Articles
Revelatory Giacometti show sheds fresh light on the Swiss master / Financial Times
The Institut’s show brims with two-dimensional works, including a riveting encounter between the sculptures “The Cage” and “Four Figurines of London Version A” (1965) — the plaster figures united here for the first time with their original bronze plinth — and a panel of studio wall (remounted on canvas) covered in sketches for these works and one other.
The sculptural figurines — naked, emaciated women, their beige bodies highlighted with black strokes — perch precariously on their ledge. Are they waiting to be bought? Rescued? Dissected? In the cage, one of the open-sided cuboid structures Giacometti often used, a slender figure grasps the bars as if clamouring for escape.
Next to these desperate souls, the mural evokes a haunted house inhabited by spectral inmates — faceless custodians loom over the four women; the caged figure seems poised to leap from a precipice — who emanate like smoke through a mist of grey and red lines. This torment is very different from the “iconic dignity” of which Tóibín wrote. It is as if the act of painting, whether on canvas or plaster, plugged Giacometti viscerally into the anguish behind his efforts to articulate the void that menaces human existence.
Safet Zec at Venice Biennale — humanity at its most fragile and battered / Financial Times
A barefoot man carries a child slumped in his arms. He and his son have been painted at a moment of extremity; their bodies, swathed in pale, dirty clothes, are streaked with liquid shadows whose oscillations accentuate their vulnerability as they move through a sinister nowheresville of browns and greys. Are they struggling through a war zone, escaping a burning building or wading out of a raging sea? Titled “Man and Child”, the painting, from the artist’s “Exodus” series, has been executed in tempera, collage and acrylic on newspaper laid on canvas. Hanging from cords in the centre of the gallery, its lack of frame and frayed edges intensify its battered, intimate fragility. Only the newspaper glimmering through the paint anchors it to the here and now. Otherwise its classical technique and weighty, theological mood recall Old Masters such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt.
In truth it was created seven years ago. By then, its maker, Safet Zec, was 74 years old and knew what it was to need refuge. Born into a Muslim family in 1943, a moment when war was ripping through his homeland of Bosnia, he and his family fled from their country town to Sarajevo shortly after his birth. After studying art in Belgrade, where he lived and worked until 1989, he returned to Sarajevo but in 1992 found himself on the run once more as that city came under siege. During the Bosnian war, his print studio, in the historic walled village of Počitelj, was burnt out and plundered.
Historically, the [Venice] pavilion is an anomaly. When the Biennale started in 1895, its intention was to showcase international artists. From 1907, pavilions housed each nation. In 1932, it was decided that the host city deserved its own vitrine in order to showcase the artisanship — such as glass, textiles and goldsmithery — for which it was renowned.
It was a moment when Italy and Venice were in the grip of fascism. As with so many of the Biennale’s national pavilions, Venice’s showcase occupied ambiguous territory from its inception, at once offering opportunities for creativity to be celebrated while risking complicity with repressive systems. That knife-edge is no less sharp today as right-wing Venetian mayor Luigi Brugnaro, whose name tops the pavilion credits, faces calls to resign as he is investigated for corruption — which he strongly denies.
How the Hermitage Museum Artwashes Russian Aggression / Hyperallergic
It Is Time for International Museums to Sever Ties With China / Hyperallergic
Venetians vent their anger at Biennale land takeover / Financial Times
Since the Venice Biennale opened in 1895, it has spread from its original site in the Giardini through the entire city as palaces, gardens, galleries and shops rent themselves out to host exhibitions. In 1980, it occupied the Arsenale for the first time when it installed the Biennale of Architecture in the cavernous bays of medieval Europe’s most important naval base.
On balance, the event has been welcomed by Venetians who appreciate both its injection of contemporary culture and its boost to the local economy. Now, however, the relationship is strained.
In February this year, more than 300 angry Venice residents gathered around a banner unfurled across the bridge that spans the shipyard’s grandiose, tower-flanked watergate. Their flag’s sentiment — “the Arsenale belongs to the city” — protested bold new plans, including an expansion of the Biennale, for the hallowed district.
