By Dan Kidner

Jean-Luc Godard, Goodbye to Language, 2014. All images courtesy: BFI London Film Festival

This year’s London Film Festival offered the perfect opportunity to take stock of the state of contemporary cinema and, in particular, the place of adventurous, forward-thinking films within this vast ecosystem. The LFF may not have been able to boast many premieres – much of what was screened had been shown elsewhere this year – but it made up for this with the sheer range of work shown. Once I got used to the infuriating festival brochure – which groups films in categories such as Love, Dare, Journey and Thrill – I found that there was plenty to impress from the spectrum of moving-image production.

The first of a number of films to impress this year was Russian director Aleksei German’s extraordinary Hard to be a God (2013). This epic tale of muck and madness freely adapted the 1964 science fiction novel of the same name by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. As in the book, Anton, an ‘observer’ from a future Earth, is sent to a planet that is almost identical to ours except that culture hasn’t progressed beyond the Middle Ages – although the plot quickly becomes irrelevant. For the most part, the camera is so close to the actors’ bodies and the fluids that drip, flow and spurt from them, that you can almost smell them. When the camera does retreat to take in a whole scene, the actors continue to piss, shit, fight and drag whatever weaponry or machinery that is close to hand through the mud, as if they had been given simple instructions about how to move and express themselves, rather than any kind of script. German died in 2013 and his wife and long-time screenwriting partner, Svetlana Karmelita, and his son Aleksei A. German, a filmmaker, oversaw the post-production. It is a fitting tribute to all involved that Hard to be a God is as uncompromising and searching as anything in German’s small but perfectly formed oeuvre.

Another filmmaker stretching and reinventing cinematic forms within what can broadly be called narrative cinema is Filipino director Lav Diaz, who was represented at the festival by his new film From What is Before (2014). Known as much for the length of his films as for their subject matter (the recent social and political history of the Philippines), From What is Before has a running time of just under six hours. Like German, Diaz builds worlds for his characters to inhabit, but his narratives are tighter. Set in the early 1970s on a small island in the Philippines before martial law is introduced and as Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship is being established, From What is Before tells the story of a group of villagers being driven from their homes by a series of mysterious events. First, cattle are inexplicably slaughtered and then a man is found dead at the side of a road. At the centre of the film are a woman and her learning-disabled sister. Rather than simply operating as metaphors for the collapse of community and suppression of opposition to the dictatorship, their plight, and those of the other villagers, serves as a portent, driving the narrative forward and keeping the audience spellbound. From What is Before is virtuosic filmmaking: experimental, searching and vital. It is an example of what narrative filmmaking can do; it would have been unthinkable without digital technology, which has allowed Diaz to think way outside the frame of the constraints of tradition film production and exhibition.

Both German’s and Diaz’s films appeared in the ‘Dare’ strand of the festival, as did Jean-Luc Godard’s latest, Goodbye to Language (2014). Godard’s first foray into 3D subverts all the expectations that one might have of the medium. The film is wilfully awkward and at times painful to watch – as if we’re bearing witness to the birth of a new cinematic language. Actors are cut off at the legs or neck or shot from odd angles, their bodies crowding the frame or half disappearing from it. Like German, Godard is also preoccupied with bodily functions and uses the 3D technology to stress mind / body separation and the materiality of cinema itself, as both an art form and an experience. In his 1968 film Le Gai Savoir (The Joy of Learning) Godard famously voiced his desire to ‘return to zero’, to throw away the conventions of cinema and unlearn what had been learnt. Almost 50 years later he has thrown down the same gauntlet to those working with digital technologies. At certain points, through superimposition of images in 3D, the film threatens to induce a collective epileptic fit in the audience – at these moments the audience in unison either rip the 3D glasses from their faces, or bow down to avert their eyes. No more fitting reaction, perhaps.

Also preoccupied with the relationship of mind to body is Emily Wardill’s When you fall into a trance (2013), which screened in the Experimenta strand. Fittingly dedicated to the memory of the late artist, curator and writer Ian White, with whom Wardill shared many preoccupations, When you fall into a trance traced the fault lines that open up in the psyches of a neuroscientist, her patient, Simon, who suffers from a loss of proprioception, and her lover, who is possibly a US spy – when they are put under stress. Wardill uses warped mirrors and splits the frame with various devices and, as with Godard’s Goodbye to Language, explores the limitations of language and ideas untethered from the physical body.

Other highlights included Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s clever and funny L for Leisure (2014), which pointed a way out of the mumblecore cul-de-sac for North American independent cinema, and Argentine Lisandro Alonso’s new film, Jauja (2014). Both films featured in the ‘Journey’ strand and were as interested in the landscapes through which their protagonists travelled as they were in the journeys themselves. L for Leisure is set in the early 1990s and follows a group of young graduates during their spring, summer and winter breaks from university teaching jobs and research positions. Kalman and Horn create a weird hermetically sealed world occupied by white middle-class kids oblivious to the world around them, however much they talk about world affairs and culture. They are not doomed in the same way as the protagonists in a Whit Stillman film, for example; they have simply been condemned to live in a sundrenched 16mm world where they water ski, roller blade, smoke nutmeg (to get high) and, in a particularly hilarious scene, improvise a fashion show using the contents of a bag of denim samples.

Jauja is Lisandro Alonso’s fifth feature and his first period film as well as his first film with trained actors. Viggo Mortensen takes the central role, as a Danish military engineer stationed in Patagonia during Argentina’s Conquest of the Desert at the end of the 19th century. The film dramatically shifts focus towards its conclusion, with a temporal and spatial rupture that recalls Alain Renais’s Providence (1977), which similarly explores the processes of cinematic storytelling and realism. With his third film, Fantasma (2006), Alonso promised much. He has an eye every bit as restless and probing as Michelangelo Antonioni’s, which he combines with a reflection on cinema’s past and future, and a sense of what it might say about his country’s own culture and history that matches Resnais. After his last film Liverpool (2008), which felt like a step backwards, Jauja lives up to his early promise.

Although ostensibly one of the programming strands, Experimenta is effectively an adjunct to the main festival. Its stated purpose is to represent both ‘experimental cinema and artists’ film and video’. And while this is not uncommon – most film festivals annex the experimental work in one way or another – at the LFF it starts to look odd when so many films in the main programme could rightfully claim to be at the forefront of ‘experimental cinema’. This year the Wavelength programme at the Toronto International Film Festival, which operates in much the same way as Experimenta, included Jauja and From What is Before, both of which featured in the main programme here in London. Similarly Godard’s film could have easily slipped into the Experimenta programme, just as Wardill’s arguably could have gone the other way. There were other films of note in the Experimenta strand that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the main programme, such as artist’s Eric Baudelaire’s Letters to Max (2014) or filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes’ short film Taprobana (2014).

However, there were also films that – were it not for the relative autonomy of the Experimenta programme – would not have been shown within the context of a major film festival at all. These included a programme of beautifully restored Los Angeles’ artists’ films from the Academy Film Archive; Phil Collins’ Tomorrow is Always Too Long (2014), a beguiling and bewildering hallucinatory city symphony for Glasgow, that sees the users of the city’s public institutions – such as schools, prisons and hospitals, as well as presenters on an imagined open access TV station – burst into song – and Steve Reinke’s Rib Gets In The Way (Final Thoughts, Series Three) (2014), which begins with an image of a man with a phone up his arse and ends with an animated adaptation, ‘for children’, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891).

It is not entirely clear what the answer is to these vexed questions about definitions and categories. It is clear, however, that there is a crisis of sorts over the definition of artists’ film and video, and much confusion over its relation to the type of cinema made by the likes of Diaz, Alonso and Godard. There was an attempt to address this across two panel discussions entitled ‘Artists’ film and its Contexts’, which was held as part of the Experimenta programme, but phrases like ‘artists are returning to the cinema’ were uttered without acknowledging that whether they were actually there in the first place, and if they had left, there was no discussion about why. It is true that some artists now make narrative films (however fractured those narratives might be), and documentaries that have running times of around 90 minutes, without letting go of their gallery practice or moderating their ideas and vision to fit conventional Hollywood grammar. And, of course, with cheap digital cameras and high-end home editing suites, many filmmakers now are able to make the films they want to make without compromise. There are echoes here of Peter Wollen’s claim in his seminal essay, The Two Avant-Gardes (1975), that ‘film history has developed unevenly’. In the 1970s one solution (as much as it was one) for many was to try and hold this fragile and splintered community of ‘avant-garde’ filmmakers together under the rubric of ‘independent film’. This was not the answer, just as it isn’t now, but it might be worth having a closer look at this history to see if it’s possible to learn from it.

By Carol Khan

The Peshawar Museum

To visit Peshawar Museum is to experience Pakistan’s colonial-ridden past, terrorist-plagued present and potentially historically significant future. During the Raj era, the main building was known as Victoria Memorial Hall and it sits along Saddar Road – a busy thoroughfare running parallel to the railway and adjacent to GT Road. The landscape architecture is among the crispest in the area with several well-kept grass lawns and KPK-engraved bricks strewn about the garden, separating flower patches. To visit the museum is also to experience an avatar of provincial tolerance, which hand-in-hand carries the threat of extremist attacks.

The entire region formerly known as the North West Frontier Province is scattered with Gandharan heritage sites, but the Museum here in Peshawar archives some of the most precious Gandharan finds in the province. It also holds one of the world’s largest collections of Gandhara artefacts. Some of the displayed objects date from the 1st century ACE to the 8th century ACE. Although the collection rarely travels, it would be wrong to say that it isn’t shared internationally. For instance, a nine-day exhibition of photographs of the Peshawar Museum’s collection reflecting Pakistan’s Buddhist heritage was held in South Korea at the Jogyesa Temple in the summer of 2011. The Peshawar Museum’s ties remain close to South Korea, with a recent visit by several Korean monks last month in October.

The subject of Peshawar Museum’s most recent exhibition, ‘Islamic Calligraphy and Manuscripts’, focused on Islam. The real impetus behind the Ramazan exhibition – the first special show at the Museum in eight years – was to highlight the Museum’s Islamic Section, where the display was held from 19 to 29 July, 2014, just before Eid. From metre-long ancient Holy Qurans to delicate Iranian manuscripts, the largely calligraphic specimens were predominantly gifted to the museum from Iran. The Islamic display room, located on the second level, consisted of more than just several donations from the Iranian Consulate and the Iranian Culture Centre of Peshawar in 2003. These calligraphy specimens were among the most auspicious on display. Entry to the show was free, although the doorman did try to charge my husband and me upon entry during the special Islamic display.

Without discussing policy-making and funding in reference to the Peshawar Museum, it’s worth noting that the Museum is run by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government via the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums. The curator explained to me that the first two days of the 10-day summer show were the busiest it had experienced, and that the Museum received more foot traffic than usual with the publicity it gained at the start of the exhibition. I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on terrorism and the various causes of bomb blasts, but the curator of the Peshawar Museum did mention to me that they chose to do a temporary exhibition on the subject of Islam, without charging an entrance fee, to guarantee less of a risk of terrorist bombings or similar attacks. In terms of remaining a safe place for families and visitors, the Islamic exhibition was a success.

The threat of terrorism for the Peshawar Museum becomes quite clear when considering how few temporary, travelling or special displays the Museum is able to offer the public. The previous exhibition before this summer’s show was in 2006 and examined the architectural history of the Peshawar Museum. Furthermore, its neighbouring library is impossible to enter without booking in advance. The lack of temporary exhibitions at the Peshawar Museum is clearly a wise and precautious step by authorities considering that ISIS pamphlets were reported to have been distributed in Peshawar in September. Although I haven’t spoken with the curator recently, chances are the Directorate of Archaeology & Museums will schedule the next temporary display at the Peshawar Museum again during an Islamic holiday to promote tourism in a safe and cautious manner. Perhaps greater national efforts to make, restore and preserve heritage locations such as the Peshawar Museum will help peace spread in the city and surrounding areas whilst deterring threats of violence to which Peshawar citizens have grown accustomed.

By Tom Newth

Diao Yinan, 'Black Coal, Thin Ice', 2014

Back in the years when film critic Robert Koehler ran the show, the AFI Festival positioned itself, coming towards the end of the season, as the ‘festival of festivals’, which was a celebratory way to justify the fact that international festival-goers would have seen much of its programme already, and that those less well-travelled would get a chance to see the mouth-watering titles they’d only read about and imagined. This round-up character is no longer specified under director Jacqueline Lyanga, and such a simple elision gives the event a slight tarnish for not admitting it (recycling a lot of Toronto International Film Festival’s Korean strand, for example). Even if one may also miss the spiky serious-mindedness of Koehler’s taste, the festival nonetheless remains a decent forum for a sampling of new world cinema, much of which would never find its way to Los Angeles otherwise.

Hollywood product is standard for the galas (Foxcatcher, Clint Eastwood’s The Sniper, both 2014), which are entirely missable, unless one wants to face the scrum for the sake of getting a jump on the general release. I was far more interested to see the Chinese winner of this year’s Golden Bear (Berlin), Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai ri yan huo – Fireworks in Daytime). It turns out that prize is a tribute to the skilful direction of Diao Yinan (Uniform, 2003), with touches of dry, surreal humour, discreet revelations, boosted sound design, a measured palette from muted gray-greens to neon pink, a particularly effective burst of sudden violence, and beautifully simple reverse-shot time-jump that takes us from the prologue to the main body of the film. What all this obscures, however, is a fairly standard detective mystery short on character and emotion, lifting the endings of both A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) and Beau travail (1999) to no particular effect, and culminating in an oblique and deliberately frustrating finale. Perfectly watchable, a big hit at the Chinese box office, but not a major film by any means, even if it makes one wish that more of lightweight genre fare could be pulled off with a least such an aspiration to elegance in its making.

Andrey Zvyagintsev, ‘Leviathan’, 2014

Leviathan (Leviafan, 2014), by Andrey Zvyagintsev (who also made The Banishment, 2007), is another celebrated festival hit (best script at Cannes), and it is a curious beast. At heart, it tells two fairly simple but appealing tales: of the little man against bureaucracy, as hotheaded Kolya fights to forestall the transfer of his house and land to the irredeemably corrupt mayor. When his lawyer, armed with career-destroying dirt, makes the inexplicably idiotic mistake of getting into said mayor’s car halfway through, however, the drama becomes more intimate and family-focused, and things get even worse for Kolya. Bookending the film, however, are portentous, Phillip Glass-scored sequences of the rugged northern Russian coastline where Kolya’s little fishing town is situated, beautiful in the majesty of nature and the charm of the rundown buildings and ruined boats. The point seems to be both that man is small and, per the whale skeleton on the beach, that the body of once-great Russia (or, indeed, Thomas Hobbes’ social contract as ideally applied to communism) has been picked clean by the corrupt bureaucrats. A couple of intrusive scenes with priests indicate first how the church rubs along quite happily with the new capitalism, before baldly lecturing on the Leviathan itself (yes, man is indeed small) and the nature of God’s truth. What could have been a rather affecting, intimate film with appealing performances from all concerned is crushed by a metaphysical weight it neither earns, nor can carry.

