October 2, 2019 – April 5, 2020
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
tate.org.uk

American exceptionalism is a very real phenomenon, but it far too often obscures a British exceptionalism and a very British obliviousness to history. Whereas America is notorious around the world for its geography skills, that antagonism of history – crystallised through the struggles for civil rights – has long been in the public consciousness, however unwelcome it might be. Few people in Britain are so keenly aware of their own country’s actions, of Oliver Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland (in Britain he’s instead remembered for banning mince pies), of the East India Company, of the Opium Wars, of dividing and redividing the world according to its designs. 

Entering Tate Modern and being greeted, in the distance, by Walker’s Fons Americanus (2019) – the 2019 Hyundai Commission for the Hall – is almost overwhelming. In the Turbine Hall you’re first met with Shell Grotto (2019), a large, water-borne shell, reminiscent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), standing at the front of the Hall. But the goddess herself is absent, and instead a young boy’s head is overcome by waves at the shell’s bottom as he gazes into the sky; instead of the contained swirl of water that circles the shell and the feet of Venus in Botticelli’s painting, there is a boy drowning with tears running down his face.

Venus, absent from her stage, is at the head of Fons Americanus itself, at the back of the Turbine Hall. Whereas on top of the Victoria Memorial, which informed Walker’s piece, is a gilded personification of victory, wings and all, above a seated statue of Victoria herself flanked by truth and justice, here Venus is throwing back her arms and baring her breasts as water flows from them as easily as from her neck – downward past a caricature of Victoria flanked by a hanging tree, a ship’s captain, and a slaver. As a gift “to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world,” the didactic accompanying the 42-foot-tall statue reads, it not only “redirected the fates of the world” but also sharks’ migratory patterns to follow the British slave ships of the Middle Passage. 

“This is a piece about the oceans and seas, traversed fatally,” says Walker in her profile for the Tate, as an allegory of the Black Atlantic. And so, in the first of the two pools at the bottom of the fountain beneath Victoria and the slavers, instead of the proud bows of ships at the base of the Victoria Memorial we see sharks encircling slaves as they struggle to stay afloat. 

The lowest level of the fountain is sparser, with fewer figures. Here the sculptures are more expressionistic, with one figure resembling a Kathe Kollwitz woodcutting through its distress and mournfulness; another has a face that mirrors the anguish of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), as it’s hounded and harassed by a figure with a haircut suspiciously similar to Donald Trump’s. But Trump is only a small part of the fountain, as much as he is a small part of US and British imperialism.

Rianna Jade Parker, writing in ARTnews, is right in asking whether British artists would be commissioned on such a project, and be given the same resources and international stage that is granted to an American artist here – recalling that Boris Johnson’s promise in 2008 for a bronze statue memorializing the victims of British slavery went unfulfilled. Would another work by a British artist be more nuanced than Walker’s Fons Americanus, she asks, highlighting Walker’s misunderstanding of British history when Walker says slavery never happened on British soil – even failing to recognize the Tate’s own foundations that were built on slavery, and so failing to meet the criteria of the Hyundai commission that is to create a site-specific work for the Tate’s Turbine Hall. Had a British artist been commissioned to undertake this project, Parker writes, it would have been an opportunity to build and publicize a British discourse around race and slavery that is distinct from the American experience. But Walker herself deserves more credit.

Rather than an “an unnuanced portrayal of a subject Walker doesn’t know enough about,” as Parker claims, Walker recognizes the function of monuments and memorials beyond their official purpose. In discussing the forgettability of monuments, Walker describes first seeing the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace on her way to the airport, taking photographs in passing, and then promptly forgetting about it. “There’s this very peculiar quality that they have of being completely invisible,” she tells the Tate in a promotional video. “The larger they are, in fact, the more they sink into the background.”

And so Walker’s monument, contrary to Parker’s claim, does “what any good statue should – deal with its site and the context surrounding it.” Rather than adding another monument into the public that sits beside those like the Victoria Memorial, Nelson’s Column, or the Diana Memorial Fountain, any monument sanctioned by a British government that is headed by a notorious racist and which still fails to address basic inequality would have rung hollow. And so this is not a “counter” memorial but a negative memorial, a memorial to that failure and unfulfilled promise. When Parker “wonders whether a more introspective version of the monument was possible – and whether Walker was the right person for the job at all,” this refusal to have another memorial sit alongside them is this introspection. 

Walker’s monument then isn’t one that demands that it’s understood, but recognizes – however unjustly – its place in the British psyche. Slavery is thought as a purely American phenomenon that sullies that nation’s history, and which the US must still contend with. Britain instead celebrates its having ended slavery sooner than the US, without, of course, acknowledging its pivotal role in the American slave trade in the first place – and not to mention that its ships were still transporting slaves even after slavery itself was made illegal. It’s seen as an exclusively American problem; a novelty import from America that sits beside all its other cultural artefacts that gives us films about slavery as readily as Mad Men (2007–2015).  

Fons Americanus is a monument against this novelty of the British attitude towards slavery, that recognizes the intransigence of many of its viewers and the history of the country it exists in, presenting, as the didactic reads, “the Citizens of the Old World” and “The Monumental Misrememberings Of Colonial Exploits” in a way that putting a traditional monument a mile down the road from the Victoria Memorial could never achieve.

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November 1, 2019 – March 22, 2020
1109 5th Ave, at 92nd Street
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

To experience Rachel Feinstein’s survey, “Mother, Maiden, Crone,” at the Jewish Museum through March 22, is to walk through crowds of women and sometimes spot yourself. Feinstein, through her sculptural works, explores dualities and extremes, and the binaries of fantasy versus reality, maximalism versus minimalism, and community versus isolation, all through archetypes feminists have historically been eager to both reclaim and resist.