With the Threat of Cuts Unions get Militant in UK Museums / The Art Newspaper
In autumn 2020, as Britain’s cultural institutions reeled under the pandemic, Claire Prendergast and Richie Metcalfe, both part-time, front-of-house workers at major UK museums, found themselves threatened with redundancy and having to go through reselection. Both were required to complete an application form that saw their answers scored by senior management. Prendergast found the experience “embarrassing” and hated having to compete with colleagues who were friends. Metcalfe, who is Black, said he found the process to be “discriminative”.
Both workers kept their jobs, an achievement they in part ascribe to membership of the PCS union. “In some ways, I’m a good communicator; in others, I struggle to articulate. The union helped me express myself clearly,” Prendergast says. Metcalfe says his union representative “raised red flags around discriminatory language” in the application process.
The pair are part of a growing body of British heritage workers to join a union. At the PCS Culture Group—which represents 4,000 members including front-of-house, catering, cleaning and security personnel—membership has increased by 20% between 2020 and 2022.
Corporate sponsors have a golden grip on the art world / Financial Times
Many contemporary artists are left-of-centre believers in social justice and economic equality. The same is true for curators, trustees and critics. It is those liberal values that are fuelling the overdue welcome both to artists from diverse backgrounds and to art which expresses a radical politics. Little wonder they feel embarrassed to be stained by association with individuals and companies of which they disapprove.
British Museum’s board of trustees But why should the marriage between art and power start to crumble now? In part, it is because critique of the powerful is a larger part of contemporary discourse. It has also never been easier to follow the money or uncover the trail between a sponsor and the source of their wealth. Even as artists and institutions try to extricate themselves from tainted alliances, the golden grip closes ever tighter in a stranglehold of art fairs, extortionate auction prices, and mega-galleries.
Forensic Architecture’s investigations are both art and evidence / Financial Times
There is barely a whisper during the premiere of the film Situated Testimonies of Grenfell at the Royal College of Art in London. Nobody even glances at a phone; we are immersed in that terrible night in 2017 when fire ripped through Grenfell Tower in west London, killing 72 people. Including recordings of emergency calls, accounts of residents’ pre-existing safety concerns and social-media footage of the blaze, the film also reveals the process of its own construction as we see architectural software developers sit with survivors and eyewitnesses, while software experts recreate the building and its destruction using 3D modelling. Meticulous and detached yet filled with emotion, the film is a chilling, unequivocal condemnation of the multi-agency failures that led to the tragedy.
The film is also a form of evidence. Created by multidisciplinary research agency Forensic Architecture, in collaboration with members of the Grenfell community, Situated Testimonies of Grenfell was shown in the context of the settlement of a civil claim against private companies, local and government agencies and the London fire brigade.
From Banksy’s refugee-friendly actions to the exposés of Ai Weiwei, numerous creative practitioners narrow the gap between art and life. But few walk that tightrope with more purposeful precision or powerful effect than Forensic Architecture. Founded by the British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman in 2010, the collective’s members include architects, lawyers, scientists, software developers and “aesthetic practitioners” such as artists and curators. Based at Goldsmiths, University of London, where Weizman teaches, the collective’s reports, which investigate alleged acts of violence by state or corporate agencies, have stretched from Myanmar to the US.
Why more artists face jail around the world / Financial Times
The contemporary artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcântara was sitting peacefully on the steps of the El Capitolio building in Havana when the police came for him. Arrested ahead of a protest against a law that subjects all creative activity in Cuba to state approval, he cried out in pain as he was bundled into their car.
I watched the shocking video footage in his apartment a few months later, in November last year. Two weeks later he was back in a cell along with his partner, curator Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, arrested on suspicion of planning another protest against Decree 349, as the law is officially known.
