG (2009). The plastic standing structure proposes a principle of triangulation on the bodies, the blank backs of both photos neatly aligning with their own separate colour codes. The addition seems to have something to do with gender, which is the dominant theme of this show, with queer shades.

And, at certain points, more than shades. In the second room, Gwenaël Rattke displays three photo collages on paper and cardboard: Fear we Trust (2008), Kiraly (2009) and Point Eyes (2008). The collages are gothic and gay, Gilbert and George, green and yellow, black and white, red and blue. The black and white picture on the far right side of the wall borrows from Fascist iconography, while the red and blue, in the middle, seems orgiastic and liquid-utopian. The green and yellow image on the left includes, as a motif, a naked circle of boys. My companion is upset by the apparent lack of criticism. ‘Orgy, sex and power. Power, sex, and orgy.’ The press release, on the other hand, states: ‘The work is a type of billboard for an event that will take place on the exhibition’s closing (May 2, 5-9PM) in which [Rattke] and collaborator Chloe Griffin will bring the collage into a third dimension with live super-eight projection and sound.’

Also in the second room, Adrian Hermanides offers a grid made up of what seem like fleamarket objects, drawn from the objects of a deceased photographer. Entitled Alms for Birds (date unsupplied), a certain fastidiousness governs the grid’s structure, each particular thing sits in plenty of space. I sit on the floor to make notes, my pencil lead breaks, and I think about leaving it there, as a new object. Would this be permitted? The grid appears somehow too neat, too geometric, and the content seems flat. There are boots, jackets, a knife, magazines, film lights and a pornographic picture of a woman being fucked, a blank expression on her face. A leather belt. Two different, single, female shoes. A dirty broken record player, and, in the corner of the room, a tiny white Sony portable hi-fi, which I think about plugging in, but in the end decide not to. The environment seems unreceptive to play. One of the objects on display is a ruler, long and wooden, of the kind once used to beat children’s fingers’ with.

Back in the first room, streams of blue ribbon extend from the wall, with little piles of sand on the floor. Entitled An actor you can see through crystal (date unsupplied) the work is a collaboration between Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and Brenna Murphy, assembled by the former, based on a web collage made by the latter. The work is hard to get into; it seems that the way to experience it would be maybe to crawl through it. ‘Are you allowed to do that?’ I ask my companion. ‘Definitely not.’ On the other side of the room, a monitor displays a man darting around a recording digital video camera, pointed at a mirror, taking still pictures with another digital camera. As he presses the button, the camera flashes and the rest of the room behind him is illuminated. The video loops, the man seems in perpetual motion. Logic dictates that this must be Jennifer Locke’s video Sighting (2009) which is the only the video work in the show. But see if you can get there from this gnomic description: ‘Locke’s Sighting (2009) has two components, each trying to capture a reflection, but the effort only obscures the self further.’ Yes it does.

‘Psychometry (II)’ offers an interesting set of puzzles to work through and wonder at, with the press release itself, Press (2009), constituting the chief of these. The work reads like a poem by Hegel, which I guess is something, but it doesn’t exactly help identify individual works after the fact. At least from my perspective, it would have been very helpful if it was a bit more description, a little clearer, and a bit less discursive and dense. But, of course, this is not the only perspective.

The most thought-provoking work of all is almost the simplest. Huseby’s Memory Game (2009) is made up of an arrangement of books all open to pictures of flowers, a flowerbed of sorts planted near to the gallery’s entrance. Reds and violets and yellows, though no smell. ‘We are fascinated by the unit,’ philosopher Michel Serres has noted, ‘only a unity seems rational to us. We scorn the senses, because their information reaches us in bursts. We scorn the groupings of the world, and we scorn those of our bodies. For us they seem to enjoy a bit of the status of being only when they are subsumed beneath an unity.’ Like objects themselves, psychometry has its limits.

Daniel Miller

Loaded: Hunting Culture in America

Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago, USA

In the April 2009 issue of hunting magazine Outdoor Life, a hunter tells an anecdote about coming across a rare ‘transgendered deer’ (with male polished antlers and female genitalia); of course, he shot and killed it. On the magazine’s facing page is an ad for an erectile dysfunction pill. In a quest to understand modern hunting culture, it was satisfying to smirk at these and other mentions of complicated sexuality in the context of killing animals, since hunting is often defended as tradition. More telling, though, was the insertion of such urban concepts as ‘transgendered’ and Viagra within an age-old activity, revealing how bloodsports have been modernized and commercialized. This, too, is the intention of ‘Loaded: Hunting Culture in America’, a thematic exhibition that combines documentary photography, contemporary art, hunting-chic décor and hunting paraphernalia.

Hunting magazines comprise two main types of imagery: a photo-op of the proudly smiling hunter holding his (dead) catch, and wildlife (alive) in its natural habitat, looking pretty for the shoot. The exhibition, too, picks up on these standard poses. Erika Larsen’s series of colour photographs, ‘Young Blood’ (2007), documents the lives of various families that hunt together. Especially difficult to view are portraits of children and young adults posing with rifles, bloodied squirrels and turkeys in hand. Similarly, Brian Lesterberg’s photograph Hoof Track with Blood (2003) shows a depression on a plane of white snow, dappled with blood drippings from a fresh kill recently carted off. Each photograph could act as a condemnation of the bloodsport, though these are insiders’ views: Larsen contributes photographs to Field & Stream, a popular hunting magazine in the US, while Lesterberg is a hunter himself.

But what do the art establishment, and even urban or suburban dwellers, know about the seemingly backwoods hunting community? Lots, apparently. Like punk rock or S&M, the gear and gadgets from hunting subculture have trickled through to the mainstream. Sure, the brew gets watered-down and the bite is softened as contemporary artists and designers pick it up, but curators Audrey Michelle Mast and Ann Wiens don’t seem interested in expressing exactly what it feels like to track and kill an animal; rather, it’s the look, the fashion and the stuff - the culture - of the hunt that is on display here.

There are a handful of ‘real’ objects and scenes from hunting culture - not only Lesterberg’s and Larsen’s documentary footage but also duck decoys from the collection of an award-winning decoy sculptor. The life-like painted wooden ducks are both functioning tools and sculptural objects (though not necessarily ‘sculpture’ as we’re comfortable with the term).

The step from the duck decoys, popular in some faux-rustic dens, to ironic kitsch is easy to make, and the curators follow through by exhibiting a cardboard trophy buck head, made to adorn, presumably, college dorm rooms. The difference between the wooden decoys and the cardboard head is the seriousness with which the decoy maker works and the smugness of the cardboard joke. The contrast is similarly played-out with a taxidermied and mounted jackalope (the folkloric antlered bunny), and designer salt and pepper shakers in the shape of stag heads. Whereas the jackalope was a junk-shop prize find and is a token lowbrow curio, the spice shakers are made of stainless steel and sell for US$43. Elsewhere in the exhibition, you can play Nintendo’s popular Duck Hunt (1985). A trajectory takes shape, detailing the progression of the hunting subculture’s step-by-step manoeuvre into middle-class life. 

As for the contemporary art on view, there are similar reversals and transpositions of high and low taste. Jenn Wilson’s lush oil painting of a bear recalls a hunter’s morbid love affair with nature and the sport’s curious self-justification of environmental conservationism. Bear (2008) could hang just as easily in a lodge as it does in the Glass Curtain Gallery. Kimberly Hart’s Hunting Stand with Unicorn Bait (2007) is an installation that updates the Metropolitan Museum’s famous ‘The Hunt of the Unicorn’ (1495–1505) tapestries, using hobby-shop materials such as plastic beads and pastel pom-poms. On the side of sentimentality are Josh Winegar’s altered photographs of hunters parading their trophy kills, in which the artist has whitewashed the proud hunters with paint until they’re almost completely faded out, though leaving the animals intact. In Mtn. Lion (2007), a large, limp feline is given a painted bandage in a sweetly futile gesture of redemption.

Hunting culture is so ripe with artistic metaphors - decoys and doubles, the quietude of a collection and the violence of ownership - yet the curators don’t deviate from the historical slice they aim to present (except, perhaps, the inclusion of Diana Guerrero-Maciá’s stitched ransom note, which reads, ‘Designed to deliver kill shots’, and may be aimed at viewers). By balancing pictures of carcasses and guns alongside cultural relics, hunting is shown to be a disturbingly assimilated pastime. 

Jason Foumberg

Barkow Leibinger

Architectural Association, London, UK

Concerning the German architectural firm of Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger, ‘An Atlas of Fabrication’ initially presented itself in opposition to certain contemporary tropes. A collection of models, details, panels and leftovers, the exhibition was immediately notable for a total lack of digital images. Digitality and pixellated representation have become highly dominant in fashionable architectural circles, recently even given its own theory courtesy of architect Patrik Schumacher: ‘parametricism’. The digital building necessarily shies away from the frequently unromantic world of building, fabrication and material, yet Barkow Leibinger’s exhibition stressed exactly these three elements. Nonetheless, this doesn’t stop the show from falling into other, less immediately obvious, contemporary clichés.

Filling the Architectural Association’s Georgian exhibition space was a series of objects on wooden tables, with two videos showing on small screens. These depicted actual finished buildings, but otherwise there was a certain distrust of the capacity of the architectural exhibition to depict real structures. These models, in Barkow and Leibinger’s words, claim to ‘depict nothing but themselves’. The first objects in the show were a series of wood, metal and glazed terracotta panels, all arranged in angular, irregular patterns. A video showed some very similar details used on a roof, and one of the architects comments on their desire to ‘elevate everyday building programmes’. If we give any credence to this oft-expressed intention, then the object used to elevate is the architectural object that dare not speak its name: ornament.

‘An Atlas of Fabrication’ was, although you could find the word absolutely nowhere in the room, an exhibition of and about ornament. This shouldn’t be surprising. Ornament, though seldom actually described as such, has returned in the neo or pseudo-modernist architecture of the last decade or so. The most common version is via multicoloured, irregular curtain walls, or stick-on wood/metal cladding, both of which involve simulating function. A more straightforward and fearless ornamentation has emerged most obviously in the gables and turrets of British firms such as FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), or in Caruso St John’s peculiar Nottingham Contemporary, a concrete shed covered in lace patterns. Barkow Leibinger’s ornament lies somewhere between the two, its physicality and presence coexisting with a rhetoric of material, production and metal. ‘We like building factories’, they comment. No effete dressing-up here.

The objects shown at the AA were unashamedly material and corporeal, but, in their wilfulness and irregularity, were not so far from parametric whimsy. One of the most intriguing corners featured a collection of towers or clusters of metal tubes. Rather than standardized, interchangeable parts, these resembled steel tendrils, sheet metal tentacles. One arrangement showed them almost as a forest of metallic foliage, a bizarre biomimicry in the least biological of materials. Here, not for the first time, Barkow Leibinger veered towards kitsch. One of the metallic pipes, inset with blue lights, appears as an objet d’art seemingly designed for the mantelpiece of a studiedly avant-garde living room rather than as the conduits for a working building. This presumably unintentional flirtation with kitsch reaches particular heights in the form of a perspex chandelier, looming prettily and pointlessly over the exhibition.

As for the objects which suggest particular real structures, the most interesting were models of faceted, repeated honeycombs, which recalled the 1970s collective housing of the Israeli architect Zvi Hecker. It was unclear whether these prototypes, these offcuts, were intended as an ideal for living or as more ornamental dressing. There was, however, one very clear architectural model, of what at first appeared, in its symmetries and proportions, as a straightforward neoclassical building. Looked at closely, it was full of the pipes, voids and cyber-organicism of the exhibition’s scattered parts. Yet it was nearly as kitsch as a straight exercise in neoclassicism.

Owen Hatherley

Walter Swennen

Nicolas Krupp, Basel, Switzerland

‘I never saw an ugly thing in my life,’ John Constable once opined. Two hundred years later, his rather romantic claim found its way into a sketchbook of Belgian painter Walter Swennen, scrawled in red, uppercase letters. Tellingly, the line could apply as much to Constable’s genteel, dappled landscapes as to Swennen’s more shambling works, though the wit of its application is perhaps more pronounced when considering the latter, which often feature vaguely cartoonish visual motifs on messily abstract grounds. Born in Brussels in 1946 and now based in Antwerp, Swennen first came to prominence in the ’80s in Belgium, and his paintings still carry traces of that decade’s flamboyant laconicism. Unlike other European painters of the period who found fame in the US, Swennen never quite broke out. This is odd, considering that his untailored style of neo-expressionism seems closer to the New York artists of that time than that to their European counterparts. Nevertheless, a recent string of shows – including one now on at Nicolas Krupp in Basel – has brought his oddly current oeuvre back into the light.

The paintings at Krupp, all from the past five years, immediately establish their maker as a kind of studious slacker. Swennen’s sketchy, improvisatory technique often begins with a vaguely familiar visual motif, such as a bulbous aeroplane, a bluish wine glass, a cartoonish ghost. He then employs this image like a melody, letting it float loosely atop a ground made of more allusive elements, including spectre-like blocks of colour, dripping and scratched paint, or rough terrain that seems to have been baked in the sun. Verre et parapluie (2007) places a wine glass and an umbrella – each featuring blue, willowy stems – on top of a pale ground crossed by a geometric length of faded pink, like a red carpet stretching off into the distance. In Hélice (2009), a blue propeller hovers from the top of the painting over a hazy violet field that seems to indicate a vague crop of buildings. The oil painting – made on metal, as are several of the works in the show – seems like nothing so much as a single frame plucked from a larger cartoon, its larger narrative lost forever.  In Chalet (2009), a blue serpent wearing big ’80s headphones looms over a simple red house, its split tongue flickering toward the roof. Both beings, the snake and the home, seemed suspended in a kind of pale, dreamy space – there is no real ground, or grounding, in sight.

In other works, Swennen dispenses with figurative iconography; ground becomes all. Without any narrative signifiers, one becomes weirdly attuned to the paintings’ formal qualities: colour, line, surface, perspective. Surface in particular seems key: an untitled work from this year features thick, clotted paint in pale tones, with only a loosely architectural pattern appearing in one corner. Another untitled painting, this from 2008, has a creamy veneer with rainbow undertones that evokes a brick wall if it were made of yoghurt. One of the best works in the exhibition is also the largest, an Aegean blue painting over which is laid a kind of web or net, the Greek letters of its title painted in the top right-hand corner. With its aerial view of watery, cerulean hues, it oddly recalls a minimal ’70s-era travel poster for some island destination.

Nevertheless, each reference I alit upon eventually seemed forced. Taken together, the works are inconclusive, their overall sensibility defined by a sly, seemingly defiant indefinition. Yet, despite being so aloof, these paintings – both wry and inscrutable – are oddly personable. Their mucked-up surfaces, blasé palette and jazzy visual vocabulary have a sweet jocularity despite the grubbiness. Perhaps it’s this sensibility that leads us back to Constable’s earnest assertion that he’s never come across an ugly thing, not in his whole life. Easy as it is to find comedy in that statement, it could also hold true for Swennen, even though his oeuvre proves that he’s no faint-hearted aesthete who has little regard for the hierarchy of aesthetic subjects. Instead, the world of the cast-off and the incomplete is invited in and asked to take a seat, wherever and whatever that may be.

Quinn Latimer

Walead Beshty

LA >< ART, Los Angeles, USA

In typical Walead Beshty fashion, ‘Passages’ imbues indexical traces with a conceptual heft and aesthetic appeal that is nearly impossible not to find seductive. X-ray lines relay an unexposed film’s transit across borders; a mirrored floor’s expanding web of cracks testifies to the passage of visitors through the gallery; a series of black and white slides bears witness to the demise of the American shopping mall; a billboard (pictured below) on nearby La Cienega Boulevard shows enlarged dust particles from Los Angeles’ notoriously smoggy atmosphere. There are no loose ends here. Yet the overwhelming neatness of Beshty’s presentation establishes an unsettling neutrality around the far more complex realities documented by his work.

In the ‘Passages’ (2009) series, nebulous large-scale colour prints confess their trajectory through an airport X-ray machine in the form of blurred lines and hazy irregularities. Echoing the processes of fingerprinting and body scans used in the increasingly politicized zone of the airport, the images are an appreciable evocation of the legislative and ideological transformations of a post- 9/11 world, as felt by every traveller. (The project is an intentional exercise stemming from an earlier accident, when film Beshty had taken of the deserted Iraqi Diplomatic Mission in Berlin was run through X-ray machines during his journey, and later shown at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.) They are also thoroughly charming abstract fields of fading colour: the new systems of corporeal degradation exercized in airports since September 2001, which establish a state of exception as a civic norm, are rendered oddly palatable.

Beshty’s accompanying projects similarly circle around the notion of ‘having been there’: Untitled (LAXArt: Los Angeles, CA, March 21 - May 2009) (2009), a reflective floor of cracked, shatter-proof glass, progressively deteriorates as it is walked upon by visitors, in a reiteration of another of Beshty’s Whitney Biennial installations, where cubes of glass were shipped in standardized FedEx boxes, gathering the marks of their journey as they went.

The slide projection ‘American Passages’ (2001-ongoing) is a black-and-white eulogy to the deserted shopping malls of middle America. Beshty himself likens the series to the late-19th-century archives of Eugène Atget and Charles Marville, who created their photographic records of France’s urban and architectural past on the eve of its disappearance. Beshty’s dissolving slides are accompanied by a distilled version of the soundtrack to the 1979 shopping-mall zombie film Dawn of the Dead.

As Beshty’s emphasis on facticity - his unabashed fetishization of the indexical - becomes increasingly apparent, it becomes less clear as to exactly why he wants us to believe in the unaltered reality of his subjects. If the large-scale photographs in ‘Passages’ take on the airport as a newly important political terrain, it reflects no real desire to inspire political conviction. Beshty recently noted that, ‘The prints are seductive, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’d look good over a couch: that’s fine.’ Nor does ‘American Passages’ constitute a nostalgia-driven plea for the preservation of obsolete regional shopping centres: the malls shown as empty and unused often still function in new ways - as community gathering places where people exercise, eat at the food courts, or just hang out.

The trio of works at LA >< ART are at once rooted in fact and indifferent to it. Paradoxically, Beshty’s romanticization of the index only distances us from its referents in the airport, the shopping centre, or the gallery. We are left uncomfortably unsure as to what extent to the artist engages with the situations he addresses; and yet, in provoking this shadowy dissatisfaction, Beshty challenges our notions of ‘engagement’ as an artistic obligation. His timely observations and dexterous manipulations of visual fact leave a lingering uncertainty: what kind of inquiry does ‘Passages’ actually make? Is it an inquiry at all, or an adroit exercise in deflection?

Sarah-Neel Smith

Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger

Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, France

Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger’s ‘Farewell letter to Swiss Workers’ at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff consists primarily of two films. Alles wird wieder gut (Everything is Going to be Alright, 2006), takes as its model both Lenin’s address to Swiss workers (on the eve of the Russian Revolution) and Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s 1972 Tout va bien (Everything is Alright), which featured Jane Fonda in a Brechtian account of an American reporter covering a strike at a sausage factory. In Alles wird wieder gut, a group of young men and women in a present-day East German hamlet gather to rail against the hopelessness of their situation, and to dabble with alternatives, including much theorizing along classical Marxist lines but culminating in a dance party at a local bar. At the same time, their parents strike outside a long-abandoned factory. There they are met by a journalist, who later joins the younger generation for a drink, though is challenged about his role in the construction of shared socio-political fantasies. At the close of the film, Lenin’s address is recited by a boy of about ten years old; whatever direct power this performance may have is distanced by its repetition at rehearsal, including stage directions, notably the absurd solemnity of an added salute.

Alles wird wieder gut is noisy and social, highly referential and animated. Not so the second film, Donnerstag (Thursday, 2006). Instead of conversation, silence; instead of groups of people, just one young woman, going about her business, silently, in a dairy factory.

What is a viewer to make of these videos and of the installation, with its darkened walls, bales of hay and pile of what is presumably stylized, pixelated stock charts? A viewer of Godard and Gorin’s Tout va bien could take for granted certain Brechtian strategies, and assume an orthodox Marxist intent. The situation here is not so simple though; it is very hard to know how, exactly, to read these (filmed) texts, or even to fix their tone, which wavers between blasé, heroic and absurd. One could only say that certain Marxist tropes are being relentlessly performed. The characters can only be occasionally empathized with, because, as in Brecht or Godard, the films are so willfully contrived, so obviously staged. This is presumably intentional - and, if this is the case, it is certainly very well done. At the same time, however, viewers cannot help but feel that they too are part of the performance. Like one of the characters in the two films, responses are being carefully orchestrated (the point is pressed home by the fact that one sits on bales of hay). These reactions cannot be taken for granted as authentic. They too need to be examined; they too become part of the fiction.

But the very artfulness of the exhibition - the repetition of intellectually upscale prototypes, the cunning contrivance of performance and installation, the balancing of pathos and ridicule, of discourse and silence - makes it rather politically anodyne. ‘Farewell letter to Swiss Workers’ succeeds too well: having transformed a hard, materialist reality into a never-ending play of varying tropes, Moser and Schwinger leave it to the viewer, presumably, to find a way back to ‘reality’. Is there really an egress from this hall of allegorical mirrors, though? A much worse exhibition (from an artistic standpoint) might have seemed much more politically daring: it would not have offered the solace, or even the temptation, of art. But for anyone truly invested in the politics performed here - that is, for anyone whose Marxism takes precedent over aesthetics - ‘Farewell letter to Swiss Workers’ marks a pyrrhic, paradoxical triumph. 

David Lewis

Modern Ruins

Kate MacGarry, London, UK

‘The past is never dead.’ William Faulkner said, ‘It’s not even past.’ For the four artists in ‘Modern Ruins’ the past is also omnipresent, but as a rag-bag collection of detritus and borrowings rather than some looming monolithic concept. It is out of bits and pieces that we reconstruct histories.

Perhaps the most striking and disquieting piece in the show is Goshka Macuga’s War Memorial Study (2009). Encased in a petrified tree stump is a blown-up photograph of the upper body of a man who gazes out at us as if in a trance. Head cocked to one side, he wears a vacant smile and his outstretched arms are held in an almost balletic pose.  It’s as if the figure is rising gloriously out of the ashes. Yet there is something haunting about his posture – and, slowly, the infamous image of the tortured prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison comes to mind (a picture that was, of course, also reincarnated in Richard Serra’s 2004 oil-stick drawing).  Macuga’s passion for collecting remnants of the past to find poignancy in the present led her to the personal archive of Tom Pripish, a Vietnam War veteran, which the artist bought on eBay. Pripish’s own story is fused with a 10,000-year-old piece of wood to create a monumental geological hybrid.

Another source of inspiration for Macuga’s work is cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg, whose study of icons and symbols in art has been influential for Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas, also shown here. Atlas Poster (2009) is a compilation of photographs that Cruzvillegas took whilst on a Smithsonian Fellowship at the Natural History and the American History museums in Washington, D.C. He combines images of actual exhibits and archive material with pictures of the museums themselves, so that every surrounding element of the exhibition, be it prehistoric dinosaur bones or modern bollards on street corners, is incorporated into a cabinet of curiosities.  A photograph of a wooden box, presumably containing objects ready for display, with ‘American History’ sprayed on the side in red paint is a playful comment on our inclination to preserve and present history, and perhaps also a more political comment on our frequent attempts to suppress or forget the past.

‘Parallel Compositions’ (2008), David Maljkovic’s series of 13 photomontages, continues the theme of suppressions, mutations and absences.  There are no people. Chairs without legs, with their seats torn away, look like stranded UFOs dropped into a Zagreb residential estate.  In each photograph the chair is in a different position and a cutting from an old architectural magazine has been pasted on, like traces of a physical past or a map forever changing its shape.  This in turn evokes the tumultuous geographical and political dislocation of the former Yugoslavia.

Dr Lakra is best-known for his tattoo-style embellishments of vintage magazines, usually drawn onto pin-up girls.  Here he has looked to Giuseppe Arcimboldo for inspiration, and the three featured works, Untitled (Arcimboldo I, II, III) (2009), are very similar in style, comprising collaged heads made from vintage book clippings.  They are beautifully executed, if rather spookily reminiscent of 19th-century fairground grotesques: one is compiled from anatomical cut-outs, its features a web of brain matter and intestines; another is formed from fungi (though it could be rhinoceros skin), from which a Dalí-esque eye stares out accusingly.  Although Lakra cuts from images of flesh and even adds familiar human features, his portraits look much more monstrous or plant-like than those of Arcimboldo, who himself only ever used vegetables and books for his compositions.  In this well thought-out exhibition, Lakra is the odd one out. His imagination is certainly gothic, and, like the others, he makes use of the past, yet his work feels light-weight alongside Macuga, Cruzvillegas and Maljkovic.

Whilst the exhibition’s title suggests the death of the modernist utopia, this is not its most interesting theme.  After being the subject of a number of exhibitions (last year’s Berlin Biennial, which featured both Macuga and Maljkovic, being the most prominent example), the assumed failure of modernist ideals has become a rather hackneyed theme.  Despite this, ‘Modern Ruins’ proves both refreshing and thought-provoking.  The artists function together as archaeologists, treating the past as a landscape of souvenirs, thus bringing ideas about archives and personal and public collections into an interesting light. 

Florence Mackenzie

Kasia Fudakowski

Zak Branicka, Berlin, Germany

Zak Branicka is a relative newcomer to the Berlin art scene, having only recently joined the colony of spaces on Lindenstrasse, though, with a lively roster of brilliant young Polish artists and some sharp exhibitions, the gallery has already made quite an impression. ‘Gleaning the Gloss’ is Kasia Fudakowski’s first solo show with the gallery and brings together a dozen new sculptures that work more like an elaborate installation in 12 acts. The sculptures occupy the gallery space like cast members of a theatrical production, clustered backstage gossiping and waiting for their cue. Artificial pinks, pearlescent lacquer and canary yellows punctuate tertiary shades, while forms emerge from these part-objects, made in resin, rigid foam, Perspex, wood and plaster. Fudakowski’s work seems both organic and synthetic, bringing together both figurative and abstract forms, ready-made and highly constructed materials.

As the title of the exhibition suggests, Fudakowski’s work puns on the shiny surfaces of her carefully sanded and painted forms, while seeking to extricate meaning that may have been left behind during previous interpretations and explanations. Knackered is for Horses (2009) plays on the knacker’s yard and the British slang expression (meaning ‘tired’) that originates with it. An pink ovule form is stretched on a steel frame, appearing both exhausted and taut. The end of the piping is hoof-like, suggesting a horse hung out to bleed dry, while a wire mesh of buzzing flies surrounds it.

There are secret intentions and narratives behind Fudakowski’s works. Many of these sculptures directly mimic human forms and characters by making gentle anthropomorphic gestures. In Der Angler (2009) a fishing rod and figure become one. The spot where the fishing line parts the imaginary water is fixed as a steel circle, and below arcs a shoal of fish, each held in a Perspex frame. The shoal hovers over a pile of food, the perfect accompaniment to fish: chips. But there is also a performative physicality about the work and its encounter. In Obstruction 1, Obstruction 2 and Obstacle (all 2009), three large movable phallic plaster oblongs on steel frames divide and block the gallery space. Deliberately placed at abdomen- and shoulder-height, they physically control the flow of people milling around them. The sculptures – like many of the forms that are repeated throughout Fudakowski’s pieces – are like stylistic punctuation marks, dictating the aesthetic intonation and pauses to be observed, as if you are asked to read the works aloud.  Fudakowski’s work also traces social and cultural processes. In That’s how they’re grown and That’s how its leaked (both 2009), six forms spurt like thick oil from an outbox on a desk, and seem to be evacuated in a sculptural yellow leak at the other end, as if mimicking corporate production processes, or the acquisition and evacuation of knowledge.