Much of Feinstein’s work refers to fairy tales targeted at little girls, and at first glance seems like an indictment of those fantastical stories. From menstruating shepherdesses to castles that rape, there is something perverse about all of Feinstein’s works that reference fairy tales. Upon closer inspection, however, this distorted nature demonstrates not fantasies dashed, but nightmarish realities realized. In the case of Sleeping Beauty (the focus of Feinstein’s film Spring and Winter, 1994/96), Feinstein is most interested in the story’s parallels in reality. The original tale of Sleeping Beauty is one of rape at the hands of her rescuer, a fictional account that mirrors real cases of sexual assaults.

Feinstein’s mirror is more than an allusion; reflective surfaces appear throughout her work, further critiquing the idea that fantasy exists outside of reality. In her works of enamel paint on mirror, such as her portraits of elderly women, the viewer is forced to examine their own reflection as they consider the fantasy before them—a fantasy that teeters on the brink of collapse. Feinstein’s elderly women are styled as 18th century grande dames, but the faux expressive paint style is more mid-20th century pulp fiction cover than Fragonard or Gainsborough portrait. Similarly, Feinstein’s costuming of her muses does not disguise their age or emotions, or the viewer’s own projections about women over 50. It’s impossible not to see the women as variations on the ever-familiar crone, from Shakespeare’s witches to Bette Davis’ Baby Jane. Physically, the mirrored negative space of each of these portraits provides a literal reflection of the person viewing the work, and the textural application of paint on mirror links the concept of creative artifice with the act of applying make-up.

Feinstein’s Goldstein (2019), a 40-foot long, monochromatic white wall relief, pairs a similar set of extremes, this time juxtaposing maximalism and minimalism, pleasure and shame. Like Louise Nevelson’s work, which infuses monochromatic wall sculpture with baroque intensity, Feinstein’s Goldstein is a shrine to pleasure, despite its monochromaticity. It depicts the opulence of a lively and tropical landscape – perhaps the drug-fueled, materialistic Miami of the 1980s, where Feinstein grew up. The style is both cartoonish and joyful, almost daring the viewer to feel ashamed at its tawdriness. For Feinstein, her Jewish Museum show is intertwined with the idea of shame – her shame at being a woman, at being Jewish, and her desire to reclaim those identities by displaying them in their most extreme forms. Naming her fresco “Goldstein,” she argues in an interview with Phong Bui in the Brooklyn Rail, is one way of doing this.

Feinstein’s other “room-encompassing work,” as the Jewish Museum describes it, is by definition maximalist and baroque, but also serves to highlight one of Feinstein’s most puritan pieces in contrast. Panorama of Rome (2012) wallpapers the entire second room of Feinstein’s show, reflecting the works within, as well as the viewers themselves. The mural is meant to mimic decorative 19th century wallpapers, and depicts aging Roman ruins alongside shining statues of heroes on horses, contrasting the aging glory of Rome and the mythological figures of that time with vibrant depictions of joyous everyday life. Like Goldstein, the energy of Panorama of Rome is grand and extravagant, reminiscent of a baroque 18th century depiction of a Dionysian feast or marketplace.

In contrast to this revelry, Puritan’s Delight (2008) sits surrounded by the panorama, but is a sobering ode to minimalism and the Puritan message and aesthetic. Puritan’s Delight depicts a monochromatic black, deformed carriage, symbolizing increasing Westward expansion and urbanization taking place in the “New World” in the 19th century. The vehicle’s wheels have come off, and some are warped, bending like a surrealist’s melting clock. Christian crosses jut out from the base of the statue, perhaps commemorating lost passengers. Puritan’s Delight is literally reflected in the mirrors of Panorama of Rome, but the panorama itself also depicts a nearly identical mirror image – another black carriage (this time intact), sits in the Roman plaza.

Like Panorama of Rome, Puritan’s Delight deals in mythology, or, we might say, fantasy. The fact that the passengers of the carriage are absent forces the viewer to construct their own narrative of what occurred, perhaps drawing on nationalistic understandings of American history and the extreme archetypes perpetuated in those tales. Implicit in the broken carriage and the memorial crosses is the myth of Manifest Destiny, and the idea that European settlers who lost their lives taking land from indigenous people were victims, themselves. Puritanism and the act of purification requires the existence first of people, ideas, or objects that are initially dirty, savage, sensual, or corrupt. Thus, the Puritan’s “delight” comes from the tragedy of the carriage disaster, itself, because without such a tragedy, the myth of American nationalism cannot exist. Feinstein’s use of the word “delight” – which calls to mind pleasure over shame – is again a contrast, forcing the viewer to contend with the opposing pieces in the room, sculptures that depict rainbow women in sexually provocative stances, as well as the grand panorama. In this way, Feinstein demonstrates one extreme giving life to another, calling to mind other Puritanical dichotomies like the slut and the innocent, or the witch and the saint.

If the room wallpapered in Panorama of Rome is Feinstein’s depiction of society and the warring ideologies that command conformity, the room that houses Feinstein’s video depicts the alternative: complete isolation. In Spring and Winter, Feinstein plays both a young slumbering seductress and an old woman emerging from hibernation. The connection between these two characters mirrors the link between the slut and the witch, two feminine archetypes that have historically been punished for their nonconformism. Seen through the lens of Spring and Winter, this storied tale takes on another dimension. The punishment of isolation becomes a gift – the freedom to embrace one’s sluttiness or witchiness without prying eyes.