Earlier this year I spoke to another redoubtable Cuban contemporary artist, Tania Bruguera, whose arrest in December was just her latest run-in with the authorities. In 2014-2015, she was detained repeatedly in the eight months after she tried to stage a performance, “Tatlin’s Whisper”, that asked citizens to speak freely into a microphone in Havana’s Revolution Square. Her installation about the global refugee crisis graced the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern this winter. “There is a moment when you understand you can lose everything,” she tells me at Tate when I ask about the strains of prison. “But my anger turns out to be bigger than my need for personal freedom.”
These Cubans are part of a tide of artists enduring imprisonment around the world in recent years — a marked change from the 20th century, when writers were more at risk of persecution. It’s a measure of this that organisations are springing up to fight their cause, from the Helsinki-based Artists at Risk (AR) to the Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), an initiative from PEN America, the writers’ advocacy group.
More evidence that the art market is bananas / Financial Times
“Bananagate” exposes an elite that wants to remain uncontaminated by such associations. Among those who bought editions of “Comedian” are Miami-based Billy and Beatrice Cox. They defended their purchase by comparing the work to Andy Warhol’s seminal soup cans.
They also promised to donate “Comedian” to a museum where, presumably, its revolutionary properties would enlighten future generations. They would replace it, they said, every few days to prevent rot. Meanwhile, the seller, Paris-based gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, opined that the real value of the work lay in the certificate of authentication. “They buy an idea. They buy a certificate,” he told the New York Times.
This is nonsense. Warhol’s soup cans, though far less fascinating than many critics believe, packed a novelty factor that made them significant. Mr Cattelan’s banana will affect nothing save a handful of bank balances. A certificate of authentication for a banana, especially one that is regularly replaced, is a symptom of an art world where money is confetti and ideas are loose change. It raises two fingers to all those for whom $120,000 could change, even save, lives. For some, a piece of fruit itself is worth rubies.
Yet the wealthy wonder why they are unpopular. A recent report from UBS, the world’s largest private wealth manager (which also happens to be the main sponsor of Art Basel), defended billionaires from accusations of greed. Speaking to the Financial Times, UBS head of ultra-high net worth Josef Stadler, condemned “bias in the media” and denied that his clients made “too much money on the back of poor people”. Rather, he said, they were a force for job creation and the distribution of wealth.
And of course, there’s all their philanthropy. Hundreds of art patrons fund cultural activities while living in tax havens such as Dubai, Geneva and indeed banana-loving Florida. One Swiss-based collector said to me recently that he was planning on setting up a charity devoted to “poor children”, yet had no intention of contributing to official public services in countries, such as the US, where he was making his millions. His decision reflects a situation where 10 per cent of the global gross domestic product is held in tax havens. Given the problems we’re facing, that may be bananas but, with respect to Mr Cattelan, it’s not remotely funny.
Rediscovering the Renaissance master Antonello da Messina / Financial Times
A year later, Antonello, having rejected an offer from the Duke of Milan to become his court painter, returned to Messina. No one is sure whether or not he had already painted his greatest masterpiece, the “Virgin Annunciate” (c1476), on loan from Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo. On show here, it portrays the Madonna alone at her lectern, her head cloaked in a lapis veil whose colour possesses a matt, puritan grandeur rather than its familiar opulent gloss. There is no angel. No dove. Instead, we, the spectators, are her messenger. Her hand is raised, palm angled towards the table beneath. (Antonello has painstakingly painted in the shadows beneath her fingers.) They do not beckon; they block. Her eyes neither meet the Angel’s gaze nor does she glance down in submission. Instead, she looks to one side as if determined to evade all expectations.
And yet no Virgin before or since has occupied her space with such assurance. Behind her, there is a vault of blackness. In front, a lectern whose keyhole-shaped recesses bore into darkness. The edge of the lifted page accentuates the distance articulated by those stretched fingers.
Infinite possibilities (on Dayanita Singh) / Financial Times
When I meet Singh in Delhi, it is clear that the rapport between word and image is fundamental to her vision. On arriving at her studio in a villa in one of Delhi’s residential quarters, I am barely over the threshold before she is gesturing at a pile of volumes on a coffee-table in a room lined with groaning shelves. “Look, these are my favourite books,” she says. And there are Calvino and Sebald alongside Michael Ondaatje, José Saramago, Junichiro Tanizaki and Alexander Kluge.