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes, ‘Two Days, One Night’, 2014

About the latest from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes, Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit, 2014), there’s not criticism one can make, as has been the case for their films for some time now: pursuing their narrowly-defined, well-honed form and content, they place themselves almost outside of critical judgment, comparisons becoming valid only with the rest of their work which, being of such consistent standard, means the best one can say is that yes, this is another Dardennes brothers film. The most obvious difference here is the star power of Marion Cotillard, although if one didn’t know her, one wouldn’t guess; she is resolutely unstarry, but giving one of the strongest, invisibly actor-ly performances to be found in the brothers’ filmography. The other difference, less obvious, is that aside from the ending of Lorna’s Silence (2008), this may be the brother’s most blatant foray into metaphor. Cotillard is a recovering depressive, and the situation in which she finds herself directly mirrors the subjective experience of living with bi-polar disorder: her situation is impossible, and absurd, as her factory boss has forced her 16 colleagues to decide between letting her keep her job, or instead laying her off to keep their €1000 bonus; thus, she must spend the weekend going through the same seemingly hopeless process again and again, visiting her colleagues to try and persuade them to vote for her, an exercise that alternately produces hope and optimism, or despair and self-loathing, resolution to continue, or surrender to its futility. Whether she has won or lost in the end is unclear, and it is all rather effective if, as usual, quite depressing, the message being that making the effort is an end in itself, because what else can you do?

David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) is yet more ripe for metaphorical interpretation, although the subtextual wellspring is intriguingly unclear (and the subject could not be more different from that of the Dardennes’ film). Following a backseat make-out session, teenaged Jay learns from her seducer of the existence of an ‘it’ that, guess what, follows, and kills, unless its quarry has sex with someone else, in which case it will turn its attention to the new partner and, if successful in killing them, return to pursue its previous prey. That it moves slowly yet inexorably, can take the form of any humanoid known or unknown to those it follows, creepy or benign, and is invisible to everyone else, is effectively exploited for chills and shocks, although the nature of the set-up inevitably lends itself to repetition, and the impossibility of ending the film in any satisfactory way, opting instead for weakly-presented ambiguity. More interesting is that just as the production design is deliberately unspecific, evoking the 1980s but carefully out-of-time, so the metaphorical import of the conceit is left nebulous – one can’t lay STDs on it, nor distinguish whether high school kids should have sex as soon as possible to rid themselves of something or other, or avoid sex completely to avoid catching it in the first place. It is another example (after the ending of Black Coal, Thin Ice) of empty suggestiveness rather than intriguing implication, but more successfully so, and given the originality of the premise (alarmingly, taken from the director’s recurring childhood dream), competent direction, photography, and performances, the film ends up more or less succeeding in spite of itself (and in spite of the derivative ominous-synth-bass-chords-under-arpeggiator score).

There seems to be less on offer from the fascinating underground of Argentina than there was a few years ago. (I am waiting with baited breath for the new Mariano Llinás film La Flor [The Flower]), which is a great shame. However, a middle-ground independent cinema seems to be developing to counter the state-funded, usually-starring-Ricardo-Darín product, that is certainly better than nothing. Pedro Almodóvar-produced Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes, 2014) is the debut feature from TV director Damián Szifrón, and the background shows, with sharp, bright photography from DP Javier Julia, and several ad-ready, affluent settings. The presentation is a cover, however, for absurdist black humour, across six unconnected tales of escalating whatever-can-go-wrong-will. The direction is impeccable, the escalating chaos neatly handled, and much of the film is genuinely amusing, but Szifrón’s fondness for killing off his characters, and the suspicion that he has contempt to one degree or another for every single one of them (even Darin’s accidental folk-hero) leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth, the whole glossy enterprise suggesting another example of the film-maker wanting to have his cake and eat it.

As an Orson Welles nut, I was intrigued to see the new documentary Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (2014). There are so many by now, that what more can one say? Nothing, as it turns out, although what director Chuck Workman has done is cram a great deal of material into 94 minutes, such that aficionados will unconsciously fill in the gaps, and newcomers may be forgiven for thinking they now know the whole story. But gaps there are aplenty (most glaringly, given the title, Welles as magician), as Workman races from one obvious beat to another, covering several interesting films (Mr Arkadin, 1955, Chimes at Midnight, 1965) with footage alone (and barely touching F for Fake, 1973 or The Immortal Story, 1968), parading the usual stories and talking heads, albeit in new interviews, offering little in the way of thesis or insight, and slathering it all in bland-to-inappropriate music. A couple of rare snippets (make-up test stills for the unmade Heart of Darkness, actual footage of the 1937 ‘voodoo’ Macbeth stage production), and a delightful random montage of Oja Kodar’s opinions are slim consolation. Yes, a workman-like primer, mostly uninspirational, but for its ambition to all-encompassing scope, probably destined to become the standard Welles documentary. Not what he deserves.

No great surprises either in Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement’s What We Do In The Shadows (2014), as absurdly, self-deprecatorily amusing as one might expect, a mockumentary following the Wellington, New Zealand, flat-sharing lifestyle of a group of affable vampires. Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner (2014) is likewise hardly a revelation, although does boast a barnstorming central performance from Timothy Spall, totally deserving the Cannes award for his grunting, bandy-legged gorilla creation, and gorgeous Turner-suggestive evocations of natural light in long-term Leigh DP Dick Pope’s photography, to offset the inherent stuffiness of both the period setting and Mike Leigh’s direction.

Peter Strickland, ‘The Duke of Burgundy’, 2014

After the surprising control and effectiveness of Katalin Varga (2009) and the empty fetishism of Berberian Sound Studio (2012), I was curious to see which way Peter Strickland would swing in his third feature, The Duke of Burgundy (2014). The answer was towards the hermetic world of Berberian Sound Studio, although this time with a mite more substance. If the shade of softcore director Radley Metzger hovers around the fringes, so too do the fairytale mittel-European environments, pastoral scoring, and febrile sexuality of Juraz Herz (Morgiana, 1972; Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, 1970), and the general chocolate-box tone of the 1970s Emmanuelle series. Such emotional content as there is resides in the relationship between two female lepidopterists (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara d’Anna) who spend much of their days and nights enacting mistress and servant role-plays, to gradual dissatisfaction. But once again, Strickland is far less concerned with the people than with production design (impeccable), semi-abstract camera effects, and esoterica – a great long list of insects and field recording data makes up the bulk of the credits; the title (unexplained) is a species of butterfly – and it is thanks only to Knudsen’s finely modulated performance that the film breathes with any real life at all. Strickland is clearly a distinct and powerful talent, and has once again created a strange and glittering film, but the literally superficial, Tumblrcore approach of worrying at his various fetishes will produce diminishing returns unless he can also recapture some of the humanity of his debut.

Another disappointment was The Tribe (2014) from Ukranian director Miroslav Slaboshpitskiy, despite its winning the festival’s special jury award. Its appeal is easy to account for, however, since on one level it is a remarkable achievement – as the opening title card warns, it is a film told entirely through sign language, with no subtitles or translation, and many of the young performers give vivid performances (particularly when angry), in frequently impressive, lengthy takes. It is centred around a group of youths at a boarding school for the deaf, but is little concerned with deafness per se. Instead it follows a group of young men and two women as they go about various nefarious and well-practised night-time deeds, mugging, pimping, and whoring. The overall effect, however, is simply that of another film enamoured of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, with little concern for character or emotion. This cannot be blamed on the sign language, as there are moments when such elements have a chance to blossom, but the unflinching abortion scene seems designed more to shock than provoke empathy, and the last-minute conflict of the sullen central character results in a denouement of cold, hard violence that is abrupt and excessive, but nothing more.

Lisandro Alonso, ‘Jauja’, 2014

So this festival was not stellar for me, although of course I could have seen an entirely different set of films and perhaps be surprised by a hidden gem. But not much about such a recycling of other festivals is hidden, and if one chooses one can look at Variety, Hollywood Reporter, or Indiewire reviews from previous outings of the films for almost every single title. I had not been intrigued by the coverage of Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014) – call it fear of a slow cinema, or rather, of a pointlessly self-indulgent slow cinema – and suspicious of the star/producer/composer credits for Viggo Mortenson, but it turned out to be a captivating, delightful treat and I was unaware of what a magical film it would turn out to be. It is slow, to be sure, but measured rather than molasses; the opening scenes of conversation between soldiers and Mortenson’s surveyor, sitting on the moss-heavy coastal rocks of Patagonia, surrounded by large brown sea lions, plays like a cousin to Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976) or Kaspar Hauser (1974), quotidian conversation slowly delivered as though the words are coming from somewhere else (echoes of Herzog’s 1972 Aguirre too, in the precious jewel of a daughter amongst this small band of men in the wilderness). But the film soon reveals itself to be something more like a western on the pampas, far closer to those of Monte Hellman’s (or even Two-Lane Blacktop ,1971), as a man’s quest across the wilderness gradually loses its object, momentum, and context, ending up in a place of otherworldly magic before evaporating into thin air. The portentous late-on query (repeated) ‘what makes life function and move forward?’ is offset by the emphasis on ‘a man is not all men,’ and even a coda that hints that all may be a dream is more mysterious than infuriating. After a week of fine but uninspiring viewing, it was a thrill to see something that dared reach for the spiritual and the metaphysical, and which succeeds with such single-minded simplicity.

By Sarah Khan

Niklas Frank as a child with father Hans Frank and mother Brigitte, Krakow 1942. Courtesy Niklas Frank.

What does Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion (1727) have to do with the legal expert Hersch Lauterpacht and with the Nazi lawyer Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland during World War II? The two men met at the Nuremburg Trials organized by the Allies after 1945 to try major war criminals of the Nazi regime.

One as a prosecutor and legal expert who helped define the notion of ‘crimes against humanity’, the other as one of the main figures responsible for the killing of three million Jews and Poles on the territory of the ‘General Government’ (the Nazi term for occupied Poland). In 1946, Frank was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and hanged. During their time in Nuremburg, both men also listened intensively to Bach’s St Matthew Passion. This strange coincidence prompted the jurist and human rights lawyer Phillipe Sands to work with the opera director Nina Brazier on the musical lecture A Song of Good and Evil that premiered at the end of November 2014 in London with a cast including Vanessa Redgrave (an additional performance is scheduled for 14 January 2015 in Stockholm, with shows in Nuremburg also planned).
During his research for this work, Sands met Frank’s youngest son, the writer Niklas Frank. From his books Der Vater. Eine Abrechnung (My Father. A Reckoning, 1987, published in English in 1990 as In The Shadow of The Reich) and Meine deutsche Mutter (My German Mother, 2005), we know that he was not able to love his parents and paint them as the victims of other prominent Nazis and of victor’s justice. Instead, he insulted them publicly, in drastic terms, not least as a way of countering the grotesque bombast of his father, who fancied himself as a sensitive art lover. This earned him enemies among those Germans who seek not so much reconciliation or forgiveness as forgetting. Anonymous threats can be pushed aside, but how does one deal with massive pressure and love-drunk hate from within one’s own family? Niklas Frank’s most recent book is about his eldest brother Norman, entitled Bruder Norman! „Mein Vater war ein Naziverbrecher, aber ich liebe ihn.“ (Brother Norman! ‘My father was a Nazi criminal, but I love him’, 2013). Aged 81, Norman paid an extra burial charge of 1150 Euro and donated his corpse to the institute of anatomy in Munich. In the winter semester of 2009/2010, he was dissected until all that remained was a bucketful of human material that was then cremated and, after a memorial service with the medical students, interred. Not long before, while Norman was still alive, Niklas Frank spent weeks talking to his brother, dissecting his mental anatomy, searching for the place where an unfailing love for his father and the knowledge of this man’s crimes against millions of innocents could peacefully coexist. According to Niklas Frank, his other siblings Sigrid, Gitti and Michael were all destroyed by this conflict: Sigrid killed herself with rat poison aged 46, not wanting to live to a greater age than her father; Gitti had been suicidal and addicted to pills since her early youth; Michael drank himself to death with a daily dose of 13 litres of milk, cycling cross country with a churn to fetch it from a farm. In the sessions with Norman that form the core of the book, Niklas Frank seems to have been fighting one last battle with his monstrous father: You won’t take my favourite brother into your Nazi hell! It is an attempt to save his soul. But is it possible to save a soul by confronting it with old letters, eye-witness accounts, photographs, memories and barefaced lies? Norman’s wish for his corpse to be dissected, to have a posthumous ‘academic career’ as he joked, may have been his way of escaping the notion of facing judgment in the afterlife. Born in 1928, Norman experienced Hans Frank’s reign of terror in occupied Poland as a teenager, emotionally neglected by his parents, supervised by SS guards and domestic staff, who claims not to have seen the violence against the population and the systematic destruction of the Jews from the bay window of his corner room in Kraków’s Wawel Castle – an icy cold luxury prison cell with leather wall hangings. Having happened to witness a shooting, it dawned on him ‘that we are the enemy here’ but ‘all I knew about the persecution of the Jews was what ordinary people knew: that the Jews were being excluded. And all I knew about the concentration camps was that they were where political prisoners were sent. To Auschwitz, for example. I would go right past there on the train. The huts didn’t surprise me. There were political prisoners in there, and people who had made themselves unwelcome, like the murderers of my Kraków drawing teacher Hoff.’ It is time, dear reader, for me to make a confession. For several years now, I have had an interest in the Frank family and the rose-tinted memories of the Germans in occupied Poland, although as someone born in 1971 I am far younger than the Frank children. This ‘drawing teacher Hoff’, named by Norman Frank as retrospective legitimization for incarcerations – ‘To Auschwitz, for example’ – was engaged to be married to my grandmother. She and Dr. Erwin Hoff lived for a few years in Kraków. He was an art historian at the Institute for German Work in the East (Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit, IDO), a pet project of Hans Frank who dreamed of how, after the war, he would turn Kraków into a great German university city. My grandma came from Hamburg and was employed as a writer on the Krakauer Zeitung, a German-language newspaper. She and Hoff belonged to a small circle of Germans not in military service, subjects at the court of Hans Frank. Following Hoff’s assassination and the evacuation of women and children from Kraków in the summer of 1944, my grandmother returned to Hamburg and married a pastor, my grandfather. She had five children and became such a trying person that to this day, her children imagine her Kraków time as a phase during which their mother led the jolly life of a working adventurer with a very busy schedule. She died of cancer in the 1970s. It was only a few years ago, when family talk returned to the lovely days in Kraków, that the penny finally dropped: I realized that Kraków had not been so lovely after all, and that the photograph of a woman in traditional dress with coiled braids showed my grandma standing not in Kraków’s beautiful Old Town outside St Mary’s Church, but on Adolf Hitler Square. My aunt gave me several boxes of photographs left behind by my grandmother. I almost fell over when I found an ID card authorizing her to work as a writer in the territory of the ‘General Government’, exempting her from the tight restrictions on journalists in the German Reich. I also found several portraits of Hans Frank, large handmade prints with a studied artiness about them. A world was ending all around them, all humanity vanishing, and she took pictures of park benches in the snow and of herself in traditional Goràl dress. There are ski meetings in the Carpathians, surrounded by swastika flags; interior shots of Wawel Castle and the IDO; rallies.