The ovoid room that houses the film Spring and Winters serves as a meditation on isolation and its effect on women and artists, but also as a sort of love nest. Because Feinstein’s video, which deals so powerfully with the theme of isolation, is surrounded by sculptures of couples, it’s impossible not to draw a parallel between the strong influence Feinstein attributes to being alone and her understanding of romance, sex, and partnership. In Alice (2008), two flattened, biomorphic, stained-wood figures engage in sex. The visibly feminine figure, presumably Alice, sits with legs spread, atop her lover. Her face is bent, as if folded in half, creating both a profile and a frontal view. Alice’s hands are carved from negative space, and rather than reaching for her partner, they reach for her own body. Thus, Alice’s pleasure is fleeting – existing only for the viewer who sees her hands in the negative space. Because the sculptures in this room are the only depictions of consensual sex in the show, together they present the idea that romance, and perhaps the heterosexual romance in particular, can only thrive in isolation from, and in resistance to, sexist society.

Feinstein has said, in an interview for Gagosian Quarterly, that she believes in “a world of dualities,” and “Mother, Maiden, Crone” celebrates this universe. But, her show also questions the concept of the binary, embracing the slippery matter within overlapping opposites, and interrogating the ideological polarity within popular feminism that the feminist must choose between reclamation or resistance. Instead, Feinstein’s work manages to view feminine archetypes through the lenses of resistance, reclamation, and acceptance – sometimes simultaneously all within one work.

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January 10 to February 16, 2019
545 West 25th Street
New York City, marlboroughcontemporary.com

Davina Semo’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Contemporary, “ALL THE WORLD,” her third there, marks a shift in tone from her previous work. Although the basic constituents of her sculptures remain much the same—industrial materials, fasti craft, appropriated texts used as all-caps titles—themes of control, eroticism, and violence have been tempered. Expressions of emotion and affection have swelled, and while those elements predate this show, they are given added, moving emphasis.

The show is built around two bodies of work: cast-bronze bells and brightly colored acrylic mirrors, all dated 2019. Three early bells were shown by Semo in Marlborough’s upstairs space in the winter of 2016 and 2017, and at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery in late 2017, though those were smaller and had other differences in their facture and hanging. Semo’s use of mirrors goes back to at least 2010, though those pieces often utilized obscuration as a tactic. Rather than those previous black or silver glass mirrors, these are bright pink, yellow, turquoise, reminiscent of mirrors by Sherrie Levine.

The five mirrors, each six-by-five feet, are embedded with two sets of radial ball bearings in overlapping constellations. One set of ball bearings is arranged in a grid; the other set is dispersed across the surface in spay-like disarray, recalling a backpack by Semo that has been repeatedly shot, shown at Marlborough in 2015. The mirrors capture, in subtly warped faces, the reflection of viewers and the bells. This is a lovely curatorial trick, reiterating and altering the perception of the work and the space. And the ball bearings take on multiple readings: the fearlessness of skateboards (they’re a part of the wheel system), the suggestion of mass anxiety signified by fidget spinners (they’re also a component of those toys), or, evading that dichotomy altogether, the cold reliability of machinery. Such allusions play up or run against the titles, which vary between grim and hopeful.

Semo’s bells, ranging from 20 to 33 inches tall, are made with a wax-casting technique that results in a bullet-shaped dome with eroded-looking rifts and drips on their thick walls. They’re tall and thin, patinated with a bituminous-colored finish and hung with chains that are powder-coated glossy black. Inside each is a wooden clapper attached to a thick, woven nylon rope. Visitors are encouraged to ring the clapper, but not touch the bronze, which, despite its robust appearance, has a very delicate patina. Each is attached at the ceiling while appearing to be slung through an eye bolt and anchored (save for one) to large bales of recyclable detritus, including aluminum and electronics cables.

Semo addresses both global and local concerns in this work. Close to home, the mirror SHE BECAME VERY SENSITIVE TO THE TASTE OF WATER FROM THE TAP reads, in its blue surface and epidemiologic red and black ball bearings, as an allusion to the ongoing Flint water crisis. A pink mirror is similarly dire, called IN THE REGION WHERE HE LIVED THERE WERE NO PLANTS AT ALL. Most frighteningly and directly, a bell in the center of the gallery held by two massive, stacked bales is called “BECAUSE WE ARE FACING AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT AND THERE IS NO TIME TO CONTINUE DOWN THIS ROAD OF MADNESS,” SHE SAID, a quote from 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Part of the horror here is the scale: those enormous bales were selected from among God only knows how many others, impressing on viewers a fraction of the resources used and wasted by people, which is an existential crisis.) Another bell, nearer to the entrance, is titled “IT IS HARD,” SHE SAID, “TO IMAGINE THE WORLD AS IT WAS”.

The anchoring bale of that latter piece includes reptilian-looking metal scraps that resemble works in Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s show of erotic and mystical sculptures in Marlborough’s viewing room, called “Towards an End to Biological Perception,” organized by Leo Fitzpatrick. The crushed aluminum, in places, looks like the snake-skin dominatrix shoe in P-Orridge’s Shoe Horn #9 (2016). There are echoes, too, between Semo’s work and P-Orridge’s use of snake fetishes made of curled iron, scaly dessicated fishes, or, for example, the mirrors in No Mercy (2019).

The one bell not attached to a bale is instead connected to a slab of rolled steel, with the words “ALL THE WORLD” (the work’s title) embossed on it in welded block letters. Bells serve for warning and mourning. Lament and alarm for the world as it is or was runs through several of the sculptures, ringing with the kind of sentiment found in John Donne’s famous “No Man is an Island,” apt for the moment in all sorts of ways, including the analogizing of coastal erosion and human suffering on both grand and individual scales:

No man is an island
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Mourning and heartache are, almost certainly, impossible without the kind of compassion and love Donne expresses. Despite the distress found in works here, the exhibition is nonetheless suffused with love and reassurance—something like courage and hope when held against existential threat. A bell closest to the entrance is reassuringly titled SHE CAN SQUEEZE HIS HAND WHEN PEOPLE ASK HER QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE. A mirror is called SHE LOOKED UP AT HIM, DIRECTLY, WITH TOTAL ATTENTION.