In Spiner (2009), a sullen spider creeps across the gallery space, perhaps playfully doffing its author’s cap to Louise Bourgeois, that great matriarch of the monumental and surreal, the resemblance clearly stating the gendered subtext of her sculpture so that the viewer doesn’t have to. There is certainly something of the bulbous, latex forms of Bourgeois’s Cumul (1968) in Fudakowski’s sculpture, and a similarly part-erotic, part-macho theatricality. But Fudakowski’s work don’t sit comfortably in a feminist context; it extends beyond trite art historical self-referentiality. In German the name for a word with two different meanings is Teekesselwort, literally a ‘teapot word’, which is also the name of a children’s word guessing game. There is something perfectly apt about this playful concept in terms of Fudakowski’s sculpture, which thrives on the ambiguity that lurks between formal and linguistic resolutions, coquetting with heteronyms and hiding in homographs.

Sarah James

Jen Ray

Wentrup, Berlin, Germany

A yellow army pick-up truck, surrounded by flickering candles and empty bottles of beer and champagne, dominates Jan Wentrup’s front room. The occasion is the opening night of Jen Ray’s second solo show in the gallery, ‘Last Call’, an evening that the artist has contrived to mark – as is her custom – with a bang.

Mostly an illustrator, Ray is drawn to performance through a cluster of sources (including, amongst others, Grace Jones and Metallica). The North Carolina-born, Berlin-based artist possesses an edgier variant of the Southern talent for colourful fun. In front of the truck, two loudspeakers seep gradually intensifying noise into the room, as two projectors positioned on the truck itself beam kaleidoscopic triangles against shadowy facing walls. Meanwhile, three unobtainably beautiful women, still and unblinking, hold fierce positions. Two pack archaic weapons, a sword and a pike, and one holds an unlit cigarette in an elegantly extended hand.

The young crowd seems excited. The noise turns percussive. Three additional beautiful women now appear from the left. Moving with ritual slowness, they cut through a crowd irrigated a few moments previously by a pressed-upon gallery assistant. All wear sparkling costumes, two sport military caps. These hoist a black flag; the third, vacant and hatless, staring madly like some kind of cult member, bears a stack of flyers. The trio takes up three new positions on and around the truck. Now a tall black woman appears, again from the left, holding a tribal mask in front of her face. Ascending to the truck’s platform, she takes off her mask, and starts singing, aggressive. Thirty seconds, forty. Then the noise fades, the women file out, the vacant girl leaving last, trailing flyers behind her.

The second room of the gallery is now opened, to reveal three framed watercolours on one wall, one of the same size and description on a second wall, a larger framed watercolour on a third, and a bank of smaller, unframed watercolours on the fourth. The unframed pictures, presented in a block of eight rows of five columns, seem to have been the initial productions. These suggest sketches towards the performance itself, circling around different themes and motifs to be developed later. The technicolour triangles appear here, along with a drawing of two, almost-kissing androgynous women holding lit candles between their teeth, a skull with rainbow coloured teeth, and Ray’s own name, artfully stencilled to look like a logo.

The smaller framed pictures extend these same themes, though they indicate a higher level of composition. Details now possess settings, including the truck, while the degree of precision and clarity is impressive. But the most impressive work on display is the largest. Depicting a personal mythology of savage girls in a savage land, the drawings and the performance indicate the same sources: primitivism, show business, acid surrealism, films like Mad Max (1979) and Red Sonja (1985). The image is a wasteland fantasia; discarded computer mountains lie in a heap at the base of purple cliffs, acrid smoke billows from jet-packed girl-astronauts, torn banners fly in the centre, urban punks overturn a car.

No men are present in any of these drawing, perhaps because they have been killed off and cannibalized. Ray clearly loves female forms, and her general aim in this show appears to consist in idealizing particular ones; women at once terrifying and electrifying; witches and sorcerers, jet-pack enchantresses. Apart from the men, who I agree are essentially surplus to requirements, there is a lot which is left out here: aging and death, ugliness and sickness. But Ray’s work is undeniably beautiful and imaginative, its commitment to visual pleasure refreshing, and the artist clearly a fantastically talented draftswoman. 

Daniel Miller

Lisa Kirk

Invisible-Exports, New York, USA

Carsten Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room (2008) installation was a great publicity coup for the Guggenheim. Shown as part of ‘theanyspacewhatever’, the museum’s recent Relational Aesthetics survey, visitors could pay a few hundred dollars for the privilege of staying the night on the rotunda. Inevitably, journalists arrived like dogs summoned by whistles; fashionable couples followed. Coming in its wake, ‘House of Cards’, Lisa Kirk’s exhibition at Invisible-Exports, a gallery that opened last September on the outskirts of Chinatown, is a salty satire. She has constructed a shanty dwelling in the narrow gallery space with a range of found objects: orange road barriers have been joined to form a table in the ‘dining room’; faded vinyl covers a day bed in the ‘lounge’; old tyres support a bowl in the ‘kitchen’; and part of a transparent door is nailed to the wooden wall to create a ‘bar’.

Kirk has been exhibiting, and frequently curating, for about a decade. Her last project, Revolution!, installed at P.S.1 in 2007, was a perfumery-cum-bomb factory, and ‘House of Cards’ shares its spirit: it’s a slum as the smart set might design it. This time, though, Kirk is giving the beautiful people the opportunity to try it for a week by selling time-shares, which can be redeemed when the show closes and the shack is reinstalled for a year in Brooklyn Navy Yard. To promote the shares, Kirk has also created a mock real-estate office in the gallery, with photos of incongruously happy, solvent couples enjoying the slum experience. At weekends, actors manning the desk deliver a sales pitch for the so-called maison des cartes (2009), a pitch that is high comedy but which also has a level of satire in that, like most artists staging a commercial show, Kirk does want to sell her work.

A faded poster inside the shack shows a policeman in riot gear, and his nametag, Sgt Guy Debord, says much about how Kirk considers her shack; it also, unfortunately, highlights the fact that her critique, with its collage of violent contrasts and spectacle, has a shop-worn feel – even if it is as valid as ever. As a satire on the art market, however, it has power and subtlety, for it’s no doubt true that some wealthy collectors savour the slumming that can comes with their entry into the lower tiers of the market. Moreover, these days, when gallerists are biting the nails in their own backrooms now that no one wants to buy the hype outside, Kirk’s critique has a wicked timeliness.

Morgan Falconer

Natural Wonders: New Art from London

BAIBAKOV art projects, Moscow, Russia

Moscow’s landscape can never be trusted to stay the same. For more than 100 years the smell of sweets wafted across the frozen banks of the Moskva river, until last April, when the Red October Chocolate Factory moved out to the suburbs to make way for yet another block of luxury flats. Miraculously, however, the building has not yet become another victim of the city’s neverending redevelopment spree. Over the last six months its third floor has become one of the best exhibition spaces in Moscow, partly thanks to the financial crisis whittling down takers for the prime real estate, partly thanks to a typically large-scale autumn visit from Gagosian Gallery, and partly thanks to the efforts of ambitious young curator Maria Baibakova.

Still less than a year out of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Baibakova is one of the very few people with the passion and financial clout to establish a major contemporary space in a close-knit and still precariously developing art world. The daughter of a former nickel magnate, Baibakova began lobbying to save the factory for art in 2007 when she was just 21. And with good reason: its 3,500 square metres of floor space, windows looking out across the city, and beautiful mid-19th-century architecture should be enough to warrant preservation on their own.

Of course, rent like this doesn’t come cheap, but then cheap isn’t exactly what Baibakova does. Bersenevskaya Embankment now practically reeks of money, as BAIBAKOV art projects unabashedly embraces the glamur so beloved of Russia’s nouveau riche - and despised by so much of its artistic old guard. The uncharitable could claim that, with its VIP dress-coded openings, it has an eye as much on the society pages as the culture section. For the opening of ‘Natural Wonders: New Art from London’, the gallery even flew former Moscow Times critic Brian Droitcour over from New York to cover the exhibition for Artforum.com’s ‘Scene & Herd’. Despite all this, BAIBAKOV art projects débuted very strongly last December with ‘Invasion: Evasion’, an exhibition of 22 largely unknown Russian artists. There Baibakova and her co-curator Kate Sutton coached the artists to maximize the possibilities of the space, and, despite gathering a divergent group of artists, the duo managed to make the experience a coherent one.

But ‘Natural Wonders’, which opened two weeks ago, is something of a dud. The largest exhibition of new British art to leave those shores since the YBAs in 1995, it takes its title from High Art Lite (1999), Julian Stallabrass’s Marxist polemic targeting that very generation of brattish young things. Stallabrass conceived of the art world as ‘a country garden, cultivated but full of natural wonders’. The 22 young artists selected for ‘Natural Wonders’ have, however, little to do with this theme, and almost nothing to do with each other: there is figurative painting, low-fi sculpture, video installations, a huge image-overload canvas, and even two burnt-out black skips from a Battersea estate.

This curatorial incoherence is defended by a largely impenetrable, uncredited essay that lazily unites the artists using a loose brand of armchair postmodernism: that the urban environment is the natural environment, that artificial development is a natural process, and that anything can mean anything, since thinking makes it so. Ironically, however, Stallbrass’s intended ‘natural wonders’ to be a criticism of just the kind of sloppy categorization and bombastic preening that overwhelm the viewer at BAIBAKOV art projects.

And the show doesn’t even stand up on its own terms. Gardening seems to have been forgotten altogether – there are so many works here that the space recalls more a scrap heap, making the expansive space feel restrictive, even despite an entire room being given over to Eloise Fornieles’ performance installation Carrion (2008/2009). Amidst a pile of old clothes, Fornieles spent the opening periodically sat glowering at a table, donning the clothes, stripping naked and stuffing notes of apology or forgiveness written by viewers into a stripped cow carcass hanging beside her. All this was intended as a critique of material consumption, and, given the free-for-all going on nearby, the seclusion made it perhaps the only work to emerge with effect intact.

Since then, nearly a third of the gallery space has been closed off, and the show is distinctly poorer because of it. For every compelling work, such as Douglas White’s Counsel (2006) or Nathaniel Rackowe’s LP12 (2008), there are two that are muddled, dull or outright bad. In particular, Tim Braden’s Looking at Ballet (2006) seems to have been chosen for its topical relevance to Russia than for any artistic merit. Based on trips to the Marinsky Theater while Braden was studying at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, it recalls common-or-garden 19th-century figurative painting, largely bereft of technical skill – the red fleck of paint over a sea of blue-and-white ballerinas seems either a careless mistake or a bad joke. Mustafa Hulusi’s Extacy Almond Blossom 4 [sic] (2008) mixes one photorealism flower painting with an abstract painting in the vein of Mark Grotjahn, without displaying much nous for either genre. Diann Bauer’s massive What You Can See Won’t Hurt You (2006) mixes so many apparently randomly chosen visual references from ancient Greece to manga, seemingly without any method or quality control, and John Isaacs’ I know this world…but it isn’t the way I know it…it doesn’t behave the way I was told (2005), a plaster-cast tree with light bulbs attached, has the vapid conception and blasé title worthy of the YBAs, but without the bravura that was their principal redeeming feature

If Baibakova, Sutton and guest curator Nick Hackworth wanted to replicate the confusing hustle-and-bustle of a busy metropolis, they’ve succeeded, but at the expense of their own exhibition. Many of the works are as incompatible as their selection is incoherent. Anyone with the inexplicable desire to contemplate Braden’s ballet will find it difficult to picture Swan Lake with the sirens from Kirk Palmer’s video installation Murmur (2006) blaring around the corner. Even inside the huge Wild West set Shezad Dawood built with Russian theatre designers to house his loose and inane, albeit somewhat entertaining, cowboys’n’zombies’n’injuns film Feature (2008), the music from Idris Kahn’s Last Few Piano Sonatas…after Franz Schubert (2007) drowns out most of the dialogue. And for all the great views of the Kremlin, daylight streaming through the windows makes looking at Ryan Gander’s video Man on the Bridge (A Study of David Lange) (2008) and CutUp’s Untitled (2008), a depiction of a street riot drilled into a plywood board, all but impossible during the day.

London has every right to feel aggrieved at being represented abroad by this show, and given that seven of the 22 artists here come from Hackworth’s own Paradise Row gallery, any such claims would be premature. Muscovites, likewise, will be dismayed that this all-too-rare large-scale foreign visit is so underwhelming and puzzled by the odd feeling that their own small and myopic art world has more to offer - especially given how high ‘Invasion: Evasion’ set the bar. For some reason, the placards at the door have lost ‘Natural’ from the title: it would only make sense if ‘Wonders’ went the same way.

Max Seddon

Trisha Donnelly

MAMbo, Bologna, Italy

The guiding principle behind Trisha Donnelly’s new project for MAMbo is the desire to render both the museum and the visitor’s experience of art captivating. The spatial and temporal elements of the exhibition are enlivened by evocative dilations and juxtapositions of architectural, visual and audio elements designed to create a narrative that operates on several semantic levels. The first work in the show is a small, black and white photograph (all works untitled; all 2009) of a female face partly obscured on one side by a soap bubble: the delicacy of this unfocused photo looks like a Donnelly’s invitation to the viewer to approach the exhibition with an inquisitive mind.

A sense of unpredictability runs throughout the show, and can also be perceived in the next work, for which the artist has modified the architecture of the first, long gallery of the museum – a former bakery constructed next to the site of some now-subterranean streams. Donnelly has produced the sensation of energy flowing through the empty room, like the water in the underground channels, by her subtle modification of light in the space. She has reduced the long line of windows that flank one wall to narrow slots, so that only slivers of light penetrate the space, creating a stroboscopic effect that is intensified by the gloom within. Moulded by these fluctuations in light, the space seems elongated and merges with the next gallery, in which it is possible to discern only a long strip of red carpet on the floor, one edge of which has been roughly cut by the artist.

The carpet wasn’t initially intended to be part of the project; it was only placed there during the installation of the show as a means of protecting the floor. However, as often happens in Donnelly’s work, unanticipated effects led the artist to modify her creative process. In the same room, a row of four large slabs of grey marble lean against a long wall opposite the obscured windows. Each slab is engraved with enigmatic designs that evoke abstract shapes or natural forms. Like screens, the slabs reflect both the light streaming in from outside and the shadows cast by the viewers that superimpose themselves onto the patterns in a game of chance invention.

The exhibition presents a ‘reloading’ of details, both real and imagined, which stems in part from a preliminary work by Donnelly that involved mapping some of the places she had visited in Bologna. These include historical locations – such as the Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio Library, the network of underground streams and the former bakery of MAMbo itself – as well as indirect conceptual influences, such as the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio Morandi (who is also showing at the museum), about whom the artist writes in the press release for the show, and the radio waves that penetrate the atmosphere (the inventor of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi, was born in the city). All these references are alluded to throughout the exhibition in small-scale, black and white photographs as well as in one particular working process that Donnelly refers to as a ‘scannering’ of found images, translated into video projections, drawings and marble or fabric objects.

Donnelly’s aim is to reduce the information we receive from accepted codes and linguistic superstructures in an attempt to rekindle intuition, memory and free association. The works on display, for example, don’t have titles. Even at the level of institutional communication, Donnelly’s focus is on developing a diverse narrative for the exhibition, personally producing the press release, the invitations and the visitors’ guide to promote a sui generis approach that combines the historical and the personal in an open dialogue.

Marinella Paderni

Nate Lowman

Maccarone, New York, USA

Nate Lowman may be waving or he may be drowning in his new solo show at Maccarone. The very first work to greet us condenses his uncertainty: To be titled (Red No Smoking Smiley) (2009) combines a smiley face motif with a circular no-smoking symbol – we’re ordered not to smile.

This is only the second solo exhibition by the young New York-based artist, which may seem surprising given his visibility: Lowman’s occasional outings as a curator led him to co-curate the well-received ‘Summer Group Show’ at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue space in 2007, while his outings by night still land him in the gossip press. For those familiar with Lowman’s tastes as a curator, the Maccarone exhibition is no surprise: he could be the unhappy offspring of Richard Prince and Mike Kelley – a foul-tempered, sniggering child, dirty-minded and fascinated with death. Paintings of tombstones (that look like degraded screenprints) recur throughout the show, bearing the names of unfortunates like Loser, Spanks and Virgin. Country singer Billy Ray Cyrus and his teen star daughter Miley, the latter captured rather too intimately in last year’s notorious Vanity Fair photo shoot, appear faintly in another work.

Two heavy steel crucifixes occupy the centre of one gallery, fabricated with some dark ingenuity from truck-towing mechanisms. And Lake Photo (edition) (2009) simply rotates a photograph of a lakeside landscape to reveal how the profile of the shoreline trees, combined with their reflection, form the shape of a naked woman.

Lowman is putting forth a contemporary satire on the potent male genius, a creature with a Beavis & Butt-head mind-set that sees dirt and degradation everywhere. Even art is no refuge for him: Bring Back (2006) is a spare abstraction animated by a ‘Bring Back Monica Lewinsky’ sticker, while To be titled (Sly) (2009) features an old press photo of Sylvester Stallone painting a canvas on the terrace of his Malibu home (’I never painted a pot of flowers wilting,’ Sly affirms, ‘I never could do that’). All there is to existence, for this sad sap, is to chase skirt while he still has the energy, then slump into a shallow grave. It’s certainly nothing to smile about. 

Morgan Falconer

Helen Sear

g39, Cardiff, UK

Frederick Sommer’s 1946 portrait of Max Ernst is perhaps his best known photomontage; the double exposure shows the wild-eyed surrealist melding into an efflorescence-stained concrete wall. What was once a labour intensive photographic process can today be achieved with a few clicks of a mouse, as demonstrated in Helen Sear’s eponymous solo show by the series ‘Inside The View’ (2005-). Borrowing its title from a series of collages by Ernst, this set of nine wistful photomontages comprises bucolic scenes overlaid with translucent headshots of anonymous figures shot from behind. A painterly sensibility with an affection for sublimity is demonstrated as Sear fuses together the formal tropes of landscape and portraiture found within the Northern Romantic tradition. In an additional move – belying the work’s apparent simplicity – Sear disrupts the surface of each image with a painstaking process of digital erasure, whereby shimmering veils that resemble delicate lacework are hand-drawn in the computer. For Sear, the corrosion of these images by hand signifies a return to a more ‘primitive and bodily experience’, although quite how this is achieved in the digital domain is unclear.

Showing in the gallery’s musty cellar is the film Projection (2008). Sear appears to have aimed her camera directly at the sun for this series of richly coloured scenes evoking the dog days of summer. After a few minutes of viewing, however, it becomes clear that, unlike Gustav Fechner, the experimental German psychologist whose eyesight was severely damaged from staring at the sun, the gaze of Sear’s camera is fixed firmly on the bulb of a slide-projector as it radiates through coloured filters. Despite its simplicity, Projection is remarkably affecting, and, even after the artifice is revealed, the surrogate sun continues to induce feelings of repose that would surely have enlivened Fechner’s investigations into the corporeality of vision.

Upstairs, Display (2007-9) presents a dazzling wallpapered room placing the viewer in the midst of what appears to be a bustling aviary. A menagerie of digitally collaged birds envelops you; although the imagery remains static, the dioramic installation seems to teem with activity. The source of Sear’s vertiginous montage is, however, far from lively, being based on photographs of taxidermy displays. The relating of photography to taxidermy highlights rich conceptual parallels: both are indexical as well as mimetic, and, in both, time is suspended and decomposition deferred – in the words of Roland Barthes, they both refer to ‘that which has been’. Rather than continuing to explore this fertile ground, however, Sear disrupts the scene with a multi-coloured harlequinesque pattern covering the work’s entire surface like an obfuscating camouflage; each individual diamond has been digitally hand-coloured, though to what end – besides engendering visual overload – remains frustratingly unfathomable.

In the adjacent gallery, an unassuming animation, Flown (2001), features an empty bird cage slowly spinning like a child’s dangling mobile. The evocative simplicity of this motif is both soothing and unsettling: the cage’s former occupant may well have flown to freedom, though the accompanying silence suggests the aftermath of a more sinister episode – the piece transmutes into a sombre memento mori.

Sear’s inquiries into the construction and perception of images are at their most satisfying when she’s employing an elegant economy of means. An unrestrained tendency to clutter the work – piling on the layers and references – at times results in a loss of clarity; like the dematerializing Ernst in Sommer’s nebulous portrait, so Sear’s concerns can start to lose definition. Despite these shortcomings, there is a formal vigour running throughout the beautifully installed exhibition that acts as a seductive foil, ensuring the work’s visceral impact is not lost.

David Trigg

Superabundant: A Celebration of Pattern

Turner Contemporary Project Space, Margate, UK

The title of the group show ‘Superabundant’ conjures images of overheated fertility. Exploring the use of decoration within the public sphere, the nine artists shown at the Turner Contemporary Project Space push beyond the formalist limitations suggested by the exhibition’s rather uninspiring subtitle: ‘A Celebration of Pattern’. The frisson of urban engagement is partly due to the exhibition’s location: a former Marks & Spencer store in which strip-lights and floor tiles are still, incongruously, in place. This proximity to street-level grit is only temporary: Turner Contemporary’s gleaming new gallery is currently being constructed on Margate’s desolate-looking seafront and is due to open in 2011.

Undoubtedly the best-known artists here are Richard Woods and Wim Delvoye, who both engage with notions of public signage and décor. Woods’ vivid patchwork, re-brand (2009), adorns the gallery/shop façade, but unfortunately looks closer to an ineffectual council-led beautification project than a socially purposeful artistic intervention. The artist’s ironizing approach is more evident in a work shown inside the gallery: Flat Stack Sculpture (2009), a scattering of faux-gothic flat panels made to look like three-dimensional wooden beams. Delvoye’s amusing Marble Floor #86 (1999) is a C-print that reveals itself, upon inspection, to be a carefully arranged selection of salami and cold meats.

The show’s most notable theme is of sudden sinister revelations within otherwise mundane surfaces. Wrapped around the space’s supporting columns, from a distance Jacqueline Poncelet’s kaleidoscopic images, Push-me-pull-you (2009), look like geometric abstractions. They are, however, based on images of balefully contorted wooden craft mannequins. Lesley Halliwell’s Fanatic 4,500 Minutes (2008), a drawing of a rainbow executed in Biro, took a tortuous 4,500 minutes to complete. Paul Moss’s ‘Danger Paintings 1-5’ (2003) are a set of Op Art-inspired wall units wrapped in red-and-white hazard tape. Yet these works are stiflingly safe. Both the edgy potential for the uncanny (already exhausted by 1930s Surrealism), and formal engagements with the public sphere - as developed by Daniel Buren and Richard Serra, for example - remain inchoate. Likewise, Daniel Sturgis’ pastel-hued paintings and Henna Nadeem’s photo collages, which oscillate mildly between abstraction and representation, seem unaware of rangier art historical legacies.

Of course, in many ways the show’s curators have attempted to satisfy two impulses here. What could be more crowd-pleasing (and please the Arts Council more) than an exhibition subtitled ‘A Celebration of Pattern’? Equally, what could be more current within art world discourse than a critical re-engagement with pattern? Emblematic of this duality is Jacob Dahlgren’s work, which seeks to readdress pattern’s tendency to slip into anti-social formalism: his Heaven is a Place on Earth (2006-9) is a sort of family-friendly Carl Andre floor piece made from Ikea bathroom scales. Another option is explored by Jim Drain, whose baroque sculptural assemblages are the only works here that really have faith in pattern as a transformative form of social agency. His Hex (2008) is a camp mannequin dressed in an outfit of gaudy sequins and an iron frame sculpture encrusted in beads and tassels. Clearly, pattern has a radical potential. Yet ‘Superabundant’ is caught between populism and the fuller development of this theme. It seems like a missed opportunity.

Colin Perry

Lines of Control

Green Cardamom, London, UK

‘Lines of Control’ is certainly an ambitious undertaking. Designed in three parts, the exhibition takes place in three venues across three countries – UK, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan – in a rolling programme whereby each show overlaps with the next. Its subject matter is similarly complex, addressing various kinds of partitions. In this set of exhibitions, the partition in question is of India (last year of course saw the 60th anniversary of the creation of Pakistan); a later series of shows, taking place next year, will explore the divisions in the Middle East.

Despite the richness of this topic, in terms of India it has been surprisingly under-explored in the visual arts. This is especially remarkable when considering the enormity of the partition, when nearly a million people were killed and 15 million people were displaced. The most affecting work in the London tranche of ‘Lines of Control’ is a piece by the Berlin-based artist Sophie Ernst, which addresses this displacement through interviews with people who lived through it (Home (Zarina), 2008). She asks them to talk about, and sketch, the houses that they left behind, with films of their hands drawing their former homes then projected onto an architectural model. Through the conversations many of the most pertinent consequences of partition emerge. Notions of identity, and the trauma of the events, are discussed, alongside the emotional ties we have to houses. Despite its specificity to the events in India, Ernst’s work emphasizes how the experiences discussed can relate to other partitions elsewhere in the world.

The question of identity, and of how this can be manipulated for political gain, also arises in a work by Naeem Mohaiemen. Kazi in Nomansland (2008) contains a series of horizontal images showing the eyes of poet Nazrul Islam. Nazrul was an vocal opponent of partition as it gained momentum in India, though by the time it came to pass he was suffering from Pick’s disease, leaving him mute and suffering from dementia. Unable to express himself, Nazrul was then bizarrely co-opted as a figurehead for both India and Pakistan, and later also for Bangladesh, with each country adapting his fame and significance for its own purpose. His importance is commemorated on stamps issued by all three countries, piles of which also form part of Mohaiemen’s work.

Other works at Green Cardamom emphasize the ‘control’ aspects of forcefully imposed division by considering various ideas of the military. Roohi Ahmed places large needles used for stitching hessian in configurations that reference military manouveres, while Ahsan Jamal has painted a series of miniatures that depict men in various military uniforms. Seher Shah tackles the lack of any public memorials to the partition in India or Pakistan in a series of works that combine archival photography of architectural scenes with Shah’s own drawings of imagined monuments. In Farida Batool’s lenticular print, the line of control is formed by the dividing lines of two bodies pressed together. The fleshy forms allude to sex but in this context also to the intimacy that remains between two countries that have been partitioned. The print sways and shifts as the viewer moves before it, yet its central line remains constant.

It’s intriguing to consider the differing reactions that may have been provoked by ‘Lines of Control’ in its three venues. The catalogue accompanying the Green Cardamom exhibition also reveals works in the Dubai and Karachi exhibitions not on show here; as most people will only visit one of the exhibitions, many of these works will be seen by only one audience. In this sense, the London stage feels like a launch pad for what could be a larger exhibition, which will explore the complexity of partition in further depth. But for now it offers a compelling introduction to an unduly overlooked subject. 

Eliza Williams

Silke Otto-Knapp

Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, USA

For her debut Los Angeles show, Silke Otto-Knapp presents seven paintings, five of which are based on Russian choreographer Bronislava Nijinska’s ballets. Using watercolour on canvas, Otto-Knapp suffuses her easel-sized works with colour, predominantly silver, so that the foreground and background merge into a single field. But it is also what she washes away and removes that creates these small works that are flat in execution, yet filled with layers of depth.

Conceived between 1914 and 1921, when Modernist painting often crossed paths with ballet, Nijinska’s choreography sought to apply the techniques of constructivism and cubism to movement. This formal awareness lends itself perfectly to paintings, as in Rehearsal for Les Noces, first tableau (2008), which depicts a group of figures surrounding a central dancer. Flanked four on each side, these dancers raise their arms up to frame the central figure, creating a tiny frieze of blank-faced women. In Winterlong (2008), the same group hold their arms down in a slightly different pose; the paint shimmers, and, though the original narrative meaning of the dance is lost, their presence retains a kind of meaning, evoking some sacred ritual or ceremony. These are not the intimate dancer’s views from the wings, as with Degas, for example, but those of the choreographer, sitting a dozen rows back, dead centre, watching her ideas take form.