In a picture dated 10 March 1944 and taken in Krynica (where the Franks had a country residence), she laughs as she talks to SS men and officials from the Treuhandstelle Ost (‘Main Trustee Office for the East’, a Nazi organization set up to loot and liquidate Jewish and Polish assets in occupied Poland). On the edge of the picture, a ragged woman gazes forlornly at these members of the ‘master race’. Is that Albert Hartl there beside her, in SS uniform, the man who murdered Polish priests? My grandma’s lovely time in Kraków was a terrible construction. In the post-war years, she is said to have mentioned Hitler only once: ‘During the war, Hitler killed six million Jews.’ I wish I could have corrected her: Hitler never set foot in your beloved ‘General Government’. You managed it all on your own.
I heard about Niklas Frank and read his books about his parents, and then I sent him some of the pictures as digitized lures. ‘What never fails to horrify me,’ he answered, ‘is laughing Germans in an invaded country where mass murder was taking place every day.’ We met and looked together at the pictures of Hoff’s funeral, my grandma sitting beside his father in the front row. There were violins and flowers and the mourners facing the coffin lifted their arms in a Hitler salute. ‘Is it possible,’ I asked, ‘that my grandma is not lifting her arm?’ We counted the number of arms and the number of persons present, but came to no conclusion. How ridiculous! Was I trying to make a resistance fighter out of her? I was surprised at the intensity and astonishment with which he looked at the photographs, at these people celebrating weddings in occupied Poland, posing alongside his father, people on skis, school children. Norman could have told us a thing or two about it all, but by then he was already dead. Not long after, we met again during an event at the Topography of Terror memorial in Berlin when the criminologist, historian and writer Dieter Schenk presented his book on the Nazi occupation of Poland (Krakauer Burg. Die Machtzentrale des Generalgouverneurs Hans Frank 1939-1945, Berlin: Ch. Links, 2010). Frank sat in the audience and said a few words during the discussion. Afterwards I saw how often he was approached, by a former legionary, by a feminist literary scholar (who was studying the use of the word ‘hole’ in his mother book), and by people who cannot be described in such clear terms. But it was quite obvious that he means a great deal to them. Because he expresses the dark, libidinous dimension of feelings of guilt. The huge strain this puts on him is concealed behind his incredible charm. But did the former Stern and Playboy journalist Niklas Frank save his brother Norman’s soul? Even after reading the book, we don’t know the answer. But we do learn that if you ask lots of questions, you have to provide plenty to eat. Niklas brought Norman schnapps and marzipan, sausage and cake, and he was rewarded with Norman’s willingness to talk about anything, protected by mountains of calories and awful puns. The old anti-Semitic rhymes, children’s songs and affronts that Norman knew by heart and would deploy for their shock effect were part of his defences against empathy, as was his role of the stupid know-it-all who always managed to stay out of things. Niklas Frank has written an emotional book that seeks to understand with feeling: What did fascism do to the family, and what did the family do to fascism? Sadly, Norman could not be coaxed into revealing where their mother sold off Raphael’s still missing Portrait of a Young Man – it seems she swapped it with a farmer for some bacon after the war.

With some background knowledge about the occupation, Nazi terror and Polish resistance, the book is certainly a more rewarding read. Although Frank adds many counterarguments to his brother’s statements, he gives little explanation concerning places, institutions and events. Such added detail would probably have overburdened this finely structured book, however crude its language. When Norman mentions how German children in Kraków would break into a run as soon as they heard a group of Poles singing loudly, we are not told that Polish prisoners would sing their national anthem when they were about to be executed. For every German killed, dozens of Polish lives were taken. Much research remains to be done – the archive at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University still contains unseen material. Everything left behind in the institutions of the German occupiers on their sudden departure should be there. I spent three days in the city, reserving one day for a visit to Auschwitz. But once again I had fallen for my family’s version of my grandma as an ahistorical, apolitical figure who enjoyed life as a hardworking average girl. I only asked for the IDO files. One day I’ll go back and consult the staff files for the Krakauer Zeitung. In Niklas Frank’s book on Norman, I found lines penned by a certain Gerda Pelz, a colleague of my grandma’s at the Krakauer Zeitung who published a handbook for secretaries after the war, but who also wrote for the ‘women’s supplement’ of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In January 1945, two days before the liberation of Auschwitz, she sent her final greetings to Hans Frank, who had just left Kraków heading for Bavaria with five trucks full of furniture, wine and stolen art (including Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine). She asks him: ‘When will our sustaining and stimulating time in Kraków be revived?’ Weeks later, he answers: ‘I, too, often think back to the General Government and to beautiful, radiant Kraków, and I believe that all those who partook of our communion there gained something powerfully uplifting for the whole of their lives.’ It’s hard for me to disagree with that.

By Mike Watson

former wool mill in the cloisters of the Church of Santa Maria in Formiello, Naples, Italy

The art world in Naples has gained renewed energy thanks to the re-opening, in 2013, of the MADRE museum – which is situated in the city’s historical centre – and, since 2011, the ongoing renovation of the Lanificio (or ‘wool mill’), formerly the cloisters of the Church of Santa Maria in Formiello, in the district of Porta Capuana.

By bringing together independent artists, artisans, designers and gallerists, Made in Cloister presents an independent cultural reality which will work alongside the city’s museum spaces. Current inhabitants include sculptor Jimmie Durham, who recently fell in love with Naples relocating there from Rome. Durham has his studio in the former ecclesiastical complex and will shortly begin to run sculpture workshops for local inhabitants there. Meanwhile, gallerist Dino Morra is preparing to open his new space in early 2015, having relocated from the more affluent Neapolitan district of Chiaia. Dino Morra’s third space since opening in 2012 will have the capacity to host artists in residence during periods of research and will have a strong focus on site specific works. It will compliment an existing gallery scene which includes Galleria Fonti, T293 (who operate a second space in Rome) and Lia Rumma (who also has a space in Milan).

Made in Cloister is one example of how both private and independent interests are fundamental to the provision of a cultural programme in Naples, a situation reflected across Italy where foundations and even occupied spaces enjoy a close working relationship with both state and council run museums. In Naples this can be seen, for example, in the close working relationship between Museo MADRE and Fondazione Morra Greco with which the MADRE recently co-presented their solo show by Franco Vaccari, entitled Rumori Telepatici (‘Telepathic Static’), an overview of the septuagenarian’s practice, which explores the notions of contingency and identity through photography and film. Vaccari’s work focuses on the off kilter perspective of the banal and the everyday. A series of photos were presented next to large scale QR Code’s, which could be read by smart phones. One QR code, placed next to a photo of the Isle of Wright Festival, taken by the artist – in 1970, in which hundreds of revelers face the camera, smiling – delivers the question: ‘Do you see anyone with a camera?’. This self-reflexive piece plays on the history of photography as a medium associated with audience participation. At the 36th Venice Biennale of 1972, the artists displayed a photo booth at the Italian Pavilion, inviting the public to take and display their own portrait photos, which were shown as strips on the wall of the Italian Pavilion – a sort of collective portrait.

In Naples, Vaccari also showed unseen strips from the series ‘Photomatic Italia’ (1973-74), which were made the same way in the region of Campania. These early ‘selfies’ display a sense of humour and also relative lack of self consciousness in the Italian population long before the advent of smart phones and facebook. The empowering aspect of photography is thrown into question in an age in which we have all become subjected to a constant flow of images which need constant updating and commenting upon. Vaccari puts the public in a position to recall a time prior to the smart phone, by using that very device as a tool.

A similar self-reflective tendency can also be seen in Walid Raad’s solo show ‘Preface/prefazione’ at the MADRE, which runs until 19 January 2015. The Lebanese artist’s first solo show in Italy includes, on the museum’s ground floor, the ongoing cycle ‘Scratching on Things I Could Disavow’ (2007–ongoing), a project about the history of art in the Arab world, particularly relating to space and the way in which museum spaces in the middle East have appropriated the dominant language of the Western art institution. Museum style boards and displays as well as appropriated photos of generic gallery spaces contributed to the feeling of a museum that had been somehow disassembled, echoing the way in which the museum practices in the West are appropriated in the East. In the middle of the installation a large wall comprising two expansive white boards looks as if it has been literally ripped out of a generic museum space.

On the museum’s second floor, the show continues with The Atlas Group (1989-2004), a fictional collective conceived by Raad as a means to explore the impact of the protracted Lebanese civil war via an archive of falsified artworks and documents. There are, for example, two photographs of heavily bombed-out buildings with colour coded dots marking bullet holes according to the size of the area of impact and the origin of the country which manufactured the bullets. The series to which the two photographs belong, Let’s Be Honest, The Weather Helped (1998), presents a kind of cartography of the personal as well as impersonal affects of conflict.
A strong programme of educational events, talks and screenings characterize the cultural life of Naples, with Lia Rumma, for example, regularly supporting collective projects by the students of the city’s Accademia Dell’Arte. At the Faculty of Architecture of the Federico II University of Naples, students have occupied the building’s third floor over successive generations providing dark room, woodwork and sound recording facilities as well as a radio station and a lecture room. Such a reality exists alongside the daily functioning of the University and is tribute to the pragmatism of its staff and students. The facilities make use, so far as possible, of donated and found materials, whilst students and locals are trusted to contribute to costs.

Meanwhile, seminars and outdoor performance and film events are regularly held at Fondazione Morra which hosts the Museo Nitsch, dedicated to the work of Austrian Actionist Herman Nitsch, famous for his actions involving animal sacrifices and staged crucifixions. The museum currently holds a temporary retrospective of Actionist painting – ‘Azionismo pittorico, ecesso e sensualità’ – alongside a permanent installation comprising artefacts from Nitsch’s staged ‘plays’, including his 130th action held in the Vigna San Martino, a vineyard in the hills of Naples, in collaboration with Fondazione Morra.

In June of this year veteran experimental musician Phill Niblock – who is often described as the Grandfather of noise, a title he laughs at – played an audiovisual set at the Foundation’s 14th annual Independent Film Show in collaboration with Katherine Liberovskaya. His closing set featured characteristic dense drones layered with microtones, creating a nuanced dissonance comprising warm timbres to the accompaniment of documentary film footage Niblock shot in Eastern Asia, portraying the repetitive labour of rural communities. Listening to the mantra-like, repetitive tonal layers against the backdrop of Mount Vesuvius and the city’s night lights, it was a bit like being at the crossroads of history, between the rural Far East and Industrial West (with both being at the cusp of globalized hyper-capitalism), between Naples’ three-thousand-year-old history and its current bohemian energy (a sort of Mediterranean Berlin?) – like being in a space outside time.

By Sean O’Toole

A selfie taken by Beyonce at the Louvre, in front of the Mona Lisa

Last year 1.2 billion photos were uploaded and shared every day. By May this year, when Mary Meeker, a former Wall Street analyst turned internet sage, released her annual internet report, the number of daily image uploads and shares was already at 1.8 billion. What is the role of the solitary image now? How does one engage a zeitgeist defined by superabundance and ceaseless accumulation, rather than singularity and pause? What to do: retreat or dive headfirst into the maelstrom? I did a bit of both.

In retreat mode, I found photo historian Kate Palmer Albers’s essay ‘Abundant Images and the Collective Sublime’, published late last year, to be a helpful compendium piece to a line of enquiry opened up by Boris Groys in his 2010 book of essays Going Public: ‘The relatively easy access to digital photo and video cameras combined with the global distribution platform of the internet has altered the traditional statistical relationship between image producers and image consumers. Today, more people are interested in image production than image contemplation.’

You can include me in that statistical shift. This past year, in between sitting jack-knifed in front of screen thinking about what I’d seen, I made selfies in Osaka (in front of a Swarovski bejewelled Mercedes); in Cape Town (giving an Ai Weiwei middle-finger salute to artist Christopher Swift’s callow disco contraption masquerading as a memorial to Mandela on Signal Hill); and in New York (close to some taxidermied ‘koodoo’, or kudu as we spell it here, on display in the American Museum of Natural History).

On balance, I preferred looking Beyoncé’s Louvre selfies to mine. The Drunk in Love chanteuse, who graced the cover of Time magazine’s evanescent 100 most influential people issue (remember Oscar Pistorius?), has a good grasp of what Albers describes as photography’s ‘voracious consumptive and accumulative tendencies’. A selfie of Beyoncé giving the Mona Lisa a red-nailed victory salute during her private tour of the Louvre in August received 825 000 likes on her Instagram page. (‘Likes’ are a form of shallow looking that merit investigation. What do they denote? Are they like capsule reviews, a form of notice rather than studied attention?)

During her Louvre visit Beyoncé also photographed herself in front of an Italian marble sculpture from 1700-20 portraying Apollo conquering the serpent Python. The sculpture is currently a popular place to pose for selfies. Many tourists believe Apollo’s gesture, holding up his hand as if peering at a smartphone screen – actually, his sword went missing at some point – resembles the pose of amateur self-portraitists. Self-absorption and narcissistic wonder are hardly new human attributes. Nor is joy, communion, playfulness, affirmation, curiosity, wonder, boredom and loneliness, all attributes visible in selfies. What is new, though, is how these very primary instincts interface with, and are amplified by the perpetual present tense of social media.

Sifting through the ‘digital deluge’ (Albers again) stored by energy-intensive and secretive digital warehouses across the world, the images that most gripped me this past year included a trickle of self-portraits produced by Peshmerga fighters resisting the spread of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This is not about picking sides. There was a selfie meme featuring ISIL jihadists demonstrating their affection for that addictive Italian hazelnut chocolate spread Nutella that reminded me of Abderrahmane Sissako. ‘It’s important to say that the jihadist is someone who also resembles us, and who no doubt at one point of his life tipped over into something,’ remarked the Mauritanian-born director during the Cannes Film Festival where his film Timbuktu (2014) was shortlisted for a Palme d’Or.