And we are off, on a marathon conversation that scythes straight to the big issues: books, politics, friendship, love. Along the way we will consume coffee, biscuits, sparkling water and – downstairs in her (book-free) apartment – salad and baked fish, but such material matters barely register. Eclipsed, too, is Singh’s diminutive but demanding beauty, her onyx-black eyes and glossy bob with its Arctic-white streaks; the crystalline voice that helps to make her a consummate storyteller.
Among her favourite authors, she says, is Ondaatje. “For structure, for editing. It’s about knowing what to cut, what to withhold, what to leave out. Ondaatje is the absolute master,” she says.
Journey into the depths (on Mark Rothko) / Financial Times
The 1958 Biennale cemented the artist’s reputation, in particular his pre-eminence over Barnet Newman and Clifford Still, the other two abstract expressionists who worked in large-scale colour. Yet the artist often complained his work was not properly understood. As the 1960s unrolled, the rise of pop art and minimalism – both of which were inimical to Rothko, who felt that art must be impelled by moral duty – nurtured his sense of isolation. Painted in 1964, the Blackform cycle is stamped with an air of gathering, inexorable doom. Forms and colours have been reduced to their essence – single panels in black, plum and maroon against only marginally different grounds – yet Rothko’s sense of proportion never wavers. In the black-on-black “No 8” 1964, the central panel shimmers like a moleskin pelt, its lustrous surface thrown into relief by the unequal top and bottom margins.
The last room is devoted to paintings that were executed in 1969 and 1970, the year Rothko killed himself. In the Black and Grey cycle – “Untitled” 1969, “Untitled (Black and Gray)” 1970 and “Untitled” 1969 – the canvases are sliced neatly in two, the darker shade pressing seamlessly down on the lighter, the presence of narrow white border highlighting the sense of suffocating weight within. The effect is vertiginous, as if one were standing on the edge of an abyss. Rothko, always the architect, has taken away all supporting structures. Like Aeschylus’ eagle, one must fly or fall.
Bruce Nauman — ‘I felt it was OK to be at the edges’ / Financial Times
Much of Nauman’s work — those repetitive jabbing phrases, the absurdist wit — turns on his fascination with language and its limitations, which has been deepened through his engagement with the texts of Wittgenstein and Samuel Beckett. Just as he is elaborating on why he was excited by Wittgenstein’s method of following a process to a “conclusion that either made sense or fell apart”, a deep barking cuts across his line. “I’ll just quieten this dog down,” says Nauman, his own husky tones in synergy with his canine. Asked what kind of dog, he laughs and says: “Part chihuahua and part mini-doberman.” I exclaim over the unusual blend, he chuckles some more. “Susan and I always had big dogs, when we lost our last [one], Susan saw this dog’s picture in the paper. We thought he weighed 45lb but when we got to the pound, he weighed 10lb.” He pauses, then adds proudly. “We got him up to 16lb.”
Although I suspect he would rather talk dogs than Wittgenstein, Nauman graciously returns to the topic of language. In truth, he has moved away from text in much of his more recent work. Asked why, he replies, “I always like to make things.”
Anyone who loves La Primavera and La Tempesta should support the new generation of eco-warriors, Just Stop Oil and, in Italy, L'Ultima Generazione, who have recently glued themselves to both these masterpieces.
Compared to the suffragette who ripped through Velazquez' Rokeby Venus (1647), their actions are tame. Yet the climate activists, at least in most mainstream media, have been written off as "eco-nutters".
But desperate times call for desperate measures. From the 2019 flood that nearly destroyed Venice to the intolerable temperatures that afflicted the UK this summer, and last month's floods which put one third of Pakistan under water, the symptoms of global warming are too violent to ignore.
