Art Monthly 482: Dec-Jan 24-25

Contents

Kutlug Ataman, Snow White, 2024

Interview

Back to Nature

Kutlug Ataman interviewed by Maria Walsh

I went back into nature and started taking care of animals and planting a lot of trees, which is a ritual I do every year; I plant 5,000 trees. Doing all this holistic work gave me the freedom to reset my mind. Suddenly you start thinking of new art projects.

ANGA collective campaigning at the 2024 Venice Biennale

Feature

Critical Correspondences

Francis Frascina finds clear connections between the ‘critical correspondences’ that Bertolt Brecht drew between image and text in his wartime journals and the events unfolding in Gaza today

At Raven Row, Brecht’s image and text from 1941 made me think, again, of Theodor Adorno’s question posed in 1959: ‘What does working through the past mean?’, and his argument that ‘after Auschwitz’ there was a necessity, no matter how complicated, for postwar Germans to examine the Nazi era.

Sturtevant, Stella Averroes, 1989/90

Feature

Cultural Protectionism

Mark Prince argues that, for all its swagger, postwar US modernist abstraction betrays the country’s perennial fear of the other, revealing the cultural protectionism at its heart

Consider the rich seam of postwar formalism in US art as cultural protectionism: a metaphor that allows some shades of the primary economic sense of that term, although this is a form of production more defined by what it withholds than what it offers.

Ufuoma Essi, Bodies in Dissent, 2021

Profile

Ufuoma Essi

Tendai Mutambu

As if to visualise the unbidden return of repressed memories in our compulsion to replay them, Ufuoma Essi’s shots bounce back several times, repeating like reverb or a broken record.

Editorial

The Trifecta Factor

The results of the US presidential election have significant implications for the whole world, not least the civilian victims of wars being perpetrated whether by regimes the US currently counts as allies or as enemies.

For the ‘losers’, as Donald Trump would no doubt call those who did not vote for him, there was only despair. Losing the presidency is one thing, but the fact that the Republicans also won a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives – the trifecta – was so much worse.

Artnotes

Budget Blues

The first budget of the Labour administration gives cold comfort to the arts sector; a study shows that arts leaders are overwhelmed; Just Stop Oil tones down it stunts targeting artworks; Russia’s state collection of contemporary art is put at risk; the US National Archives modifies future displays to mollify white conservatives; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Obituary

Gary Indiana 1950–2024
Chris Townsend

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 1996 (rehearsal studio no. 6), 1996/2024, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin

Exhibitions

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit

Tate Modern, London

Larne Abse Gogarty

Karanjit Panesar: Furnace Fruit

Leeds Art Gallery

Amna Malik

Anya Gallaccio: preserve

Turner Contemporary, Margate

Cherry Smyth

Barbara Walker: Being Here

Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Tom Denman

Osman Yousefzada: When will we be good enough?

The Box, Plymouth

Lizzie Lloyd

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Happiness is not always fun

Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin

Mark Prince

Lauren Halsey: emajendat

Serpentine Galleries, London

Martin Herbert

Lucy McKenzie: Super Palace

Z33, Hasselt

Camiel van Winkel

Heague Yang: Leap Year

Hayward Gallery, London

Martin Holman

Hilary Lloyd: Ok darling, show’s over!

Roland Ross, Margate

Michael Kurtz

Temporary Monuments

Books

Rebecca Zorach: Temporary Monuments – Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise

Richard Hylton

Rebecca Zorach’s complex but gripping narrative debunks myths of American modernism’s apoliticism and firmly implicates it in the nation’s racial enterprise.

Navigation Beyond Vision

Books

Navigation Beyond Vision

Nicholas Gamso

This book of essays was inspired by a claim that German video artist Harun Farocki made a few weeks before his death in 2014: that navigable, computer-rendered worlds would supplant cinematic montage as the topos of 21st-century visual culture.

Sam Ashby, Sanctuary, 2024

Film

Sam Ashby: Sanctuary

Theo Gordon

By juxtaposing road-trip footage of flowers and birds in the blue sky with Purusha’s desire to enable people to expand consciousness, the filmmaker seemingly breaks with Purusha’s proscriptions on when and how transcendence can be accessed, suggesting that it can continually permeate our lives if one looks in the right places.

Nina Cristante, The Richest Man in Babylon, 2024

Film

Nina Cristante: The Richest Man in Babylon

Ellen Mara De Wachter

Elda dances her heart out to explain her predicament, while her doctor stares at the clock before handing her antidepressants. We are left to guess at the cause of Elda’s illness: overwork, an excess of empathy, the brutality of modern city life or freelance survival?

Seanie Barron dressed as An Poc Ar Buile (The Mad Puck Goat), c1970

Events

Tulca 2024: The Salvage Agency

Chris Clarke

Tulca occupies most of the city’s arts spaces with a programme of performances, talks and screenings that elaborate on the festival’s central premise: how can art create something new from the wreckage of civilisation?

Salvo, ‘Arriving on Time’, Pinacoteca Agnelli

Reports

Letter from Turin

Chris McCormack

Strikingly, the curators batch work along the changing light of the day – from bright sunshine to sunset and night-time. This obsessive relation to the sky’s seasonal changes in colour in Salvo’s paintings characterises a certain romantic, even Arte Povera-like attachment to the fleetingness of the material world, albeit one inflected by the chemical emissions of local industry.

Kengo Kuma’s extension to the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian

Reports

Letter from Lisbon

Henry Broome

The structure is supported by recessed V-shaped columns that are cast under shadow, almost invisible: it appears as if the roof is levitating. The extension is considered neither public nor private, a transitional space between the museum and the city, intended to be a link between the old and the new, screening the original building while simultaneously revealing it.

Smart Fund campaign graphic

Artlaw

Smarter Artists’ Funding

Henry Lydiate

Missing from the budget was a proposal that would not require government expenditure, but which would significantly benefit all UK creators, including visual artists: the creation of a national Smart Fund.