Sissako predates the age of abundance. His films are slow, as is his output. Since releasing his first film in 1989, a short, he has produced only four features. Speaking to film festival director and promoter Peter Scarlet in 2006, Sissako remarked on the interelationship between pace, politics and poetry in his work: ‘For me poetry is a better way to communicate with the other, to say things that are important, important politically. Because when we live in a country and on a continent where making a film is a very rare and difficult act – because the means are not so readily available – we can only be but political. But political in the sense of building a better world, not only for oneself, but for everyone.’

Two offline projects from this year, both photographic books, both produced in Göttingen by Gerhard Steidl, bear all the hallmarks of Sissako’s riff of being an artist from Africa. They are also great examples of what it means to grapple with abudance as a working premise. Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases is both a heartsore archive of murdered friends and rigid taxonomic study of the LGBT community in which Muholi honed all the many facets of her dynamic personality. It is also, quite simply, a gorgeous book of portraits. Ponte City, a collaborative project between fellow South African photographer Mikhael Subutzky and English designer Patrick Waterhouse, is nominally a book. It is possibly better understood as a Perec-like attempt at exhausting a place in central Johannesburg through words and images. Plentiful, superbaundant images – fitted into a box. Pleasingly, both books have earned their makers nominations for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

By Timotheus Vermeulen

Two Days, One Night (French: Deux jours, une nuit), 2014, written and directed by the Dardenne brothers, starring Marion Cotillard and Fabrizio Rongione.

My highlights of the year must definitely include Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which really moved me

I saw Benjamin Clementine in concert and was blown away by the guy’s Jacques-Brel-ian voice and performance and Nina-Simone-ish musicality;

the latest film by the Dardenne brothers, Two Days, One Night, was simple but effective;

Mark Leckey’s survey show at WIELS, Brussels, ‘Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials’ (on until 11 January), was exciting;

Circa ’87, 2013. Courtesy the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin; Cabinet, London

Installation view of the exhibition Mark Leckey: Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials at WIELS, 2014. Photo by Sven Laurent

Videos by Nastia Mosquito and Hedwig Houben at the MUHKA in Antwerp, part of the group show Don’t You Know Who I Am? were both special, as was the solo exhibition of Oscar Santillan at The Ridder, Maastricht;

I loved Adam Thirlwell’s project Multiples, in which a whole bunch of amazing writers from different countries translate stories from languages they are not fluent in not to see what is lost but what is won;

Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis was an eye opener for a political-economist ignoramus like myself;

TV: The Good Wife, Veep, Mad Men;

Richard Smith, solo show at Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Lydia Davis’ collection of short stories, Can’t and Won’t ; Aleksandra Domanovic at the Glasgow Modern Art Gallery; René Magritte at the Art Institute of Chicago; and, finally, my guilty pleasure was the Dutch TV program Thuis voor de guis, the Dutch version of Gogglebox, in which you watch people watch television. Once I started, I couldn’t stop.

By Dan Fox

As far as disgraceful social injustice and disgusting political corruption go, 2014 was a vintage year. So for me, two of the most significant works made by artists in 2014 were not artworks. The first of these, Laura Poitras’s film CITIZENFOUR, is an astonishing historical document, recording the days and weeks during which Edward Snowden’s revelations about electronic government surveillance became one of the defining political stories of our age. Whether or not CITIZENFOUR is a ‘good’ documentary in the aesthetic sense is neither here nor there. Since the film’s release in October, I’ve had numerous arguments with people who think that Poitras could have ‘done more’ with her footage. I think they are missing the point. (What do you want? A nine-channel HD video installation featuring the complexities of electronic surveillance explained through a Judson Church-influenced dance sequence, sound-tracked by Miley Cyrus, and accompanied by a collateral programme of talks and film screenings?) What CITIZENFOUR makes clear is how few documentary films actually record a story of global proportions unfolding in front of the director’s camera. Here is a subject that needs no embellishment, no artistic lace doilies. CITIZENFOUR will be seen in the future as an exceptional piece of primary historical evidence. I left the cinema stunned by the courage of those involved in breaking the story, and in the production of this film.

Perhaps CITIZENFOUR felt all the more urgent because 2014 was a miserably grim year in world news, and Poitras’s film was just one particularly explicit expression of our frustration at the current shape of power. Which brings me to the second notable non-artwork by artists this year: The W.A.G.E. Certification campaign by New York-based artist group Working Artists for the Greater Economy. In the organization’s own words, ‘Certification is a voluntary program initiated and operated by W.A.G.E. that publicly recognizes non-profit arts organizations demonstrating a history of, and commitment to, voluntarily paying artist fees that meet a minimum payment standard.’ In October, New York’s Artists Space was the first non-profit gallery to sign up to the scheme, an important gesture in a town held in the vice-grip of unchecked real estate greed and increasing economic disparity. (‘People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent,’ remarks Crocker Fenway, a ruthless businessman in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. Both the film and the Thomas Pynchon novel it is based on are set in 1970, but that’s a line aimed right between the eyes of 2014.)

Chris Ofili, ‘Confession (Lady Chancellor)’, 2012. Installation view at the New Museum, New York, 2014

‘But c’mon Fox,’ I hear you cry, ‘we’re here to read about art not the price of eggs!’ OK, fair enough. 2014, for me, often seemed to have its gaze fixed on the past rather than the present, and notable retrospectives and surveys were thick on the ground. ‘The Heart is Not a Metaphor’, Robert Gober’s ‘this is your life’ moment at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, may not have been quite the immersive experience as his 2007 career overview at Basel’s Schaulager was, but I rarely tire of seeing his sculptures and installations. Gober’s work serves as a gentle and often moving reminder that Surrealism is the one art movement that never really disappeared or lost its power to disturb and entrance. I was taken aback by how much I enjoyed ‘Night and Day’, Chris Ofili’s victory lap at the New Museum, New York. In Britain during the 1990s heyday of Young British Art, Ofili’s work was so often reproduced in the media that it lost some of its pizzazz through overfamiliarity, so perhaps absence has made the heart grow fonder. (Protests erupted in New York when his 1996 painting The Holy Virgin Mary was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. In 2014, we’ve got far bigger problems to worry about than offending the sensibilities of a few iconodule Catholics.) Amy Sillman’s survey show ‘One Lump or Two’ at the Hessel Museum of Art/CCS Bard (which toured from the ICA Boston) was not just funny and imaginative, but a testament to the possibilities of painting, and ‘The Production Line of Happiness’ – a wonderfully titled retrospective of Christopher Williams’ photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and MoMA, New York – was as crisply milled as the glass on a Leica lens.

Many of the past year’s retrospectives were dedicated to the sadly departed. We had Sigmar Polke’s inventive mischief at MoMA, New York and Tate Modern, London; Sturtevant’s pioneering work in the field of appropriation – also at MoMA – and a moving exhibition of painting by Leonilsson at the Pinacoteca do Estado São Paulo. And I mustn’t forget the small but knockout selection of small paintings by US artist Albert York at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; bucolic landscapes, still lifes and allegorical works suggesting what Giorgio Morandi and Odilon Redon might have painted had they lived on Long Island.

Beatrice Gibson, ‘F is for Fibonacci’, 2014. Film still

Back in the land of the living, my other indelible exhibition memories from 2014 include, in no particular order: Camille Henrot’s exhibitions at Chisenhale, London and the New Museum, New York (without doubt one of the most compelling young artists working today), Scott Reeder’s deranged DIY science-fiction film Moon Dust (which received its New York premiere at Anthology Film Archive), Nathaniel Mellors’ equally far-out sci-fi short The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Beatrice Gibson’s unsettling, funny and erudite new film F is for Fibonacci at Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (which involved European serialist music, the finance industry, and a tour of a virtual city in Minecraft given by an entertainingly precocious child dressed as a banker.) In New York there was a superb season of work dedicated to Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie at The Artists Institute, (technically speaking this began in 2013, but this constantly-mutating show crossed over to the early months of 2014), and other highlights of the year in the city included Tim Braden’s homage to Cornwallian modernism at Ryan Lee; Sanya Kantarovsky’s Saul-Steinberg-goes-Fauvist solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan; new works by Gary Panter at Fredericks and Freiser and by Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures. I was taken by Sara Cwynar’s richly coloured explorations of photographic representation and still lifes at Foxy Production, and it was nice to see artist-cum-garden-shed-inventor Steven Pippin resurface at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. ‘Project LSD’, a set of artist-designed acid blotter sheets curated by Rob Tufnell for White Columns, surely had to be one of the more witty, original and zeitgeisty ideas for a show this year, given the resurgence of interest in psychotropic drugs today. As for art in 2015, I am curious as to what Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin will pull together for the New Museum Triennial, and what the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s new director Anthony Huberman has in store for the San Francisco venue. The opening of The Whitney Museum of American Art’s new premises open on the west side of Manhattan in May is sure to spark all kinds of fun debates for and against, and it’s a dead cert that the Venice Biennale will be the usual mixture of duds and delights.

Scott Reeder, ‘Moon Dust’, 2014. Film still

With record attendance for this year’s Printed Matter Art Book Fair at MoMAPS1, New York – it was absolutely mobbed – I feel compelled to mention a few of my favourite art books of 2014. Firstly, I was unsure whether to categorize novelist, art critic and frieze columnist Lynne Tillman’s collection of essays What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (published by Red Lemonade) as an ‘art book’ or not, given its dizzying scope of topics. But this is my end of year roundup, so I’ll do whatever I please and put it top of the list. Aside from carrying possibly the wittiest title of any essay collection this year, it stands as a testament to the insistent clarity, intelligence, and integrity of this singular New York writer. The catalogue to Mark Leckey’s mid-career survey show at WIELS, Brussels, ‘Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials’, was also a beautifully designed hardback by Sara de Bondt, featuring sumptuous layout, crystal clear navigability and a deluxe gold cover typeset after a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes. (Full disclosure: I contributed an interview with the artist to this publication.) Lucas Blalock’s monograph Windows Mirrors Tabletops, published by Mörel Books, provided a playful and wide-ranging introduction to this US photographer’s work, along with an illuminating interview by David Campany. A dense variety of source material relating to one of Los Angeles’ most influential artists could be found in Allen Ruppersberg Sourcebook: Reanimating the 20th Century, published by Independent Curators International. (Special mention should also go to his solo exhibition of new work at Greene Naftali, New York, which opened near the end of 2014.) Another doozy for the archive nerds was The George Kuchar Reader, published by the consistently on-point Primary Information. This collection of archival images and correspondence from the late lamented Kuchar is worth the price of the book alone for his wildly funny and generous ‘Letters of Recommendation’, written for his ex-students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Celine Condorelli’s book The Company She Keeps (produced by Book Works, and elegantly designed by An Endless Supply on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Chisenhale, London) features rich conversations are the topic of artists and friendships. Raphael Rubenstein’s short book The Miraculous (Paper Monument) describes 50 canonical works of modern and contemporary art, but not by name, and nor, really as works of art, resulting in a dreamlike art history with echoes of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965) or Invisible Cities (1972). Finally, the catalogue to the exhibition ‘What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art 1960 to the Present’ at the RISD Museum, Providence, edited by Dan Nadel, should be made compulsory reading for every primer course on postwar US art history; a necessary corrective to the idea that New York-centric Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art were the only games worth watching. However, little of the above would ever even reach our bookshelves at home without the near-heroic work of those running small independent booksellers dedicated to visual art and culture. I’ve not the space nor knowledge to give a comprehensive list, but in the cities I’m most familiar with, shout outs go to: Artwords, Claire de Rouen, Donlon Books, Foyles, ICA, November Books and X Marks the Bökship in London; 192, 6 Decades, Brazenhead, Dashwood, Karma, Mast Books, McNally Jackson, Printed Matter and Strand Books in New York.

Sleaford Mods, 2014

The music section of these end-of-year roundups is often the part I enjoy writing the most, but I found 2014 to be an uneven year in terms of record releases. Try as I might to get inside FKA Twigs’ LP1– her debut already tops a number of 2014 ‘best of’ lists – or Sleaford Mods’ angry and funny Divide and Exit (for me, a band whose lyrical wit – like a potty-mouthed John Cooper Clarke – outstrips the sticky-ness of their most recent music), and much as I wanted to like Scott Walker and Sunn0)))’s collaboration Soused– a pairing that made everyone do a double-take when it was announced – there was little that really wormed its way into my ears this year. I was happy to see that the ever-unpredictable Dean Blunt released a new LP with the surprisingly gentle-sounding Black Metal (which came on black labelled black vinyl, in black inner sleeves, in a black gatefold album cover, inside a black plastic bag, in case you missed the title). James Hoff’s Blaster was a bracing experiment with sound and computer viruses, and the impressive Unflesh, by Gazelle Twin – the project of Elizabeth Bernholz – was a serious and unsettling album of sparse vocals and electronics about subjects such as euthanasia, bodily horror, feral children, and gender politics. Russell Haswell – one of the most prolific electronic artists at work – produced the bullish 37 Minute Workout, which was made with a synthesizer, bass drum, hi-hat and clap module. It features of the most nervy, anxious dance tracks of the year, with its opener ‘Spring Break (Extended Freestyle Playlist Edit)’. Both Einstürzende Neubauten and Tindersticks this year produced tough and evocative responses to the centenary of World War One (Lament, and Ypres, respectively) that I admired for the ambition as much as anything. At risk of repeating one of my picks of 2013, I got hooked by Preternaturals, the latest album by Grumbling Fur; no great step forward since 2013’s Glynnaestra, but I’m a sucker for their Eno-esque pop melodies. Daniel Patrick Quinn – a musician based in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland – released Acting the Rubber Pig Redux, one of the most unique sounding albums of 2014: a mixture of field recordings made in the local countryside, looping rhythms, droning strings and pipes, plaintive brass and half-spoken observations about memory, landscape and travel. New albums by Ghostface Killah and Wu-Tang Clan (36 Seasons and A Better Tomorrow) were hugely enjoyable even though both sounded like hip-hop suspended in amber since the 1990s.

V/Vm, ‘The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback)’, 2014. Album cover

In fact, the 1990s kept coming back to haunt me this year; the first band I obsessed over as a teenager, Ride, announced a comeback tour for 2015, and Suede re-issued Dog Man Star, a 1994 album I can’t help loving for its over-reaching and often hammy ambition. Well worth the trip down nostalgia lane was the box set Suburban Base Records: The History of Hardcore, Jungle, Drum’n’Bass 1991–1997, a tendentious but great reminder of that point in the 1990s when dance music seemed to evolve at an almost weekly rate, and still carried a subversive, underground charge. (A good companion to this compilation was The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback), a haunting, bittersweet record about the ghosts of rave and British dance culture, by V/Vm aka Leyland James Kirby.) This year we were also reminded of the unsung genius of Annette Peacock, with the reissue of her album Revenge (1968), made in collaboration with Paul Bley. Accompanying the publication of Different Every Time, Marcus O’Dair’s authorised biography of Robert Wyatt, Domino Records put out a two-volume compilation of Wyatt’s work. The first disc, Ex Machina, is a small but perfect group of tracks selected by Wyatt himself, reaching right back to The Soft Machine and Matching Mole in the 1960s. The second volume – titled with tongue firmly in cheek, Benign Dictatorships– collects together Wyatt’s collaborations and appearances on other musician’s recordings. If you’ve never before explored Wyatt’s work – and, given he is one of the most original musicians to emerge since the 1960s, you really must – these compilations aren’t half bad as a place to start.

