July 2016
Avenida Central (at Calle 11)
San José, Costa Rica

Despacio ( “slowly”) is an independent art and residency space located in the Costa Rican capital of San José. Suspended above the chaotic atmosphere of the city, Despacio highlights individual explorations of the temporary, the absent, the forgotten, the mis- or dis-translated, the transience of things. The recent appointment of curator Sandino Scheidegger, founder of the Random Institute and gleaner of time, has slowed things down even more devotedly.

Many of the previous exhibitions at Despacio — such as Julien Prévieux’s collection of obsolete books, or Diana Abi Khalil’s space-addled notebooks — were library based, and the gallery’s most recent project continues with this leitmotif. On July 26, two separate solo exhibitions opened simultaneously under Despacio’s roof: Florence Jung’s “Nadie Nada Nunca” (“nobody nothing never) and Thomas Moor’s “Herencias” (“heirlooms”).

Jung is a French artist who’s enjoyed many recent successes; currently, she is showing at Manifesta 11 in Zurich, and received the Swiss Performance Prize in 2013. These are notable accomplishments considering her principled refusal to photograph or publish the work. Jung is a conceptual extremist who handles, smuggles and muffles the media of experience and thought, pre- and post- conception, with precision. Her happenings, installations or interventions are undocumented, ensuring that they remain as transitory as they are un-tweetable. Take, for example, Jung43 (2015): exhibited this spring in a North Korean hotel room, the work — a conceptual thought alone — demanded it was not to be thought about. Upon consideration, she insisted, it would be destroyed. For the sake of art conservation, I’ll leave it at that.

In Jung’s exhibition, a pale wooden platform showcases a scatter of thick white texts. Arranged with as much care as retired phonebooks, the cover of each reads: “El presente libro recopila todos los Quijotes retirados de Costa Rica” (“This book collects all the Quijotes removed from Costa Rica”). In a mix of quixotic quest and Reconquista, Jung has traveled across Costa Rica to gather or steal every possible copy of Don Quijote from bookstores, libraries, second-hand shops and flea markets; the fruits of this labor are indexed within these unassuming books. As is characteristic of Jung, the details of each acquisition are listed, but the physical object (and its visual evidence) is missing. Despite the negating proclamation of “Nadie Nada Nunca” — perhaps notably, a title shared with a novel by the Argentinian author Juan José Saer — Jung approaches a great deal of who and what and when in these archives, be they invented or accurate.

Jung’s project seems at once like a symbolic effort to decolonize, de-tongue, and a compulsive act of love (that is, possession). It certainly echoes Francis Alÿs’s ongoing Fabiola Project — an endeavor started in the 1990s that brings together reproductions of a long-lost 1885 painting of 4th-century Roman Saint Fabiola, collected from junk shops around the world. Like Fabiola, Don Quijote is a cult figure who pursued honor and charity with charming persistence. Unlike Alÿs, Jung does not display her collection, but hides it away in a clandestine location. Knowing her past work, we could go so far as to question if it truly exists — after all, Cervantes lends Don Quijote credibility through the invented gravitas of “The Archive of La Mancha” and the bogus Moorish translator, Cide Hamete Benengeli. Is Jung pulling a Cervantes? In a favorite adaptation of the novel, Man of La Mancha, Cervantes asks: “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?” And I wonder. Across the street from Despacio, on the corner of sea foam green rooftop, lies a large box. On the side it reads: “Nadie Nada Nunca.”

Swiss artist Thomas Moor is a collector of the intangible as well. His past work includes the installation of a false Starbucks franchise (Trojan Horses, 2016), a newspaper Kiosk (2013) installed mid-air on an apartment balcony, and Touching Tangibles (2013-2014): a full body cotton suit, the same material used for art handling gloves, worn by the artist that allows him to hug valuable artwork, such as Jeff Koons sculptures.

Bubble wrap that once protected artwork, discarded carpeting from an art fair, receipts from past transactions, museum paraphernalia — Moor gathers these laminations of the art object for “Herencias” (“heirlooms”), his exhibition turned inside out. Cargo Veils, a project begun in 2015, is composed of the discarded duct tape and bubble wrap previously used by galleries to transport art. Baby blue sheaths, immortal padding and the familiar, fragrant brown tapes join to become strikingly modern works (surely every artist has admired the molted Mondrians that accompany their shipped art). Like sticky cicada shells, the works hangs with characteristic lightness, depending on namedropping titles — VonBrandenburg002, Malevich001, Weiner001 — for weight. Strangely, looking at Cargo Veils, I immediately though of Roland Barthes’s beautifully belabored description of Japanese tempura, in The Empire of Signs (1970):

“The contour is so light that it becomes abstract […] It has for its envelope nothing but time […] on the side of the light, the aerial, of the instantaneous, the fragile, the transparent, the crisp, the trifling, but whose real name would be the interstice without specific edges, or again: the empty sign.”

Yet just as Jung’s nothing is a something, Moor’s empty sign still echoes of the absent object’s dual artistic and monetary auras. Indeed, Moor is an art handler, and Cargo Veils finds the shape of value without containing it; this applies equally to the installation of “Heirlooms”: a collection of coffee mugs — filled to the brim with coins — from the world’s museum gift shops. Naturally, coffee is a major cash crop for Costa Rica, so the artist has created a connection between two economic and highly branded cultural forces.