Bells also ring for celebration and contemplation. Among the people I saw tolling them, one of the gallery’s preparators was rolling the clapper gently around the lip of the bell, like a meditative singing bowl, making it hum. It’s hard to know how to address the beautiful and the horrible on Earth side by side, except perhaps to face what is awful, and to cultivate what is not.

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October 27 to December 17, 2016
510 West 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

In a show of new sculpture at Alexander Gray, Siah Armajani has made the gallery a mortuary temple stocked with the tombs of two poets, one philosopher, and one martyr. The sculptural/architectural proposition of the tomb has traditionally encompassed both subversive and normative figures from Alexander to Oscar (the Great and Wilde, respectively), so his choice of Arthur Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, Richard Rorty and Dietrich Bonhoeffer doesn’t stray from tradition. Still, the act of publicly commemorating cultural figures via intricate and monumental sculptural tombs certainly fell out of favor over the course of the 20th century, so Armajani’s pieces, invoking wit and anger with his crisp visual riddles rather than melancholy, is a welcome return to one of humanity’s more enduring tropes of visual culture. The artist’s process is on display in the exhibition as well, with preparatory drawings presented alongside the executed sculptures, but this decision posits much more of a quandary: while the two-dimensional renderings of the monuments are arresting in their sharp orthogonal perspective, their inclusion, as well as that of maquettes for the larger works, primarily serves to double the number of objects in the show and display a variety of scale that is largely irrelevant. In an architecture exhibition, drawings and maquettes are included because the final product isn’t. Armajani is not an architect, he is a revolutionary in terms of the direct connection between politics, life and art which he insistently draws in his work, and the inclusion of these Lilliputian doppelgangers only serves to create a false sense of the magisterial controlling master plans that are the bane of most monumental architectural projects. Armajani’s sculptures, despite their aspirations to the eternal and their sleek signature aesthetic, are humble, deeply heartfelt and personal.

Do the tombs evoke the individuals they represent, or are the titles more of a playful allusion to the artist’s own intellectual meanderings? It’s hard to tell: Armajani expects a lot of his viewers in terms of background knowledge.Tomb for Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2016), a sleek vermillion coffin on black sawhorses, clearly evokes the courageous minister, fitted with a noose, which was the instrument of his martyrdom at the hands of the National Socialists. The tombs of Rorty, Ribaud and O’Hara are not quite as explicit. Tomb for Frank O’Hara (2016) is a jolly affair and a much looser interpretation of the tomb — five disembodied and legless chairs emerge from two tables implying a late-night drunken conversation. The presence of a dark casket arbitrarily placed on the white tables pulls the whole assemblage back to the funereal; but this surreal centerpiece serves to heighten the absurdity, again directing the mind towards a besotted Irish wake rather than an eternal resting place. Tomb for Arthur Rimbaud (2016) also is a play on furniture-as-sculpture, lifting the everyday to the monumental. The “punch line” or pivot around which the piece moves is a pink and baby blue ramp or distorted table, perhaps alluding to Rimbaud’s youth and melancholy nostalgia, as well as his overall surrealism — in this tomb there is no box for a corpse.

The philosopher’s tomb, Tomb for Richard Rorty (2016), is the most architectural, and by that token the least sculptural; a large beige box stands atop a scaffold, like a fisherman’s hut on a pier, while the end of an umber coffin emerges from a rectangular orifice in the side. Both the coffin and its housing are not completely opaque: there are sizeable chinks between the wooden slats allowing for a visual permeability that negates the monolithic quality of the massing. How this is related to the father of neopragmatism is anyone’s guess though. It does seem a very pleasant dwelling place for the hereafter.

Written Iran (2015-16) and 100 and 1 Dead Poets (2016) utilize text in much the same ironic way that the artist repurposes furniture (and, to a subtler extent, architecture). In both cases, Armajani uses words to construct a fabric: in the former, text becomes an urban expanse, and, in the latter, an abstract pattern punctuated by a few small drawn objects referring to the text. As with the tombs, text becomes the jumping-off point of visual experience, and what the words actually say is sometimes less important that what they symbolize or the individual who wrote them. Written Iran brilliantly hops back and forth between the proposition that the city is a regulating geometry and presentational structure for the writing versus the words supplying the building blocks of the city. Armajani’s bridges and towers, recurring images for the Iranian-born artist, function much in the same way — their obvious but limited practicality only serve to highlight their metaphysical and textual meaning as beacons and links between people. In his sculpture, Armajani emphasizes a clear but limited color palette — and one that seeks to visually delineate the different parts of the construction — rejecting the idea of unifying the form through a sameness of medium but instead outlining a narrative by distinguishing the multiple parts and aspects of the piece. This brings a depth of vibrancy, warmth and humor to a dauntingly titled series.

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September 9, 2016 to January 14, 2017
500 Capp Street (at 20th Street)
San Francisco, 415 872 9240

Skellig Michael, a rugged island off the southern coast of Ireland, is known for the austere, beehive-like monastery built there in the 6th century. In 1993, the Conceptual artist David Ireland and his friend, photographer and filmmaker Jane Levy Reed, traveled to Skellig Michael for inspiration for their 1994 exhibition, “Skellig,” at San Francisco’s Ansel Adams Center for Photography, a show that consisted of photographs of shared authorship, objects in his studio, and pages from their travel journals. Ireland was primarily a sculptor and painter, with this being his first major use of photography and film. Through it, Reed wrote, Ireland “sought to convey the monastic experience of Skellig as a metaphor for his own acts of artistic creation.” The name itself translates as “Splinter of Stone,” a reference that held special meaning for the artist.