Paul Thomas Anderson, ‘Inherent Vice’, 2014. Film still

In cinema, the buzz this year was all about Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a film shot over a period of eleven years and tracing the coming-of-age of one Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) from ages six to 17. It was, in many senses, an extraordinary achievement, although outstanding performances from Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as Mason’s parents were reminders that youth isn’t always as compelling to watch or listen to as maturity. I was initially blown away by the horror and claustrophobia found in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin– its scenes of alien carnivorousness, evoked by little more than shots of a vast black pool of oil, were striking, and the film shared much of the dislocated atmosphere of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). But on further reflection, the way Glazer’s camera drooled over Scarlett Johanssen, and the ambiguous class subtext of his shooting methods, left a bitter taste in the mouth. (It was hard to tell whether the film was laughing at the Glaswegians unwittingly caught by his hidden cameras, or aiming for a gruesome ‘eat the poor’ satire.) Although much more heavy-handed with its social allegory, I enjoyed Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-ho (originally released in 2013 in South Korea, it only got its US release in summer 2014). This tense tale of class war and ecological catastrophe, set aboard a perpetually moving train where the poor live in cramped quarters at the back of the train whilst the rich live it up near the front, was the most visually impressive science fiction film of the year, even with its clear nods to Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil, and the early films of Jean-Pierre Jeanet and Marc Caro. (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes gets the Best Summer Multiplex Popcorn prize from me.) It may not be cool to admit, but my opinion of Wes Anderson turned around with The Grand Budapest Hotel. After the early delights of Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tennenbaums (2001), I had presumed Anderson was lost forever to cloyingly twee tales about self-consciously quirky and over-privileged families, recycling the same stylistic licks and shots of Bill Murray looking all world-weary. What The Grand Budapest Hotel made me realise is that Anderson’s leading actor is his art direction. Forget the cast of people speaking lines, who have all the roundedness of characters in a Tintin adventure. (The fictional Balkan states of Hergé’s imagination must surely have been an influence on this film.) These actors are just there to animate his delightful sets and costumes, which dominate The Grand Budapest Hotel to such a degree that it almost seems like a witty avant-garde move. However my film of the year was by the other Anderson – Paul Thomas – for Inherent Vice. No director could ever hope to replicate the labyrinthine complexities of Pynchon’s writing, but drenched in warm Californian light and featuring compelling comic performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin, Anderson managed to create something that doesn’t match, but certainly parallels the stoned paranoia, conspiracy theories, maze-like plots, language games and slapstick action of Pynchon’s universe. Inherent Vice tells a tale of police corruption, racist gangs, rapacious property development, government conspiracies, the drug trade, and of paranoia both to the political left and to the right. Which is another way of saying that this movie is a heart-warming slapstick comedy for our miserable times. As the Wu-Tang Clan put it, here’s to a better tomorrow.

By Tom Morton

Basim Magdy, 'A 240 Second Analysis of Failure and Hopefulness (With Coke, Vinegar and Other Tear Gas Remedies)', 2012, 160 color slides and two synchronized Kodak slide carousel projectors. Courtesy: hunt kastner, Prague; artSumer, Istanbul; Gypsum Gallery, Cairo; and Marisa Newman Project, New York.

EXHIBITIONS

In a year in which documenta 14’s Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk announced that his 2017 edition of the quinquennial mega show will be partly staged in Athens, the Greek capital played host to some fantastic exhibitions, not least in the independent spaces Kunsthalle Athena (‘This is Not My Beautiful House’, curated by Marina Fokidis), State of Concept (a solo show by Basim Magdy, curated by Iliana Fokianaki) and Totàl (‘They are indeed the principle of things, and yet they are not interpretable and empty as mirrors’, curated by Michelangelo Corsaro).

On a trip to Milan in March, I was fortunate enough to catch both the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi’s screening of Stan VanDerBeek’s immersive Cine Dreams: Future Cinema of the Mind (1972) at the city’s planetarium, an extraordinary explosion of projected images that felt like a premonition of a networked future, and the quieter pleasures of Uri Aran’s solo show ‘Puddles’ at Peep-Hole. Curated by Xander Karskens, ‘Superficial Hygiene’ at De Hallen Haarlem, was especially notable for the inclusion of Erkka Nissinen’s hilarious and utterly sui generis video Inner Materials … (2013) – I can’t wait to see what this Finnish artist does next. My full review of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Taipei Biennial appears in the January-February 2015 issue of frieze, but suffice to say that this intellectually ambitious reckoning with ‘the coactivity amongst humans and animals, plant and objects’ was a major event. I had been looking forward to Alessandro Rabottini’s Robert Overby show (‘Robert Overby – Works 1969–1987’) at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for some time. I wasn’t disappointed – taking the idea of skin (whether of a building, painting or S&M gimp suit) as its presiding metaphor, this survey of a neglected pioneer of postwar American art made him feel utterly fresh.

Alistair Frost ‘AZQ < > $@?•^’, 2014, installation view at Mary Mary 32 St Andrews Street, Glasgow. Courtesy: Mary Mary

In Britain, Glasgow International was a heaving buffet of treats (perhaps the choicest among them being Simon Martin at Kelvingrove and Alistair Frost’s working nail bar at Mary Mary’s offsite space), while Wysing Art Centre’s group show ‘Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century’, with its weirdly successful cheesy-nightspot-meets-holodeck exhibition design, pointed towards the rural Cambridgeshire not-for-profit’s ongoing invention, and atBALTIC, Gateshead, a survey of Simon Bill’s goofily lyrical oval paintings felt long overdue. In London, some favourites brought their A-game (Erik Van Lieshout at Maureen Paley, Pierre Huyghe at Hauser & Wirth, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Ed Atkins at the Serpentine Sackler, Cullinan Richards at 5 Howick Place), while I was surprised, and delighted, to enjoy Richard Deacon at Tate Britain quite as much as I did. At the capital’s David Roberts Art Foundation, ‘Geographies of Contamination’ – a group show of artists including Nicolas Deshayes, Marlie Mul, David Douard, Magali Reus and Rachel Rose, curated by Vincent Honoré, Laura McClean-Ferris and Alexander Scrimgeour – made a persuasive case for a kind of grubby, seeping post-digital order, and Trisha Donnelly’s solo at the Serpentine still has me wondering, in the best of ways, at this most elusive of artists’ intentions. Taking its cue from a photograph of the Victorian ethnologist Augustus Pitt Rivers’ artefact-strewn billiard table, the group exhibition ‘On the Devolution of Culture’ at Rob Tufnell introduced a host of domestic scale sculptures (by, among others, Aaron Angell, Brian Griffiths and Mike Nelson) to the green baize in a complex, trans-temporal game of bait and switch. ‘Rembrandt: The Late Works’ at The National Gallery was, of course, incredible – these are paintings that would still glow if they were installed in a skip. Also of note were Camille Henrot’s ‘The Pale Fox’ at Chisenhale Gallery, Adam Linder and Jonathan P. Watts’s dance / text performance at Silberkuppe’s Frieze Art Fair stand and the first UK solo show of American sculptor Melvin Edwards at Stephen Friedman Gallery.

I’d sort of promised myself that I wouldn’t repeat any names from 2013’s highlights, but this has proved impossible. Andreas Angelidakis (at EMSTE, Athens), Jessie Flood Paddock (at Carl Freedman, London), Catherine Story (again at Carl Freedman), Matthew Darbyshire (at Stanny House, Iken), Alex Dordoy (at Inverleith House, Edinburgh) Alexander Tovborg (at Overgarden, Copenhagen): these shows were all too good to let pass without mention.

‘On the Devolution of Culture’, 2014, installation view at Rob Tufnell, London. Courtesy: Rob Tufnell

BOOKS
Craig Burnett’s Philip Guston: The Studio was a thoughtful, often funny and beautifully written addition to Afterall Books’ ongoing ‘One Work’ series, while Gilda Williams’s gem of a primer How to Write About Contemporary Art will, I hope, feature on the Christmas wish lists of many of my students. Ned Beauman birthed a new sub-genre, the south London corporate thriller-cum-chemical romance, in his characteristically clever novel Glow, while also writing some wonderfully odd journalism, such as this piece on New York’s Westminster Kennel Club dog show: http://ow.ly/FIAvs. Set in a Damien Hirst-less alternate universe, Jonathan Gibbs’s fictional history of the yBas Randall, or The Painted Grape was ecstatically reviewed by the British broadsheets, providing another hit for Norwich-based indie publishers Galley Beggar Press to follow Eimear McBride’s 2013 A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing. (Full disclosure: Gibbs is the husband of my mother’s cousin’s daughter – nothing like keeping these lists in the extended family). Will Wiles’s sophomore novel The Way Inn fused J.G.-Ballard-meets-Alan-Partridge musings on chain hotels with Lovecraftian horror to intriguing cut-and-shut effect, while listening to Lorrie Moore read from her short story collection Bark at London’s Purcell Room was one of my highlights – literary or otherwise – of the year.

Simon Bill, Milk Churns, 2002. Courtesy: BALTIC

TV, FILMANDPODCASTS
HBO’s True Detective was superb, right up until the final episode, in which slow burn nihilism gave way to hackneyed sub-Thomas Harris horror. Ultimately more satisfying was The Leftovers (also HBO), an almost unbearably bleak post-rapture drama, and the second season of BBC America’s enormously fun genetic engineering dramedy Orphan Black. In the cinema, The Grand Budapest Hotel was the best film that Wes Anderson has made for years, while Guardians of the Galaxy became the new benchmark for superhero movie making, eschewing Christopher Nolan-style grandeur for a kind of Tarantino-goes-family-friendly take on the space opera. British standup Richard Herring continued to issue podcasts of brilliant comic invention. Like his (rightly lauded) former double act partner Stewart Lee, he is at heart a formalist, although Herring cakes his rigour in a thick layer of hilarious, schoolboy smut. Alongside millions of others, I’ve found myself waiting breathlessly for each new episode of This American Life’s podcast Serial, in which a real Baltimore murder case is investigated in weekly installments. The format is so simple – and so arresting – it seems incredible that it has not been tried before.

Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014

MUSIC
Ten tracks that kept me company during 2014: Rick Ross ‘Sanctified’; Todd Terje (feat. Bryan Ferry) ‘Johnny and Mary’; St. Vincent ‘Digital Witness’; Future Islands ‘Seasons (Waiting on You)’; Taylor Swift ‘Out of the Woods’; Beyoncé ‘Drunk in Love’ (the Feb ’14 Kanye remix); M.I.A. ‘Double Bubble Trouble’ (that video!); Caribou ‘Can’t Do Without You’; War on Drugs ‘Red Eyes’; FKA Twigs ‘Two Weeks’.

LOOKINGFORWARD
Tino Seghal at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Roger Hiorns curating a show themed on bovine spongiform encephalopathy (or mad cow disease) at the Hayward Gallery, London; Elizabeth Price’s Contemporary Art Society Award show at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Mary Ramsden at Pilar Corrias, London; Charles Avery at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Ronald Cornelissen at Tropicana Rotterdam, Christian Marclay at White Cube Bermondsey; Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island, and Adam Thirlwell’s novel Lurid & Cute.

Mary Ramsden, Remote, 2014, oil on board, 51 × 41 × 3.5 cm. Courtesy: Pilar Corrias, London

By Sean O’Toole

A selfie taken by Beyonce at the Louvre, Paris, in front of the Mona Lisa

Last year 1.2 billion photos were uploaded and shared every day. By May this year, when Mary Meeker, a former Wall Street analyst turned internet sage, released her annual internet report, the number of daily image uploads and shares was already at 1.8 billion. What is the role of the solitary image now? How does one engage a zeitgeist defined by superabundance and ceaseless accumulation, rather than singularity and pause? What to do: retreat or dive headfirst into the maelstrom? I did a bit of both.

In retreat mode, I found photo historian Kate Palmer Albers’s essay ‘Abundant Images and the Collective Sublime’, published late last year, to be a helpful compendium piece to a line of enquiry opened up by Boris Groys in his 2010 book of essays Going Public: ‘The relatively easy access to digital photo and video cameras combined with the global distribution platform of the internet has altered the traditional statistical relationship between image producers and image consumers. Today, more people are interested in image production than image contemplation.’

You can include me in that statistical shift. This past year, in between sitting jack-knifed in front of a screen thinking about what I’d seen, I made selfies in Osaka (in front of a Swarovski bejewelled Mercedes); in Cape Town (giving an Ai Weiwei middle-finger salute to artist Christopher Swift’s callow disco contraption masquerading as a memorial to Mandela on Signal Hill); and in New York (close to some taxidermied ‘koodoo’, or kudu as we spell it here, on display in the American Museum of Natural History).

Selfie taken by a Peshmerga with a member of the YPG in Kobane, northern Syria

On balance, I preferred looking at Beyoncé’s Louvre selfies to mine. The Drunk in Love chanteuse, who graced the cover of Time magazine’s evanescent 100 most influential people issue (remember Oscar Pistorius?), has a good grasp of what Albers describes as photography’s ‘voracious consumptive and accumulative tendencies’. A selfie of Beyoncé giving the Mona Lisa a red-nailed victory salute during her private tour of the Louvre in August received 825 000 likes on her Instagram page. (‘Likes’ are a form of shallow looking that merit investigation. What do they denote? Are they like capsule reviews, a form of notice rather than studied attention?)

During her Louvre visit Beyoncé also photographed herself in front of an Italian marble sculpture from 1700-20 portraying Apollo conquering the serpent Python. The sculpture is currently a popular place to pose for selfies. Many tourists believe Apollo’s gesture, holding up his hand as if peering at a smartphone screen – actually, his sword that went missing at some point – resembles the pose of amateur self-portraitists. Self-absorption and narcissistic wonder are hardly new human attributes. Nor is joy, communion, playfulness, affirmation, curiosity, wonder, boredom and loneliness, all attributes visible in selfies. What is new, though, is how these very primary instincts interface with, and are amplified by the perpetual present tense of social media.