Once your eye gets used to navigating the diaphanous layers of sheen, it is somewhat jarring when Otto-Knapp punches up the colour. The largest work in the show, Group (Purple Dress) (2008-9), lays out a smattering of high-end fashion outfits from the ‘50s, demonstrating Otto-Knapp’s skills as a colourist, with the aforementioned purple dress bleeding through its confines to fill the surrounding space with chroma. This knack for colour works best when paired with her sliver technique, as in Costumes (A room in Yaroslavna’s palace) (2008), in which a pierrot in hat and costume and two female dancers are blushed with pale yellow, salmon and fuchsia that emanates from the canvas ground, while the crisp silver glazing defines the figures.

One of the strongest works is Figure (diagonal) (2008), which depicts a dancer posed in an arabesque. Seen in raking light, the figure looks as though it is carved from the canvas, as sharp as an Art Deco motif, the space around it aglow with a warm platinum shine. Walk back to the right, the fore/background shifts back to a dull metallic grey, and the sharp figure is now just the white ground with some residual pigment which has been wiped away to reveal soft pale thighs, head and feet. The change is remarkable, yet the means are so simple. Figure (half-bending) (2008) is brushier still, but now the paired-down beauty leans down to touch the ground with a languid arm. Otto-Knapp’s meditations on dance have served her well, and it will be interesting to see what will come next once she lets the curtain fall on this subject. For now, however, maybe these paintings will inspire another dancer’s eye, and keep this graceful conversation going. 

Jeffrey Ryan

Where in the World

Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India

Over the last ten years, favourable tax policies have turned the once largely agricultural city of Gurgaon into one of the most popular outsourcing destinations in South Asia. In addition to the city’s premium real estate, banking and retail centres, Gurgaon is home to India’s first corporate art foundation. In contrast to the predominantly concrete, pollution-blackened urban architecture (typified by Le Corbusier’s weather-beaten Chandigarh Capitol Complex), architect and landscape designer Aniket Bhagwat has created the Devi Art Foundation from materials that pre-empt the threat of decay.

The titanic cuboid structure is made of sheets of rusted Corten steel resting on two sturdy, rectangular brick bases, while rows of slender windows perforate its facade. When I last visited the foundation, construction work was almost completed. In the vast pit, its sides cut into a giant stairway, very few mechanical diggers could be seen. Instead, men dug with shovels, others moved large sacks while some women carried bricks on top of their heads. Inaugurated last August, the Devi Arts Foundation is the first non-profit space designed to give a platform to young Indian artists as well as providing an arena for the development of the emerging curatorial and critical scene. It is run by one of the oldest business families in India, Anupam and Lehka Poddar, and the space boasts an unrivalled collection of contemporary Indian art.

The current show, ‘Where in the World’, jointly curated by the students and faculty of the School of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, presents the works of 28 artists across four sections. Each considers the way in which the categories ‘Indianness’ and ‘Ethnicity’ have been self-consciously deployed and restaged by artists in their work.

‘Export’ comprises works which display or erase signs of ‘Indianness’ to commercial advantage. Jagannath Panda’s Untitled (2007), a compressed ball of dictionary pages, calls to mind Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Ball of Newspapers (Globe) (1968). The spherical structure alludes to globalization, evoking the universal anglicisation and linguistic bastardization that it has brought about. Barthi Kher’s Hirsute (1999-2000) involves the serial repetition of small, rectangular plates depicting a distinctively male accessory: the moustache. Each square depicts a close-up of a moustache. The re-arrangeable nature of the painted display highlights the conventionality implicit in certain societal idiosyncrasies and points to the internalization of ethnic taxonomization.

A selection of Subodh Gupta’s work includes his Bihari (1999), a self-portrait betraying the touch of a humbler and less cynical artist. Rani (2001), a Warholian fucsia cow, and The Other Thing (2005-6), a spherical sculpture made of stiff kitchen utensils, are reminiscent of Arman’s assemblages. In these works Gupta’s manual input is almost undetectable among the slick, highly polished surfaces. In the section titled ‘Outrageous’, Ashim Purkayastha toys irreverently with the political icon of Gandhi in his Untitled (2006). The Mahatma, a figure whose worship in India is a constitutionally mandated duty, has been cut out from a hundred or so national stamps, thus leaving behind a trail of blasphemic silhouettes.

In the ‘Outraged’ section, Gigi Scaria’s video PAN (i) CITY (2006) stands out as one of the most revealing pieces of the dilapidated state of the old neighbourhood around Jama Masjid. Situated on prime real estate, the old district attracts investors and developers. From the top of the Masjid tower, Scaria conducts a 360-degree survey of the district, constantly collapsing and digitally rebuilding its precarious buildings. In the evocative documentary Known to Unknown (2006) artist Srinivasa Prasad, transforms himself into a sorcerer. Having collected the ashes of unclaimed bodies from the burning ghats, Prasad has dipped his fingers in the powder and covered the walls of his studio with his fingerprints. The last stage of the ritual involved the whitewashing of the walls: a profane burial alluding to the aestheticization of death of anonymous dispossessed.

Finally, ‘Uncollectable’ groups works which purport to defy commodification and collecting. These include works by Shetty, A. Balasubramaniam and others. One could ask whether all the works displayed neatly fit into the allotted categories or spill over. Art can only enter the market and the collection when acquiring a collectable form, but for a private collection to display work under the rubric ‘uncollectable’ is to court a self-defeating project. Also, given the recurring fetishization of ‘Indianness’ in the exhibition, one could explore the ‘heritage’ and ‘commodification’ issues further benefiting the works and strengthening the critical apparatus sustaining them. This is a thought worth well considering.

Emilia Terracciano

Monuments with a Horizon Line II

Buchmann Galerie, Berlin, Germany

‘Whenever art finds itself growing grim about the mouth,’ wrote Herman Melville, ‘whenever it is a damp, drizzly February in its soul, it is high time for it to get to sea as soon as it can.’ Andre Buchmann’s new group show, ‘Monuments with a Horizon Line II’, takes this dictum to heart, unfolding a maritime exercise in tossing curatorial waves, as the snow falls outside on Charlottenstrasse.

The sea has laws, and the first order of business is apparently to introduce them. Architecture critic and editor Markus Miessen and artist Bettina Pousttchi open the show with a short wall-mounted text about the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The text notes that the United States is the only world power yet to ratify the treaty; a copy of the convention itself is provided nearby, bound in blue cloth and impressed with the title ‘Closed Waters’. This is actually the collective title for Miessen and Pousttchi’s general contribution to the show, which also includes a plastic model ship placed in the middle of the gallery floor, surrounded by expanding white lines, marked with paint. These grid the seabed into a series of boundaries. The labels read: ‘Continental shelf, maximum 250 nautical miles from the baseline’; ‘Exclusive economic zone 200 nautical miles from baseline.’

Jorinde Voigt explores a related theme with 27 Positonen, Deklination Blickwinkel, Auskustische Raumabtastung, Strom (2009). The work comprises a wall chart, which looks very similar to Mark Lombardi’s global networks, though on closer inspection it appears to simply mark shipping positions. On another wall, Lawrence Weiner supplies a green caption, in both German and English, which reads: BOILED FOR THREE MINUTES AT THE LEVEL OF THE SEA/GEKOCHT FÜR 3 MIN AUF DEM MEERESPIEGEL. ‘Sea-level’ in German literally means ‘sea-mirror’.

Mirrors turn up in Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s video work The Autonomous Object (2009), which, projected onto a gallery wall, shows a series of people holding up mirrors to the camera from a series of locations – a beach, a bench, a photographer’s studio. Other works include Zaha Hadid’s two architectural paintings (Central Business District in Beijing and Central Business District in Beijing (detail), both 2008), both are both nicely rendered. Amongst the other paintings, Clare Woods supplies Fantastic Zoology V (2008), an oily green and brown abstract on aluminium, and, in the second room, Sean Dawson has Amphimix (2008), a well-composed brighter work of primary colours. Pousttchi’s art historical synthesis Double Monument for V. Tatlin and D. Flavin (2009) is the other piece in the second room: a white sculpture resembling the Monument to the Third International, though constructed from metal crowd barriers with a single neon light running through it. (Oddly, this piece is one of two Flavin/Tatlin crossbreeds currently on show in Berlin, the other being at Helen Cho’s solo show ‘Together in Fateful Collision’ at the Christian Nagel gallery in Mitte.)

‘Monuments with a Horizon Line II’ appears more then the sum of its parts, making singling out individual works hard. But the single most striking piece on display is undoubtedly the photographer Joel Sternfeld’s witty digital C-print Spaceshuttle Columbia, Texas (1979). The work cites Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (The Wanderer Above the Mists, 1818) by employing the same trick of perspective: a solo traveller with his back turned, facing the sublime. But both the sublime and the hero seem to have altered in the intervening 200 years: the man is balding and portly, while his view is now the scarred chassis of the Space Shuttle Columbia, mounted on a NASA refuelling jet, as crowds mill around on the tarmac.

The presence of Hadid in this show, along with Miessen, testifies to the exhibition’s heavy architectural bent. Given the long relationship between architecture and waterways, this connection is natural and seems generally fathomable. But then again Le Corbusier drowned in the Mediterranean - it shouldn’t be forgotten that the sea also means Ahab, madness, the Titanic. In light of this vastness, ‘Monuments with a Horizontal Line II’ remains a little landlocked, harbouring plenty of economy but not enough poetry. I feel dirty saying this, but it could have done with some circling sharks.

Daniel Miller

Sean Snyder

Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK

The ICA’s substantial ground-floor gallery contains a small collection of pinned-up photographic print-outs - the sparsity of Sean Snyder’s exhibition, ‘Index’, is striking. Further investigation reveals a film behind a temporary partition at the end of the space, two more films in the upper galleries and a series of prints in the corridor. Yet the initial impression is worth noting, for it complements the subject of the photographs: physical data containers from Snyder’s personal archive (USB sticks, dossiers, CDs, tapes and so on) and various found images (that span subjects, geography and time). The latter had previously been stored on the former, but are now digitized, with the physical containers destroyed (though conversely photographed). Sparseness announces a concern that is now integral to Snyder’s work: the dematerialization of information following the advent of digitalization. While by no means attention-grabbing, there are some interesting ideas to be found at the artist’s first exhibition in a UK institution.

Snyder’s work has previously investigated the ideological use of imagery by the media, governments and individuals, concerns that are continued by the films shown at the ICA. Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars (2004–5) charts the part that brand names have played in the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. While the idea of war as a branding exercise is diverting, there is little here that wasn’t already covered by Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995). Afghanistan circa 1985 (2008–9) is a very short looped film of found footage from a training video for Soviet and Afghani troops, however, other than positing a 1980s counterpoint to the current conflict shown in its partner film, it gives very little away.

Considered alongside the body of work shown downstairs, these films are clearly case-studies in Snyder’s ongoing consideration of taxonomies. Just as broadcasting companies edit war footage to tell a narrative, Snyder sources footage from news agencies and assembles it into a personal archive to tell his own tales. Unlike the journalist, however, Snyder does not only use secondary footage: he opens out his working methods by presenting his own archive for public consumption. In doing so the artist moves the viewer’s concern from the overtly political natures of the films to a consideration of how belief and knowledge are formed by the structuring of information.

In destroying the physical manifestations of his archive, Snyder asks whether the proliferation of digital documentation will hinder or help future attempts to order and categorize present events. Where historians have previously arranged a number of primary sources into a historical narrative, will the sheer amount of recorded material, held in infinite digital code, propose a problem? Or will the abstraction of information create a bigger problem? It is a dry subject, but one that is worthy of attention. 

Oliver Basciano

Guillaume Bijl

COMA, Berlin, Germany

The voyage of the object through postmodern philosophy, from Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes’ semiotics through to the more recent contributions of the rising Bruno Latour and his Egyptian-stamped epigone Graham Harman, has been accompanied at every stage of its journey by a series of trusty artistic companions. Marcel Duchamp – whose work only started to become known outside of art circles in the late 1950s – was the first to offer an interpretation of the Sancho Panza role. After him, came Marcel Broodthaers, followed by Fischli and Weiss. The work of the Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl is located along this same highway. Bijl delights in objects, their oddities and animisms, their hauntings and quirks, their strange correspondences. His new show at Berlin’s Centre for Opinions in Music and Art (COMA), consisting of three installations – one in the window and one in the back, with a series of assemblages placed between – takes its leave from the mysteries of indexes, classifications and assemblages, and their connections to ready-mades.

Visible from the street, the installation displayed in the window, Himalaya Fabrics (2009), presents three brightly dressed female mannequins looking out on Charlottenstrasse. The effect is slyly destabilizing: when I walked past these figures a couple of weeks ago, never having been to COMA before, I initially thought it must have be some sort of shop. Which of course it is.

The back-room installation is the most fully-realized of the works on display. Souvenirs of the Twentieth Century (2007) is a kind of cabinet of curios planted under a blocked-out skylight and shrouded in dusty light. Four pot plants stand at each corner of a tasteful blue cube, framing three glass display cases – two vertical, facing each other, and one horizontal, facing the doorway. Inside the cases, Bijl has arranged a series of signature objects, representing some of the iconic figures of the twentieth century. Some of these are prosaic, like Gandhi’s little round spectacles. Others are more imaginative: Stalin is represented by a formidable-looking black telephone, after Nikolai Bukharin’s famous ‘Genghis Khan with a Telephone’ quip. The game-playing Duchamp is four chess pieces. Albert Speer is a mighty-looking Nazi lighter.

Bijl uses his cabinets to set up relationships. Orson Welles and Rainer Werner Fassbinder are contrasted in terms of two different models of cameras. Marlon Brando is a big black hip flask, whereas Sinatra is a slenderer silver one. And then Bijl’s careful arrangement imply some strange bedfellows: Peggy Guggenheim’s champagne bucket entreats George Orwell’s typewriter to what feels like evening cocktails. Meanwhile Stalin, flanked by two dames (Marilyn Monroe’s stiletto to his right, Audrey Hepburn’s pump to his left) faces Albert Einstein’s dignified pipe and Sugar Ray Robinson’s boxing trophy.

Each of the objects is shown next to a small, typed label, makes this system of objects possible to decode, if haphazardly. Lacking an equivalent index, the work in the main room – collectively titled Composition Trouvée (2009) – appears more gnomic.

What to make of a big pair of new Thinsulate boots, still bearing their tags, placed square on a doormat? The boots stand under a shelf, garlanded with a black, yellow and red trims, and occupied by a white piston. What is the significance of 16 kitschy clocks, printed with tacky images, arranged in the form of a rectangle nearby? Or the tiny arrangement contained in the plastic cube on the plinth – a rose-tinted assemblage comprising a little gold pencil, a pink ceramic heart and a plastic bouquet of pink roseheads?

Elsewhere, busts square-up to masks – brass and marble against a pyramid of sculpted plastic horror faces shown in wooden boxes. A female mannequin in fetish gear – a leather skirt, a riding-crop – covered in chicken-pox-like stickers stands at the head of a goon squad of torsos. A couple of slogans in Flemish and French: Foire du Tapas an 4eme Etage; Den Draver d’j Elza. Plastic-cast busts, like the kind sold at garden centres: Napoleon, Elvis, Marilyn, Nefertiti, some Doric columns, a nose…

It is tempting to read in this a theory of history – postmodernism as the historical consciousness of an age which has forgotten how to think historically, that kind of thing. The prevailing kitchiness of Composition Trouvée seems to support this hypothesis, even as the presence of a big wooden ladder lying on a floor near the wall provokes the perennial question: is this meant to be here?

Daniel Miller

Arlo Mountford

GrantPirrie, Sydney, Australia

Melbourne-based artist Arlo Mountford, currently showing at GrantPirrie gallery in Sydney, has a propensity for mining the annals of art history in search of iconic one-liners to use as dialogue in his slapstick video romps.  In his 2007 solo show at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space in Melbourne, Mountford employed his - now well-known - animated talking head (which consists of nothing more than a black circle with a morphing red line for a mouth; Stand up, 2005) to pontificate to an applauding, cheering invisible audience, delivering lines such as: ‘Art will be the culmination of its pasts’; ‘Art will change the world’; and ‘I’m glad painting is dead because I can’t paint.’ In another video work, also show at Gertrude, two little road sign figures plunder the same resource as they wander around two split screens.  One arrives, floating down on a Jeff Koons-like balloon dog, with a penis for a nose (á la the Chapman brothers’ Fuck Face, 1994) and promptly starts urinating into a porcelain urinal, whilst the other intently pulls canvases from the wall.  First Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) is disposed of, followed by Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) and then the little figure turns to the pile of canvases, which has morphed into a luminous blue paint tray, pulls his head off, rolls it in paint and proceeds to lather International Klein Blue all over the wall. The scene culminates when Picasso’s Guernica (1937) appears, receiving a thorough blasting from a spray can in parody of the infamous Tony Shafrazi graffiti moment (1974) before being similarly ripped from the wall.  All the while the other road-sign figure is defecating off the side of big black box whilst wearing a chef’s hat.

Clearly nothing is sacred when Mountford is involved.  Yet the video works maintain a degree of freshness by means of the artist’s ability to unpack the iconic works and examine each as raw material with great comedic skill and timing.  Because, let’s be honest, at face value a stuffed, shaggy angora goat slotted into a tyre and adorned with glittering paint is funny, regardless of whether or not it’s Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955-9). It would be remiss to consider Mountford’s practice as mere mockery, though, as this would ignore how research-based his practice is - here there is no reference left without a footnote.

For his current show at GrantPirrie, Mountford turns his attention away from the 20th century and looks to the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Mountford has painstakingly recreated three paintings - The Corn Harvest (1565), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, (c.1558) and Hunters in the Snow ( 1565) - by laboriously drawing directly into a flash programme with a mouse.  The result, a triptych video piece titled The Folly (2008), is a respectful reincarnation of Bruegel’s village scenes in full movement.  The figures are lock-kneed and stiff-jointed, making the animation seem amateur in comparison to the 3D worlds we are now used to in video games.  However, this is truthful to the source material, in that the figures are depicted, not so much anatomically correct with distinct personal traits, but as forms we recognise as a human representation, and for once Mountford seems to maintain a respectful distance.

The three video pieces are distinct, but projected in perfect alignment on to a wide white wall.  A looped audio track directs our gaze into each scene, the sound of baying dogs forewarns of the advance of the hunters and their pack, as the old woman continues to stoke the fire under the swinging sign of the inn in the first scene.  When a church bell tolls, we are pulled from the hunters to search for the new visual reference point.  And so it goes on, each scene is glided over with fragments of every-day sounds: blades through corn crops; a horse neighing; a cart-wheel bumping over a mound of dirt. 

At one point the soundtrack is interrupted by a woman’s voice, at which point we reach a conundrum.  The speech is barely audible over the clutter of the scene’s other sounds.  But surely Mountford would have only included a monologue so it could be heard?  After locating the source of the voice - a women sitting near the corn harvesters eating her lunch - I will give Mountford the benefit of the doubt and suggest that the monologue is simply not meant for the audience.  We are expected to hear only muffled fragments and passing words.

Such an interpretation points to a subtle irreverence running through the entire work. The woman is quoting from an Aldous Huxley novel, Eyeless in Gaza (1936), which traces the implosion of the intellectual debates that raged after First World War as the second draws ever near, and the effect this has on the protagonist’s closest friends.  Feverish idealism is rife among the novel’s characters, but, as history shows us, war pays a crushing blow to such grand ideas.  Thus it is not entirely out of place that Mountford’s peasant woman should be quoting fragments from the novel such as, ‘blessed is the poorer spirit’.  There is a sense that the scene is supposed to be prophetic of our current times in its depiction of the core values of community, but Mountford is wily enough to inject a level of scepticism.  Huxley’s novel was marred by war, in turn implying that the scene before us and the grand speeches that accompany will face a similar dystopian reality at some point.

This scepticism is evident again in the final scene, which depicts the fall of Icarus.  In Ovid’s account of the myth, from which Bruegel’s original painting was conceived, the three figures - a shepherd, a farmer and a fisherman - are too busy tending to their own chores to notice Icarus fall from the sky and plunge to his death, evoking the Flemish proverb: ‘No plough stops because a man dies.’ But in Mountford’s version, his trademark sense of humour creeps in: an apple is placed on the side of the turned field for the farmer to eat, which he does, taking a seat on the ground to savour the fruit and stare out towards the ocean.  He is doing so when Icarus falls.  But does he actually notice?  It is hard to tell, but one gets the impression that if he had he would have likely shrugged his shoulders and gone about his business thinking to himself, ‘ah, what a shame but what could I have done?’

Mountford’s wonderful video installation reminds us that theorizing in times of crisis is often mere pageantry. Calls for a return to the simple way of life and to community values to stave off depression sound appealing, but we cannot ignore the last hundred years and the development of a western world who simply shrug their shoulders when things go wrong. 

Nicola Harvey

Jane and Louise Wilson

BFI Southbank Gallery, London, UK

It’s Stanley Kubrick season at the BFI, but alongside the iconic films being shown as part of the month-long celebration is an unfamiliar title: Unfolding the Aryan Papers (2008). The short film is a new work by Jane and Louise Wilson that delves into The Stanley Kubrick Archives at University of the Arts London (UAL), bringing to the screen an abandoned project about the Holocaust.

In 1993, Kubrick began preparations for a film based on Louis Begley’s 1991 novel Wartime Lies, that follows a Jewish woman and her nephew pretending to be Catholic in occupied Poland. Although the project never progressed beyond pre-production, a wealth of material remains as evidence of the director’s vision: on-set photographs, research into war-time ghettos, screenplay drafts, and, crucially, wardrobe shots of Johanna ter Steege, the young actress due to play the lead.

Commissioned jointly by not-for-profit arts organisation Animate Projects and the BFI, the Wilsons’ research-based project – made during a residency at UAL – splices this preserved material with newly shot footage of Steege reenacting the wardrobe shots and poses that she had performed for Kubrick 15 years before.  We see a still frame of the fresh-faced young actress standing in costume, facing away from us, hands flared and crossed behind her back, every detail carefully posed and crystallized. Minutes later the same costume and pose reappear, but now the body breathes and quivers with the effort of holding still.  The wrinkles and physical changes of 15 years assert themselves subtly yet insistently, proving that this footage is an imperfect imitation rather than a realization of the original pre-production shots.

The image of Steege never speaks; the recent footage, like the archived stills, is stalled at the point of preliminary shots – mute suggestions of what will come.  However, Steege’s disembodied voice narrates throughout the entire film: with the rambling rhythm of reminiscence, she tells nostalgically of her interview with Kubrick, of her excitement about working with him and her own devastation when the film failed to materialize. We learn of Kubrick’s scrupulous attention to detail – dictating the exact slant of the actress’s pose, adjusting a couple of hairs on her head, retaking each wardrobe shot until flawless.  We also hear of the crippling effect that such perfectionism had on the director, who convinced himself that he could never do justice to a topic like the Holocaust.  The horror and sheer scale of the subject depressed Kubrick, and, like so many artists and writers before him, he grew painfully aware of the shortcomings of a straightforwardly mimetic approach.

Yearning pervades Unfolding the Aryan Papers.  The young Steege longed to master the character of Tanya, and for eight months she waited to assume the role and for filming to begin. The older Steege, in turn, yearns to revisit that earlier moment and retrieve the role so devastatingly denied to her.  For her, the Wilsons’ project offers this chance: at the end of the film the actress’s voice tells of a text message that she has recently sent to a friend stating that the dream had ended at last – that it had finally turned into reality.  Yet this, of course, never really happens; Steege never gets the chance to play Tanya.  Ultimately her yearning simply results in a reenactment of her younger self, full of anticipation yet poised for disappointment.

Kubrick’s perfectionism becomes reformulated and replicated in the Wilson twins’ project.  Their research methods, which are often scrupulous, echo the detailed preparations conducted by Kubrick, while the repetition of certain images reflects the director’s own tendency to retake. Rather than pressing forwards, Unfolding the Aryan Papers informs the viewer by retracing Kubrick’s footsteps. Above all, the Wilsons preserve the unfinished – or rather, never begun – nature of the director’s last project.  What remain in the UAL archives are mere fractions of a film: lines of script; set ideas; detailed close-ups of an actress’s upswept hair or sensually parted lips.  Rather than piece these together, the disembodied voices and disjointed narrative of the Wilsons’ project embrace and augment their fragmentary quality.  In this fact perhaps lies a tacit agreement with Kubrick’s decision never to finish this film about the Holocaust.  Offering an absorbing and poignant glimpse into one undeveloped fraction of Kubrick’s work, Unfolding the Aryan Papers leaves us with a richer yet even more enigmatic vision of the celebrated director.

Katherine Holmgren

Garth Weiser

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, USA

Here’s a good argument for painting: Garth Weiser. Graced with a candid intelligence, a solid craft and a shrewd sense of composition, the 17 paintings and one work on paper in this exhibition seem less painted than engineered. For this is some sturdy stuff. If it had an odour, it would be pungent and structured. If it had a sound, it would be that of things ineluctably clanking into place.

Inspired by graphic design, modernist painting, corporate logos (the show’s press release goes so far as to cite two: Halifax Bank and Valvoline Oil) and a general sense of ungainly ‘80s corporate culture, these paintings could be characterized by a kind of ‘corporate abstraction’. Each canvas is structured around a horizon line, and is orbited either by circles or a series of slanted groups of black-and-white striations. The tension that animates the compositions varies. For instance My love is chemical (2009) could hardly be more taut; the coexistence of an almost sculptural space and painterly flatness galvanizes the picture with an extraordinary tension. This is subtly produced by the placement of three flat circles (one black, one irregularly graded colour wheel, and one a dark shade of orange) against an orange ground, the edges of which taper towards the top and the bottom, revealing a white margin, such that the horizon-line seems to jut out like a pack of matches lying open face down. The tension of the composition is doubled by the multiple painting techniques, varying from hard-edge to sprayed-on to brushed, not to mention the anachronistic-advertising palette of orange, white and black, which makes for a raw and homely sophistication. 

Other paintings, such as Hyper Tight Light (2009), take the push-pull to another level. Slanted groups of striations, created by combing thick white paint over a black ground, run parallel or into one another and meet on a horizon-line, next to a flat black hexagon, thrown in for good compositional measure. Like an early Bridget Riley, the white striations are liable to make you dizzy when looked at straight-on, though when viewed from an angle they are relieved of their dizzying power and a blue layer of under painting, full of doodles, emerges. Geometric hard-edge abstraction is blended with messier matters. While this shift could be seen as an optical gimmick, it invests the picture with a spatial presence, requiring the viewer to partially circumnavigate the painting, like a sculpture. Not all of the paintings are as successful though; works like Cardio (2009) or Cooper Union (2008), both of which are dominated by rectangles and void of the vertical angles that vitalize the rest of the show, feel slack in comparison, lacking the compositional vibrancy of their coevals. But this show looks so good that a few less than captivating canvases hardly affects the general impression.

One of the more compelling things about Weiser’s work is its refreshing lack of subterfuge; it is confident in its right to exist. Not in thrall to self-deprecation (which is not say that it is humourless: these motifs are, after all, largely recycled corporate recuperations of modernism), it seems untroubled by the ‘to paint or not to paint’ quandary that haunts so much contemporary picture making. Weiser’s work proves that painting does not have to be consumed by strategy, and can still just get down to the business of painting.

Chris Sharp

Susanne M. Winterling

Bawag Contemporary, Vienna, Austria

‘I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don’t know,’ sang German photo model Nico with the Velvet Underground in 1967. ‘I’ll be your mirror but I’ll dissolve’ is the title chosen by German artist Susanne M. Winterling (one time member of Hamburg collective Akademie Isotrop) for her first solo show in Vienna – attributing to the mirror and its image an entirely different but profoundly human consequence. In a four-minute 16 mm film loop from 2005, which shares it title with the exhibition, soap bubbles float through the room. Steadily but with incomprehensible speed, they enter the picture and then confound expectations by exiting the frame again intact. The colours of the rainbow shimmer in their fragile skins, and, reflected in this, four accompanying photographic works vaguely hint at the artist in her studio. A kind of multiple portrait made, like Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524) (which hangs a few streets away in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum), with the knowledge that no mirror gives an undistorted reproduction of reality.