That Skellig is now the subject of “The Echo,” the third curation at the newly opened 500 Capp Street Foundation, by Bob Linder and Diego Villalobos, the foundation’s co-curators. Linder was a student and personal friend of Ireland, and Villalobos was a student of Linder. The rooms of Ireland’s house have remained essentially as he left them, but, using documentary photography from the span of Ireland’s history in the house history, Linder and Villalobos curate additional artworks and objects (such as furniture) that contextualize of refer to the artworks within each quasi-quarterly exhibition.

Downstairs, viewers enter the Foundation into a former accordion workshop, where a suite of Ireland and Reed’s photographic works from the 1994 Ansel Adams show is hung. There are two images of a staircase carved into the sheer face of a cliff leading up from the sea to the island’s monastery, an ancient stone cross, and a wash basin, with jars, which may be from either Ireland’s own house or from the monastery. Rust-colored Constructivist squares are painted on top of the black and white photographs, with large areas masked by white paint, creating a play between documentation, illusion, and object. In one photograph in this entry space, viewers can see a repurposed band-saw machine for giving films the bobbing sensation of being afloat appears.

Ireland was born in Bellingham WA and studied printmaking at the California College of the Arts, before serving in the military. Afterward, he worked as a tour guide in Africa, a carpenter, an insurance salesman, and ran an African import shop on San Francisco’s high-rent Union Street. (Sculptures shaped like Africa or elephant ears can be found throughout the home, especially upstairs.) He returned to art school in his 40s, enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute, and fell under the artistic influence of John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and especially Marcel Duchamp, who is pictured many times around the house, such as in Ireland’s bedroom and study.

Ireland purchased 500 Capp Street in 1975, and, like Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, made the run-down Victorian not only a site for artistic production, but also an artwork itself. Resembling his prints of the time, the building’s walls emphasize their own hand working, cracks, and blemishes, glazed all over with polyurethane to preserve their history of imperfections. Paul Greub — the former occupant of 500 Capp Street, an accordion maker who ran his business out of his home for 45 years and, evidently, never threw anything away — provided Ireland with a treasure trove of readymades and inspiration: Greub’s hoard of old jars, old brooms, old chairs, old lamps, etc. There are small brass plaques that commemorate aspects of the renovation, as when Ireland helped Greub move a heavy safe out of the house by rope and plank, and the safe fell twice, damaging the walls and floors. Ireland installed two plaques at the base of two stairs to commemorate the event: The Safe Gets Away for the First Time November 5, 1975 and The Safe Gets Away for the Second Time November 5, 1975 (both 1975).

Upstairs, one finds more renovation projects, as well as a catalogue of Ireland’s work. Complexly twisted wires fall somewhere between sculpture and drawing. Several bookcases are filled with his own work and knickknacks, as well as Greub’s jars — filled with sawdust or other materials gathered in the house’s reworking. Ireland remarked on these as being like small exhibitions of their own. He made more than 200 “dumbballs,” small balls of concrete that were the by-products of his “meditations,” i.e. passing them back and forth between his hands, and which he duly stationed around his house, sometimes stuck in the corners of rooms or on the ceiling, other times carefully displayed in buckets or basins, or on tables.

There’s a great deal of natural light in the house, emphasized by the gloss of the urethane-coated walls. One room emphasizes this fact especially. Another, a dining room whose table is particularly full of sculptures, is slightly darker: an untitled piece is composed of a copper printing plate covering a window. A reel-to-reel tape is included here, of Ireland enumerating the things seen from that window, which had been broken, before sealing it entirely.

Two other rooms, a guest bedroom and a study, are stripped to their natural white state instead of the urethanic ochre. They reprise the Skellig photographs, with a contact sheet marked with a red cross, set on a shelf in the guest bedroom, and a Skellig photo on a desk in the study. Here also are several recurring images: a water buffalo skull from Africa; a picture of Duchamp and an homage to his In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), made with a shovel trapped in a banded cord of wood; several Constructivist-indebted paintings, including some on cardboard boxes; and memorabilia from Ireland’s life.

The rooms read like mysteries strewn with possible clues: an opened book on James Lee Byars, its pages burned, a sting of lights shaped like fishes from Ireland’s hometown, allusive sculptures, personal possessions. Ireland’s work is understated, beautiful and intriguing but not precious. In “The Echo, Linder and Villalobos honor Ireland’s life and art, much in the spirit of Ireland himself, who venerated and preserved the contents of the former owner of 500 Capp Street. Linder and Villalobos’s actions not only create a continuum, with Ireland’s intentions and work, but underscore the basic human need to remember and make meaning from the history and stories of our lives.

David Ireland’s house was rescued by artist friends and wealthy supporters who thought that 500 Capp Street should be preserved. Carlie Wilmans, head of The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, bought the home in 2008, shortly before Ireland’s death the following year, at the urging of many of his friends. Ireland referred to his work in the house as “stabilizing things,” but ironically the first job was to shore up the unstable foundation weakened by his ongoing excavations. He, and we, are lucky the house did not collapse on itself. The small, guided tour offered at the house ends in the dining room where we were seated around a big table laid with silver dessert bowls filled with concrete blobs and silver spoons. The antique gas lamps, the religious figures, the horns, the altar to Natalie Wood, the cabinets lined with reliquary jars of sawdust, the balled-up wallpaper, the leftover birthday cake for Greub — it’s all still there in all its unorthodox glory.