Sifting through the ‘digital deluge’ (Albers again) stored by energy-intensive and secretive digital warehouses across the world, the images that most gripped me this past year included a trickle of self-portraits produced by Peshmerga fighters resisting the spread of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This is not about picking sides. There was a selfie meme featuring ISIL jihadists demonstrating their affection for that addictive Italian hazelnut chocolate spread Nutella that reminded me of Abderrahmane Sissako. ‘It’s important to say that the jihadist is someone who also resembles us, and who no doubt at one point of his life tipped over into something,’ remarked the Mauritanian-born director during the Cannes Film Festival where his film Timbuktu (2014) was shortlisted for a Palme d’Or.

Selfie taken by a member of the PKK in Shingal, Iraq

Sissako predates the age of abundance. His films are slow, as is his output. Since releasing his first film in 1989, a short, he has produced only four features. Speaking to film festival director and promoter Peter Scarlet in 2006, Sissako remarked on the interrelationship between pace, politics and poetry in his work: ‘For me poetry is a better way to communicate with the other, to say things that are important, important politically. Because when we live in a country and on a continent where making a film is a very rare and difficult act – because the means are not so readily available – we can only be but political. But political in the sense of building a better world, not only for oneself, but for everyone.’

Two offline projects from this year, both photographic books, both produced in Göttingen by Gerhard Steidl, bear all the hallmarks of Sissako’s riff of being an artist from Africa. They are also great examples of what it means to grapple with abundance as a working premise. Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases is both a heartsore archive of murdered friends and rigid taxonomic study of the LGBT community in which Muholi honed all the many facets of her dynamic personality. It is also, quite simply, a gorgeous book of portraits. Ponte City, a collaborative project between fellow South African photographer Mikhael Subutzky and English designer Patrick Waterhouse, is nominally a book. It is possibly better understood as a Perec-like attempt at exhausting a place in central Johannesburg through words and images. Plentiful, superbaundant images – fitted into a box. Pleasingly, both books have earned their makers nominations for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

By Timotheus Vermeulen

Two Days, One Night (French: Deux jours, une nuit), 2014, written and directed by the Dardenne brothers, starring Marion Cotillard and Fabrizio Rongione.

My highlights of the year must definitely include Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which really moved me

I saw Benjamin Clementine in concert and was blown away by the guy’s Jacques-Brel-ian voice and performance and Nina-Simone-ish musicality;

the latest film by the Dardenne brothers, Two Days, One Night, was simple but effective;

Mark Leckey’s survey show at WIELS, Brussels, ‘Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials’ (on until 11 January), was exciting;

Circa ’87, 2013. Courtesy the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin; Cabinet, London

Installation view of the exhibition Mark Leckey: Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials at WIELS, 2014. Photo by Sven Laurent

Videos by Nastia Mosquito and Hedwig Houben at the MUHKA in Antwerp, part of the group show Don’t You Know Who I Am? were both special, as was the solo exhibition of Oscar Santillan at The Ridder, Maastricht;

I loved Adam Thirlwell’s project Multiples, in which a whole bunch of amazing writers from different countries translate stories from languages they are not fluent in not to see what is lost but what is won;

Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis was an eye opener for a political-economist ignoramus like myself;

TV: The Good Wife, Veep, Mad Men;

Richard Smith, solo show at Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Lydia Davis’ collection of short stories, Can’t and Won’t ; Aleksandra Domanovic at the Glasgow Modern Art Gallery; René Magritte at the Art Institute of Chicago; and, finally, my guilty pleasure was the Dutch TV program Thuis voor de guis, the Dutch version of Gogglebox, in which you watch people watch television. Once I started, I couldn’t stop.

By Dan Fox

As far as disgraceful social injustice and disgusting political corruption go, 2014 was a vintage year. So for me, two of the most significant works made by artists in 2014 were not artworks. The first of these, Laura Poitras’s film CITIZENFOUR, is an astonishing historical document, recording the days and weeks during which Edward Snowden’s revelations about electronic government surveillance became one of the defining political stories of our age. Whether or not CITIZENFOUR is a ‘good’ documentary in the aesthetic sense is neither here nor there. Since the film’s release in October, I’ve had numerous arguments with people who think that Poitras could have ‘done more’ with her footage. I think they are missing the point. (What do you want? A nine-channel HD video installation featuring the complexities of electronic surveillance explained through a Judson Church-influenced dance sequence, sound-tracked by Miley Cyrus, and accompanied by a collateral programme of talks and film screenings?) What CITIZENFOUR makes clear is how few documentary films actually record a story of global proportions unfolding in front of the director’s camera. Here is a subject that needs no embellishment, no artistic lace doilies. CITIZENFOUR will be seen in the future as an exceptional piece of primary historical evidence. I left the cinema stunned by the courage of those involved in breaking the story, and in the production of this film.

Perhaps CITIZENFOUR felt all the more urgent because 2014 was a miserably grim year in world news, and Poitras’s film was just one particularly explicit expression of our frustration at the current shape of power. Which brings me to the second notable non-artwork by artists this year: The W.A.G.E. Certification campaign by New York-based artist group Working Artists for the Greater Economy. In the organization’s own words, ‘Certification is a voluntary program initiated and operated by W.A.G.E. that publicly recognizes non-profit arts organizations demonstrating a history of, and commitment to, voluntarily paying artist fees that meet a minimum payment standard.’ In October, New York’s Artists Space was the first non-profit gallery to sign up to the scheme, an important gesture in a town held in the vice-grip of unchecked real estate greed and increasing economic disparity. (‘People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent,’ remarks Crocker Fenway, a ruthless businessman in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. Both the film and the Thomas Pynchon novel it is based on are set in 1970, but that’s a line aimed right between the eyes of 2014.)

Chris Ofili, ‘Confession (Lady Chancellor)’, 2012. Installation view at the New Museum, New York, 2014

‘But c’mon Fox,’ I hear you cry, ‘we’re here to read about art not the price of eggs!’ OK, fair enough. 2014, for me, often seemed to have its gaze fixed on the past rather than the present, and notable retrospectives and surveys were thick on the ground. ‘The Heart is Not a Metaphor’, Robert Gober’s ‘this is your life’ moment at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, may not have been quite the immersive experience as his 2007 career overview at Basel’s Schaulager was, but I rarely tire of seeing his sculptures and installations. Gober’s work serves as a gentle and often moving reminder that Surrealism is the one art movement that never really disappeared or lost its power to disturb and entrance. I was taken aback by how much I enjoyed ‘Night and Day’, Chris Ofili’s victory lap at the New Museum, New York. In Britain during the 1990s heyday of Young British Art, Ofili’s work was so often reproduced in the media that it lost some of its pizzazz through overfamiliarity, so perhaps absence has made the heart grow fonder. (Protests erupted in New York when his 1996 painting The Holy Virgin Mary was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. In 2014, we’ve got far bigger problems to worry about than offending the sensibilities of a few iconodule Catholics.) Amy Sillman’s survey show ‘One Lump or Two’ at the Hessel Museum of Art/CCS Bard (which toured from the ICA Boston) was not just funny and imaginative, but a testament to the possibilities of painting, and ‘The Production Line of Happiness’ – a wonderfully titled retrospective of Christopher Williams’ photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and MoMA, New York – was as crisply milled as the glass on a Leica lens.

Many of the past year’s retrospectives were dedicated to the sadly departed. We had Sigmar Polke’s inventive mischief at MoMA, New York and Tate Modern, London; Sturtevant’s pioneering work in the field of appropriation – also at MoMA – and a moving exhibition of painting by Leonilsson at the Pinacoteca do Estado São Paulo. And I mustn’t forget the small but knockout selection of small paintings by US artist Albert York at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; bucolic landscapes, still lifes and allegorical works suggesting what Giorgio Morandi and Odilon Redon might have painted had they lived on Long Island.

Beatrice Gibson, ‘F is for Fibonacci’, 2014. Film still

Back in the land of the living, my other indelible exhibition memories from 2014 include, in no particular order: Camille Henrot’s exhibitions at Chisenhale, London and the New Museum, New York (without doubt one of the most compelling young artists working today), Scott Reeder’s deranged DIY science-fiction film Moon Dust (which received its New York premiere at Anthology Film Archive), Nathaniel Mellors’ equally far-out sci-fi short The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Beatrice Gibson’s unsettling, funny and erudite new film F is for Fibonacci at Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (which involved European serialist music, the finance industry, and a tour of a virtual city in Minecraft given by an entertainingly precocious child dressed as a banker.) In New York there was a superb season of work dedicated to Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie at The Artists Institute, (technically speaking this began in 2013, but this constantly-mutating show crossed over to the early months of 2014), and other highlights of the year in the city included Tim Braden’s homage to Cornwallian modernism at Ryan Lee; Sanya Kantarovsky’s Saul-Steinberg-goes-Fauvist solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan; new works by Gary Panter at Fredericks and Freiser and by Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures. I was taken by Sara Cwynar’s richly coloured explorations of photographic representation and still lifes at Foxy Production, and it was nice to see artist-cum-garden-shed-inventor Steven Pippin resurface at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. ‘Project LSD’, a set of artist-designed acid blotter sheets curated by Rob Tufnell for White Columns, surely had to be one of the more witty, original and zeitgeisty ideas for a show this year, given the resurgence of interest in psychotropic drugs today. As for art in 2015, I am curious as to what Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin will pull together for the New Museum Triennial, and what the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s new director Anthony Huberman has in store for the San Francisco venue. The opening of The Whitney Museum of American Art’s new premises open on the west side of Manhattan in May is sure to spark all kinds of fun debates for and against, and it’s a dead cert that the Venice Biennale will be the usual mixture of duds and delights.

Scott Reeder, ‘Moon Dust’, 2014. Film still

With record attendance for this year’s Printed Matter Art Book Fair at MoMAPS1, New York – it was absolutely mobbed – I feel compelled to mention a few of my favourite art books of 2014. Firstly, I was unsure whether to categorize novelist, art critic and frieze columnist Lynne Tillman’s collection of essays What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (published by Red Lemonade) as an ‘art book’ or not, given its dizzying scope of topics. But this is my end of year roundup, so I’ll do whatever I please and put it top of the list. Aside from carrying possibly the wittiest title of any essay collection this year, it stands as a testament to the insistent clarity, intelligence, and integrity of this singular New York writer. The catalogue to Mark Leckey’s mid-career survey show at WIELS, Brussels, ‘Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials’, was also a beautifully designed hardback by Sara de Bondt, featuring sumptuous layout, crystal clear navigability and a deluxe gold cover typeset after a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes. (Full disclosure: I contributed an interview with the artist to this publication.) Lucas Blalock’s monograph Windows Mirrors Tabletops, published by Mörel Books, provided a playful and wide-ranging introduction to this US photographer’s work, along with an illuminating interview by David Campany. A dense variety of source material relating to one of Los Angeles’ most influential artists could be found in Allen Ruppersberg Sourcebook: Reanimating the 20th Century, published by Independent Curators International. (Special mention should also go to his solo exhibition of new work at Greene Naftali, New York, which opened near the end of 2014.) Another doozy for the archive nerds was The George Kuchar Reader, published by the consistently on-point Primary Information. This collection of archival images and correspondence from the late lamented Kuchar is worth the price of the book alone for his wildly funny and generous ‘Letters of Recommendation’, written for his ex-students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Celine Condorelli’s book The Company She Keeps (produced by Book Works, and elegantly designed by An Endless Supply on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Chisenhale, London) features rich conversations on the topic of artists and friendships. Raphael Rubenstein’s short book The Miraculous (Paper Monument) describes 50 canonical works of modern and contemporary art, but not by name, and nor, really as works of art, resulting in a dreamlike art history with echoes of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965) or Invisible Cities (1972). Finally, the catalogue to the exhibition ‘What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art 1960 to the Present’ at the RISD Museum, Providence, edited by Dan Nadel, should be made compulsory reading for every primer course on postwar US art history; a necessary corrective to the idea that New York-centric Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art were the only games worth watching. However, little of the above would ever even reach our bookshelves at home without the near-heroic work of those running small independent booksellers dedicated to visual art and culture. I’ve not the space nor knowledge to give a comprehensive list, but in the cities I’m most familiar with, shout outs go to: Artwords, Claire de Rouen, Donlon Books, Foyles, ICA, November Books and X Marks the Bökship in London; 192, 6 Decades, Brazenhead, Dashwood, Karma, Mast Books, McNally Jackson, Printed Matter and Strand Books in New York.

Sleaford Mods, 2014

The music section of these end-of-year roundups is often the part I enjoy writing the most, but I found 2014 to be an uneven year in terms of record releases. Try as I might to get inside FKA Twigs’ LP1– her debut already tops a number of 2014 ‘best of’ lists – or Sleaford Mods’ angry and funny Divide and Exit (for me, a band whose lyrical wit – like a potty-mouthed John Cooper Clarke – outstrips the sticky-ness of their most recent music), and much as I wanted to like Scott Walker and Sunn0)))’s collaboration Soused– a pairing that made everyone do a double-take when it was announced – there was little that really wormed its way into my ears this year. I was happy to see that the ever-unpredictable Dean Blunt released a new LP with the surprisingly gentle-sounding Black Metal (which came on black labelled black vinyl, in black inner sleeves, in a black gatefold album cover, inside a black plastic bag, in case you missed the title). James Hoff’s Blaster was a bracing experiment with sound and computer viruses, and the impressive Unflesh, by Gazelle Twin – the project of Elizabeth Bernholz – was a serious and unsettling album of sparse vocals and electronics about subjects such as euthanasia, bodily horror, feral children, and gender politics. Russell Haswell – one of the most prolific electronic artists at work – produced the bullish 37 Minute Workout, which was made with a synthesizer, bass drum, hi-hat and clap module. It features one of the most nervy, anxious dance tracks of the year, with its opener ‘Spring Break (Extended Freestyle Playlist Edit)’. Both Einstürzende Neubauten and Tindersticks this year produced tough and evocative responses to the centenary of World War One (Lament, and Ypres, respectively) that I admired for the ambition as much as anything. At risk of repeating one of my picks of 2013, I got hooked by Preternaturals, the latest album by Grumbling Fur; no great step forward since 2013’s Glynnaestra, but I’m a sucker for their Eno-esque pop melodies. Daniel Patrick Quinn – a musician based in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland – released Acting the Rubber Pig Redux, one of the most unique sounding albums of 2014: a mixture of field recordings made in the local countryside, looping rhythms, droning strings and pipes, plaintive brass and half-spoken observations about memory, landscape and travel. New albums by Ghostface Killah and Wu-Tang Clan (36 Seasons and A Better Tomorrow) were hugely enjoyable even though both sounded like hip-hop suspended in amber since the 1990s.