The ‘dissolve’ technique in film corresponds to multiple exposure in photography. Both are evoked in ‘Untitled’ (2007), a series of eight black-and-white prints. They show role models, strong women pushed into grey zones by society on account of their self-determination. One is a film still showing the writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) on a horse, titled A Swiss Rebel (2007) after Carole Bronstein’s film of the same name from 2000. There is Effi Briest, once with her back turned and once sleeping, from Reiner Werner Fassbinder’s Fontane Effi Briest (1974) based on the novel by Theodor Fontane (1895). Fassbinder gave his film the terse subtitle: ‘Many have an idea of their potential and their needs, but accept the prevailing system in their heads nonetheless by their deeds, thus consolidating and endorsing it.’ The series ends with an MGM logo from which Winterling has erased the roaring lion, leaving the scroll with its motto ‘Ars Gratia Artis’ framing a dark empty space. With such concise, strategic interventions in the visual canon, Winterling casts these courageous women as subversive heroines who don’t accept the prevailing system in their heads and who are not accepted by it.

The show also includes two video projections whose protagonists operate within a theatrical black void. In Untitled (Play, Winterling) (2007), a dark-haired woman in dark clothes with white collar and cuffs – the title may at first seem to suggest it is the artist herself, but in fact ‘Winterling’ is the name of the violinmakers – plays solo violin. Turned away from the viewer and absorbed in her playing, she draws dissonant notes from the instrument. At first she looks inapproachable, but also trapped in an endless rehearsal, joined by the twittering of birds from off screen, as if this sound were also made by the violin. At this point, the supposed security of distance fails and pain becomes audible.

In Le sens practique (2005), two women face each other in a black void, repeatedly exchanging a typical gentleman’s trench coat. Only by wearing an item of clothing not tailored for them do the women’s bodies become visible in the all-enveloping blackness. By helping each other into the coat in turn, each affords her counterpart a fleeting corporeality. Out of the repetition of this scene develops an indissoluble regularity, which the two women obey in mutual dependence. In this piece, Winterling’s approach becomes especially clear: her works derive their force from subtleness; they remain accessible even though they are also closed; and they render the hide-and-seek game of identity in role playing obsolete by opening it up.

Jakob Neulinger

Allora & Calzadilla

Gladstone Gallery, New York, USA

In Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on ‘Ode to Joy’ for a Prepared Piano (2008), long-time collaborators Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla incorporate musical, sculptural and performative elements in what has now become a familiar process and consistent pattern for the Puerto Rico-based pair.

This time, the duo enlisted a rotating roster of six pianists to play the famous fourth movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (1824). Using an early 20th-century C. Bechstein grand piano that has been customized and set on casters, given a reverse set of foot pedals, and bearing a hole cut clear through the centre of the cabinet, each performer is provided with just enough room to fit through the opening. This forces them to perform backwards and over the top of the keyboard while traipsing through an otherwise empty gallery with the piano firmly in tow.

Despite the players’ obvious interpretive skills, their best efforts are thwarted: the cut hole means that two full octaves are now inoperative, so long sections of the melody are lost. These are replaced by the tap, tap, tapping of the pianists’ fingertips, and with the notes sounding more like Morse code than symphonic splendor.

As with prior works, Stop, Repair, Prepare strikes a precarious balance between a sound and sculptural work, a found and modified object, and between stasis and live action. It also evinces Allora & Calzadilla’s ongoing fascination with music as an alternately unifying and de-stabilizing force. Over the last hundred years ‘Ode to Joy’ has been identified - variously - with the Nazi regime, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall, while it is currently the European Union’s official anthem. Given its historical lineage, the piece is an appropriate choice, even if, in channeling this politically charged work, Allora & Calzadilla do not honour so much as make visible and audible the destructive potential of its continued use.

Fittingly, Stop, Repair, Prepare was first exhibited in Munich last year at the Haus der Kunst. Erected in 1933 to promote the Nationalist Socialist agenda, this latest showing provides an added dimension to the attendant politics of both locations. Both constitute contentious sites, but what arouses a greater sense of struggle - that is, between presenting it in a venue intimately (Haus der Kunst) and obscurely (Gladstone) associated with its creation, is a conundrum perhaps best answered through its reception. The audience invariably follows where the pianist leads them, but whether this makes them cognisant of their role in the making - or unmaking - of their present situation, is less clear. What the ebbs and flows of the audience shifting alongside the piano’s movements do highlight are other moments that invoke mass conversion, inspire public solidarity, or incite civic disobedience.

Allora & Calzadilla clearly do not fit neatly within the confines of a media-based practice, opting instead to create tenuous circumstances that intermix form and function. The result? Works that possess a counter-intuitive sensibility, informed as much by post-minimalist forms and post-modern subjectivity as they are by real world politics. If creating works that invoke a conflicted state of being is precisely what Allora & Calzadilla do best, then what this show makes clear is the heightened degree of complexity and subtlety with which this has been achieved over time.

So, then what of the reparation to which the title alludes? Perhaps this proves unnecessary. Standing amidst the empty gallery in between hourly performances, the piano temporarily immobile, Allora & Calzadilla’s prescient sense of how absence constitutes its own form of presence, rings clear.

Ingrid Chu

Lynchmob

HBC, Berlin, Germany

The last time David Lynch surfaced in Berlin he was involved in a minor diplomatic incident. In a public meeting in November 2007, the American director had to take to the microphone in order to calm a crescendo of outraged objections, after his otherworldly ally Raja Emanuel Schiffgens proposed that their joint ‘Transcendental Meditation’ project would lead to an ‘invincible Germany’. ‘I don’t know what he said,’ interposed Lynch, who doesn’t speak German, ‘but I think I understand that he used a word from the Third Reich, and let’s just look at it this way, it’s a new world now.’

Last week, as Lynch made his way to Berlin once again, this time to source European distributors for a forthcoming film collaboration with Werner Herzog, ‘Lynchmob’, a well-timed group show devoted to Lynch and the Lynchian, opened near Alexanderplatz. Featuring the works of around 30 artists, spread around the rotting architecture of the former Hungarian Cultural Centre, it is not known whether Lynch himself found the time to visit. Had he done so, something like the Marshall McLuhan scene from Annie Hall (1977) may well have transpired.

‘I heard what you were saying,’ McLuhan emerges from behind a prop to chide a pontificating professor in a movie line: ‘You know nothing of my work! How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!’ Similarly, ‘Lynchmob’ does not really offer much insight into Lynch. The exhibition does reference him, citing a few of his signature moves. The box of stale doughnuts included in one installation is one of the fresher of these quotations. There are also a couple of decent works on display: Oliver Pietsch’s found-footage montage Hit Me (2006) stitches together film clips of violence against women and is pertinent, if brutalizing, while the same artist’s cut-up of sleeping and dreaming scenes (The Shape of Things, 2008) employs the same technique to more lushly romantic effect. But the curators’ stated ambition - to ‘invoke in the viewer the same psychological and emotional response as Lynch’s films’ - isn’t achieved.

The opening night of ‘Lynchmob’ saw its art works submerged beneath a free party vibe. By around midnight, cigarette butts and empty Pilsner Urquell bottles had colonized every surface, in a triumph of generic amusement. Meanwhile, DJs spun nothing in particular: no Angelo Badalamenti, no Julee Cruise. All in all, genuine ambition seemed in short supply. If the party is part of the point, why not attempt to design a genuinely Lynchian atmosphere, rather than just throwing something together under his name? Where the curators in fact did take steps in this direction, it was towards exploitation. In an advert posted on Craiglist shortly before the opening night, the following calls for performers were made: ‘WE ALSO NEED MIDGETS & DWARFS !!! to run around we can provide you with DRINK and fun [...] WE ALSO NEED FAT CHICKS Really FAT CHICKS to dance like at Daves place.’ I don’t mean to sound humourless, but this seems pretty grubby. Or as a manager at the Berlin culture centre where Lynch and Schiffgens spoke back in November observed at the time: ‘It’s all a bit embarrassing.’

Daniel Miller

Jimmie Durham

Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris/ARC, Paris, France

It took Jimmie Durham three tries to shatter the glass display case during his inaugural performance of his retrospective ‘Pierres Rejetées’ (Rejected Stones). The exhibition comprises a generous serving of largely sculptural, video and installation works, but also drawings and photographs, from his ‘Eurasian’ period, which dates from Durham’s arrival on the continent where he has lived a nomad’s life since 1994, seven years after his definitive departure from the United States.  Twice Durham lobbed the smooth, roundish stone, procured from medieval poet François Vilon’s Paris home, and twice it gaily bounced away with a thunk (this re-enacted work, A Stone from François Vilon’s House in Paris, was first created in 1996).  The American in me occasionally and involuntarily thinks in sports metaphors: ‘that’s two strikes!’ I worried.  Then, when Durham heaved the stone with two hands onto the case, his entire body lifting off the floor in the effort, and the glass shattered as planned, another American saying came instantly to mind: ‘third time’s a charm’. Finally, as he encouraged us to gather around and listen to the faint, sparkling sounds of the settling glass, I unintentionally recalled vintage commercials for a famous breakfast cereal’s ‘snaps, crackles and pops’, and the forgotten image of a cheery towheaded child tilting his ear toward a sputtering cereal bowl.

These reactions were quite disconcerting, but it was admittedly not the first time that Durham had stirred some unconscious, uneasy recognition of ‘American-ness’ in me.  His 35 mm film La poursuite de bonheur (Pursuit of Happiness, 2002), titled after one of three ‘certain inalienable rights’ the colonizers decreed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, features artist Anri Sala playing a celebrated Native American artist named Joe Hill, modeled on Durham himself, who is of Cherokee descent and was an activist in the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements for decades. In the film, Hill travels the highways picking up rubbish (or, rather, ‘found-objects’), which he turns into art.  After his successful opening, he torches his camping car then moves on to France.  When I first saw the film at a screening in Marseilles in 2002, the figure of Sala on the roadside immediately conjured the now-iconic 1970s ‘Keep America Beautiful’ television advertising campaign against highway litter, which starred a ‘crying Indian’ who roamed on horseback and by canoe through a waste-besieged, automobile ridden landscape.

It is impossible for me to do justice to the art historical or theoretical importance of this overview of Durham’s work.  Individual pieces tug at me in such a way that I am incapable of adopting the appropriate distance.  On the whole, Durham’s work is too archaeological in nature, too much about origins, and too playful, not to appeal my inner-child - though I somehow feel it shouldn’t.  After all, we couldn’t be more different.

Ghost in the Machine (2005), a life-size ancient statue of a helmeted Athena coiled with rope to a refrigerator, is surely about Cartesian mind-body dualism, but to me it just appears as some miraculous treasure hoisted from the depths. Baby Please Don’t Go (2000), a pointy pair of bowed shoes peeking from beneath a funereal slab of mottled grey diorite, evokes houses falling on witches and recuperated ruby slippers, as well as a blank slate ready to receive Babylonian ruler Hammurabi’s code.  Durham’s world is one in which odd-shaped stones are believably displayed as hunks of cheese or a petrified clouds (The Dangers of Petrification I and II, 1998-2007); an aeroplane is grounded and riven by a gigantic boulder, seemingly pelted by some vengeful, or bored, sky-god (Encore tranquilité, Still Tranquility, 2008); and a minuscule bird sits in a wonky wooden cage set atop a colourfully painted branch, with an attached hand-written sign indicating that this is A Peanut Shaped like a Bird (2006).

If one merely glances in that direction, one can clearly see Durham’s concern with ‘anti-architecture’, ‘estrangement’, ‘language’ and ‘negativity’ in the pocked and scratched wood slabs of Labyrinth 1-6 (2007), or the printed and stacked oil drums of Sweet Light Crude (2008):  the visual evidence for those critical terms is bolstered by the artist’s statements and several exegetic essays in the valuable catalogue.  One can also discern the power dynamics of master-builders and labourers at work across his production.  Yet, despite myself, when faced with the wondrous profusion of work here, I am inexplicably drawn to it like some whimsical mystic writing-pad and become slave to my most childish of memories.

Vivian Rehberg

Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures

BCAM, Los Angeles, USA

When I recently visited the Los Angles County Museum of Art’s new annex, the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum, to see ‘Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures’, an immense rainbow arched over the green expanse of the Hollywood Hills. If it seemed a bit jarring to turn from the pale letters of the Hollywood sign to a historical exhibition examining more than four decades of parallel yet wildly divergent art-making in West and East Germany, that incongruity was somewhat mitigated by the fact that LA’s own cultural history has been formed by the many German and Austrian WWII exiles that fled here in the ’30s and ’40s - among them Thomas Mann, Bertholt Brecht, Billy Wilder and Theodor Adorno. (This was likely very much in the mind of LACMA’s Stephanie Barron - co-curator here with Eckhart Gillen of Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH - as she staged two celebrated German shows at the LA institution in the ’90s: ‘Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany’ and ‘Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler’ in 1997.) Indeed, Adorno’s over-employed maxim, that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz, seems an insistent touchstone for an exhibition that traces how German artists from both sides of the wall struggled to make art in the wake of the Holocaust, and the waves of damaging political developments - including the partition of their country - that followed it.

With some 300 works - paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations and videos - by 120 artists, the exhibition explores how Cold War-era politics framed - while not always defined - art-making in Germany between the end of WWII and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yes, modernist abstraction dominated West Germany at the same time that a static socialist realism became the state-sanctioned East German artistic mode, but within those structures there was more ebb and flow, more overlap and conversation, than one may think.  Artistic experimentation was not relegated to the West (see Hermann Glöckner’s inspired objects made in the GDR from the ’50s on), while aesthetic stasis and questionable political motive did not wholly reside in the East (note the sometimes limp abstraction in the West, not to mention an uncomfortable overload of Beuys’ übermensch-healer theatrics). But beyond those welcome (if expected) revelations is a larger one that the exhibition slowly, carefully reveals: how East and West, over the course of nearly half a century, attempted to come to terms with their appalling history through their visual art.

‘Art of Two Germanys’ opens with a small, dark gallery of works from 1945 to 1949. The styles are disparate (Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism, sober photojournalism) but the tone - one of mute, immutable destruction - is not.  Images of dancing skeletons, dead birds and twisted hands repeat across the walls like refrains. Ruined buildings, their gaping facades like so many skulls, are depicted in photographs of Dresden by Richard Peter Sr., a drawing on a door by Werner Heldt and a haunting collage by Juro Kubicek, with its torn pieces of paper floating down on a bombed-out building like ash. Hannah Höch contributes not a witty collage but a folksy, Expressionistic figurative painting, Mourning Women (1945), its taut female faces recalling nothing so much as Käthe Kollwitz’s own wrenching self-portraits, made in despair over the son lost in WWI.

From such multivalent and horrific beginnings, the show moves through the ’50s, an era dominated by socialist realism in the East, which readily delineates its limits in forgettable paintings of industrious workers, triumphant building projects and noble comrades. The work from the West is more varied: from Scheeler-like Precisionism to torpid abstraction to a verdant Expressionist figuration reminiscent of Alice Neel. But two early A. R. Penck paintings, made in the East, are the most experimental works in the room, preparing the viewer for his unflaggingly central role in the exhibition, and in modern German art history as a whole. Nevertheless, despite Penck’s talent, walking into the next gallery, devoted to the art of the ‘60s and the ‘70s, is like walking into another century.

In 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected and Adolf Eichmann went on trial, while the German art world became at once more politicized and emboldened with artistic experiment from international movements such as Fluxus and Minimalism. Artists like Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz (whose early paintings suggest that he gained much from his later decision to turn them upside down) trade abstraction for a more politically loaded figuration (as in Richter’s blurry portrait of his smiling Uncle Rudi in Nazi uniform), while Blinky Palermo, Eva Hesse and artists from the Zero Group begin working in a pared-down yet sensual Minimalism that seems light years ahead of the comrades rolling up their sleeves next door. Günther Uecker’s domestic objects - a television, a chair, a yellow triangle - studded with nails, which trail the works like demented shadows, are a revelation; Nam June Paik’s work nearby looks fairly conventional in comparison. It was a little discomforting to suddenly arrive at works such as Dieter Roth’s wonderful chocolate lions (whose aroma permeated the gallery) and sausages wrought from books he hated (an unloved Martin Walser novel) after the political intensity of the work that came before. But this levity is short-lived: Sigmar Polke’s large installations critiquing West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ are pointed, while Wolf Vostell’s Pop-inflected Coca-Cola collage and ‘lipstick bombers’ disturb in a way that American Pop cannot.

Beuys’ decisive tenure in Düsseldorf began about this time, and performance photos show him being attacked by an audience member on the 20th anniversary of a failed assassination attempt of Hitler; hung nearby a Jörg Immendorf painting declaims ‘Beuysland’ under the man himself adorned in his famed fishing vest. While Beuys’ felt suit and sleds are now so familiar as to be opaque, and his familiar striding figure in a human-sized photograph feels too militaristic and authoritarian by far, the artist is also represented by a vitrine of rubbish swept up on May Day, 1972. The crumpled newspapers, plastic cups and cans, all set behind glass, are politically resonant in a way that the artist’s more celebrated works - and their self-mythologizing stance - cannot reach in the larger political context of this exhibition. But less vaunted works impressed even more: Herman Glöckner’s folded paper and tempera pieces, with their vague allusions to flags and alpine vistas, dissolve the nationalist tendencies of both motifs in a studied and defiant abstraction, while Penck’s moving ‘Standart’ models - using bottles, a rolled manuscript, and cardboard - are both cryptic and inexplicably affecting.

As ‘Art of Two Germanys’ turns to the late ’70s and ’80s, the work gets even more pointedly political. Swastikas, homages to Nazi victims and fallen activists, explorations of the Red Army Faction and images of Ronald Reagan abound. Photography gains ground, revealing - in the deliberate work of Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth - the inescapable influence of the Bernd and Hilla Becher, who are also on view here. While Höfer and Olaf Metzel detailed growing anti-Turkish sentiment and latent anti-Semitism, East German photographers like Ulrich Wüst and Helga Paris chronicled the stagnant streets and complicated citizens of the GDR. The Autoperforationists, a Dresden-based group of artists, offer some of the most intriguing work on view: a series of photographs and videos of their food and cage-festooned performances (by the likes of Via Lewandowsky and the celebrated East German poet Durs Grünbein). Against the surprise of such work, the last room is a little more familiar, and its choices seem crucial if customary symbols of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Richter’s magisterial November (1989) shares space with a Rosemarie Trockel hammer-and-sickle motif and Iza Genzken’s 1988 ‘door’ made of heavy rocks. But an inscrutable Martin Kippenberger painting, though made a few years earlier, evoked the most: titled Martin Peeks Through the Keyhole (1983), it functioned less as a door closing on Germany’s Cold War era, but more as a hint of a new, unfathomable world to come.

Quinn Latimer

Simon Starling

Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, Berlin, Germany

It’s a disorientating scene. Perhaps it’s the lone cactus, standing ten-feet high, or the big chuntering motor. Maybe it’s the large leafless branch and the suspended chainsaw.  Simon Starling is a master of the uncanny, creating works that are the end result of a journey from the familiar to the strange via the eccentric. The best-known example of this was his Turner Prize-winning Shedboatshed (2005), which, true to its name, started off in someone’s garden in Germany, was dismantled by Starling and turned into a boat that was then paddled down the Rhine, only to be reassembled as a shed at the Kunstmuseum Basel.

The adventures that Starling embarks upon and the bizarre transformations he orchestrates set out to reverse the classic artistic endeavour whereby all effort is concealed behind the integrity of the work.  For Starling the effort is the art. His work externalizes the mental and physical process involved in creation and involves the spectator in a series of rhetorical questions about art and its relation to energy and waste. It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that the cactus on display at Berlin’s Temporäre Kunsthalle – one half of the installation Kakteenhaus (2002) – was in fact found by Starling in the Andalucian desert and transported back to Germany in a red Volvo. This car is now parked in front of the gallery space, and its motor, having been removed and set up inside, is now producing sufficient heat for a cactus-friendly climate.

Elsewhere, Plant Room (2008) also employs the use and conversion of energy in an interesting way.  Photography – the ultimate time-traveller – is often an inspiration for Starling’s works, and central to this piece is a selection of eight original photos by Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), each one a close-up of a flower or leaf.  Blossfeldt is known for his detailed, formalist depictions of plants, for transforming the plant from something wild and natural to something architectural, almost artificial. Starling is evidently drawn to this artist, who, a century before him, was concerned with analyzing the point at which the inanimate and the living converge.  In Plant Room Starling honours this shared fascination: the photographs are housed in an archaic clay brick house, of which the integrated humidity-monitoring system draws the water it needs from the nearby river Spree, and a fuel cell then works in harmony with the clay to maintain the optimal climate for conserving the vintage prints.

There is something ironic about viewing Starling’s work in the palimpsestic Temporäre Kunsthalle. This impressive space is located on the site of the recently demolished Palast der Republik, which before that was the home of a baroque castle. Two years from now it too will be pulled down to give way to a new construction. Amidst this grandeur, Under Lime (2009), commissioned specifically for this exhibition, seems at first sight rather uninspiring and small – ephemeral even. A branch protruding from the ceiling is easy to miss and the chainsaw suspended next to it looks like something the builders left behind.  The narrative behind this work is that the chainsaw was used to remove the branch from a tree on the famous Berlin boulevard Unter den Linden, which is home to Humboldt University but was of course also the site of the infamous Nazi book burnings.  Perhaps this is another of Starling’s comments upon the vulnerability of nature in the face of human intervention; or perhaps it was merely the closest tree to hand. Either way, it makes the moving point that, in Berlin’s painful history, destruction and waste are never far away.

Starling has some good stories to tell, and his strange couplings – characteristically drawn from both the man-made and natural world – leave one curious, even baffled, and wanting to know more. He makes poignant use always of his environments and is sensitive to atmospheres.  In an age where the physical ‘art work’ is still so emphasized, it is intriguing to see in him a performer, a maker, someone who deals very much with the process of producing art. Indeed, Starling would no doubt be amused to learn that the 35,000 tonnes of steel that once held the Palast der Republik together are currently being shipped to the United Arab Emirates, soon to be resurrected once again as the Burj Dubai, which will be the tallest man-made structure of all time.

Florence Mackenzie

Laura Oldfield Ford

Hales Gallery, London, UK

2013 has arrived quicker than we expected. For Londoners even a year ago, the dateline ‘2013’ evoked a period after-the-goldrush: the come-down following the euphoria of the London Olympics. Laura Oldfield Ford’s collections of drawings at Hales Gallery – titled ‘London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins’ – celebrates and memorializes the scurf regions of the East End which the Olympic development programme is systematically destroying. ‘The London I conjure up in these drawings is imbued with a sense of mourning’, Ford has said. ‘These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates.’ Yet her drawings are now also an ironic work of mourning for the very Olympic project that Ford opposes. Now that the credit crunch has led inevitably to a recession, the Games seem more like a poisoned chalice than a glittering prize, a relic of – and monument to – a rampant finance capitalism that has retreated (no doubt only temporarily) into a depressive deflation. In many of Ford’s drawings, the vast financial necropolises of Canary Wharf preside over the landscape. However, in early 2009, with finance the object of popular anger, the high-rises do not seem as imperiously forbidding as they once did. The 2012 hangover has set in even before the party has happened, with Tessa Jowell, the government minister for the Games, notoriously asking: ‘Had we known what we know now, would we have bid for the Olympics? Almost certainly not.’ We’ve reached 2013 without ever getting to 2012; there are ruins even before the OIympic village has been built.

The drawings which Ford has produced for ‘London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins’ are part of an ongoing project, much of which is collected in her cut-and-paste psychogeographic fanzine Savage Messiah, all ten issues of which are also displayed here. In form and content, Ford’s work deliberately echoes 1970s and ‘80s anarcho-punk para-art. The photorealist militancy of Gee Vaucher, who produced the record covers and posters for punk band Crass, is perhaps the most obvious stylistic precedent, yet Ford’s work is far from pastiche or homage. It derives much of its power from the very contemporary urban struggles that it documents and contributes to. ‘I regard my work as diaristic; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting’, Ford has said. ‘The need to document the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and privatisation continues apace.’ With their lovingly reproduced junk-strata, overgrowing vegetation and Tarkovsky-esque abandoned factories, this work constitutes a direct riposte to the slick digital images which the Olympic Delivery Authority has pasted up in the now heavily policed, restricted and surveilled Lee valley. Now that the recession is certain to force a downsizing of the games, these CGI murals (pictured below), with their cheery consumer-citizenry walking next to a River Lee cleansed of algae, have changed their ontological status; instead of being projections of what is to come, they have been downgraded into an unintentionally melancholic art – virtual images of formerly possible worlds. Iain Sinclair, another dogged opponent of the 2012 project, has called the Olympic development site ‘a fault line between the virtual and the actual’. Like Sinclair, Ford understands that aesthetics and architecture are directly political here.  At Hales Gallery Ford sets one version of urban poetics – in which brutalism co-exists with dereliction – against the hygienic, hyper-bright spaces projected by late-capitalist development, where the future contracts into the short term, and all history is PhotoShopped into a manicured ‘heritage’.

Collage is central to Ford’s method, indeed, the whole of this exhibition is perhaps best seen viewed as an unfinished collage, which – like the city – is constantly reconfiguring itself. Ford colours and graffitis her own drawings, treating them like urban walls, as surfaces to be decorated and defaced. Macro- and micro-narratives proliferate tuberously between the drawings; spidery slogans recur; figures migrate through various versions of the city, sometimes trapped inside the drearily glossy spaces imagined by advertising and regeneration propaganda, sometimes free to drift. Ford’s city is the site of the kind of ontological and temporal war that rages throughout the fiction of William Burroughs: a struggle over the nature of reality between the spectres of speculation and the ghosts of unrealized utopias. 

Mark Fisher

Lisson Presents I

Lisson Gallery, London, UK

‘Lisson Presents I’ is the first in a proposed series of regular group exhibitions at Lisson’s second space on Bell Street. Each new instalment will showcase the work of an artist ‘not currently’ represented by the gallery, alongside work by gallery artists, with a focus on a new body of work by one represented artist.

This first instalment profiles the work of Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, already well known for his film and video work that explores the vicissitudes of his native country by scrutinizing the function of archives and documentary images. Both works shown here form part of an ongoing series that utilizes the archive of Lebanese studio photographer Hashem El Madani. Video in Five Movements (2006) compiles clips of Super-8 home movies made by Madani during the late 1960s and early ‘70s. There are five distinct sections, though it is difficult to tell what the organizing principle of each section is, the silent footage in each depicting friends and family of the photographer uneasily walking towards the camera. The obvious awkwardness that they feel, betrayed by facial expressions and body language, points up a tension between the still photograph and the moving image, and between studio photographer and his subjects.

The second work, L’Enlèvement (2008), contains two elements. The first is a small light-box, illuminating a photograph taken by Madani in the late ‘50s of a group of people in a cinema. The second is a digital projection of a film made of a Super-8 projector set on a plinth, and projecting off-screen. The Super-8 film, which can be heard but not seen, is an episode of ‘70s BBC TV series The Protectors, entitled ‘The Kidnapping’ - both projector and film were found in Madani’s studio. While this ongoing ‘Madani project’ is a complex meditation on authorship, and an artist’s relationship to his immediate environment and economy, I’m unsure whether these two works successfully stand alone in this context.