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September 8 to October 8, 2016
521 W 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 695 0164

At Loretta Howard Gallery this month, six sculptures by Joel Perlman make the best argument I’ve found recently for reassessing a growing tendency to consider an artist’s dedication to working with a specific material as something that has passed into history. I don’t mean to imply that the assemblage techniques currently dominating, for instance, the Turner Prize competition are not adding to a welcome broadening of the sculptural genre. I’m wary of allowing technical mastery to lapse into a misguided notion of obsolescence. Intimate knowledge of a material gained through hands-on experience and nurtured along with an artist’s talent, judgement and intuition, has been a property of sculpture shared by nearly all cultures and in nearly all historical contexts. It is not a style. It is the recognition that sculpture has a formal essence.

As Perlman’s work shows, to develop an intimate and tactile knowledge of a specific material is not to unduly confine one’s experience, but to foster a level of focus that frees intuition and helps an artist develop an instinct for spatial language. His passion for industrial metal, specifically steel came early in his education. Leaving his native New York to spend a portion of his undergraduate years studying with welded sculpture pioneer Brian Wall at the Central School of Art in London, he returned to the states to complete a degree at Cornell, then went on to Berkeley. Though Wall has been a definite influence on his work, the sculptures at Loretta Howard are very much in the tradition of David Smith, particularly in regard to Smith’s innovative drawing mode as exemplified in the Whitney’s Hudson River Landscape (1951).

Like Perlman’s 2014 exhibition at Loretta Howard, the current work concentrates on a motif of open circular frames, with perimeters punctuated by half round and triangular shards dispersed intuitively along their curved edges. These marks function like swells and blots along a line of ink. One might consider them distant cousins to Pollock’s flung sinews, but the level of compositional control Perlman displays belies that tempting parallel. More than signs of mere spontaneity, these smaller elements read as stops or accents on a line of thought. When enlarged they intrude into the open space within each circle, redefine that space and accentuate the work’s abstraction. When smaller, they enliven pieces like Double Trouble (2015) by provoking a calligraphic interpretation that can lend itself to a range of implied references. Triangles suggest saw teeth; strings of half-rounds suggest worn gears.

Yet in either case, Perlman favors the abstract side of the spectrum and keeps the viewer’s eye trained on how the open spaces are defined by interruptions along the overlapping curves that define each piece. In Masterpiece (2015), a lower and upper emphasis on perpendicular circles cluster in a way that gives the space created in the center an illusion of expansion, which subsequently de-emphasizes the implied references to machinery. It is a delicate balance that changes with one’s concentration. The control Perlman demonstrates attests to his comfort with thinking in formal terms. Foremost here is a non-verbal and intuitive methodology apparently developed over decades of practice.

Perlman’s confidence allows him to occasionally leave the tactile security of steel, which informs his process through a feeling for weight, resistance and flexibility, and move to a near weightless material like Styrofoam in order to construct sculptures designed to be cast in bronze by means of a process similar to lost wax. Four of the pieces in the exhibition, including Double Trouble are fabricated this way. Casting in this manner is not all that different from the usual welding procedures, considering that it is based on assembled elements. Moreover, the production of multiples to which casting is often associated, is not possible in a loss system. Thus the motivation for its use is more like an exploration of visual ideas—sketching so to speak, not creating a line of multiples.

Each of the four cast pieces received a unique patina. Though subtle in range, color is important to Perlman, who prefers color that seems to deviate modestly from the look of the material beneath. And as he works intuitively, so experimentation with painting techniques follow. The two larger pieces in the gallery, Broadway (2016) and Wonder Wheel (2015–16) have been painted using a technique called powder painting or e-coating, which employs an electric current running through the sculpture that encourages an ionic bond between pigment and surface.

The formal vocabulary established in the smaller bronze pieces takes on an entirely different feel in the considerably larger Wonder Wheel. Here the triangular and half-round elements are scaled up, releasing them from their accentuating role and putting them to work merging and equalizing their relationship to the circular elements. A sense of solidity now joins the shards to the curve, leaving a more unified mass, the effect of which is to draw the eye to the irregular spaces between the solid elements—spaces that resemble the simplified edges of Matisse’s cutouts. They also — perhaps accidentally — create a pun on the idea of a cut-out.

It is this complexity, arising from nuance set upon nuance that makes contemplating these six sculptures a rich and open-ended experience. The variety of uses to which a few elements can be employed is limited only by the artist’s ability to see beyond the material fact of each shape toward a unified sculptural essence. And that ability, that sensitivity to variation and adaptation that Perlman’s work clearly demonstrates, ought to be a larger part of sculpture’s continued progress.

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There’s a delayed shock built into the work of sculptor and video artist Yeshaiahu Rabinowitz, which is all the more effective for not being immediately apparent. Underlying his work, which at first seems playful, is a quiet but no less searing reflection of how it might feel to be a gentle, slightly built Israeli male facing the prospect of army service.

Rabinowitz makes sculpture out of soft materials like felt and cardboard to deal with hard subjects, including violence and war, fear and vulnerability. He keeps his subjects at a distance; the action is offstage. But it is Rabinowitz’s sense of drama that attracts attention to his work, starting with the life-size sculpture of a fallen horse made of cardboard sheeting, which he presented at his degree show two years ago — which led to almost immediate showings of his work at the prestigious Herzliya and Israel Museums.

His first solo exhibition, “Attributes of a Hero,” was staged at Hansen House, Jerusalem, earlier this year. The space was built as a leper hospital in the late 19^th century, and still retains a spooky, historic atmospheric even after being reinvented as an art center. Rabinowitz’s sculptures of hand-sewn, made-to-measure body parts — or coverings for body parts — are well suited to the venue, a stone-walled gallery space with domed ceiling and cobbled floor. And it’s not just because of the association of leprosy and losing limbs. The dim, cell-like space, with spotlights that cause the shadows of sculpture and viewers to move across the walls, adds to the theatricality of the work, but also — if I’m not looking too deeply into it — its melodrama, fakeness and subversive joke.