V/Vm, ‘The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback)’, 2014. Album cover

In fact, the 1990s kept coming back to haunt me this year; the first band I obsessed over as a teenager, Ride, announced a comeback tour for 2015, and Suede re-issued Dog Man Star, a 1994 album I can’t help loving for its over-reaching and often hammy ambition. Well worth the trip down nostalgia lane was the box set Suburban Base Records: The History of Hardcore, Jungle, Drum’n’Bass 1991–1997, a tendentious but great reminder of that point in the 1990s when dance music seemed to evolve at an almost weekly rate, and still carried a subversive, underground charge. (A good companion to this compilation was The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback), a haunting, bittersweet record about the ghosts of rave and British dance culture, by V/Vm aka Leyland James Kirby.) This year we were also reminded of the unsung genius of Annette Peacock, with the reissue of her album Revenge (1968), made in collaboration with Paul Bley. Accompanying the publication of Different Every Time, Marcus O’Dair’s authorised biography of Robert Wyatt, Domino Records put out a two-volume compilation of Wyatt’s work. The first disc, Ex Machina, is a small but perfect group of tracks selected by Wyatt himself, reaching right back to The Soft Machine and Matching Mole in the 1960s. The second volume – titled with tongue firmly in cheek, Benign Dictatorships– collects together Wyatt’s collaborations and appearances on other musician’s recordings. If you’ve never before explored Wyatt’s work – and, given he is one of the most original musicians to emerge since the 1960s, you really must – these compilations aren’t half bad as a place to start.

Paul Thomas Anderson, ‘Inherent Vice’, 2014. Film still

In cinema, the buzz this year was all about Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a film shot over a period of eleven years and tracing the coming-of-age of one Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) from ages six to 17. It was, in many senses, an extraordinary achievement, although outstanding performances from Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as Mason’s parents were reminders that youth isn’t always as compelling to watch or listen to as maturity. I was initially blown away by the horror and claustrophobia found in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin– its scenes of alien carnivorousness, evoked by little more than shots of a vast black pool of oil, were striking, and the film shared much of the dislocated atmosphere of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). But on further reflection, the way Glazer’s camera drooled over Scarlett Johanssen, and the ambiguous class subtext of his shooting methods, left a bitter taste in the mouth. (It was hard to tell whether the film was laughing at the Glaswegians unwittingly caught by his hidden cameras, or aiming for a gruesome ‘eat the poor’ satire.) Although much more heavy-handed with its social allegory, I enjoyed Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-ho (originally released in 2013 in South Korea, it only got its US release in summer 2014). This tense tale of class war and ecological catastrophe, set aboard a perpetually moving train where the poor live in cramped quarters at the back of the train whilst the rich live it up near the front, was the most visually impressive science fiction film of the year, even with its clear nods to Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil, and the early films of Jean-Pierre Jeanet and Marc Caro. (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes gets the Best Summer Multiplex Popcorn prize from me.) It may not be cool to admit, but my opinion of Wes Anderson turned around with The Grand Budapest Hotel. After the early delights of Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tennenbaums (2001), I had presumed Anderson was lost forever to cloyingly twee tales about self-consciously quirky and over-privileged families, recycling the same stylistic licks and shots of Bill Murray looking all world-weary. What The Grand Budapest Hotel made me realise is that Anderson’s leading actor is his art direction. Forget the cast of people speaking lines, who have all the roundedness of characters in a Tintin adventure. (The fictional Balkan states of Hergé’s imagination must surely have been an influence on this film.) These actors are just there to animate his delightful sets and costumes, which dominate The Grand Budapest Hotel to such a degree that it almost seems like a witty avant-garde move. However my film of the year was by the other Anderson – Paul Thomas – for Inherent Vice. No director could ever hope to replicate the labyrinthine complexities of Pynchon’s writing, but drenched in warm Californian light and featuring compelling comic performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin, Anderson managed to create something that doesn’t match, but certainly parallels the stoned paranoia, conspiracy theories, maze-like plots, language games and slapstick action of Pynchon’s universe. Inherent Vice tells a tale of police corruption, racist gangs, rapacious property development, government conspiracies, the drug trade, and of paranoia both to the political left and to the right. Which is another way of saying that this movie is a heart-warming slapstick comedy for our miserable times. As the Wu-Tang Clan put it, here’s to a better tomorrow.

By Jonathan Griffin

Samara Golden, 'Thank You', 2014, Installation view at 'Made in LA', Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

How many enemies will I make if I say that 2014 was not a stellar year for art in Los Angeles? It’s true though. I put it down to a regathering of energies, a time for taking stock and inaugurating fledgling ventures. Many column inches have been lavished on the ongoing explosion of L.A.’s gallery scene but at this point we have less to show for it, in terms of memorable exhibitions, than one might expect. All is promise for 2015, but in 2014 there were relatively few major chords.

A couple of high notes were museum shows that arrived in Los Angeles after first receiving wide acclaim in Europe: Mike Kelley’s astonishing springtime retrospective at MOCA, a home-coming parade poignantly missing its king, and Pierre Huyghe’s current retrospective at LACMA. Exhibitions like these really drive home how ambitious contemporary art can – and should ¬– be. They raise the bar for everyone.

People often complain about the smallness of the Los Angeles art world. (I think they’re wrong, by the way. Its problem is not size but insularity.) One advantage of the community’s seeming compactness, however, is that it often creates opportunities for repeated viewing of artists’ work. I rarely make my mind up the first time I see something new.

Not coincidentally, several of my highlights from 2014 are artists whose work cropped up twice or more through the year. Samara Golden went from strength to strength in 2014, first with a brilliant, topsy-turvy installation at Night Gallery titled ‘Mass Murder’, then with a keynote piece for the Hammer’s ‘Made in L.A. 2014’ biennial that reportedly depicted everyone she knew in Los Angeles. (A work that did not help the city’s reputation either for smallness or insularity.) Now PS1 MOMA in Queens, New York, is showing the most ambitious installation of her career, The Flat Side of the Knife (2014).

In January, a gust of fresh air blew through Southern California with the inauguration of a new art fair, Paramount Ranch. Largely thanks to the extensive rolodexes of its organizers, gallerists Robbie Fitzpatrick and Alex Freedman and artists Pentti Monkonnen and Liz Craft, some of the world’s smartest young galleries turned up at a wild west movie set, an hour out of town, with suitcases stuffed full of art.

It was at Paramount Ranch that I first encountered the living sculptural environments of Max Hooper Schneider, who showed an anatomical model of a uterus with live newts inside it, blue-lit and spilling mist. Selected by Milan-based curatorial outfit Several Flames, his space (a wooden shack) also contained retro-futuristic airbrush paintings of sexy chrome robots by Hajime Sorayama. Schneider popped up again a few weeks later with a solo exhibition at Gallery 169 in Santa Monica Canyon featuring a suspended whale skeleton cast in home-made phosphorescent resin. In September, he showed some sculptures (one featuring a live Emperor scorpion) in a dystopic group show called ‘Bathymetry’ at Del Vaz Projects, a new space operated out of a west L.A. apartment. A month later, he had a solo show (titled ‘THE POUND’) at Jenny’s, one of the city’s most promising alternative project spaces-cum-commercial galleries.

Max Maslansky, ‘Dancers III (Twin-Size Bed),’ 2013

Schneider wasn’t the only artist to surface repeatedly in 2014. Max Maslansky won a lot of new fans with the selection in ‘Made in L.A. 2014’ of his luminous, soft-edged paintings of 1970s porn stills. He returned a short while later with a solo exhibition at Five Car Garage, another fleet-footed commercial project space run by the dealer Emma Gray.

Maslansky, like almost every artist of note in L.A., was included in 356 Mission’s ‘Another Cats Show’ (a smart-Alec follow-up to an Alex Katz show) which managed to be better than it sounds. One painter whose work leapt out from the melee was Joshua Nathanson, also a winning inclusion in the group show ‘Little Messages for Modern Shut Ins’, curated by Olivan Cha and Eli Diner at Aran Cravey.

What else? Offsetting the preponderance of dudes on my list so far, the tidy two-woman show ‘Wives’, featuring Petrova Giberson and Sam Moyer at the project space Patrick Gomez for Sherriff, was refreshing in its stark economy. As was, for different reasons, the micro-exhibition at LACMA of portraits by self-taught Gullah artist Sam Doyle, who painted on corrugated iron and scraps of wood. A very different stripe of self-taught artist is the Kentucky-based John Tweddle, whose scallop-edged canvases were the best thing that Kayne Griffin Corcoran showed all year.

By Gemma Weston

George Egerton-Warburton, 'Administration is just Oulipian Poetry', 2014, exhibition view at Perth institute of Contemporary Arts. Courtesy: the artist

It’s traditional to begin examinations of Western Australian economics, politics or culture by invoking the state’s geography, making particular reference to the isolation of its capital city, Perth. In the interest of avoiding well-worn, perhaps worn-out centre-periphery dichotomies and as pragmatism, especially in the early 21st century, should suggest means by which such isolation can be transcended, it’s worth nodding to this tradition before quickly moving on. The state is larger than most countries, its population concentrated in the south-west, and the Indian Ocean to our own west is wide. South East Asia is closer than Australia’s Eastern states and London, but those latter map-points tend to remain engraved on our instruments of cultural measurement. There, it is done.

It’s relevant to invoke geography again here only in so far as it remains a popular rhetorical explanation for Western Australian art’s struggles with contemporaneity but an internal audit is perhaps more pressing than an examination of external relationships. The last few years have seen the rug pulled out from under the contemporary art ‘industry’ of Perth, a city that has for the equivalent time been flush with the mineral wealth generated by the far north, although that wealth remains elusive to many of the capital’s cultural interests.

2012 and 13 saw the closure of three of Perth’s major commercial galleries, Galerie Dusseldorf, Goddard de Fiddes and Gallery East, leaving close to 100 local artists – many of whom had ceased to exhibit either regularly or outside of Western Australia – without a reliable venue. One of those galleries, Goddard de Fiddes, has tentatively re-opened, operating from the residence of its directors. A number of newer commercial spaces that might have filled that vacuum have also since closed their doors. Unsustainable visitor numbers prematurely and publically ended a high-profile partnership between New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, cutting AGWA’s four-year exhibition series of International modern and contemporary art short before it had sunk its teeth into the 21st century. A wave of redundancies and restructuring has washed through the university art schools, ending training in a number of disciplines at Curtin University and the Fine Art degree itself at the University of Western Australia. Soul-searching abounds, although it is mostly focused on modes of reception rather than an analysis of what is being produced, exhibited and promoted.

What is being produced and exhibited in Perth varies vastly for a relatively small scene, concentrated in disparate pockets of activity that each avoids reaching critical mass. A group of mostly established painters working in revised streams of modernism have pooled their resources post-closure of their various galleries to form Art Collective WA, a not-for-profit organization that looks and operates like an inner-city commercial white cube. A younger generation of artists and curators takes for granted the idea that one must produce not only the work but also its ultimately ephemeral context. Temporary exhibitions and studios, often at once, cannibalize shop-fronts, office high-rises, apartment lounge rooms and back-yard garages, or experiment with alternatives modes of distribution. Slivers of emergent ‘network’ discourse, however, remain stubbornly interested in the physicality of the image and highly localized distribution networks, in the artist book, boutique printing or the digital-made-sculptural. What happens to and for these artists after self-generated exhibition options are exhausted is a question yet to be answered.

Experiments on the borders of discipline remain quietly successful. From a laboratory at the University of Western Australia, SymbioticA offer a ‘Masters of the Biological Arts’ and a seminar series in ethics and practice that attracts both international, and local attention. Sarah Rowbottam’s ‘Proximity’, a festival of one-on-one performance annually occupies various arts institutions, producing an intimate, site-specific and participatory art/theatre hybrid. Spaced, directed by Marco Marcon, facilitates a program of residencies placing both local and international artists in regional cities and towns. The often collaborative results, exhibited locally and in a major touring exhibition, the second of which will open in February of 2015, serve as a reminder of a means by which remoteness might be discussed without provincialism, and of another central-periphery spilt that often characterizes Western Australian art discourse: between the capital and the roughly 2.5 million square kilometres of everything else.

Regional Western Australia produces its own vibrant contemporary art. Recent exhibitions of paintings from the Indigenous Martu people of the far Western Desert – ‘We Don’t Need a Map’ at Fremantle Art Centre –and a series of expansive collaborative paintings on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney present an aesthetic complexity and vibrancy both transcendental and grounded in a unique and inherent understanding of Country. Paintings, glass, textiles and photographs produced by Indigenous artists from the community of Warburton, roughly 900km north east of the goldfields town of Kalgoorlie, have toured Chinese museums for the last 3 years – a project supported like many in remote regional WA by mining giant Rio Tinto – but have returned home to the closure of the art centre that assisted in their production.

Attempts to theorize a Western Australian discourse of contemporary art tend to falter against such fragmentation. In trying to summarize it I keep returning not to the landmass or the landscape or the impact of the tyranny of distance but to a 30-second video recently exhibited at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art by Western Australian expat George Egerton-Warburton, who is now based in LA.

The central work of Egerton-Warburton’s solo exhibition, ‘Administration is Just Oulipian Poetry’, was a large mobile from which shapely cutouts of the gallery’s false walls had been suspended. Their absence revealed the colonial skin of the grand, repurposed boys school and through large, usually concealed windows, the ever-expanding boom-time city skyline, washing the gallery space with uniquely bright Australian light. In his written ‘Apologia’ for the exhibition, Egerton-Warburton quoted Franco ‘Bifo’ Bernardo: ‘money and language have something in common, they are nothing and they move everything’ – but the expensive and ultimately ephemeral gesture of the mobile was counterpointed with an video unmentioned in the text that seemed to reinforce the power of a third element. The video consisted simply of footage appropriated directly from a television advertisement for insurance reshot in-situ as it played on the screen of a macbook. In the ad, two men discuss a kitsch sculptural volcano erected in a backyard. One describes it as a metaphor for his savings, at which point the other thrusts his hands into it, receiving surprisingly real and horrific burns.

For me, trying to explain Western Australia, that metaphor becomes another metaphor. Here, we have high hopes for the impact of dialogue, earnestly discussing the best way forward, and we see first hand the impact of money, but we’re still collectively ambivalent about the impact of practice itself.