Ceal Floyer is represented by what would be an enigmatic and intriguing addition to any group show. Autofocus (2002) is neatly summarized by its title and list of materials: ‘Light projection with Leica Pradovit P-150 projector and Unicol ‘teloscopic tilting stand’.’ The work adroitly avoids the pitfalls of rehearsing - or rehashing - conceptual art strategies by injecting humour and pathos into its aesthetic of administration. The focus slips in and out, bringing the dust that lies on the lens of the projector into sharp focus before rejecting it as an appropriate image to project. The work is poetic and allegorical in contrast to Jonathan Monk’s Developing Mirror Piece (with Filming Process) (2006), a more didactic, and laboured excavation of ‘60s artistic tropes, or Sean Synder’s clinical rerun of institutional critique.

There is also familiar work here from Lisson stalwarts Art & Language and Rodney Graham, and a new film, Black and White (2008), from Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky, which forensically examines a single close-up of Liv Ullmann from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966).

The function of ‘Lisson Presents’ is similar to that of their yearly themed summer shows. The potential problem of explicitly foregrounding the function of these presentations is whether this curatorial conceit can be sustained for long. Nine shows of this sort every year means that nine artists not currently represented by the gallery will be given what amounts to a test-run - a little like a very public interview. In addition, how many more themes or conceptual frames are capable of unifying the work of Lisson’s artists? For this outing the works are said to be concerned with the ‘self-evident quality and immediacy of images’, and they - mostly - use a range of neo-conceptual strategies to explore these concerns. With one or two exceptions, this is a pretty succinct (though admittedly crude) way of characterizing the work of Lisson’s entire roster. So what next? 

Dan Kidner

Hurvin Anderson

Tate Britain, London, UK

Hurvin Anderson’s meditative suite of paintings, ‘Peter’s Series’ (2007-09), teleports the viewer back to a poorly remembered 1950s Britain. Here, in the intimate surrounds of a sparse blue-hued attic room, newly arrived Caribbean immigrants too poor to rent commercial property have set up a barbershop in their own home. (A common practice among first-wave Afro-Caribbeans, according to Anderson.) The sketchiness of these renderings exudes existential uncertainty: walls, chairs and mirrors seem to melt continuously into the abstraction of anemic winter light. It’s a vision of an awkwardly accommodated immigrant culture. Yet, if there’s a sense of alienation here, it’s also because Anderson’s memories are not the vivid ones of a first generation migrant; born to Jamaican parents in Birmingham, England, Anderson follows what Paul Gilroy once called ‘routes’ (rather than ‘roots’) culture – a mapping of the paths that weave identity.

Each painting is rendered as a basic tricolour flag: earthy red carpet; blue walls; white ceiling. Mentally subtract the furnishings, and they become northern European seascapes, washed in the gentle tones of Peter Lanyon’s St. Ives; mentally rebuild the walls, and you have the drab moodiness of Ivon Hitchen’s London Group. Anderson achieves these retro-eggshell hues using a two-layer technique, a haze of white obscuring a base structure of vibrant geometrical form. ‘Peter’s Series’ was made over a three-year period and it forms a record of Anderson’s attempts to negotiate between abstraction and figuration. From the near-featurelessness of blue-and-white walls in Peter’s III (2007), Anderson has slowly populated his images with furniture. In Peter’s Sitters III (2009), in which a customer is depicted hunched in the barber’s chair, Anderson achieves full figuration. The client’s hair, however, lies scattered on the ground, melting into the painterly carpet as if the this fragile world is about to rebound back into hazy abstraction once more.

The first time I saw ‘Peter’s Series’, I had a calypso song stuck in my head. It came from the Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal Handsworth Songs (1986), also currently on view at Tate Britain though not part of the triennial. The song was ‘London Is the Place For Me’ (1948), by the brilliantly named Trinidadian singer Lord Kitchener, a ditty full of hope, if somewhat wince-inducing naivety. The reality, as those who were reduced to barbershops in attics experienced, was economic and social marginalisation. The immigrant’s dream is as fragile as a wish: Kitchener’s hopes of assimilation and the intimate pragmatics of making-do can be dashed by the harsh reality of racism, joblessness or police brutality. Anderson’s acute formal powers, however, give this condition a sort of nobility. The lone figures in Peter’s Back (2008), Peter’s Sitters II and Peter’s Sitters III (both 2009), look away demurely, displaying their napes to the barber. Yet, in looking away, these figures are also cryptograms. Anderson knows this room and these people – his father used to have is hair trimmed in similar digs – but the community of immigrants is a closed shop. Exile cannot be inherited. Sphinxes do not relinquish their secrets so easily.

Colin Perry

Paper Exhibition

Artists Space, New York, USA

Entering ‘Paper Exhibition’ at Artists Space is like taking a leap through a distorted looking glass - or better through the hole in one of Job Piston’s cocktail napkins Untitled (Etiquette) (2009), included here.

The maze-like collection of lost, found and made-up fragments and artifacts, all of which respond to cryptic narratives, is mesmerizing - but it can also be confusing. Lucky, then, that Judith Braun’s drawing The Line Between Fiction and Reality (2009) functions as a guide to the exhibition. Taking on the longest wall of the central space, Braun’s life-size charcoal work is a response to the curator’s challenge to draw a line between reality and fiction. The wall-piece was drawn simultaneously with both hands, tracing concentric movements that work outwards from an empty centre. Most of the works in the exhibition, about 37 in total, depending on who’s counting and who’s counted (works seem to have the tendency to appear and disappear over the course of the show), linger in a similarly indiscernible centre that evades taking shape. Though not all of the works here are on paper, the uniting quality is an ‘exchange between the literal and the literary’ - as the press release puts it. The divisions between substance and content are floating, as in Mark Geffriaud’s Small World Hobbies (2007), which presents a delicate origami recreation of a crumpled piece of paper next to its original.

‘Paper Exhibition’ is oddly reminiscent of Morten Harket’s struggle between physical and paper versions of himself in the video for a-ha’s ‘Take on Me’ (1985).  A similar struggle can be seen in Mariana Castillo Deball’s paper masks that adorn the other wall of Artists Space’s central room. Visage faux (2008) consists of 24 replicas of indigenous masks made from folded A4 paper. The masks originate from the pages of art history books, though all imagery has been erased to leave only blank pages and image credits. These pages were then folded to mimic the shapes of the masks they once depicted, and the captions that once classified the masks according to terms foreign to their original context define the abstract folds instead.

Shifting forms or the unstable essence of material is also a central idea in the work Trong Gia Nguyen’s Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Last Chapter-3062 words) (2009). Nguyen wrote the complete last chapter of the 1856 novel word for word on 3,062 kernels of rice. He collected the rice in a little bag that now hangs in the gallery space. The bag doubles as its own library card and has the information provided by a New York Library card imprinted on its surface. Like a Dadaist word game or the magnetic poetry on refrigerators, every movement of the bag creates thousands of new possible endings.

The collective speculation of curator, artists and visitors that characterizes ‘Paper Exhibition’ is united in a search for the missing masterpiece or the missing link, something that grants a fleeting yet momentarily satisfying feeling of comprehension and legitimization. However, this link might not even be missing, rather just masquerading as something else in the show. The show should possibly be viewed like Gareth Spor’s Dreamachine (2008), with closed eyes - and what counts is not the object but rather its reflection on the retina of the viewer. And to escape from the alluring abyss of confusion and bewilderment that opens up one needs only to open one’s eyes. Still, something stays behind, faintly staining our vision just like the repetitive sounds of Robert Rauschenberg erasing a de Kooning in Mario Garcia Torres’ recording An undisclosed month in 1953 (2007), which remains audible long after one has left the paper space.

Anna Gritz

Pavel Pepperstein

Regina Gallery, Moscow, Russia

To a wider public, Pavel Pepperstein is better known for his best-selling books – in 2007 Russian GQ named him writer of the year – than his art work, despite being the leading latter-day figure of the Moscow Conceptualist school co-founded by his father Viktor Pivovarov. Indeed, Pepperstein’s uproarious essay accompanying ‘Either/Or’, his recent exhibition at Regina Gallery, threatens to dwarf his so-called ‘National Suprematist’ paintings.

‘Either/Or’ is effectively a follow-on to 2007’s ‘Russia City’, in which Pepperstein warned that replacing old buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg threatened the ‘sense of Russia’. Instead he proposed that the cities were turned into ‘living museums’ and that a new capital should be built midway between the two. This was to include buildings with huge live heads on top, antennae for communicating with the dead, and a colossal floating ‘Mount Russ-more’, all illustrated in Pepperstein’s self-titled ‘psychedelic realist’ children’s book style.

Ludicrous as it was, ‘Russia City’ inspired as much awe as it did laughter, providing one of the most original artistic responses to Russia’s rapidly changing urban landscape. At ‘Either/Or’, however, the problem lies less with establishing where the joke ends than if it ends at all. A linguistic play on bizarre Russian political ideologies such as the nationalist-anarchist-punk National Bolshevism movement, Pepperstein’s modest aim is a ‘new representative style for Russia’, designed as a friendly riposte to both American culture and pop art. The exhibition consists of a series of brightly coloured canvases featuring a haphazard mix of Russian national symbols such as matryoshka dolls, pop art colours and markers of American capitalism, frequently interspersed with Kazimir Malevich’s all but obligatory black square.

Though Pepperstein’s deadpan hope is to see homes, public and private transport, businesses and Russian culture festivals ‘nationally suprematized’, his real achievement here is to have brought the Conceptualist play on Suprematism full circle. Where artists like Nikita Alekseev inverted Malevich’s desire to free the image from representations of reality by opposing it to official Soviet images, invoking the black square as a national representative style not so much completes it as confounds it.

This could have been excellent cause for reflection on the exploitation of images in contemporary society, were the rest of Pepperstein’s ideas not so blatantly and deliberately silly – starting with having a national representative style in the first place. Pepperstein makes the odd claim that, since Suprematism is too ascetic a style to find overseas approval, it’s necessary to add elements taken from Russian art nouveau to confer ‘the aura of a Russian holiday’ and rococo cockleshell spirals to form an ‘ecological matrix, ending opposition between earth and space.’ All this is too vague to make its execution coherent, seemingly encompassing any Russian or American culture joke for its own sake. Most often these are simply tired, from the old gag about Russia being the homeland of elephants to uninspired renderings of dollars as snakes and a man eating the Apple Computer logo.

Still, a few are clever enough for a first-glance chuckle. The eponymous painting contrasting a black square crushing a blood-spurting Campbell’s soup can is, if nothing else, a witty literalization of Suprematism, while The Birth of Hollywood (all works 2008) parodies the famous scene from The Battleship Potemkin (1925), replacing the baby careening down the Odessa steps in a carriage with a black square. Some others, however, come across as weak, shallow and cheap, the main culprits being Obama-Mama’s black woman in Russian peasant dress and Are you afraid off’s [sic] gauche invocation of 9/11.

Ultimately ‘Either/Or’ is far less creatively ambitious than ‘Russia City’. Neither the threat pop art poses nor whatever relevance it may have to Russian culture is clear; in any case it is a much less interesting target than Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s all-powerful mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Cossack runs this home: painted in the same way as most of the ‘Russia City’ works, the solitary figure dancing the kazachok looks practically joyless, while the sort of horizon that Pepperstein has filled with what he calls ‘mountain-skyscrapers’ or a ‘Sphere of Russian Spirituality’ is troublingly empty. It’s hard to see an artist as imaginative and versatile as Pepperstein running out of ideas, but compared with so much of his previous work, ‘Either/Or’ can’t help but come across as a mediocre sequel.

Max Seddon

Leon Vranken

Stella Lohaus Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium

After having seen Belgian artist Leon Vranken’s first solo show, a variation of a Sol LeWitt sentence came to mind: artists are artists rather than home decorators, they leap to conclusions that mere tastefulness cannot reach. Here, the artist did leap.

Vranken had previously been known for intricately made and expertly skilled 3-D trompe l’oeil replicas, often of furniture or other household objects (he is a trained cabinet-maker). Sometimes these are identical twins of existing objects, at other times – as in a series of glass showcases – they involve precise geometric ‘ruptures’ in the structure, that is, parts cut out and protruding or recessing, as if a time-space fissure had occurred. Objects of that kind were also on display at Stella Lohaus – for example the wooden replica of a hi-fi speaker, cut into slices as if chopped by an uncannily precise machine, with the layers separated and exposed by thin wooden spacers; or the kinds of wooden trestles used for impromptu desks, but of an unusually smooth wood quality. But all of these objects were cast to be serving a ‘higher’ cause here.

Upon entering, the very act of entering becomes part of the piece: one has to go through a tiny wooden corridor built into the regular front of the backyard gallery space. At the end of it, there is what at first looks like a swing-door (that is, without a knob), but instead of moving sideways, it recedes like a drawer or a secret entrance; as you slip in, at first you only see an empty space. Once inside it becomes apparent that a whole set of objects is piled up behind that backwards-moving door, all of them placed on a rail dolly, in a way that allows the whole set-up to be pushed backwards before it automatically moves forward again to close the entrance off. In fact, every time the door opens, a paint roller, precariously balanced at the end of the conglomerate and dipped in green paint, rolls across a small area of a wooden plank leaning against the back wall, thus turning each visitor into a mechanical painter by default.

Vranken could have just displayed his well-crafted objects – which also include basic, painstakingly precisely constructed geometric objects such as a triangle, a sphere and a cube – in the usual way, that is, elegantly spread them throughout the space. That way they might have fallen flat though, becoming merely ‘good design’, as Clement Greenberg so disparagingly called Minimal Art. By ‘degrading’ the individual objects to elements of a hilariously dramatic construction, he rescues them from precisely that destiny; ‘piling up’ is shown to be a convincing alternative to the minimalist trick of serialization. This strategy recalls Hague Yang’s storage piece (2005), a conglomerate of previous works forming a new piece or installation, born out of necessity (the itinerant Yang had a storage problem at the time the piece was created).

So-called Rube Goldberg machines perform a simple task (e.g. painting a small area) in a very complex way. Through turning his eye-deceiving objects into elements of such a machine, it’s a little as if Vranken had fused two strands in Fischli/Weiss’s work into one: their trompe l’oeil polyurethane everyday objects and the absurd chain reaction featured in their famous film Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go, 1987). Maybe most importantly, Vranken created a succinct and funny allegory for the anxiety of the first solo show: the artist piling up his work against the door – another slapstick trope – as if trying to prevent the audience from entering and witnessing his possible failure. Which is the ultimate slapstick trope: turning failure into triumph.

Jörg Heiser

Raphael Danke

Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz/Basel, Switzerland

‘Filer à l’anglaise’, the title of Raphael Danke’s current show at Kunsthaus Baselland, is the French foil to the English expression, ‘To take French leave’, which implies the act of leaving unannounced - perhaps ‘in the dark of the night’, as it were.  It’s an altogether apt description of the Berliner’s Surrealist-invested process - and his work on view, which includes collages, a slide show, sculptures, a curious couch, and a disfigured Victoria’s Secret bag - which invariably begins with the human form and then deletes or distorts it, turning what is left into form alone. The effect is that the body haunts each finished piece like a dislocated ghost or an absent cipher, asserting its relevance while at the same time being nowhere (or only partially) in sight.

Collage, with its cuts and elisions, is the perfect medium for such disappearing acts, and Danke’s Baselland show - his first at a European institution - features two distinct series in the format. The first (including works from 2003 to the present) mines the fashion magazine spreads of amateur collagists everywhere, but the artist upends this all-too-familiar goldmine by excising the models at the centre of them. With the lovely, attenuated female forms gone, the collages become studies in the often empty and moody atmospherics that remain. Long, svelte vertical cuts make their way up the center of each image, sewing together shadows, patterns and the odd chair or stool. In some, the play of shadows and the willowy curve of the cuts evoke Edward Weston’s modernist nudes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Tina Modotti. But in the most intriguing works, a shock of hair emerges from the centre seam. Missing a body, the hair - frizzy, isolated, freaky - is weirdly compelling; it plays witty counterpoint to the bland attractiveness of the ads themselves, offering itself like a funky fetish object come from more tepid environs. As a coda to the series, a slide-show of the excised models - each pasted in turn onto the far-out cover of the 1978 Stuart Holroyd book Great Mysteries: Mysteries of the Inner Self - seems unnecessary. As the slides cycled through the models, they began to sap the collages of their latent eroticism, turning them back into the static advertisements from which they came.

The next series of collages are strewn through a larger installation (Ansicht 1:1 (la différence), 2006), comprising white building blocks and a noirish pair of mens-size black-patent high heels, which simultaneously referenced one of Carl Andre’s brick floor works and Umberto Boccioni’s seminal 1913 Futurist painting, Dynamism of a Human Body. If the installation, with its allusions to both pure form and the clearly corporeal, was a bit forgettable, the collages that wound their way through it were not. For them, Danke dispensed with the fashion industry and took as his material elegant black and white photographs of ballet performances. In one, an inspired geyser of tutus and bodies rises from a pile of dancers in ecstatic plié. In another, a dancer en pointe offers up a burst of tulle in place of the top half of her body. In such works, it is clear that collage is the medium in which Danke excels - his juxtapositions seem inevitable but not showy, pleasurable but not pointedly so—yet this does not stop him exploring his chosen themes in other media.

Filer à l’anglaise (2008)

An eponymous series of sculptures from 2008 offers another take on physical disappearance, with all its erotic and fetishistic potential on full throttle. Russian dolls - the insides of which famously yield ever-smaller versions of the same form - are turned into burned-out husks that resemble claws or pseudo-African totems. The tall, slim pedestals on which they’re presented are shrouded in women’s pantyhose in various hues, with ladders running up their sides and feet left to lie limply on the floor beside. Danke’s preoccupation with a kind of caffeinated Surrealism was probably at its most evident here; yet no matter how pleasing the works, their obvious origin begged the question of what their dialogue with the earlier movement was achieving. Despite their wit and seriousness of intent, the works on view inched closer to homage than critique.

All, that is, but for the few odd-men-out works that opened the show - a couch, a bag, and a screen - which seemed themselves to act as humorous foils to Danke’s project. In line with the artist’s established theme of bodily vanishing, the couch - which greeted museum-goers like a genial slacker - was shrouded in a rainbow blanket that was ostensibly an image of the artist’s aura, with the artist’s aura-beaming visage removed.  Next to it, a Victoria’s Secret bag hung off the wall, featuring the outline of three Russian dolls cut into its shiny pink paper. Nearby, an austere geometric wood screen glared from its perch on the floor. The works, in their odd proximity to each other, seemed a little ridiculous, but in the end, the comic relief they provided seemed to at once add levity to Danke’s show and underscore its seriousness of purpose, by revealing just how far he’d go to make his point.

Quinn Latimer

Tala Madani

Pilar Corrias, London, UK

At first glance, Tala Madani’s paintings could be the work of an imaginative child who witnessed some kinky acts through the keyhole. But Madani’s simple, seemingly naïve style - a blend of lush expressionist painting and cartoonish drawing - belies an impressive range of hard-hitting topics. In ‘Dazzle Men’, her UK debut at Pilar Corrias, the Iranian-American artist deftly combines machismo and nationalism, arrogance and degradation, violence and homoerotic friendship. Her paintings of male group activities - featuring Middle Eastern men in absurd scenarios - have the pointed humour and intelligence of political satire, yet tinged with the bitterness of personal experience.

Madani’s small-scale paintings play upon the concept of dazzle camouflage, a technique adopted during WWI by the Allied forces.  Building upon the Cubist aesthetic, dazzle camouflage entailed obscuring the shape of submarines and naval ships in a mass of garish colours and patterns. ‘Razzle Dazzle’, as this technique was dubbed, sought to confuse and distract the enemy rather than hide a target from view; if art had long served as a tool for politics and war, it now became a literal weapon.

Under Madani’s paintbrush, dazzle camouflage makes a comeback, but now it is the human body - the chosen weapon of the terrorist - that requires disguise. In Man in Cape (all works 2008), two men kneel on the floor as a third covers them in stripes of paint, which pour forth like vomit. Dressed only in white underwear, the two victims submit willingly, their gaping mouths and thick buffoonish features signaling idiocy. The absurdity of the scene distracts us from its violence and degradation, but only momentarily.

Homoeroticism joins this potent mix in Becoming Dazzled. Here, a black-clothed man bends back the legs of the pliant figure lying in front of him, whose body has been painted and positioned to resemble a diagram hanging on the wall.  Thick lines of black slash across the prone man’s body, appearing particularly aggressive in contrast to the pale pink and yellow washes in the background. There is nothing sympathetic or respectful in Madani’s portrayal of the male world - derision pervades.

Throughout Madani’s images of ‘dazzle men’ runs a sense of macho coercion and a (corresponding) mindless compliance.  In her large-scale works, this undercurrent grows more explicit. Everybody Wants to be Chinese depicts a mass of men who distort their faces or hide behind masks, melding together in their common desire to look identical; while in Red Stripes with Stain, crawling figures with urine-stained bottoms form an anonymous procession. The abstraction of individual characteristics becomes expressed in formal abstraction.  Madani’s paintings are dominated by bold patterns and flatly minimalist compositions, which illustrate a near-perfect command of line.

Presented in the sleek Rem Koolhaas-designed space of Pilar Corrias’ new gallery, the exhibition belongs to a fresh wave of Middle Eastern art. As the mammoth survey show opening this week at the Saatchi Gallery noisily proclaims, Middle Eastern art has apparently changed: sensitive subjects are no longer taboo and traditional styles have been cast aside. Madani’s work, which also appears in the Saatchi show, certainly exemplifies this shift, focusing on the human body in the context of both the suicide bomber and homoeroticism within the Islamic community. The cool intelligence of ‘Dazzle Men’ both merits and demands our full attention. 

Katherine Holmgren

Tobias Buche, Neil Campbell, Ulrike Heise & Dan Peterman

Klosterfelde, Berlin, Germany

‘Less is more’, said Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. ‘Less is a bore’, said Robert Venturi. Less provokes startling interpretative overreach, says the press release for Klosterfelde’s untitled new exhibition. Tasked with describing a strikingly stark four-person group show, the document charts an ‘overwhelming effect’ in one case, a ‘constant raising of questions’ in another, and an undeniable ‘sense of cruelty’ in a third. Not unimpressive achievements!

The artists in question are Neil Campbell, Tobias Buche and Ulrike Heise. The silent fourth part belongs to Dan Peterman, who contributes the first work that visitors see. His minimalist sculpture (pictured above) – a quadratic column of vertical stakes – stands in the gallery atrium like a sentry, cutting off the view of the room, and threatening vague violence. The press release reports that ‘the present arrangement of the tower, the artist insists, is not a supposed representation of its final form or purpose, but rather a reference to continuing (possibilities of) transformation.’ The idea seems simple, if not simplistic: what stands for the moment as a tower of power might be easily reassembled into some more benign form.

Peterman’s stakes are made from recycled plastic, a fact which grants the press release leave to discern in them natural themes. A more direct treatment of this misunderstood topic is given by Ulrike Heise’s unblinkingly viscous video documentation of a slug slowly killing and eating an earthworm. Partly squamous, partly rugose, the ooze that this operation produces recalls H.P Lovecraft in its forensic depiction of alien substances. The intermittent sound of children laughing on the audio track dryly emphasize horror.

The overwhelming effect claimed by the press release belongs to Neil Campbell’s two massive black circles. Painted directly onto the walls of the gallery, the shapes are, admittedly, oddly unsettling. Reminiscent in some sense of an oversized pair of speakers, the shapes harbour a peculiar relationship to the space around them, for mathematical reasons remaining unclear.

Tobias Buche’s work seems to me the most interesting of the quartet. Sharing the second room of the gallery with Campbell’s wall-mural ghetto blaster, his contribution consists of four chipboards of scrappy found images, mixed with his own photos. Mainly black-and-white and printed on paper, the images seem like remainders, concerned less with depicting something than in marking a moment, or perhaps pressing a button. The stress is on portraiture, but applied from the side: individual subjects tend to be off-guard and unbalanced, going somewhere, involved in other things, lacking a clear or direct relationship to the camera. A leg comes through a ceiling in one case, in another, a man face down on a desk bears a cheek covered in pen scrawls. Elsewhere, more surreal and political and satirical images jostle, pursuing some cause of elusive significance in a world of contingent and tattered connections.

Buche’s low-key presentation recalls Wolfgang Tillmans, but is less sentimental, and I think less contrived. Whereas Tillmans retains the figure of the heroic photographer, recording the vanishing summer of a still-meaningful world, Buche’s agenda is colder, more realist, and in some ways, more moving.

Daniel Miller

Kara Uzelman

Sommer & Kohl, Berlin, Germany

Dr. Joseph Cavor was the scientist hero of H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon. The Cavorist Projects (2009) is a site-specific installation by Canadian artist Kara Uzelman. While the former discovered a miraculous anti-gravity element, named it Cavorite and used it to build a homemade space-vehicle, the latter is devoted to an imaginary movement of acolytes who followed in Cavor’s starry wake.

Uzelman’s installation is nominally made up of the contraptions and detritus left behind by successive generations of this movement in the course of their researches. The dominant items are sculptures, but the installation also includes photographs, a video work, and an assorted collection of documents. These huddle together into one corner of the room, in a sort of altar-archive hybrid.

The contents of this corner (collectively named Cavorist Archive, 2009) are sprawling and various. Small tsotchke-like pieces – a Canadian dollar, a matchbook-sized sarcophagus filled with dice, a whistle, a kind of toy horseshoe and a glass jar filled with hair – rest on a cloth-bound copy of Nikola Tesla’s autobiography, turned to the chapter ‘The Art of Telautomatics’. Pinned to the wall, an illegibly signed hand-written letter reports that researches are entering a critical stage. Nearby, a title page snipped from the Wells novel salutes the Cavorists’ illustrious inspiration while another page taken from G.H. Dury’s forgotten book of cartography The Face of Earth (1916) bears a skilled pencil portrait of anarchist ‘Red’ Emma Goldman. ‘If we wanted, we could change the face of the Earth,’ reads the slogan on a hand-drawn circus poster.

Uzelman’s mixed-media corner shows how diverse materials – apparently sourced from garage sales – can be rendered coherent by means of a strong central narrative. Stretched between science and fiction, in this case the tale is recounted in Cavorist terms, though the structure of the story seems more general. A mythologized founding father; a utopian quest for a philosopher’s stone – it is hard not to hear echoes here of some of the other ideological isms which animated the twentieth century.

Uzelman’s sculptures also sound these echoes. In the centre of the room, a cone of magnetized metal (Magnetic Stalactite, 2009) hangs from the gallery’s ceiling. Individual components include metal spoons, forks and coins. Framed photographs on the wall (for example, Centre for Research, Observation and Technology – Cavorist Settlement, Yukon, 1993, 2009) document expeditions and field-work. A cheap television set, resting on a wooden log, plays a flickering video (An Outline of the Cavorist Universe, Volume 1, 2009) and pumps eerie music into the room. Nearby, two stained glass vitrines (Observation Tank A and Observation Tank B, 2009), the neck of one stuffed with twigs and the other with fabric, register the existence of obscure experiments. The feel of these pieces is occult and cargo-cultish. The magnetic stalactite suggests everyday life swirling around a charged central well, while the use of natural materials elsewhere gives off a bricolagical quality. The photographs record how stories can act to propel their partisans to the end of the earth. In all cases, the main point seems to be that quixotic enterprises organize collectives around them.

The final sculpture in the exhibition is an old-style reel-to-reel recording device, attached to an apparently non-functional microphone. The device comes loaded with a tape – an interview with quackish anti-gravity researcher John Hutchison, recounting outlandish stories of government interference and military surveillance. The tape seems to have been treated, and swiftly degenerates into dubby echos and abstract noise. The elusive Cavorite possessed anti-gravitational properties; the search for Cavorite was anti-entropic – and entropy always wins. A project that starts in earnest austerity descends into magic tricks, like the magnetic shoes (Magnetic Shoes, 2009) that Uzelman has climbing the radiator. 