The limp, tailored shapes are scaled and segmented, like pieces of human and animal armor, momentarily bringing to mind Claes Oldenberg’s big, soft replicas of everyday commodities, being both strange and out of context, yet immediately familiar. Instead of a hamburger or household plug, we discover a bit of human torso, a horse’s muzzle, pair of legs, horns. As shells sloughed off by a living body, or waiting to be used, they emphasize a need for protection — not that they would be of any more use than the plug or hamburger.

These pieces could be theatre props, perhaps from an amateurish Shakespearian production, either abandoned or waiting to be used in a play. Then the gallery space could be a scene in Macbeth’s castle. In discussion, Rabinowitz says that indeed, Shakespeare and his views on the complexities of heroism are an intrinsic part of his plot.

The organically shaped shells or molds are casually but expertly cut and sewn. Rabinowitz trained as a tailor after his obligatory national service as a soldier in the Israeli army, and says he “entered the art world through the back door.” Conceptualism comes naturally to him. He makes his art out of the unlikely combination of soldiering and sewing, uses it to express irony and an eager enjoyment of being an artist, and expresses a worldview that is tragic, naïve and knowing, all at once.

In the exhibition’s eponymous video, Rabinowitz shows himself trying to become a hero. An observant Jew with a yarmulka on his mop of curly hair, he first dresses carefully in white shirt and trousers, the modest clothes of a yeshiva student, while telling about biblical war heroes. His personal training exercise turns out to be running around in circles in a disused city space, crouched forwards with his fingers raised like the horns of a bull. The gentleness of the smiling young man and the futility of his personal exercise are offset by fierce energy and determination, and undermined by his own amusement. It’s the histrionics of heroism: weakness and foolishness fueled by heroic fantasy and will power. It’s a far-reaching metaphor that includes the collapsing horse. War is a subject often returned to by Israeli artists, but Rabinowitz has his own way of making a lot of suggestions about it, and leaving them in the air.

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May to October, 2016
941 North Street (at Hurlingham Drive)
Greenwich, CT, 203 869 0611

“My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

Guests to the opening of Jonathan Horowitz’s “Occupy Greenwich,” at the Brant Foundation, may have been very surprised: whereas the multimillionaire paper magnate Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie, typically open the spring exhibition at their art and study center with a pig roast, the carcasses of dead animals forced open and staked on the grounds, this year’s attendees were greeted with vegan catering. Horowitz is vegan, and dressing as a slaughterhouse the beautiful Connecticut estate surrounding his show seems likely to have undermined his work, some which speaks to the politics of what people eat and why.

Even before it opened, the show embraced some surprising contradictions. It runs the gamut, in a way, speaking to a number of social and political problems. It was promoted with a full-page ad, reproducing Horowitz’s print Go Vegan! (Stephanie) (2016), with the slogan underscoring the portrait of a seductive young woman. Horowitz is gay, but he also understands that pretty girls sell better than pictures of cute animals, which are often paired with that exhortation. (Though women are also often referred to with metaphors for penned animals, obviously.) At the bottom was the show’s sardonic title, equating the carefully executed exhibition of expensive collectibles with an anarchist takeover of the exurban enclave.

“Occupy Greenwich” touches on a number of seemingly partisan themes, often with messages that are superficially evangelist but which also include a subtext of uncertainty or perhaps even irony. That’s especially useful as America’s political discourse has grown increasingly polarized, in spite of the fact that people don’t lead polar lives and usually have beliefs and practices that differ radically from common stereotypes about, say, vegans, Republicans, working class voters, queer people, gun owners and so on.

Hillary Clinton is a Person Too (2008), staged in one early room, is a cartooned, life-sized bronze sculpture of a woman being crowned by a small boy standing on a chair, with the sculpture’s title cast into the base, in a corny comic font. Next to it, a whole wall of similar figurines — the size of paperweights and cast in the style of 1970s Sillisculpt statues, titled We the People are People Too (2008) — are marked with affirmations that “Young Mothers Are People Too,” “Socialist Medics Are People Too,” “Donald Rumsfeld Is A Person Too,” “Ellen And Portia Are People Too,” “Fetuses Are People Too,” and others. It’s not at all obvious how sincere Horowitz is being in his parodic coronation of Mrs. Clinton and the insistence on a common humanity shared alike by working people and Rumsfeld et al. It is absolutely essential to remember that everyone is a person, but it’s also important to recall that both of those politicians were managers of massive death, and putting them on the same scale as mothers, doctors, and embryos, etc., is discomfiting.

A stairway leading to galleries downstairs is lined with Go Vegan! (200 Celebrity Vegetarians Downloaded from the Internet) (2002/10). Each low-resolution-pictured person eats (currently, formerly, occasionally) a vegan or vegetarian diet, including Vincent van Gogh, Prince and Franz Kafka, among many others. Similar mosaics are found in vegan restaurants, online, and on posters produced by PETA. But they’re also dubious; Horowitz commends the plea and also slyly digs at its cheesy, superfluous celebrity endorsements, which seem to put animal-cruelty-free eating in the same basket as Coca-Cola and Nike.

Downstairs, a large room recapitulates Horowitz’s November 4, 2008 (2008) installation, originally staged at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, wherein viewers watched live election returns in a room divided between red and blue, FOX News and CNN, on back-to-back LCD screens. Here is the same set up, balloons poised to drop from the ceiling. The TV monitors are still playing the ‘08 election, and all of 24-hour cable news’ on-screen signs of urgent immediacy — rapidly moving graphics, breaking updates, a scrolling crawl at the bottom, and more — all this stuff that’s meant to convey nowness, is, eight years later, manic, diminutive, impotent.