The mugs are arranged across three low pedestals, Islas De La Felicidad (“islands of happiness,” 2016), that float in a sea of discarded and wrinkled art fair carpet (Flying Carpet, 2016). Moor, who shares his name with another maker of utopic islands, collaborated with Sabrina Röthlisberger to create the fragmented poems that line the islets. Her words are sourced from a delayed baggage receipt — American Airlines had lost, or stolen, the original bag of coins intended to fill Moor’s mugs. The vinyl letters stutter: “We sincerely apologize everything possible.”

When reading up on Despacio, I came across an old Spanish proverb: “Vísteme despacio que tengo prisa.” In unforgiving English this advises to do things carefully even when hurried — “make haste, not waste,” and the like. It has been attributed to Napoleon, Emperor Augustus, Charles III and even — according to the tangential wanderings of the Internet — Don Quixote. “Nadie Nada Nunca” and “Herencias” beg the same, asking us to consume them slowly, like a beloved novel. And like good writers, these artists think in circles, following the natural shape of time: Jung tilting at windmills, Moor tracing their movements.

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Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, is held in Western European cities — most recently in Genk, Belgium. This tenth edition, hosted by St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, was housed in the Winter Palace and New Hermitage, the two main buildings of that institution and, across the enormous Palace Square, the city’s main plaza, in the newly renovated General Staff Building. The Hermitage, an encyclopedic museum celebrating its 250^th anniversary, is devoted to world art, going up to Post-Impressionism and the paintings by Henri Matisse; another collection of Russian art is in the State Russia Museum. Because visas are expensive, Russia is not readily accessible to many Americans and West Europeans, so the primary intended audience was Russian. There were a great many foreign tourists in St. Petersburg when I visited in late July, but relatively few of them focused on Manifesta.

Some of the artists responded to specifically to contemporary issues in Russian society. Alexandra Sukhareva, who is Russian, presented photographs from World War II archives. There is a video of a Russian dance class by Klara Lidén and a video of young dancers by Rineke Dijkstra. Boris Mikhailov presented photographs of a protesters’ camp in Kiev. The late Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a gay artist who had been beaten up in the streets, was represented with Tragic Love (1993), a series of photographs of the artist dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Some foreign artists also offered Russian themes. Yasumasa Morimura made photographs based on drawings of the Hermitage when its art was removed during World War II. Marlene Dumas showed portraits of famous gay men including three Russians — Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Rudolf Nureyev. Thomas Hirschhorn, whose Abschlag (2014) was designed for “Manifesta 10,” showed a gigantic collapsed building in which works by the revolutionary Russian Constructivists are installed. Erik van Lieshout presented the story of the Hermitage cats, longtime residents of the museum; they perished during the siege, but today are back in the museum basement, controlling invading rodents. And Francis Alÿs, whose boyhood dream was to travel from his native Belgium to the other side of the Iron Curtain, crashed a Russian Lada, a now-obsolete model of car into a tree inside the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Facing controversy about Russian anti-LGBT laws and, also, about the country’s action in the Crimea, in interviews Manifesta’s curator Kasper König, who described Russia as “a repressive and authoritarian country,” articulated frankly the difficulties he faced. So far as I could see (I was not able to attend the performances or public performances, which were held outside the central exhibition site), much of the art, including most of the art by non-Russians was the kind displayed at such exhibitions in America. Certainly this is true of Olivier Mosset’s large, handsome monochromes; Ann Veronica Janssens’s very beautiful installations of floating liquids; and Vladim Fishkin’s A Speedy Day (2003), which compresses the twenty-four-hour light cycle into two-and-a-half hours, an effect especially evocative in far-North St. Petersburg, where the summer days are so long. The same can be said of Joseph Beuys’s Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980), a commentary on food shortages in East German stores; Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage, 2001); Susan Philipsz’s piano recording inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was played on the main staircase of the New Hermitage. Lara Favaretto’s installation of concrete blocks in the gallery for ancient Greek sculpture; Tatzu Nishi’s temporary wooden living room built around a chandelier in the Winter Palace, creating a home with the museum; and a painting from 1966 by Gerhard Richter made similarly affecting use of the site.

As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, rightly notes in the catalogue, “Displaying contemporary art alongside the classics is a common occurrence.” The logic of this procedure deserves discussion. In the gallery of the Hermitage devoted to Nicolas Poussin you can see the relationship between his early Joshua’s Victory Over the Amalekites (1625-26); Moses Striking Water from the Rock (1649), painted more than 20 years later; and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1655-57), a marvelous example of his late style. Normally we thus find visually connected works in one gallery. When, however, the physically contiguous works are historically distant, imagination is then called upon to identify connections. This is true when Louise Bourgeois’s silver sculpture The Institute (2002) is installed alongside an etching by Piranesi and when Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture Frau mit Hund (“Woman with Dog,” 2004), which alludes to the life of Russia’s historical high society, is displayed in the former emperor’s private quarters. In a challenging variation on this familiar procedure, Maria Lassnig, Dumas and Nicole Eisenman occupied the two rooms of the Winter Palace usually dedicated to Matisse. (His paintings were removed to the General Staff Building.) They too deal with the female body and its sexuality, and so temporarily giving them his privileged place in the Hermitage counted as a political gesture.

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David Brody, Paddy Johnson, and Peter Plagens joined David Cohen to review shows by Francis Alÿs at David Zwirner, Song Dong at Pace, David Shrigley at Anton Kern, and Diana Cooper at Postmasters.

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