Daniel Miller

Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of Cool

The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA

Barkley L. Hendricks has emerged as a key influence on a generation of emerging artists, such as Rashid Johnson and Kehinde Wiley, whose recent show at Deitch Projects ran concurrently with Hendricks’ current retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem.  Perhaps for this reason, a fresh eye is being cast over his body of work, with particular focus on his paintings.

While ‘Birth of Cool’ (which is touring from the Nasher Museum at Duke University) includes some recent, small-scale landscapes, produced between 2000 and 2007, the bulk of the exhibition concentrates on Hendricks’ signature portraits from the 1960s and ‘70s. The earlier paintings, many of which were included in his 1980 exhibition at the Studio Museum, propose a clearly defined cultural and theoretical task: recontextualizing classical painting techniques within the context of Black American culture in the wake of the civil rights movement. Figures and fabrics are painted in styles reminiscent of Renaissance painting, but are bristling with contemporary attitude and dropped into a monochromatic background of decidedly Pop flatness.  Lawdy Mama (1969), for example, combines references to Nina Simone with Byzantine religious imagery.

That conceptual structure is the frame within which Hendricks’ extraordinary skills in painting and portraiture are presented to the viewer.  Hendricks has a strong feel for the posture and physique of his subjects, who are often depicted with an almost sculptural awareness - a sensation most apparent in works such as Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris (1972), which features a young man in a dramatic red coat, replicated in triplicate. 

Hendricks is also a brilliant colourist, and his bold use of colour adds to the graphic juxtaposition of figure and ground.  The exhibition opens with What’s Going On (1974), a group portrait that might variously be reduced to a minimalist white-on-white composition, a painterly reference to Whistler, a political statement, or a nod to Marvin Gaye’s eponymous 1971 album.  Blood (Donald Formey) (1975) is an equally graphic image of a man clothed in red, against a crimson backdrop.

Perhaps most striking is Hendricks’ skill in depicting textiles, which directly invokes Renaissance painters such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt.  Each painting can be conceived of as a study in social and personal character through the portal of fashion, and actively posits style as central to social identity; what makes the portraits pop is Hendricks’ ability to make the clothes as fascinating as the people wearing them. Looking at these paintings at this particular juncture has something of an added charge, if only because they represent so acutely the act of self-definition that was critical in the post civil rights era.  Hendricks concentrates on the public act of self-imagining; it’s his skill as a painter that allows for what might be described as the painterly equivalent of Roland Barthes’ photographic punctum - an inexplicable charge that makes the public front presented by each subject not only more persuasive, but also more personally moving.

Katie Kitamura

R.H. Quaytman

Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, USA

In 1939, R.H. Quaytman’s grandfather and great-grandfather were driving back from the New York World’s Fair when they were suddenly crushed to death by an oncoming train. The accident was caused by a malfunctioning railway light. Much later, Quaytman tracked down the story in New York newspaper The Sun and used it as the basis for her 2001 exhibition at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, ‘Chapter 1: The Sun’. The reaction is characteristic: hers is a deliberate practice with a strong sense of the past (all four of her parents were artists) and of community (she was the director of the collaborative artist-run gallery Orchard for three years). Likewise, the tragedy, with its flickering lights in darkness, attests to the nature of Quaytman’s metaphorical systems, in which vision and disappearance, or blindness and insight, are inevitably intertwined.

These elements - the complications of tradition, an intimate and opulent solar weave - are significantly elaborated in ‘Chapter 12: iamb’ at Miguel Abreu. The paintings, all silkscreen on wood, derive from a very simple motif: a painting lit by a lamp, from which comes the idea of the blind-spot. Sometimes the theme is fairly literal - four are titled Chapter 12: iamb (2008), each depicting a painting and a lamp - but there are also formal variations on the theme: sometimes the bulb yields a fuzzy circular glow; sometimes a halo, from which soft light falls; and in one case the verticality of the lamp and painting is dramatized by a tall acidic streak against the otherwise subtle palette. In paintings like Chapter 12: iamb, (lateral inhibitions in the perceptual field) (2008), no lamp is depicted, just a shimmering grid: the blind-spot here is optical - the viewer is unable to bring the grid into focus, not without flickering and ghosts. On the other hand, Chapter 12: iamb (Fresnell lens) (2008) does not emphasize the disruption or inconsistency of vision so much as the sparkle of revelation, achieved with a sprinkling of real diamond dust.

The more one looks, the more intricate and self-referential Quaytman’s theme becomes. Motifs, even whole paintings, reappear: Chapter 12: iamb, (lateral inhibitions in the perceptual field) (2008), for example, is vertical. In another painting, however, one sees that first painting again, only rotated 90 degrees and framed by a white border. In Chapter 12: iamb (blind smile), it is again rotated, marked by lamplight in the upper right corner, and held aloft, or at least cryptically pointed to, by a shirtless bearded man (Dan Graham, actually). The addition of two smaller, hand-painted oils from another, earlier series increases the complication. The first, Chapter 2: Lødz Poem—Caption b (2002), literally points towards the paintings that follow; Limbo of Vanity (2003) reiterates the solar metaphor with its concentric circles above a black field, painted with spinel black, an ultra-absorbent pigment invented for the stealth bomber.

The big blind-spot here is painting - a question, or void, that one can only circle around: painting as (absent) father and bright and blinding sun. Quaytman has emphasized the absolute centrality of painting to her development as an artist, her desire to ‘maintain and simultaneously disrupt painting’s absolute presence’, as well as the medium’s ‘arrogance’ and ‘ego’, its foundational and even prophetic efficacy. Even when working as a photographer, Quaytman had painting on her mind - or, more precisely, she picked up the camera as a path towards painting, to better ‘understand the symbolic space of painting.’ It is therefore fitting to evoke an image from the history of painting: Quaytman’s motif - the painting lit by the lamp - recalls Georges de la Tour, who attained, with candlelight, and especially the effects of a hidden or obscured candle, an art of occasionally elfin abstract delicacy, as well as a reverential quality that is never histrionic. With ‘Chapter 12: iamb’, Quaytman could be said to achieve much the same thing. 

David Lewis

Superflex

South London Gallery, London, UK

In August 1999, a group led by sheep farmer and agricultural activist José Bové dismantled a soon-to-be-opened McDonald’s in the southern French town of Millau, depositing the site’s construction materials in front of the town hall.  In May 2000, May Day demonstrators in London smashed in the windows of the McDonald’s on the Strand.  No single group claimed responsibility for the action.  In late 2008, Danish group Superflex created an exact replica of a McDonald’s in a film studio in Bangkok, and flooded it with water.

Superflex have long taken a multifaceted approach to questioning conditions of production and consumption.  They’ve created games, books, and products like ‘Free Beer’, a
misleadingly named creation modeled on Creative Commons and open source software with the tagline, ‘free in the sense of freedom, not in the sense of free beer.’ These projects are designed to blur the lines of ownership and agency by prodding at their limitations, as if Greenpeace started staging more Fluxus-style events. More recently, the group have turned to film to create a sort of voyeuristic branch of Fight Club’s ‘Project Mayhem’, enacting poetic scenes of anarchic destruction in a series of slick video works. Burning Car (2008) took on the presentation of car advertisements, with its close-ups and smooth panning shots encircling the machine as it sits in an empty, clean generic space.  Only this car is on fire, and for ten minutes we watch the paint bubble, glass melt and tyres burst.

Flooded McDonald’s (2009), Superflex’s new film presented at South London Gallery, makes use of the editing and camerawork of the Hollywood horror genre.  Think The Poseidon Adventure (1972) via the suggestive absences of Val Lewton’s The Cat People (1942): we are trapped in the bland space of a fast food restaurant we all recognize, when water begins streaming in at all sides from an unknown source.  The viewer is the only witness to the event, among the abandoned burgers and fries still gleaming with fat.  A rush of disgust and delight comes with the rate at which the place fills up, cups and trays slipping into the the over-crowded slush of disintgrating wrappers, discarded Happy Meal toys and half-eaten buns.  There is some humour in Superflex’s attention to the details of the disaster, but there are no surprises in this film; after 15 minutes, as the title predicts, it really is flooded.

The film almost balances its adolescent wish-fulfillment with the ambiguity of the gesture, weighing its blatant anti-globalization dreams with the ecological portends of unstoppable rising waters.  The source of the threat in this horror film is unseen, unknown; and though there is no direct moralizing or finger-pointing here, it doesn’t feel far off.  Superflex attempt to show the eerie and threatening waters that surround us in global politics and ecology, but the film has the air of a novelty act arrived too late.  Being at once a pseudo-anarchist coup and a blunt environmental warning, the water in Flooded McDonald’s isn’t really all that deep.

Chris Fite-Wassilak

Political / Minimal

Kunstwerke, Berlin, Germany

Despite its solipsistic claims, classical minimalism has always evoked something outside of itself. Eva Hesse saw the floors of the gas chambers in Carl Andre’s works, for example, while Tony Smith talked about his sculptures as silent aggressors in hostile lands. In ‘Political/Minimal’ at the Kunstwerke, curator Klaus Biesenbach seeks to survey a recent tendency that adds another dimension to the reduced formal language of minimal art. Comprising 32 works, the exhibition presents the minimal form as being mined with political content that is, under closer inspection, often - though not always - revealed in a shocking twist. Works like Teresa Margolles’ Entierro/Burial (1999), in which the familiar form of a concrete cube lures in the visitor, while the accompanying wall-text shatters expectations by exposing the object’s true nature - the concrete cube encloses the corpse of a prematurely born baby.

Similarly, Seth Price’s Untitled Multiple, 2004 (2004), a shiny stack of black DVDs, changes its face once one finds out that the discs store footage depicting a series of executions of hostages being executed. Likeminded approaches can be found in the works of Terence Koh, Adel Abdessemed, Mona Hatoum, and Damian Hirst, all of whom are included in the show. As a strategy, the twist can have a very powerful effect, but in ‘Political / Minimal’ it is an overused formula, the effect of which is weakened with each reiteration. The individual works disappear within the curatorial premise and lose the impact they may have had elsewhere.

The more captivating pieces here succeed less because of the juxtaposition of abstract form and political content and more because of their subtle approach. Less outspoken and direct, these works creep into consciousness by managing to capture an essence of political consequence.

Tino Sehgal’s Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000) is performed by an actor who seems to be crawling in pain, disturbing one’s visit by silently agitating over an unknown cause. Reminiscent of Bruce Nauman’s studio explorations, the body on the floor is assessing not only its physical situation within the exhibition space but its existence in general. Without any outspoken political references the work manages to convey a tone that acutely matches current political sentiments. The political content of the work is not so much stressed as transmitted through images of absurdity and despair.  Similarly, in Francis Alÿs’ video, Paradox of Praxis (1997), the absurdity and unreasonable nature of the action portrayed mirrors our frustration with the administration of the everyday. In his tongue-in-cheek spin on the tale of Sisyphus Alÿs painfully pushes a big block of ice down the streets of Mexico City, the heat and the friction causing the ice to melt to the size of an ice cube that he can kick it in front of him until all that is left is a puddle of water. Also striking are the oil tanks by the xurban_collective: like dying bodies of prehistoric animals they lay on the floor of the exhibition space, rusting giants from a different time. These custom-built containers were taken from trucks used to smuggle oil across the border between Turkey and Iraq. Now useless, they can be found decaying along the sides of the motorways.

What the exhibition ends up proving is that, even without straightforwardly literal imagery, minimal forms have always been engaged with the political. Nevertheless, the strongest political statements are often the works that avoid clear articulation, choosing to employ subtlety, vagueness and ambiguity in favour of the choreographed response. 

Anna Gritz

PREDRIVE: After Technology

The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, USA

It is a fine moment to mount a show like ‘PREDRIVE: After Technology’. While our culture fully expects screens and clicks and immediate information, the economic engine behind all that newness has slowed, stuttered, or maybe even stopped - at least for a while. Global markets are frantic and our once-great growth rates are nil or negative. So what comes next? What do we do when the ‘wow’ is gone?

This is the central question of ‘PREDRIVE’, a group show at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, guest-curated by Melissa Ragona, a professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University. Works by Takeshi Murata, Brody Condon, Gretchen Skogerson, Antoine Catala and the collective Paper Rad seek out juxtapositions, loops and forms that are unwavering, if varyingly successful, in their quest to ferret out a place for new media in an age in which technology’s magical newness has been lost.

Paper Rad’s The Dark Side of Light (2008) quite fittingly functions as the show’s foyer. Brightly patterned knitted blankets hang like primordial pixels in the space’s windows and announce that what lies behind them is a techno clubhouse that pits the matte form and function of some not-too-distant ‘then’ against the high gloss of now. Past the giant DayGlo hand, the compulsive doodles, the clear plastic sacks of stuffed animals and the flat-panel video screens vibrating with what feels like every awful gif animation, collaged with what one might find by searching YouTube for ‘lonely’, then set to yappy dance music, there is a pile of decidedly out-dated technological apparatus: Wood-paneled speakers; 1980s-grey plastic amplifiers; cassette tapes; a Walkman; a video rhythmically plodding through its cuts; and a soft synthesizer groove.

In the next room, Takeshi Murata’s hand-drawn animation Homestead Grays (2008) follows circles as they bumble their way into ‘U’ shapes, then squares, then folding boxes, balloons, fireworks, Alice in Wonderland-puffs of hookah smoke and more token psychedelia. As the animation builds in busyness, it starts to zoom in on itself, adding a sudden sense of perspective to the work. What was once an animated Rube Goldberg machine, busy changing lines to whirls and wonders through simple gestures strung together in convoluted ways, becomes a documentary on the lever, the cog, the pulley, or some other essential parts of the process. Taken together, these two pieces make a strong argument about the weird relationship that new media has to itself: no matter the current shines and flashes, the obsolescence built into a technology will, over time, wash and dye the work a drastically different shade.

Gretchen Skogerson takes up the same theme in her marvelously literal Switch (2008). Hung above a curved wall are a variety of ultraviolet bulbs that cycle through a series of combinations, casting the viewer, the wall, and the delicate lines that run down it in different spectrums of blacklight. The transitions between the hues are loaded with possibility, awkwardness and a fluorescent flicker that reminds one of just how tenuous the magic of technology can be: that ‘wow’ won’t always be enchanting, which is something worth remembering these days.

Graham T. Beck

Three by Three (3)

Yinka Shonibare’s New Space, London, UK

The third edition of ‘Three by Three’, a series of exhibitions taking place in the shell of Yinka Shonibare’s studio-to-be in Hackney, reminds us of two things that the art world has – at least until very recently – tended to forget: that a group show doesn’t need to be crowded with curatorial babble to offer a dense and rich experience, and that a lot can be done with very little. The principle of Shonibare’s latest venture is simple: every other month, he chooses three selectors (artists, curators, writers and his studio manager), who, in turn, invite three artists they like. It’s worth pausing on the word for a second, because if it seems obvious that exhibition-makers should like the people and practices they work with, it’s also one of the job’s great taboos, and some curators would sooner die than admit that what they do is driven by taste and friendship rather than some profundity of Foucault or Agamben.

None of that at ‘Three by Three’; no philosophers, no woolly theme, not even named curatorial endorsements. The names of the selectors (for this show Ruth Beale, Maria Marshall and JJ Charlesworth) are not attached to the names of the artists. Here it’s not about who chooses who, it’s about, as Shonibare says, looking at the stuff and enjoying yourself. And there is plenty to see in the semi-derelict rooms of the two-storey building overlooking the canal. Bjørn Venø’s wallpaper of photographic self-portraits of the artist in various degrees of undress is certainly one of the highlights. Caveman, Jesus, Nordic god or masturbating teenager, the character he enacts is as cathartic for the viewer as it might be for the artist, proposing a liberating, alternative male role model, one that fully embraces its contradictions and childishness. Other highlights include Brigida Mendes’ quirky black and white photographs, which disturbingly combine (and perhaps compare) the body of an elderly woman with minimalist units and assemblages, and Michael Pinsky’s wall of chemists’ neon green crosses.

The space doesn’t only showcase underrepresented artists; ‘Three by Three (2)’ featured a bingo with art works as prizes, and before I left the opening of this show I was told that I was about to miss karaoke and a drag act. The project is almost as social as it is artistic: once Shonibare’s studio is installed in the building, the venture will continue, not with exhibitions, but as a salon with talks and events. ‘We’ve got a hundred chairs’ says Shonibare, ‘we’ll be alright.’ Artist-run spaces and self-initiated curatorial experiments have long been a crucial part of London’s artistic life, sadly outshone in the last few years by art-market bling. The opening of this new space – alongside (to pick just three) Wolfgang Tillman’s Between Bridges, The Hex and FormContent – revives London’s tradition of the alternative, and reaffirms that the future of its art scene doesn’t lie in the deep pockets of its wealthy dealers, but in the energy of its artists.

Coline Milliard

Matt Saunders

Andreas Grimm, Munich, Germany

‘And now her face is slowly going white.’ So wrote Bertolt Brecht in his 1927 poem ‘Ballad of the Love-Death’, in which he describes a couple’s slow dissolve. That line, with its clear cinematic tenor, hovers like a spectral banner over Matt Saunders’ exhibition of new works at Andreas Grimm. Composed of mysteriously incandescent black-and-white portraits of Hertha Thiele—the German cult actress (1908–1984) who has long fascinated the American-born, Berlin-based artist—the show comprises both an extensive portrait of a single subject and an exploration of the medium of film itself.

Saunders’ photographic works use Thiele’s few films as their source material, including her work from the early Weimar period: the groundbreaking lesbian film Mädchen in Uniform (1931) and the formally experimental, Communist-themed Kuhle Wampe, made by Brecht himself in 1932. Taking frames from these films, the artist drew ‘film negatives’ with ink wash on small sheets of transparent Mylar. These negatives were then printed as large black-and-white photographs, in which the dark lines of ink became light sources, while any uninked surface is turned into a sea of black. The results of the hand-drawn negatives blown up on a photo enlarger are mostly stunning. Seen as an installation, the portraits appear like ghostly apparitions animating the gallery walls. Up close, a thin stroke of black ink becomes a wide swath of solarized gray, burning out into white at the edges. A miniscule black dot becomes a luxurious pool of ever-paler gradients. That solarized images first became a popular in the ’30s is yet another way that this body of work pulls the viewer into that decade.

Saunders favours Thiele in classic poses suggestive of pathos and emotional distance, which reminds that her films were made not so long after the silent-film era, when dramatic body language was de rigueur; eyes are downcast, chins tilted slightly away, shoulders turned in. In the moody Hertha Thiele (Mirror Scene) (2008), the actress shows us her back as she fixes her hair. Thiele’s hands are vague silver planes, infinitely suggestive and satisfyingly abstract. The mirror in which she watches herself is reduced to two thin shards of white, nearly swallowed by the black flood consuming each figure. That dark, ever-encroaching ground is a neat metaphor for both film and history—the explicit and implicit themes at work here—which reliably subsume their subjects with unfathomable intensity.

Some of the most formally pleasing, if politically disquieting, moments in the show are images of Thiele taken from Mädchen in Uniform, in which she wears a striped dress with a loose bow at the neck. With its long, shimmering ribbons of luxurious black and white, the dress is absurdly pleasurable—until it evokes the striped uniforms of the camps, and then of Thiele’s own courting by the Nazis (which she rebuffed, resulting in her long exile from the film industry in Switzerland). But Saunders’ images don’t only look backward. They also variously recall contemporary work based on photographic sources, namely Gerhard Richter’s seminal ‘18 October 1977’ (1988) series and Marlene Dumas’s cool, addictive portraits — not to mention less politically weighty fare such as Elizabeth Peyton’s slouchy portraiture. In a few works, in fact, the closeness to Dumas is uncanny—and perhaps it’s here where the trouble occurs.

With works so invariably attractive, there is the tendency for easy love and easier leaving. And it feels as though this thought may have worried the artist himself, driving him to complicate his process, and dress his ever-beautiful work in anxiously conceptual clothing. This is nowhere more apparent than in the exhibition’s title, ‘Censor’s Cuts’, a reference to both the censored versions of Thiele’s films and the images on view in the gallery, which Saunders chose not to include in his previous show of Thiele-related pieces in the Statements section of Art Basel last year. The parallel, however, doesn’t really work (it’s a bit grandiose, to say the least), and it feels like a conceit Saunders doesn’t need. The photographic works stand on their own, painting complicated, illumined portraits of both their subject, an uncommonly interesting actress, and of their maker, a fan in the most dedicated sense.

Quinn Latimer

Uriel Orlow

Blancpain Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland

Uriel Orlow is best known for his contemplative video works that investigate the roles that language, image and memory play in structuring private and collective experience. However, ‘In These Great Times’, his new exhibition at Blancpain Art Contemporain, puts the medium of drawing centre-stage, in the form of a group of 35 marker-pen portraits (’Oddly, one lived the war in one`s mind more intensively than in a country at war’, 2008) of men and women who clearly belong to another age. Because some of them - such as Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein and James Joyce - are immediately recognizable, it is inevitably frustrating that the others, apparently also part of this intellectual elite, elude the naming process. Orlow`s decisions to make the drawings in a small format (28 x 38 cm) and with the graphic sobriety of marker-pen enhance this shift between the tangible and the fragile: whilst encouraging a sense of intimacy with the subject matter, the size and medium render the faces impossible to grasp.

Although some crossed paths elsewhere, the figures featured in the series all frequented Zurich’s Café Odeon, the famous haunt of intellectuals, radicals, asylum seekers and artists. Orlow extends and intensifies his investigation of whether the café`s history can be told coherently with a number of other elements. A pile of newspapers at the base of the wall displaying the portraits is updated daily and opened at reports of conflicts from around the world. Referring indirectly to the involvement of many of the portrayed figures, such as Stefan Zweig and Mussolini, in the two world wars and the role of Café Odeon as a place of verbal exchange, this neat insertion of a contemporary element subtly questions the power of newspapers today to disseminate information.

One of the two videos, In These Great Times (2008), juxtaposes the café being prepared before and cleaned-up after opening hours with scenes of a wood, accompanied by the raucous sound of printing machines, referring to Austrian journalist Karl Kraus` description of the three hours it takes for a tree to be transformed into a newspaper (the title of the video is taken from a 1914 lecture by Kraus). The silent stories contained in the faces are thus fast-forwarded to the present, collapsing the hierarchy of time and opening anecdotal history and current affairs to new associations and chronologies.

Orlow creates images that challenge our desire for understanding and classifying the past and its relationship to the present. In focussing on the appearance and atmosphere of the Café Odeon - the curve of a wooden armchair, a chandelier, a marble tabletop - the video Ornament and Crime (2008) would have been anathema to architect Adolf Loos. His 1908 essay of the same name, in which Loos denounces ornament as a crime against aesthetics, was written in the period of utopian fervour that inspired many of the intellectuals who visited the café. In the context of the portraits, the video questions whether it is possible to unite the material facts of the place with the conversations, ideas and thoughts that occurred there.

‘In These Great Times’ asks whether history and memory should be understood less as being structured by time than as being rooted in a specific place and in the connections made by those present. It is the disparate nature of the project, employing different approaches to image-making, fragments of research and narratives that refuse to be brought together in a single story, that points to ways of translating rather than telling history. 

Felicity Lunn

Material Presence

176, London, UK

I seem to have been visiting a lot of shows after dark recently. Surprisingly often, this is quite appropriate: the limited hours of daylight and wintry weather outdoors naturally lend themselves to the exhibition of spooky art, of things that go bump and clatter in the night. The latest exhibition at 176, the former Methodist chapel now employed as an exhibition space by collector Anita Zabludowicz, seems to deliberately exploit these seasonal atmospheric conditions.

Even before the first art work comes into view, noises reminiscent of wind whistling through windows fill the gallery’s café space; not remembering any such exaggeratedly gusty weather on my way in, I imagine that the building itself had engendered its own microclimate.  I follow my ears past Katja Strunz’s wall-mounted sculpture Fall into Space (2008), through a door into the building’s main gallery (once the church’s nave), where a towering wood and scaffold construction looms out of the darkness, creaking and whirring with intermittent lights and sounds from within its planked interior. The installation, a specially commissioned work by Graham Hudson, is titled On Off (2008) – a curt description of its modus operandi, which simply involves a number of record players and lights switching themselves on, then quickly off again, apparently at random. The windy sound effects are produced by the records coming up to speed and immediately slowing down again, an effect that also allows disturbingly distorted snatches of voices and music to emerge from the hubbub.

As if that wasn’t unnerving enough (particularly in an unlit empty church at night), a winding and uneven staircase invites the viewer to ascend two storeys to a platform near the ceiling. Once entered, the construction becomes a berserk and disorienting environment, a skeletal and precarious house of horrors. With all its wires, bolts and electrical mechanisms exposed, it plays on the cinematic device so often used in scary movies: when the source of the eerie noise or ghostly apparition is revealed to be nothing more than a radio left on or a dust sheet in the breeze; rather than diffusing the initial sense of alarm, the hitherto innocuous object is imbued with a supernatural sense of foreboding.

I hasten next door, where James Ireland’s delicate assemblages of found objects and images reveal, when seen from certain perspectives, sudden flashes of Romantic landscapes – mountain panoramas, sunsets and lonely trees – before dissolving immediately into their constituent parts: steel brackets, panes of glass and twigs. Like On Off, Ireland’s work relies on a physical engagement from the viewer, who crouches and peers to catch the fleeting alignment. Perhaps it’s my mood, but the uncanny qualities of the sculptures seem to evoke a chilly sense of unease – though more Alfred Hitchcock than Wes Craven – through which the objects emphasise their own deadness by their brittle allusion to natural landscape.

Mechanical Poem (2007) is an installation by Laura Buckley, comprising four works that variously play with the reflection and refraction of light from DVD projections and lightbulbs through, over and across plywood and acrylic constructions that double as supports and housings for the lightsources. The result is simultaneously enchanting and banal; one element, titled At the Summerhouse (2007), includes a film of a figure arranging and rearranging small squares of Perspex, glass and mirror on a bench outdoors. Scenes reflected from off-camera – sunlit trees, sky, clouds – dissolve over the geometric formations with an unexpected melancholy.

The tone is far sterner in the neighbouring room, occupied by Mark Titchner’s When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever (2006). The impressive installation, involving animated projections (of Tate Modern being consumed in flames), runic panels, sculptures, lighting devices and films on monitors, seems to aspire to the graphic cohesion and purposefulness of a cathedral, although the meanings of the objects and images were obscured (perhaps as religious imagery would be to the uninitiated) by aesthetic stylisation and linguistic arcana.

176 is a difficult space to show art in; the dilapidation of the building’s fabric and its evident former life as a church does not suit all types of work. Titchner’s and Hudson’s installations succeed particularly well for thematic reasons, and also owing to their theatrical bearings. Strunz’s elegant Fall into Space, whose rusty surfaces and dramatic arrangement I can imagine looking quite striking in a white cube, fares less well here. In two smaller rooms tucked away upstairs, a strange poltergeist seems to have been at work, pressing institutional furniture into perverse agglomerations or unhappy feats of levitation. These are in fact sculptures by Alexej Meschtschanow, which, like Myriam Holme’s spidery and materially eclectic installation next door (combining thread, glass lumps and sticks, amongst other things), seem perfectly at home in these abandoned spaces.

Bringing life to inanimate objects – an ambition at the core of the traditional sculptural impulse – is recast by ‘Material Presence’ as a paranormal concern, an alchemical practice of almost sinister implications. Wrapping a scarf around my neck, I scurry out into the night. The wind has risen, and it’s started raining.