Feminist revisions of art history have been around for decades. What’s remarkable is that they are still relevant. Most major institutions continue to display scenes of female abuse, exploitation and servitude with barely a nod to the stomach-churning nature of their inspiration. Yet it’s true too that much of their audience, including women, show little outrage at these paintings. “Don’t ruin them for me, they’re so beautiful!” cries a woman in the audience of a lecture on the politics of the female nude by McCormack.
The most interesting question about these images is not why they are loathsome to some women but why they are — still, despite decades of feminism — loveable to so many others?
The answer, of course, is that women are not a single entity. One woman’s masterpiece is another’s pornography. Personally, I love Renaissance painting, though not so much the rape scenes. But Picasso and Schiele can leave me outraged with their sadistic female wreckages whose aspects — perhaps starved, perhaps deformed, frequently desperate — say more about the painter’s own psyche than either his model’s or mine.
Indeed, in late 2021 we are becoming aware that considering women as a homogenous category is no longer viable. Whether we are making paintings, looking at them, or writing about them, much of our response — as well as our very access to these practices — is contingent on our identity.
“It’s not about building institutions, it’s about building infrastructure.” Curator Hammad Nasar is analysing his craft. “It’s not enough to pull in visitors. You have to connect with communities, create legacy.”
Nasar reaches for one of the off-piste metaphors he loves. “If you were a mountain climber, the question would be not ‘Can you reach the summit as an individual hero?’, but ‘Have you pushed the base camp higher?’”
Thanks to Nasar, the cultural camps of several British cities have been elevated. We are talking at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, where his exhibition Divided Selves: Legacies, Memories, Belonging, co-curated with Rosie Addenbrooke and Alice Swatton, is due to open next week.”
“Nasar’s unconventional beginnings — he trained as a chartered accountant — may have nourished his gift for thinking beyond traditional frontiers. After growing up between Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan — “I’d never heard the term curator — I didn’t grow up going to museums” — he moved to London in the late 1980s. “You could get seats for a fiver in the Barbican. I went to a lot of films, a lot of art galleries,” he remembers.
He enrolled at Birkbeck College for evening classes in art history. Later, he took a postgraduate diploma at Goldsmiths. Art, he discovered, had “this amazing capacity to be multiple things at once. It can be a hyper-luxury good, a site of political urgency and a pocket utopia simultaneously.”
The peasant stands in front of his hut as the Russian soldier takes aim. Painted in 1927, “Shooting at Mezhyhirya” by Ukrainian artist Vasily Sedlyar depicts the murder of Ukrainian peasants by Russian imperial forces during the civil war of 1917-21. Although this painting critiques the Soviet army’s enemies, its author was still executed by the regime in 1937 and the painting hidden in the stores of National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) in Kyiv, where its condition severely deteriorated. Only after the cold war was it shown again.
This sort of suppression was not rare. Before Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February, Ukrainian scholars were challenging the concept of the “Russian avant-garde” because the movement included many Ukrainian painters, such as Kyiv-born Kazimir Malevich. Like Sedlyar, they suffered during Stalin’s rule and, even when rehabilitated, their Ukrainian origins remained invisible.
These are exactly the sort of histories that contemporary artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke, who has a Ukrainian mother and a Tunisian father, was excavating long before Putin’s tanks rolled in. “Shooting in Mezhyhirya” is one of a clutch of paintings in “Blindstrom”, an installation in Kaabi-Linke’s exhibition of the same name, which was due to open on March 4 this year at NAMU.
“People hug me in the street. They say: ‘You were so brave!’ I don’t think so.”
Shahidul Alam takes a sip of almond milk, his mellifluous voice resonating through the sunlit sitting room of a mutual friend. “The things I said are not earth-shattering. They are things we should all be saying. They seem remarkable because others are silent. We have a tradition of resistance in Bangladesh. For people not to speak is a problem.”
In August 2018, the photographer, artist, teacher and civil rights activist was arrested, imprisoned and tortured for 107 days by the Dhaka police after criticising his country’s Awami League government in an interview on Al Jazeera. So Alam knows why his compatriots remain silent.