The last installation, I, Hillary (2016), is a room empty save for a spare white bench, desk and chair, and an ink-jet printed and framed low-res portrait of Mrs. Clinton. From a small PA system comes Horowitz’s voice, giving a meandering, rational and sort of defensive account of the show and his support for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. He describes how capable she is, and that her policy aims seem pragmatic and reasonable. Although Horowitz sounds like he’s speaking extemporaneously, if haltingly, his remarks also seem canned, robotically parroted from Clinton surrogates, partisans and pundits. Many of the same claims were repeated at the Democratic National Convention in July and have been found in the opinion media for the past year — the thrust being basically that he’s not crazy about her, but thinks she’s capable and will do a good job and have you seen how insane the alternative is? Horowitz’s minimizations of Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street money and influence are followed by preemptive defenses about working with the Brants at their ostentatious estate, drawing a sharp parallel between her compromises and his own.

“I guess I am not a big proponent in general of supposed ideological purity,” says Horowitz in his monologue. Probably few people are. More than that, though, Horowitz seems deeply interested in apparent contradiction, performativity, appropriation and allusion, both in politics and culture, and in his own life. One can hope that poking at those conflicts and misconceptions might lead to better elections, or maybe more civility. Or perhaps even just a few more vegans.

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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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June 24 to August 26, 2016
12 Berkeley Street (between Stratton Street and Mayfair Place)
London W1J 8DT, +44 20 7491 0100

The distinguishing feature of Bas Jan Ader is the way he brings personal feeling and its hinterland of autobiography into a conceptual practice. That’s what makes him a “Romantic,” topped off by the mysterious manner of his death. Add the counter-intuitive combination of Modernist art history (with Piet Mondrian as focal point) and slapstick à la Buster Keaton, and you have much of Ader’s context. That dovetails with both his Dutch origins and his American residence from 1963, including the final five years which yielded his oeuvre. That consists of just 35 mature works, so it’s unsurprising that Simon Lee has not unearthed the previously overlooked — indeed, the content here is close to Camden Arts Centre’s 2006 retrospective — but the gallery does make an exemplary presentation of seminal pieces, supported by still photographs which acted as studies towards the films.

The most potent biographical interpretation takes us back to the Nazi execution of Ader’s father, who harbored Jews. I’m Too Sad To Tell You (1970–71), the film in which Ader cries, gains from the possibility — but not necessity — that he might be recalling that event and what it says about humanity. Here, the silent black-and-white image is presented on 16mm through a clattering projector with the artist’s head projected to triple life size — factors which undercut the immediacy of the emotion. We’re reminded of the gap between art and life.

Ader’s famous “falling” films are presented as a continuous loop, again on the original 16mm, allowing their similarities and differences to come to the fore. Five times a fall occurs, and in each case the artist disappears from view as a result: in Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970), he tumbles from a chair on an LA roof and into the garden’s bushes; Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970) sees him vanish beneath the water after he and his bicycle tumble into a canal; in Broken fall (geometric) (1971), he ends up in a ditch at the side of the road following the failure of what look far from determined efforts to remain upright. Broken fall (organic) (1971), opens with Ader hanging to a tree, until he loses his grip — like a leaf in autumn — and again vanishes into a canal beneath. Nightfall (1971), not only introduces a pun but applies the process to an object, a stone which Ader drops onto the scene’s lighting, so plunging him into the invisibility of darkness. Ader is often seen as relinquishing control to gravity in these films, but his agency is clear enough in the action of Nightfall, and arguably in Broken Fall (geometric) as well. Moreover, he has set up the effects of gravity in the other three films. The more consistent themes in this set of works are absurdity (again emphasising the gap between art and life) and, given the final vanishing enacted in each, the implication of death. That makes it equally feasible to read them as versions of the fall of Ader’s father, shot in the woods; as plays on the biblical fall from grace; or as existentialist commentaries inspired by Ader’s favourite author, Albert Camus, and in particular his Amsterdam-set novel The Fall (1956).

Broken Fall (geometric) also reflects on Mondrian: the road, we can see, leads to a windmill which features in several of his early paintings. And Ader’s thin form, dressed in black, makes the vertical line Mondrian would have approved — before Ader falls into the diagonal apostolically introduced by Theo van Doesberg. And Mondrian takes centre stage in the remaining works. On the road to a new Neo-Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971) also shows Ader before “Mondrian’s windmill,” but this time imitating the structure of his classic abstract compositions as he lies— playing dead, perhaps — on a blanket on the ground. In the film Primary Time (1971), we see the black-clothed Ader successively rearrange a multi-colored vase of flowers by adding and removing blooms so that exclusively red, yellow and blue bouquets remain. This, too, is somewhat absurd, and a potentially Sisyphean task is implied. Primary Time could be regarded as a painting reversed into its constituent colors to underline the clichés in the traditions of Dutch floral art, or as a claim that nature can provide a purer outcome than Mondrian’s more artificial reductions.

This grouping of work brings Beckett to mind as much as Camus: Ader performs pointless tasks and sets himself up for failure. Yet the sense is that attempting the apparently pointless is better than giving up, and when he cedes control it comes across as a strategic decision, not a lack of engagement. In his last act, he ceded considerable control to the elements by taking on the Atlantic crossing in a smaller boat than had anyone before him — not fatefully, the rest of his work suggests to me, but experimentally.

All of which is to say: Ader remains poignant and relevant. And if this show fitted a little too well with the air of gloom which descended on London following the decision to leave the European Union, perhaps Ader’s embrace of the ridiculous could be read a message of hope.

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