Jonathan Griffin

Matt Mullican

The Drawing Center, New York, USA

Channeling something like the spirit of Doctor Daniel Paul Schreber crossed with Jorge Luis Borges, Matt Mullican’s drawings dominate the walls of The Drawing Center.  Less an ordered retrospective than a selection of work from across the years, the exhibition is equal parts visceral experience and intellectual exercise. Mullican’s works on paper are paranoid, obsessive and possibly schizophrenic, yet they are also full of humour and intelligence.  In many ways, Mullican’s practice is better characterized as picture-making than drawing.  The marvelously diverse images range from the runic to the cosmological to the thoroughly modern. 

Mullican creates a singular background of myths and histories, and it is the dazzlingly hermetic nature of his world that makes ‘A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking’ so Borgesian, in addition to Mullican’s preoccupation with cataloguing and a compulsion to order the world that is so strong it seems to edge back into chaos. Compulsion is at the core of the exhibition - and, with more than 200 individual works, the exhibition list is itself in obsessive ordering and confusion - whether that is expressed in the intricate images or the extended lists of words and numbers that repeat themselves throughout his work. 

Most striking is the video Untitled (Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis: Zurich) (2003), in which Mullican thrashes and contorts his body as he declaims a stream of repeated words and phrases.  At the core of these phrases is a repulsion directed toward the body, Mullican repeatedly crying, ‘I stink, I stink.’

This obsessive preoccupation with the corporeal reality of the body is found elsewhere in a series of drawings of stick figures that covers an entire wall.  Each is captioned with phrases such as ‘His Ganglion (Part of the Nerve Cell)’, ‘His Fat Cells’ and ‘Smelling His Body’.  It’s here, as in the video, that Mullican most strongly recollects Freud’s celebrated analysis of Schreber, the paranoid schizophrenic who believed his body was radiating sun beams (and who had fantasies of being sodomized by God). Like Schreber, Mullican is also fascinated by the idea of heaven and hell, of cosmology, and the way this vast territory of belief is sustained by the fragile human body.  It’s the terrifying chasm between the two that is constantly expressed in the work, but also the ecstatic horror that occurs when the two are finally bridged.

Katie Kitamura

Carey Young

Thomas Dane Gallery Project Space, London, UK

‘Mutual Release’, the inaugural exhibition at the Thomas Dane Gallery Project Space, is a new commission by artist Carey Young. Curated by Lisa Rosendahl and arts lawyer Daniel McClean, it is the first in a series of projects entitled ‘Offer & Exchange: Sites of Negotiation in Contemporary Art’ that links contemporary art with the law. Over the next 18 months, a number of artists – including Jonathan Monk, Maria Eichhorn, and Santiago Sierra – will be commissioned to create works for locations such as a corporate collection, an art magazine and a public institution.

‘Mutual Release’ comprises seven new and recent works that deal with the subject of legal contracts. Plato Contract, Unilateral Contract, Disclaimer (Risk), Mutual Release and Counter Offer (all 2008) are text-based works. The exhibition also includes a video piece, Uncertain Contract (2008), and Donorcard (2005/2008, remade for this exhibition), an edition of playing card-sized objects.

Some of the main concerns within this exhibition are the context of the commercial gallery, temporal aspects and the question of authorship within the relations that define the art market, and the nature of legal language. Such concerns, as well as the implicit performative element of some of the pieces, connect ‘Mutual Release’ with works such as Yoko Ono’s Instruction Paintings (1961-62) or Joseph Kosuth’s The Fourth Investigation (1969). The difficult relationship to works concerned with Institutional Critique, however, is of particular interest when discussing ‘Mutual Release’. With works such as Plato Contract and Donorcard, Young tries to disturb the system of relations that determines the art market within the constrictions of a commercial gallery thus creating a link with these aforementioned critical positions. 

Plato Contract is a framed print of a grey moonscape accompanied by a text aimed at the collector who, by purchasing this print, agrees that it will only attain the status of an artistic work if exhibited within the Plato Crater on the Moon (the location of which is handily indicated on the print itself). Young tries to create a delay and shift within the art market’s system of relations by denying the object the pre-existing status of ‘art’. Plato Contract only incorporates the potential to be an art work; the collector must become an active participant in order to ‘fulfil its destiny’ – which in this case is almost impossible to achieve. 

Similarly, Donorcard, an edition of 750 brightly coloured cards signed by the artist, requires that visitors get actively involved in turning the object into an art work. In contrast to Plato Contract, however, the cards are available for free within the exhibition. The back of each states that, by adding their signature, visitors can turn these cards into art works which stay in their possession and retain the status of ‘art’ either the artist or the owner of the work has died. There is not only a shift from the singular artistic authorship to a form of joint authorship with the owner, these cards are also to be seen as works of art which will not endure the passage of time – the art work only exists as long as both signatures can be repeated. As in Plato Contract, Young creates a temporal rupture within the relationship between artist, work and owner. However, the fact that Donorcard is only a temporary art work does imply that monetary exchange is necessary in order to allow for an art work to retain its status within the market context. 

Plato Contract and Donorcard aim to create a rupture within the market system in order to provide a space for thinking about the potential which may be opened up by a different set of relations. It is, however, questionable whether this can be achieved considering that, for example, Plato Contract will still be sold as a ‘conventional’ art work seemingly oblivious to the concerns that define the work. Through the ‘institutionalization of institutional critique’ (a phrase used as well as questioned by Andrea Fraser in her writings on the subject), early critical practices such as those of Michael Asher, Hans Haacke and Daniel Buren have now been absorbed into the institutional canon. It is, therefore, more important than ever to continue exploring ways of critically investigating the function, purpose and strategies of art institutions – be it commercial or public galleries, museums or art magazines. The question is whether this requires a stronger voice than is present within ‘Mutual Release’, something that Young has achieved herself in the past with various performance pieces such as Speechcraft (2007) and Optimum Performance (2003) which show the artist’s deep engagement with a contemporary rethoric practiced within corporate and legal contexts.

Bettina Brunner

Reality Check

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark

The first thing you see when walking through the Statens Museum for Kunst’s garden is Chris Burden’s The Flying Steamroller (1996). Operated by museum assistants, it slowly accelerates as it circles around a platform, lifting off the ground once its reaches a certain speed. It looks quite unbelievable; ten tonnes of steamroller are not supposed to fly. Yet, inside the museum, another suspension of tradition awaits: the institution has organized its first ever exhibition of contemporary art since it opened in 1887. ‘Reality Check’ is the single largest presentation of contemporary art in Danish history; taking up 3000 square metres of gallery space, the survey of work from the mid-1990s to the present comprises 62 works by some 39 international artists. Curated by Marianne Torp, the exhibition concerns itself with three general tendencies – documentation, reinterpretation, and re-contextualization – and aims to investigate the conditions determining our concept of what is real. The premise is in no way new, though, in addition to the contemporary pieces, ‘Reality Check’ comprises various contextualizing works, such as Bas Jan Ader’s I’m too sad to tell you (1971) and some more recent work by the likes of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

One of the more intense pieces is Album (2005) by Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska, in which, with uncanny attention to detail, she has erased herself from every family picture in a photo album. It is a strangely self-destructive piece that clearly manifests just how dependent reality is of how it is represented. Other works play with the physical structure of the institution, such as Annika von Hausswolf’s image of a radiator, hung on the wall as a radiator – a trompe l’œil that gets you every time, as does Ceal Floyer’s film of an electrical socket projected onto a wall. Elsewhere, a thoroughly researched work by Danish artist Henrik Olesen documents a history of homosexuality (Variations, 2008) and consists of a pile of images with written notes on the back, laid out on a table for the viewer to leaf through. As the order in which you read the texts and see the images can fall out in a thousand different ways, Variations opens up myriad alternate readings of our pictorial history.

‘Reality Check’ is one of those exhibitions whose significance may very well turn out to be greater than the impact of the work displayed. It is certainly a milestone in the museum’s history, and may even turn out to be a paradigm shift. The SMK wants to present itself, strategically, not only as a space for storing tradition, but also as an institution that experiments with contemporary art – a strategy that could dust off the museum faster than any renovation job. 

Matilde Digmann

Jennifer Cohen & Vlatka Horvat

Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, USA

This exhibition pairs the work of American sculptor Jennifer Cohen with Croatian artist Vlatka Horvat, who share an interest in the representation of the body. While they traverse well-trodden territory, both artists – though particularly Cohen – find quietly incisive ways of exploring the compromised status of the female body, as well as an alchemy of transformation behind representation itself.

Cohen’s sculptures dominate the space like a collection of exotic hybrid creatures: geometric shapes are capped with glitter-strewn hands; a curve of concrete terminates in a black jazz shoe (Untitled, 2008) that somehow evokes Bob Fosse and Swan Lake at the same time.  Each work is an amalgamation of the static and the kinetic, with the depersonalized concrete structure segueing into the vividly suggestive flourish of the shoe or the glove.

In Cohen’s work there is a clear separation between the body (as represented in the concrete structures) and the objects that adorn and embellish it.  These objects are grafted onto the body, injecting the abstract form with a distinctly animate aspect. Yet the sense is less of political engagement than of uncanniness; Cohen’s work is unsettling precisely because of its lack of a clearly declared agenda.

Horvat’s photographs and collages are more direct: in one series, ‘Packages’ (2005), the artist is concealed in a range of different packaging – from boxes and bin-liners to gift wrap.  The sense of the invisible or obscured nature of female identity is again literally represented in ‘Obstructed’ (2007), a series in which the artist is partially concealed by a distinctly phallic column. Those phallic symbols return in Horvat’s collages, which feature female bodies – stockinged and high-heeled legs, gesticulating arms – grafted onto everything from wind turbines to chainsaws and trombones.  The idea of grafting and transformation is not unlike what occurs in Cohen’s sculpture, but here it is rendered rather more literally.

Cohen also uses her hybrid figures to evoke a state of compromise, with the leaden and inanimate limbs of her sculptures drawn into uncanny and reluctant life.  But she does so with a keener sense of subtlety and reluctance that feels closer to both the predicament of gender identity today and the ongoing dilemmas of representation. 

Katie Kitamura

Christodoulos Panayiotou

Freymond-Guth & Co Fine Arts, Zurich, Switzerland

Some months ago, Freymond-Guth & Co Fine Arts moved into a former car repair shop. Aside from the narrow window across the large doors, the two exhibition spaces offer a retreat from the bustle of the surrounding neighbourhood. For the solo exhibition and one-work show by Christodoulos Panayiotou, part of the gallery gained a slide-projected view out into an unexpectedly Neapolitan night. Only the projector’s rhythmical clicking briefly interrupts the glare of the photographs of firework displays gathered from the archives of two Naples daily newspapers for the slideshow If Tomorrow Never Comes (2007). It should be noted that the occasions for these photographs may not always have been happy ones, since fireworks are used in Naples both for popular festivals and by the Camorra to transmit sensitive messages.

Although the photographs date back to the early 20th century, historical orientation during the slideshow is near impossible. As both newspapers print their pictures in black and white, even today, the firework displays are reduced to a range of greys and appear almost interchangeable – even if the various motifs span an entire century. This difficulty of historical orientation allows the work to awaken paradoxical hopes. What was once captured on film as news and then apparently vanished forever is brought to light again – if only for a few seconds – in the projector’s endless loop. Removed from the context of day-to-day reporting, isolated from any text, the pictures now stand out from the background. A simple trick, but one which in Panayiotou’s work creates a distinctive sense of time, which seems to expand again and again during the viewing process.

In many cases, the press photographer’s camera is pointed out over the sea, which amplifies every effect of the light during the firework display like a huge mirror. The bundles of light spread out like rays above the water and briefly illuminate the Gulf of Naples with its boats and promenades. Sometimes, historical buildings, lampposts or a shoreline make their way into the foreground. Brightly lit by a powerful flash, trees and bushes are starkly outlined against the night horizon. As a result of the peculiarities of photographic imaging, various light sources merge with the haze of burning gas from the fireworks. And the long exposure carefully archives the arcs described by the rockets. Only in photography can visual traces from a given time-lapse be visualized together in a single image.

The spectacular light events almost transform the mechanical re-presentation of a slideshow into a performative act that permanently reverses the camera’s recording process: instead of capturing light waves, a firework display becomes visible on the gallery wall with a click from the projector. For a moment there is darkness, and then the next bright rocket trace lights up the here and now – thanks to an event that was recorded during a brief time-span several decades ago and then archived. Whether using photographs, sound recordings or video installations, Panayiotou’s works perform an exchange between the act of recording and the act of showing that is capable of developing a time structure all of its own.

Burkhard Meltzer

Laurence Kavanagh

Hill House, London, UK

Stepping out onto the darkened tenth floor of Hill House one hardly knows where to look. A glittering nocturnal panorama of London wraps around the windows on three sides of the derelict office. To the right, Laurence Kavanagh’s installation The Lonely Room (2008), only accessible after nightfall, stands crisply in a pool of light down at the end of the room.

At closer quarters, the structure reveals itself to be a grid of rooms, snipped and scored out of grey office filing cabinets whose frames mark the edges and corners of a space that resembles a diagram of a domestic interior. A lampshade, a staircase, a bed and a dressing table are all also conjured from the same metal sheeting, each a fractionally smaller-than-life-sized feat of material transubstantiation. Elsewhere, an overturned glass spills its metal contents over the side of a table while a cigarette packet lies open and empty.

Eschewing these objects’ approaches towards illusionism is a silhouette of a figure on horseback, painted gloss red and dangling at one end of a counterbalanced metal bar, itself suspended from the ceiling like a Country & Western Alexander Calder. This anomaly is, in fact, just another page in a lexicon of cinematic reference points that Kavanagh has compiled during his research for the work – in this case a nod to Sidney Pollack’s The Electric Horseman (1979). Many motifs are taken from the five last films to be shown in the now demolished cinemas of Archway, the busy north London gyratory on which the Hill House office block is built.

Pushing further back, Kavanagh unearthed R. W. Paul’s 1906 film Is Spiritualism a Fraud?, which climaxes in a chase down the nearby Holloway Road. That got him thinking about the possibility of telepathy, and the scientists that attempted to discredit it by challenging mediums to transmit filmic imagery from one mind to another, or physical matter from the past into the present. Bringing the two dimensions of cinematic projection into the three dimensions of the office space, the horizontal memory of the razed buildings onto the top floor of their defiantly vertical replacement, and the flat pages of historical records into the deep space of personal experience all seem like appropriate ways for the artist to try and make sense of such a loaded location. Tellingly, Kavanagh is more used to working with collage, cutting together found imagery and occasionally allowing it to peel away from the page.

There’s a lot going on in The Lonely House, and this prevents it from being easily bound into a single, conveyable idea or image. Like snatches of sentences caught through radio static, or the disjointed images jotted down by a medium, the work’s meanings are alternately clear and muddied. The installation is most like a combination of half-dismantled movie sets, stripped of narrative cohesion but packed with curious non-sequiturs in every corner. Only when I turned to leave, and caught sight of the work reflected in the darkened glass of the window, did it pull focus into an image, while the city outside, with its thousands of rooms-within-rooms and stories-within-stories, stretched dizzyingly away behind it. 

Jonathan Griffin

Roman Signer

Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna, Austria

Entering Roman Signer’s fourth solo show at Martin Janda, one walks straight into the line of fire; a cannon loaded with a rather over-familiar projectile is aimed directly at the viewer (Kanone, 2005). At the sight of the red Euro 2008 ball in the barrel, the football championship’s slogan springs to mind: ‘Expect Emotions’. But there was no need to worry: since Signer used it in an action last year to blast a stack of blue barrels, this particular cannon seems to have fallen silent. Apart from a strangely natural-sounding hum, the rest of the gallery, too, is suspiciously quiet. The other objects in the space also bear tell-tale marks of past explosions. Signer is showing 3 blaue Kisten (3 Blue Wooden Crates, 2008) in which he blew up paint – where the lid may lift to reveal a glimpse of a wonderful blue testimony to the completed process.

On the upper floor, elements of the artist’s typical deformed vocabulary form a beautiful whole, where the surviving fragments of an exploded briefcase (Aktenkoffer, 2001) meet a table with a hole in it (Tisch, 2008). Roman Signer advocates ‘controlled destruction, not destruction for its own sake’, and in a series of five photographs he documents cause and effect in an accident with a Piaggio laden with water barrels that overturns on a ramp (Rampe, 2008).

A climax of this kind must also have taken place in the gallery’s basement in the form of three explosions in blue paint pots (3 blauen Farbtöpfen, 2008). In this work, Signer has extended his sphere of activity to the walls, floor and ceiling of the room. And here in the white cube, these ‘temporary sculptures’ appear almost as transient and wonderful as if they were outside in the open countryside.

In Kleine Helikopter (Little Helicopters, 2008), Signer uses three objects and a video to shows the prototypical rise and fall of an insect-like species. Its breeding ground appears to be located on the ceiling in the form of distinctively packaged ‘larvae’. Several ‘drones’ appear caught in a transparent tube on the wall (Rohr mit Helicoptern, 2007). Outside a wooden box that recalls a polling-booth structure, underneath a Perspex tube protruding diagonally from its front, a pile of these objects lies motionless on the floor (Kabine, booth, 2008). Inside the box, suspicions are confirmed that certain helicopters have been selected to be inserted into the tube, for a controlled act of destruction.

The kinetic quality of these works would be merely inferred were it not for the whirring sound in the video 56 Kleine Helicopter (2008). We see this group of creatures flying rapidly around a room that is far too small for them. Lined up in neat rows, they wait for a remote command, upon which they take off and circle. Only a few prove effective in this swarm mode, and one after another they fail or collide in the crowd and then fall to the floor. With many of Signer’s previous works, one instinctively closed one’s eyes in anticipation of the blast, a brief moment of oblivion before returning to delight in the aftermath. This time, the bang is missing and the viewer’s powers of imagination are seriously but not unpleasantly put to the test.

Jakob Neulinger

Anish Kapoor

Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany

Memory (2008) appears before you like an unexploded bomb, rust-coloured and swollen and oddly submissive. Forged from 24 tonnes of Cor-Ten steel, Anish Kapoor’s new site-specific installation at the Deutsche Guggenheim (a site-specific installation strangely set to travel) presents three discrete and non-synchronous faces to museum visitors: the first snub-nosed and sheer; the second conical and rocket-shaped; the third a yawning mouth leading into the structure’s interior. Memory the creator, memory the preserver, memory the destroyer.

According to Kapoor, one of Memory’s principle aims is to demonstrate – TARDIS-like – a negative internal space larger than a positive exterior space. This goal is pursued through a tactical programme borrowed from Marsyas, Kapoor’s 2002 commission in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Like Marsysas, Memory as a whole is not visible from any one single point; each side presents obstructed views so the work is difficult to imagine holistically. A possible source of inspiration here is the well-known Hindu parable about a procession of blind men feeling different parts of a peculiarly quiescent elephant, and so arriving at radically different conclusions about the nature of the beast – it’s a spear, says one, feeling the tusk, a wall, says another, feeling the flank, a snake says another, grasping the trunk.

Kapoor himself would likely reject this interpolation. At one of the conferences organized to mark Memory’s opening, he fiercely rounded on the popular concept of ‘asian art’. Turning to face his curators at the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative, who struggled to come up with a plausible multiculturalist defence, Kapoor fiercely challenged their institutional role, claiming that their work ‘effects to put Asian artists into a drawer’, insisting that: ‘if there is an avant-garde, there is not a Chinese avant-garde, and an Indian avant-garde, and a Russian avant-garde: there is only one avant-garde.’

The quarrel between multiculturalism and universalism is a venerable topic in the field of contemporary art discourse as elsewhere. But interesting in this case was the clear revelation of the structures supporting the war of ideas. In the red corner, the Mumbai-born, London-based, half-Jewish and practising Buddhist, Kapoor finds himself sincerely moved to champion universality against all and every diminishing regionalism. In the blue corner, requiring an institutional password for securing bureaucratic bequests, strategic curators alight on a regional category and move to commission artists like Kapoor on that basis. Hence we arrive at the paradoxical position of an international artist laying critical siege to the regional platform provided for them.

The torturous ironies of this state of affairs notwithstanding, Kapoor himself seems to have largely escaped from the Asian drawer. In an intriguing example of symbolic literalism, the sculptor’s objects have ballooned along with his reputation, the fragile powder works of his early career giving way to monumental extravagances like London’s PVC Marsyas and Chicago’s stainless steel Cloud Gate (2004).

This remarkable transition from an odd, intellectual sculptor possessed of narrow aesthetician’s interests to an international icon has not occurred without some criticism. Perhaps chief amongst the dangers that lurk here are the twin perils of cliché and mannerism. When an artist develops a signature style, as Kapoor has now plainly done, the problem becomes that they begin to regressively counterfeit it. There is some hint of this with the Guggenheim installation, which Kapoor himself freely admits recycles already employed ideas. At the same time, however, further issues of discursive caricature also develop.

Running alongside this danger of mannerism, there is also the perhaps greater peril of discursive pop-cliché. The experiential intent of his current practice makes Kapoor particularly vulnerable to this charge, which is levied by hostile critics and sympathetic supporters alike. With the intellectual content here to be found only in a portentous and clingy rhetorical register – ‘memory’ as a thing larger on the inside than on the outside, impossible ever to envision entirely etc – a commission is tendered for superficial tendentiousness. Under the lights of this logic, an unfortunate aromatherapeutic discourse of ‘spiritual’ and ‘transcendent’ seems to continue to dog Kapoor the exotic. At another point in the press conference his vulvic use of Cor-Ten steel was contrasted to the monolithic erections of Richard Serra along the lines of a feminism contrasted to machismo.

To his credit, Kapoor himself seems in some ways uncomfortable with the discourse around him. Speaking at one point in reference to Cloud Gate, he confessed his ambivalence in the face of that work’s wildly popular public reception, alighting on what he called ‘the danger called Disney’. His suggested idea for a bulwark against this was ‘dignity’. It’s an idea worth considering.

Daniel Miller

Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA

‘Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport’ sets out to investigate constructions of masculinity as they appear in mainstream athletic culture, through the work of artists Mark Bradford, Harun Farocki, Brian Jungen, Shaun El C. Leonardo, Collier Schorr and Joe Sola. Curator Christopher Bedford is concerned with representation: he wants to reform an archetype, a symbolic figure – the ‘masculine’ subject as it is presented through the rituals of sport. Such archetypes certainly populate the broader discursive field that surrounds athletic practice: they are consistently reiterated in the press, by sport fans, and in the cinema. As legible stereotypes they are easy enough to ‘unmask’, and Jungen and Bradford do so with some wit. Other works resist this particular framework. Schorr and Leonardo, for example, point to how individual athletes develop their identities on the playing field, where standards of physical capability act as a foil to – and in some cases transcend – a gendered vision of identity.

For his series ‘Prototypes for New Understanding’ (1998-2005), Jungen stitched Nike Air Jordan sneakers into sculptures that resemble the masks, sticks and ceremonial accessories produced by the First Nations of the Northwest Coast. Jungen’s work begins and ends with the objects themselves. He positions his ‘prototypes’ as a critique of athletic branding and capitalist consumerism in general, expressing deep skepticism towards the idea that identity of any sort can be bought and sold. Although he does not directly intervene in, or appropriate from, the realm of advertising, Bradford riffs on the mainstream media’s perpetuation of a specialized iconography linking sport and masculinity. In his video Practice (2003), the artist – a tall, young black man – casts himself in the legible stereotype of an American basketball player. A close-up video shows the artist as he feints, bounces a ball and throws hoops: his uniform, in the Los Angeles Lakers’ iconic purple and yellow, is a cumbersome billowing skirt. Bradford’s athlete is positioned in antagonistic opposition to his uniform, a signifier which reduces the individual to gender, team and number, and which Bradford literalizes as an encumbrance.

Leonardo and Schorr focus on athletic practice itself. They position the body as an abstract entity whose ability to perform within sport’s matrix of physical demand and temporal immediacy dominates individual players’ ongoing efforts to establish and maintain athletic identity. Sport’s defining standards are shown to routinely push questions of gender aside.

Schorr’s photographs of half-naked adolescent wrestlers present singular moments of intense mental concentration and physical strain. 152 lbs (H.T.) (2003) shows a young man’s head and torso as he hangs from an unseen support outside the image’s frame. Covered in a sheen of sweat, his downturned face grimaces at the approaching pain, muscles straining against a counter-force which, it appears, may out-do him. Rather than ‘freezing’ a moment or ‘stopping’ time, Schorr’s record of lived bodily experience becomes an index of the perpetually ongoing, moment-to-moment mental engagement of athletes. Leonardo’s sculpture Bull in the Ring (2008) emphasizes a very similar point. A large ring of ominous black football helmets hang from the ceiling, facing inwards toward a final helmet which hangs alone – replicating a football drill in which individual players are trained to prepare for attack from all sides. Leonardo’s helmets are stand-ins for individual bodies, hollow shells which make a presence out of absence and evoke a sort of ghostly physicality. As supplements to a set of invisible bodies, Leonardo’s symbolic prosthetics suggest that athletes are fundamentally defined by their ability to perpetually push their own physical limits.

‘Hard Targets’ neglects to distinguish between a broader ‘culture of sport’ and actual sporting practice. Such a distinction would perhaps lay the ground for a more explicit investigation of their overlap – their conflicts and complicities – and would greatly illuminate the works selected. Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007) is characteristic of this. The 12-screen film shows how sport provides a formal site for the construction of identity through conforming to (or resisting) a set of over-drawn ‘masculine’ ideals construed in terms of emotion, of physical prowess, and of pain. The work is a hypnotic rendering of the 2006 World Cup championship between France and Italy. Alongside (and atop) documentary evidence the artist presents multiple, real-time schematized views of the game. Players challenge each other, butting chests. They insult one another; they engage in utterly transparent histrionics. And yet the presence of Farocki’s digitized moving schemas on top of real-time television coverage shows this all to be an ongoing sham. The trajectories of players’ movements, each traced as a coloured line, eventually accumulate into an abstracted knot – we cannot tell where choreographed movement ends, and where players depart from the ‘masculinized’ theatrical script, to exert their own will to act. This is a knot which athletes themselves cannot unravel.

Sarah-Neel Smith

War + Medicine

Wellcome Collection, London, UK

Presented as part of ‘War + Medicine’ at the Wellcome Collection, David Cotterrell’s five-channel video installation, Theatre (2008) offers a glimpse into a military world that is usually hidden from view. The film is screened across three walls, in which the viewer is placed, appropriately enough, in the position of fourth wall. Theatre appears to document the evacuation of a number of wounded soldiers from a war zone, including one who is seriously injured and lying on a stretcher hidden beneath medical paraphernalia. With the loud engine noise obscuring any speech between the soldiers and medical staff, the journey appears calm and methodical, and is compelling, in spite of its lack of action.

As its title suggests though, the film is in fact a reconstruction of the last day of training for evacuation crews before they are deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. In a three-channel work by Cotterrell, 9-Liner (2008), a film of a genuine evacuation is shown. Despite its jerky camera work, the systematic approach displayed by the soldiers in Theatre is still evident, enhanced by two additional screens that document the journey from different perspectives: one shows the progress of the patient’s flight in scrolling code; the other follows the watchkeeper, a soldier who monitors computer screens from an office. The result is an abstracted vision of an injury, far removed from the circumstances in which it was sustained.

This cool analysis of the horrific consequences of war recurs throughout ‘War + Medicine’, with the exhibition placing an emphasis on the medical discoveries and advances that have come as a result of warfare. Cotterrell’s films, which were commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, are shown amongst a collection of intriguing objects and art works that stretch back to the mid-19th century. The emphasis is largely on the aftermath of conflict, and on the treatment and rehabilitation of those injured, with images of severely scarred soldiers appearing alongside some of the implements that were used to treat them.

A final section of the exhibition concentrates on the effects of war upon the mind, an area that neatly loops back to Cotterrell’s works. In a film on the Wellcome Collection’s website, Cotterrell talks at length about his experiences in Afghanistan. He emphasizes the distances, both physical and mental, between where an injury is sustained and the systems of rehabilitation found in the civilian world, of which the flights recorded in his films (real or simulated) provide a bridge. Cotterrell’s films provide an insight into this military environment, as well as to some of its methods and techniques, but perhaps only as much as the medical artefacts elsewhere in the exhibition give access to historical conflicts. Instead of revealing the harsher realities of warfare, the medical teams give order to the chaos and tragedy of war, keeping any sense of confusion or disarray out of sight, if not out of mind.

Eliza Williams

Dayanita Singh

Frith Street Gallery, London, UK

Night, Delhi-based photographer Dayanita Singh asserts, is transformative; it conjures figures lurking in shadowy recesses and renders small movements — rustling leaves, distant footsteps — threatening, even ominous. In ‘Dream Villa,’ the largest single body of her colour work shown to date, Singh explores the mysteriousness of ordinary spaces obscured in darkness. She exploits colour photography’s unique ability to reproduce gradations of colour and density in light, juxtaposing artificial lighting with moody night skies.

The resulting images are formally experimental yet atmospheric, almost cinematically so. One of the first photographs in the exhibition, DMV 27 (2008), presents a symmetrical landscape: a shack, with two identical doors, is flanked by two lights — one harsh, the other hazy. Like two opposing forces, a fluorescent rod brightly illuminates the left half, saturating the surrounding foliage and washing the foreground with cool light, while, on the right, the moon casts a warm yellow glow. DMV 11 (2008), an aerial shot of a city at dusk, reveals a network of golden arteries, with traffic rushing like blood through dense urban tissue. Here, lapis blue twilight sky meets the dazzling gleam of headlights and street lamps.

Though Singh is best known for her black-and-white portraits of India’s urban well-to-do, ‘Dream Villa’ is mostly devoid of human presence. Instead, the series’ vacant, quiet, anonymous spaces allow the drama of light and shadow to take centre stage. The few photographs with figures, surprisingly, are among the weakest. While the exhibition’s subject matter and colour represent a departure for Singh, its depiction of India is consistent with her larger oeuvre. This India is no Bollywood romp, third-world tragedy or Orientalist fantasy. Rather, Singh photographs the world’s second most populous country but leaves her images empty. In her shift to colour, she eschews the sunny palette of saris and spices for hues that are both richer and more muted. Just as when she turned her lens on India’s urban elite, here, too, Singh reveals a side of the subcontinent less familiar to western eyes.

As one of India’s most celebrated photographers, Singh’s work will also be shown at the Serpentine Gallery’s ‘Indian Highway’ (19 December 2008-22 February 2009) — a snapshot of the country’s flourishing art scene that follows their 2006 survey of Chinese art. (Next up is the Middle East; these three regions form a trifecta that, independently, will constitute a series of three shows at the Saatchi Gallery.) ‘Dream Villa’, however, is emphatically not about place; the photographs were taken all over India and their setting is rarely identifiable. The exhibition, the gallery press release insists, ‘exists as much in the artist’s imagination as in the real world.’ Singh endows her images with a mysterious and sometimes sinister air, just as we embellish the shadows and sounds of night, creating paranoid fantasies in response to the obscured, the shrouded and the unknown. 

Natasha Degen

Deimantas Narkevičius

Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels, Belgium

‘The fundamental contradiction of contemporary man is that he still does not have an experience of time adequate to his idea of history, and is therefore painfully split between being-in-time as an elusive flow of instants and his being-in-history.’ When Giorgio Agamben wrote Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience in 1978, Lithuania was under the conservative rule of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and artist Deimantas Narkevičius had just begun to study sculpture in Vilnius.  A year later, Brezhnev’s administration would invade Afghanistan, ending its decade-long détente with the United States.  In the meantime, the self-immolation of 19-year-old Romas Kalanta had become iconic of the Lithuanian nationalist movement, and, 13 years later, Lithuania would be the first Baltic state to claim independence.

That same summer of ‘78, the Plokštinė launching site of four of Soviet Lithuania’s R-12 thermonuclear missiles was shut down and its stationed officers relocated. In The Dud Effect (2008), Narkevičius’ most recent film, Evgeny Terentiev, a former Russian officer who served at a similar military base in Lithuania, is in character, playing the typical day of one such officer. The only exceptional difference: the order to detonate.

Blip. A geometric drawing flashes on the screen. A high-pitched whistle ascends. A series of black and white photographs appear, one after the other: a missile launcher; the blurred ghost of swift movement; night scenes of officers unloading equipment. Not an explosion, but the clinking of cups and saucers end the kettle’s scream. Terentiev contextualizes his re-enactment with a briefing in sparse phrases recited to the sounds of children playing football.  The layered beginning of Narkevičius’ 15-minute film is emblematic of the cinematographic assemblage he employs, not simply to change history, but to change time.

Using archival material, rudimentary film collage, tailored audio tracks and his own footage, Narkevičius works beyond the circular or linear temporality which are often seen as characterizing contemporary experience, adopting instead what Agamben calls a ‘broken line’, that is, ‘without expecting anything from the future.’ There is no anticipated end to this trajectory, and, in traveling it, time is arrested at each and every moment.  It is incoherent and fragmentary if experienced consciously but the perfect mirage of narrative continuity, if lived passively.  The apocalyptic scenario recalls Hegel’s ‘end of history’, as though to stress that the post-Communist condition is the passage from one state after-the-end-of-history into another, as Boris Groys writes, ‘from real Socialism into postmodern capitalism; or, from the idyll of universal expropriation following the end of the class struggle into the ultimate resignation.’ The hollow of one missile’s massive cradle, cracked and crumbling, resonates with both memory and premonition.

In Once in the XX Century (2004), Narkevičius appropriated footage of Lenin’s monument being pulled down and reversed it: with his cloak billowing behind him, the bronze Lenin seems to fly onto his pedestal.  Narkevičius sculpts in time, liberating the contemporary both from the angst of progress and from resignation to the cyclical, leading instead into a chronology of action: conscious direct experience of simultaneous being and becoming.

Emily Verla Bovino

Nina Canell

Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin, Germany

Swedish artist Nina Canell engages in a kind of stoner science, her easygoing experiment-based practice yielding whimsy, poetry and humour. Canell’s interest in cause and effect, and her fondness for abject materials and casual apparatus—plastic buckets, plastic bags and plastic funnels; cassette players, cables, and electric fans—lead to artfully informal assemblages of objects that often beget real results, slight as they may be. For ‘Walking on No-Top Hill’, the New York-based artist has turned Barbara Wien Galerie into a kind of spare, high-school science fair. A fair, it should be noted, in which the top prize does not reward scientific breakthroughs but rather giddy, lo-fi demonstrations of the way the physical world—and the sweet awesomeness of its daily electrical phenomena—works.

In Sleep Machine (all works 2008), a small plastic bag, slightly ripped and of a vivid verdant hue, is affixed to the wall somewhere near your knees. What keeps it there is a handily wrought device: about two feet away is a small electric fan tied to the top of a broom handle, itself stuck into a plastic funnel sitting sturdily on the floor. The thread of green—in the bag, the funnel, and a plastic tip on the broom handle—ties the whole assemblage together, and the fluttering of the bag, pressing its bright face against the smooth white wall, is a nice touch too. While the work’s methodology is quickly understood, its inexplicable poetry—the work works in both senses—is not; Canell shows us her bag of tricks but we remain mystified.

If, in Sleep Machine, Canell readily reveals her hand, in Triangular Interlude she is a little more poker-faced. The sound piece comprises two bulky black cassette players, hung back-to-back from the ceiling. The arrangement has an attractive symmetry, but its odd charge comes from its fuzzy recording of Canell’s attempts to tape the sound of a triangle. Instructively, this was done in the most straightforward manner possible: she recorded herself riding a bike in the aforementioned shape. If this experiment feels cloyingly sincere, it is offset by its more mysterious neighbour, Mutual Leap (After Nollét), another hanging work but crafted from a round of femur bones and string. Mutual Leap pays tribute to Jean-Antoine Nollét, a French clergyman and physicist who, in the 18th century, made one of the first electrometers (his fellow monks acted as very patient, and often shocked, guinea pigs).

Nothing blurs the boundary of object and casual scientific performance, a border that Canell seems to favor, more than the exhibition’s pièce de résistance, Anatomy of Dirt in Quiet Water. An experiment less contained than sprawled over the gallery floor, its snakelike cables connect lights, amplifiers, hydrophones and pipes, all of which work together to exchange and transform energy. A motor causes vibrations picked up by a mic, while also triggering a light and a basin of seemingly still black water, the movement of which is also amplified. While Canell’s interest often lies in making visible what is invisible, her intention extends to sound and making heard what normally passes unheard. This is not a unique aim in art, which often portends to make the inexplicable, well, explicable, but in Canell’s light, dexterous hands and able ear, her exploratory sculptures come across as vivifying, instructive, and—for empirical knowledge that’s been around forever—something new.

Quinn Latimer

Bjarne Melgaard

Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin, Germany

Bjarne Melgaard’s installation Kidwhore in Manhattan – A Novel (2008) approaches the novel in the same way that Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 1978 movie Hitler – A Film From Germany treated the Hitler-phenomenon as if it were somehow itself a film. For his sophomore solo show at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, the Norwegian enfant terrible (ageing) has produced a sprawling installation that incorporates video work, photographs, paintings, neon slogans and furniture. The sum effect is to spatialize a rhetorical theory of surfaces, just as Syberberg once deployed Hitler to argue for a spiritual theory of cinema.

Syberberg’s thematic focus was the aesthetics of power, his stylistic approach operatic and portentous. Melgaard, by contrast, is more interested in sexual violence and pederasty – all scored in the key of Grand Guignol. The narrative thread of Kidwhore... swirls round the adventures of an unnamed Manhattan rent-boy, presented through a series of fragmentary statements and scenes. The lurid impasto of the deliberately hideous paintings charts a series of vividly experienced tricks, the new media work (a short clip of a man in a blue shirt sexually embracing a lion through the bars of a cage) arrives on a different level, and seems to initially imply something about non-standard partners. A group of three Modernist tables originally designed by Paola Piva (two covered with press cuttings from the now-defunct NAMBLA-rag Made in the USA, one covered with crudely drawn, child-like sketches, all three pinned down to the tabletops with a thicket of scalpels) meanwhile pose points about character against cultural backdrops.

Melgaard has never been known for his aversion to shock tactics and this show is unlikely to change that perception. Even laying the sleaziness of his theme to one side, taken individually a couple of pieces here are strikingly and dumbly provocative. One of two neon poems, for example, broadcasts the slogan: ‘The world is full of rich corrupted cunts.’ This is beyond cliché at this point: it is all very well shocking the bourgeoisie, but if the bourgeois in question simply nods and signs cheque, the gesture becomes hollow and prick-kicking.

But is Melgaard’s gesture simply hollow, or instead a signifier of hollowness in the service of a wider point? The quiet suspicion that there are subtler concepts at play here, detectable beneath the initial sensationalist bombast of the rhetoric, is driven home by the cleverest pieces presented, a series of furniture works by the architect Frederick John Kiesler, upholstered by Melgaard with further Kidwhore... scenes. The medium drains the imagery of its sensational power, thus ladling a large measure of irony onto the show as a whole

When transgressive clichés become literally part of the furniture – as they have done in our post-Genet times – the deeper value of this show begins to become apparent. There is tactical logic in the selection of particular mediums, and their crashing-together here exposes this hidden dimension. Hung by themselves, the paintings would seem raw and authentic, but their jostling blocks off such a reading. Similarly, in their flat presentation of cuttings, the tables in some way recall Wolfgang Tillmans’ Truth Study Centre (2007) but here their sincerity is shown to be calculated.

This critical sense extends downwards into the rhetoric of the theme itself. From fictional novelist J.T. Leroy to the more studied biographical excesses of the young New York artists, the conceit of the drug-addled Manhattan rent-boy today appears as authenticity’s highly marketable final stand. In Kidwhore in Manhattan Melgaard embraces the figure, like the man in his video embracing the lion, and thereby succeeds in driving home its ridiculousness.

Daniel Miller

Phillip Allen

The Approach W1, London, UK

Lovers of visual clarity, purity and transparency beware of Phillip Allen.  With their crowded surfaces and jumbled syntax, the paintings in Allen’s third show at The Approach revisit the blurred line between representation and abstraction that fascinated Kandinsky and Delaunay. Quotations from this period of early Modernism abound in the vibrant colours and optical refractions of the densely worked paintings.  Even the architectonic imagery of works such as Rich History of Fouls Ups (2008) recalls the Art Deco motifs of the 1920s and ‘30s.

Despite such studied references, Allen’s work is neither staid nor dated: his interest lies in the creative process and in methods of representation – in particular, in the abilities and shortcomings of visual and written languages. Many paintings in the exhibition, ‘Sloppy cuts no ice’, readily evoke the chaotic stage set by today’s numerous systems of representation.  The illusionistic expanse at the centre of Allen’s pictures has the stylized, flattened appearance of graphics on a computer screen; technicolour bursts evoke technological pyrotechnics; this feels, somehow, like a very 21st-century kind of information overload. Not only have the concerns tackled by Modernism not been resolved, they have multiplied.

Allen’s paintings have a basic compositional structure of three horizontal sections. The multicoloured upper and lower bands feature thick impasto and fibrous daubs reminiscent of paintbrushes. In the centre lies a broad expanse upon whose flat surface dance geometric shapes, towering architectural forms and semi-abstract patterns that skip just beyond the grasp of familiarity.  Even in this illusionistic field, Allen’s brushwork remains prominent; he makes no attempt to obscure the creative process behind uniform facture. Standing in front of Allen’s paintings, our minds race to make sense of the images and to reconcile them with their disjointed titles. (Allen’s words, just like his images, toe the line between suggestiveness and non-representation.) We stubbornly produce figures and shapes from within the abstraction that seem to suit the titles.  White daubs at the bottom of Sloppy Cuts No Ice (2008) become frost-tipped objects, while the collaged patterns at the centre develop into a single lunging figure. It is impossible to know which came first – image or title – or whether they should remain separate.

In WXY and ONM (2008), the relationship between letters and images becomes even more convoluted. Monumental-feeling letters, clambering atop one another within pseudo-landscapes, morph into decorative symbols. Written characters seem to lose their traditional meaning entirely.  The lesson - that too rigid a dichotomy exists between letter and image - is a little academic, but their cartoonish exuberance stops short of heavy-handedness.

In spite of the reigning disorder, a sense of joy pulses through the exhibition.  Intellectual but also whimsical, Allen’s paintings throb with the pleasure of the creative process. The jumble of systems, languages and materials offers endless possibilities for invention, while the thick globules of paint in the upper and lower registers become points of genesis.  In Volume Champion (2008), for instance, the band of raw paint running along the bottom shoots forth a bouquet of magenta and black lines.  Surging upwards the lines appear triumphant and indefatigable – if also a little pointless. Lovejoyvian (Extended Version) (2008), one of the largest pieces in the show, perhaps best expresses Allen’s creative joy.  Perhaps referring to Lovejoy, the roguish antiques dealer from the cult 1980s’ BBC series, the title sets the cheerful tone for the work: improvisational, a little foolish and outdated, yet irresistible. 

Allen is hardly alone in embracing the busy abstractions of earlier Modernism: a similar use of exuberant colour and dense composition appears in the work of artists such as Chris Martin and Franz Ackermann, whose interest also lies in mapping the contemporary experience.  Nevertheless the freshness and wit of Allen’s work continue to charm and engage the viewer.

Katherine Holmgren

Psychology of a Pawn

PARTICIPANT INC, New York, USA

The figure of the pawn is, for some, the ultimate image of compromise. American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton coined the term ‘psychology of a pawn’ during his 1961 study of human behaviour in extreme cases of re-education, such as cults or the Chinese under the Cultural Revolution. In such cases, the implementation of a group ideology causes the individual to relinquish personal freedom in favour of servicing the greater cause.  Curated by Mari Spirito, ‘Psychology of a Pawn’ at PARTICIPANT INC goes on to examine much more than just extreme behavioural models, as the exhibition advances into a general study of behavioural modification created by society. Behaviour in any group situation always constructs itself through the subordination of individual aims under a common group goal. Exhibiting works by Shai Azoulay, Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, Alex Israel, Linda Post, Kevin Schmidt and Corin Sworn, Spirito traces these behavioural codes into the realm of the everyday: from education to self-adjustment, traditions, subliminal messages and popular psychology.

The idea of correcting an outside perception though self-correction is examined in Linda Post’s sculptural video installation Glean (2008), comprising two monitors facing each other like mirrors. As if in conversation, the videos expose the intricate negotiations of an individual relating itself to the outside world. These studies consist of intense personal observation paired with constant re-adjustment - a learning scenario in a loop.

Kevin Schmidt’s video projection Sad Wolf (2006) depicts an arctic wolf in captivity. The video is projected from a homemade video projector encased by a dilettantishly put-together plywood construction. The video carefully follows an omega wolf which has been shunned by the rest of his pack, the survival of which depends on a sense of unity created through designating a single outsider. Yet the pack itself is captured in a zoo, an artificial construct created so as to mark otherness and grant a sense of unity to the viewers.

The centre-piece of the exhibition, Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio’s film Arabic Lesson (2005) offers the viewer a very different view on the study of the Koran than is generally shown by the western media. Through repetition and imitation a young second-generation Moroccan boy studies in his Turin home. Mediated though Italian, the Arabic language becomes awkward while his movements in the mosque feel clumsy and strange; words, meaning and movements do not yet move in unison for him. The film reveals the difficulty of the preservation of traditions and culture in a word of multiple, overlaying cultures.

Alex Israel’s collages oscillate between propaganda and school pride. The small works in the style of building-size high-school murals advocate messages such as ‘Go Sheiks’ and ‘Praying hands’. Israel’s clever play with size and content reveals the effects that subliminal messages can have on its surrounding despite the message they carries.

‘Psychology of a Pawn’ offers a sinister vision of human group behaviour. It exposes the dangers of being part of societies, which gain their strength through a collection of communally agreed on truths, which if in question would eliminate the very basis of its existence. Without offering an easy way out, the exhibition leaves the viewer with the question of how to best preserve a sense of individualism while remaining part of a community, how to maintain a position of distance that allows for critical reflection and oppositional thought.

Anna Gritz

Smoke

Pump House Gallery, London, UK

It runs against the current grain for a themed show to be assembled around anything so concise as a single noun. One recent trend has been long, uniformative titles, recent examples being Haunch of Venison’s ‘Peace and Agriculture in a Pre-Romantic Ideal Landscape, Without Sublime Terrors’ (London, 2008) and Museum 52’s ‘When Leaves Fall They Return to The Root, When I Die I’ll Have No Mouth’ (London, 2008). To group together a multifaceted collection of art and artifacts around the notion of ‘smoke’, as the editors of occasional periodical Implicasphere have done at Pump House Gallery, is, then, a relatively innovative endeavour. Much of the publication’s existence has been dedicated to exploring the hidden depths - or ‘implications’ - of everyday words, and the curators of ‘Smoke’ clearly intend their temporary museum to creep beyond the ordinary.

The exhibition shares the spirit of the curiosity shop that, whilst modest in its individual selections, still manages to provide a surprising experience. The academic, thoroughly curated collection of smoke-related paraphernalia brings together engravings, posters, political cartoons and various devices (from pipes to bellows), as well a handful of works by, among others, Pae White and Henry Krokatsis. A range of predictable associations - from cigarettes, volcanoes and explosions to various kinds of chimneys - dominate, but there are some unexpected inclusions. For example, a creepy-yet-camp 1908 film, The Red Spectre, which shows a devil-like magician performing amid billowing red smoke, or an antique tobacco enema pump once used to revive the hapless unconscious. 

Intentionally or not, one point ‘Smoke’ ably proves is the way in which one or more audible installations can dominate the atmosphere of an entire exhibition. The audio attention-seekers here, carrying their sound across the four narrow floors of Pump House, are a 1986 video by John Smith (Om) and a British public education film from 1937 that warns of the corrosive power of excessive coal smoke. The link between Smith’s work and the exhibition as a whole is a little tenuous, with the smoke from what is supposedly a cigarette rising upwards as a Buddhist monk has his head shaved by an unseen barber. But it would be a shame to be churlish and miss the simple novelty as the continuous ‘om’ chant of the monk, or the man dressed as a monk, mixes with the voice of the well-spoken narrator from the film on the floor below.

Smoke’s shifting social relevance is the most interesting theme developed by the exhibition. Where it was once upheld as a modern wonder, rising from the furnace of industry, and offering the healing power of an elixir, by the beginning of the 20th century smoke had become synonymous with dirt, a relic from a pre-electrical past. Neither, though, is this path shown to have been straightforwardly linear. Included is an intriguing passage written in 1604 by James I, apparently an anti-smoking campaigner when tobacco had only just made its entrance into western culture. Preceding the English smoking ban by more than 400 years, the king begins his lament with the hope that, ‘the manifolde abuses of this vile custome of tobacco taking, may the better be espied.’

The other key implication premised by the exhibition’s curious collection is that, just like its historical transition, smoke is a physically illusive quantity. In part this is clearly obvious, but a more thoughtful theme emerges to do with smoke’s drifting, dream-like nature, its ability to consume and fill a void, and its magical quality to allow apparitions to appear from other realms - be they the genie emerging from a smoking lamp or the drug-smoked visions of a shaman. While it would be going too far to say that Implicasphere’s editors have unearthed far-reaching revelations in the everyday with ‘Smoke’, what they have provided is a more pleasingly scenic route than would ordinarily be followed. 

Richard Unwin

Claire Hooper

Hollybush Gardens, London, UK

Nach Spandau (2008), a new film by Claire Hooper, is a demonstration of an artist well versed in the language, techniques and motifs of cinema. While the work comes, at times, dangerously close to a staid retread of familiar precedents, Hooper manages to engage for the film’s entire 52-minutes, as she documents one of Berlin’s most architecturally attractive Metro lines: the U7. Spanning from the eponymous terminal to the city’s south-eastern fringes, the line was designed between 1971 and 1984 by engineer Rainer G. Rummier and is a mix of decorative Modernist stylings and run-down shopping kiosks. Hooper impressionistically documents each station with a series of collaged, forensically slow pans. The film isn’t narrated, the only sounds being the occasional rumble of a passing train or the crackle of a PA announcement

Created in the early hours of the morning, Nach Spandau is a portrait of the U7 empty of users. For a post-28 Days Later (2002) audience the melancholia of a depopulated city is a familiar pull, while the use of Berlin as a back-drop has some perhaps too obvious romantic connotations. For example, anyone who has seen Uli Edel’s Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981), in which many key scenes are set in U-Bahn stations, may be forgiven for expecting David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ to surge up towards the end of Hooper’s film. Instead the audience is treated to the clichéd cinematic full-stop of a wide-angle zoom-out that feels at odds with the intimate visual language of the rest of the work.

The vacant stations nonetheless allow the viewer’s attention to be snagged on architectural details, from which Hooper teases out a certain sensuousness - an attention to surface familiar from her 2007 film Auditorium. These abstracted planes are at times reminiscent of Luisa Lambri’s fussy close-ups, which is certainly no bad thing. Hooper must also be commended for her occasional use of split-screening that creates a mesmerizing symmetry to some of the colourful geometric tiling that characterizes the interiors of Rummier’s stations. Her comic juxtaposition of tight shots of advertising hoardings with their airbrushed models and sunny scenes against the grim reality of the early hours commute is also well placed. 

In the accompanying press release Hooper nods to the voyeuristic observer of Venice in Henry James’ The Aspern Papers (1888). It is dangerously easy for an outsider to buy-in to the supposed romance of a city, and Berlin’s artful bohemianism and Modernist follies have been a familiar point of return of late. The romance that Hooper - and, indeed, this reviewer - associates with the city is doing most of the talking in Nach Spandau. In stripping away the context from her photography Lambri unsentimentally documents surface; Hooper revels in a kind of selective nostalgia, asking the viewer to admire the U7 with not even a nod to Berlin’s fraught past. This lack of political engagement would be perfectly excusable were it not for the fact that Berlin’s division had a direct effect on the U7: Rummier’s line should have linked the city - it’s the longest on Berlin’s underground system - but no through trains ran from east to west until after the wall fell. To solely address the aesthetics of this once divided infrastructure seems a strange, missed chance.

It is not just Hooper’s subject matter that seems to reference the past. The film’s unnarrated documentary approach is reminiscent of the output from the British Transport Commission’s in-house production unit. Formed in 1949, the unit created promotional films that tracked the technological advances of railways in the mid-20th century. Hooper seems to be doing the same, the key difference being that Nach Spandau details - even promotes - something long-gone: the design aesthetic of Modernism and the technological progress that it celebrated. Hooper seems to be exhibiting the very 21st-century trait of not looking forward, but hankering after a constructed past. Were this straight documentation, for the purposes of posterity or wider communication only, Hooper’s film would be a laudable venture; as art, it adds nothing new.

Oliver Basciano

Pöpp68

NGBK, Berlin, Germany

’Vivre sans contrainte et jouir sans entrave!’ (Live without limits and enjoy without restraint) sang the generation of 1968, as students took to the streets. While they rioted, the war in Vietnam raged on, JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, and the Prague Spring witnessed Alexander Dubček’s election in Czechoslovakia. Under the banner of the personal as political, 150 women protested against the Miss America Pageant, while feminism’s radicalism impacted directly upon the art world, as Valerie Solanas shot and wounded Andy Warhol. In Frankfurt am Main Baader-Meinhof bombs exploded in department stores.

But times have changed. Today, Fauchon, the luxury Parisian food shop, commemorates those days of mass political protest by offering a May ’68 brand of tea, ‘with a flavour of revolution’. The ’68-ers’ rebellion and hedonistic abandon has congealed into the smug middle-aged complacency implicated in the present global financial crisis. Can the cultural and artistic legacy of ’68 be re-engaged with without indulging in either rose-tinted gazing or cynical condemnation? Can any of the lost radicality of that generation be redeemed in today’s post-political, apathetic, corporate climate?

‘pöpp68’, NGBK’s strange new group show, suggests not. Presenting itself more as a working project – with numerous workshops and events – than an exhibition, it brings together a curious group of ‘intergenerational’ artists’ work and historical documents, loosely based around the issue of social participation in art. But there is no more framing, no hint at critical reception, and no suggestion of whose version of ’68 is being re-engaged.

The best work is undoubtedly from the veterans of that year, many of them German and East European artists often overlooked in a narrative that has largely been constructed from an Anglo-American perspective. There are brilliant black and white video works from the Croatian feminist pioneer Sanja Iveković, such as Looking At (1974), which records a prime-time evening news broadcast with a static camera that captures only the lower-right corner, the earnest sound jarring with the displaced visuals. There are documents and films by Copenhagen collective The Canon Club (named so because of their collective purchase of a Super 8 Canon camera), such as Oslo Trip (1970), documenting their gate-crashing of an art museum dressed as Native Americans. Excellent videos by German film-makers Claudia von Alemann and Reinhold E. Thiel, such as EXPMNTL Knokke (1967/68), present two men laughing like lunatic hyenas, bringing to mind early Vito Acconci.

But the newer works don’t cut it. Rainer W. Ernst and Paula Hildebrandt’s Globalisation is a Political, Public Affair (2008) is a floppy and all too obvious installation critiquing the cotton industry, while the video Parking – Finding a Place (2007), documenting a performance by Rebekka Uhlig’s ‘Performance Choir for Experimental Singing’, comes across as embarrassing and provincial. Framed original copies of silver- and bronze-covered issues of the Situationist International, and anti-authoritarian socialist flyers distributed by the German writer Peter-Paul Zahl in 1970, are sandwiched in between past and present works, but their status – romanticized aesthetic objects, or radical political documents – isn’t clear. Sadly, all they really achieve, like the show, is to suggest the vague ‘flavour of revolution’.

Sarah James