By Ed Atkins

Jana Euler, Analysemonster, 2013, acrylic on canvas

As ever, I listened to Graham Lambkin more than anything else. In particular, an album with Jason Lescaleet called Photographs (2013). The domestic field recording/improv thing Lambkin’s been honing for years, reaches an incredible pitch of intimacy and reverie here. Landmass-scaled tones arrive abruptly, simply, at a kitchen table in Folkestone at teatime; a Church of England hymn folds back and drifts off in the back of a taxi, the indicator segueing into a pensioner’s carriage clock. Loss is it’s great subject and also its material, in that the scale of the thing – temporally, sonically – encounters experience and its vital irrecuperability, celebrating the vicissitudes of memory through a kind of emphatic now that cannot be retrieved, and is all the more extraordinary because of it. That, and an insistence on the public quotidian mapped through personal document – something that Richard Dawson’s album Nothing Important (2014) shares. In fact, the two sets of musicians (Lambkin/Lescaleet and Dawson) are in many ways twinned, not least in how they stir up a profoundly political sense of British life, written into its relations, cultures and aesthetics. Both albums are so, so moving, perhaps because they’re so totally, radically apart from the rhetoric of contemporary British politics. Theirs is an affective politics that intones the pain of the government’s systematic destruction of the very structures their music is formed of and through. Which, of course, is precisely the thing which provides hope, even as it eulogises its passing. Drunk on a flight back to London, I listened to the titular song from Nothing Important, and cried.

Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams (2014) is an amazing collection of essays. It presents empathy in so many expository modes, that the book feels pretty much allegorical as a whole. Certainly its ethical demands are essential, and the life it seeks via encounter after encounter with lives on various precipices – not least the author’s own – is utterly worth following and empathising with. In a similar vein (to Jamison, but also Lambkin/Lescaleet and Dawson), I had lots of conversations with people about earnestness, autobiography and style in literary writing. I suppose loads of people did, beginning with all that fizz around Karl Ove Knausgaard, then back to Tao Lin et al. Benji by Mark Kozelek in his Sun Kil Moon guise transcended banality with the same sort of de-stylings, if made fantastically bathetic by being sung. Ben Lerner seemed part of it, though his askance realities are riddled with change, with an attention to the utopian, that makes them hopeful, even as they convincingly document a world scabbing over entirely. His most recent novel, 10.04 (2014), is wonderful. Still, those men telling the truth, albeit thinly veiled in fiction, hunting for a reset button to render all those apparently pompous excesses – style, narrative, etc. – redundant, and return us to a place before such moves seemed like demonstrations of privilege. I exaggerate. But there is something about men telling the truth that feels like a desperate attempt at re-establishing lost ground: trying to re-colonise the episteme, truth via different means. It feels suspiciously like a way to get back to something we might have been trying very hard to be rid of.

I watched lots of movies, but I want to say something about the one I particularly disliked, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), because it relates to thoughts above on white men and truth, and because almost everyone else seems to think it’s some fucking amazing, groundbreaking conceptual artwork. It’s not. The fact that it was filmed over years, and that the boy grows, is held up as some extraordinary and extraordinarily serious, worthy bedrock of inexhaustible critical, structural validity; something to excuse, apparently, its defeated banality: its boring, whimsical meh. In reality, Boyhood appears to be the work of a rambling but immovable ideologue who requires stolid, structural concepts to mirror his politics, wedded as they are to unreconstructed ideas of what’s normal, how self-centred we are, how that’s basically ok, and how we might erase history and shrug at the sun. Boyhood‘s lives are homogeneous in their emotional incapacity and, at most every turn, their untruth, their fiction.

Elsewhere, Jana Euler’s exhibition ‘Where the Energy Comes From’ (2014) at Kunsthalle Zürich was pretty incredible. What the paintings managed to straddle, so did the show: literal schema of a social or political concept; ingenuousness regarding the performance of that schema (the paintings performed– they are discrete protagonists); a beautiful sense of humour; and radically, totally explicit, explication, through a kind of blunt pedagogy that completely retards certain critical gropings.

By Sean O’Toole

A selfie taken by Beyonce at the Louvre, Paris, in front of the Mona Lisa

Last year 1.2 billion photos were uploaded and shared every day. By May this year, when Mary Meeker, a former Wall Street analyst turned internet sage, released her annual internet report, the number of daily image uploads and shares was already at 1.8 billion. What is the role of the solitary image now? How does one engage a zeitgeist defined by superabundance and ceaseless accumulation, rather than singularity and pause? What to do: retreat or dive headfirst into the maelstrom? I did a bit of both.

In retreat mode, I found photo historian Kate Palmer Albers’s essay ‘Abundant Images and the Collective Sublime’, published late last year, to be a helpful compendium piece to a line of enquiry opened up by Boris Groys in his 2010 book of essays Going Public: ‘The relatively easy access to digital photo and video cameras combined with the global distribution platform of the internet has altered the traditional statistical relationship between image producers and image consumers. Today, more people are interested in image production than image contemplation.’

You can include me in that statistical shift. This past year, in between sitting jack-knifed in front of a screen thinking about what I’d seen, I made selfies in Osaka (in front of a Swarovski bejewelled Mercedes); in Cape Town (giving an Ai Weiwei middle-finger salute to artist Christopher Swift’s callow disco contraption masquerading as a memorial to Mandela on Signal Hill); and in New York (close to some taxidermied ‘koodoo’, or kudu as we spell it here, on display in the American Museum of Natural History).

Selfie taken by a Peshmerga with a member of the YPG in Kobane, northern Syria

On balance, I preferred looking at Beyoncé’s Louvre selfies to mine. The Drunk in Love chanteuse, who graced the cover of Time magazine’s evanescent 100 most influential people issue (remember Oscar Pistorius?), has a good grasp of what Albers describes as photography’s ‘voracious consumptive and accumulative tendencies’. A selfie of Beyoncé giving the Mona Lisa a red-nailed victory salute during her private tour of the Louvre in August received 825 000 likes on her Instagram page. (‘Likes’ are a form of shallow looking that merit investigation. What do they denote? Are they like capsule reviews, a form of notice rather than studied attention?)

During her Louvre visit Beyoncé also photographed herself in front of an Italian marble sculpture from 1700-20 portraying Apollo conquering the serpent Python. The sculpture is currently a popular place to pose for selfies. Many tourists believe Apollo’s gesture, holding up his hand as if peering at a smartphone screen – actually, his sword that went missing at some point – resembles the pose of amateur self-portraitists. Self-absorption and narcissistic wonder are hardly new human attributes. Nor is joy, communion, playfulness, affirmation, curiosity, wonder, boredom and loneliness, all attributes visible in selfies. What is new, though, is how these very primary instincts interface with, and are amplified by the perpetual present tense of social media.

Sifting through the ‘digital deluge’ (Albers again) stored by energy-intensive and secretive digital warehouses across the world, the images that most gripped me this past year included a trickle of self-portraits produced by Peshmerga fighters resisting the spread of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This is not about picking sides. There was a selfie meme featuring ISIL jihadists demonstrating their affection for that addictive Italian hazelnut chocolate spread Nutella that reminded me of Abderrahmane Sissako. ‘It’s important to say that the jihadist is someone who also resembles us, and who no doubt at one point of his life tipped over into something,’ remarked the Mauritanian-born director during the Cannes Film Festival where his film Timbuktu (2014) was shortlisted for a Palme d’Or.

Selfie taken by a member of the PKK in Shingal, Iraq

Sissako predates the age of abundance. His films are slow, as is his output. Since releasing his first film in 1989, a short, he has produced only four features. Speaking to film festival director and promoter Peter Scarlet in 2006, Sissako remarked on the interrelationship between pace, politics and poetry in his work: ‘For me poetry is a better way to communicate with the other, to say things that are important, important politically. Because when we live in a country and on a continent where making a film is a very rare and difficult act – because the means are not so readily available – we can only be but political. But political in the sense of building a better world, not only for oneself, but for everyone.’

Two offline projects from this year, both photographic books, both produced in Göttingen by Gerhard Steidl, bear all the hallmarks of Sissako’s riff of being an artist from Africa. They are also great examples of what it means to grapple with abundance as a working premise. Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases is both a heartsore archive of murdered friends and rigid taxonomic study of the LGBT community in which Muholi honed all the many facets of her dynamic personality. It is also, quite simply, a gorgeous book of portraits. Ponte City, a collaborative project between fellow South African photographer Mikhael Subutzky and English designer Patrick Waterhouse, is nominally a book. It is possibly better understood as a Perec-like attempt at exhausting a place in central Johannesburg through words and images. Plentiful, superbaundant images – fitted into a box. Pleasingly, both books have earned their makers nominations for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

By Timotheus Vermeulen

Two Days, One Night (French: Deux jours, une nuit), 2014, written and directed by the Dardenne brothers, starring Marion Cotillard and Fabrizio Rongione.

My highlights of the year must definitely include Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which really moved me

I saw Benjamin Clementine in concert and was blown away by the guy’s Jacques-Brel-ian voice and performance and Nina-Simone-ish musicality;

the latest film by the Dardenne brothers, Two Days, One Night, was simple but effective;

Mark Leckey’s survey show at WIELS, Brussels, ‘Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials’ (on until 11 January), was exciting;

Circa ’87, 2013. Courtesy the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin; Cabinet, London

Installation view of the exhibition ‘Mark Leckey: Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials’ at WIELS, 2014. Photograph: Sven Laurent

Videos by Nastia Mosquito and Hedwig Houben at the MUHKA in Antwerp, part of the group show Don’t You Know Who I Am? were both special, as was the solo exhibition of Oscar Santillan at The Ridder, Maastricht;

I loved Adam Thirlwell’s project Multiples, in which a whole bunch of amazing writers from different countries translate stories from languages they are not fluent in not to see what is lost but what is won;

Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis was an eye opener for a political-economist ignoramus like myself;

TV: The Good Wife, Veep, Mad Men;

Richard Smith, solo show at Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Lydia Davis’ collection of short stories, Can’t and Won’t ; Aleksandra Domanovic at the Glasgow Modern Art Gallery; René Magritte at the Art Institute of Chicago; and, finally, my guilty pleasure was the Dutch TV program Thuis voor de guis, the Dutch version of Gogglebox, in which you watch people watch television. Once I started, I couldn’t stop.

By Tom Morton

Basim Magdy, 'A 240 Second Analysis of Failure and Hopefulness (With Coke, Vinegar and Other Tear Gas Remedies)', 2012, 160 color slides and two synchronized Kodak slide carousel projectors. Courtesy: hunt kastner, Prague; artSumer, Istanbul; Gypsum Gallery, Cairo; and Marisa Newman Project, New York.

EXHIBITIONS

In a year in which documenta 14’s Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk announced that his 2017 edition of the quinquennial mega show will be partly staged in Athens, the Greek capital played host to some fantastic exhibitions, not least in the independent spaces Kunsthalle Athena (‘This is Not My Beautiful House’, curated by Marina Fokidis), State of Concept (a solo show by Basim Magdy, curated by Iliana Fokianaki) and Totàl (‘They are indeed the principle of things, and yet they are not interpretable and empty as mirrors’, curated by Michelangelo Corsaro).

On a trip to Milan in March, I was fortunate enough to catch both the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi’s screening of Stan VanDerBeek’s immersive Cine Dreams: Future Cinema of the Mind (1972) at the city’s planetarium, an extraordinary explosion of projected images that felt like a premonition of a networked future, and the quieter pleasures of Uri Aran’s solo show ‘Puddles’ at Peep-Hole. Curated by Xander Karskens, ‘Superficial Hygiene’ at De Hallen Haarlem, was especially notable for the inclusion of Erkka Nissinen’s hilarious and utterly sui generis video Inner Materials … (2013) – I can’t wait to see what this Finnish artist does next. My full review of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Taipei Biennial appears in the January-February 2015 issue of frieze, but suffice to say that this intellectually ambitious reckoning with ‘the coactivity amongst humans and animals, plant and objects’ was a major event. I had been looking forward to Alessandro Rabottini’s Robert Overby show (‘Robert Overby – Works 1969–1987’) at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for some time. I wasn’t disappointed – taking the idea of skin (whether of a building, painting or S&M gimp suit) as its presiding metaphor, this survey of a neglected pioneer of postwar American art made him feel utterly fresh.

Alistair Frost ‘AZQ < > $@?•^’, 2014, installation view at Mary Mary 32 St Andrews Street, Glasgow. Courtesy: Mary Mary

In Britain, Glasgow International was a heaving buffet of treats (perhaps the choicest among them being Simon Martin at Kelvingrove and Alistair Frost’s working nail bar at Mary Mary’s offsite space), while Wysing Art Centre’s group show ‘Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century’, with its weirdly successful cheesy-nightspot-meets-holodeck exhibition design, pointed towards the rural Cambridgeshire not-for-profit’s ongoing invention, and atBALTIC, Gateshead, a survey of Simon Bill’s goofily lyrical oval paintings felt long overdue. In London, some favourites brought their A-game (Erik Van Lieshout at Maureen Paley, Pierre Huyghe at Hauser & Wirth, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Ed Atkins at the Serpentine Sackler, Cullinan Richards at 5 Howick Place), while I was surprised, and delighted, to enjoy Richard Deacon at Tate Britain quite as much as I did. At the capital’s David Roberts Art Foundation, ‘Geographies of Contamination’ – a group show of artists including Nicolas Deshayes, Marlie Mul, David Douard, Magali Reus and Rachel Rose, curated by Vincent Honoré, Laura McClean-Ferris and Alexander Scrimgeour – made a persuasive case for a kind of grubby, seeping post-digital order, and Trisha Donnelly’s solo at the Serpentine still has me wondering, in the best of ways, at this most elusive of artists’ intentions. Taking its cue from a photograph of the Victorian ethnologist Augustus Pitt Rivers’ artefact-strewn billiard table, the group exhibition ‘On the Devolution of Culture’ at Rob Tufnell introduced a host of domestic scale sculptures (by, among others, Aaron Angell, Brian Griffiths and Mike Nelson) to the green baize in a complex, trans-temporal game of bait and switch. ‘Rembrandt: The Late Works’ at The National Gallery was, of course, incredible – these are paintings that would still glow if they were installed in a skip. Also of note were Camille Henrot’s ‘The Pale Fox’ at Chisenhale Gallery, Adam Linder and Jonathan P. Watts’s dance / text performance at Silberkuppe’s Frieze Art Fair stand and the first UK solo show of American sculptor Melvin Edwards at Stephen Friedman Gallery.

I’d sort of promised myself that I wouldn’t repeat any names from 2013’s highlights, but this has proved impossible. Andreas Angelidakis (at EMSTE, Athens), Jessie Flood Paddock (at Carl Freedman, London), Catherine Story (again at Carl Freedman), Matthew Darbyshire (at Stanny House, Iken), Alex Dordoy (at Inverleith House, Edinburgh) Alexander Tovborg (at Overgarden, Copenhagen): these shows were all too good to let pass without mention.

‘On the Devolution of Culture’, 2014, installation view at Rob Tufnell, London. Courtesy: Rob Tufnell

BOOKS
Craig Burnett’s Philip Guston: The Studio was a thoughtful, often funny and beautifully written addition to Afterall Books’ ongoing ‘One Work’ series, while Gilda Williams’s gem of a primer How to Write About Contemporary Art will, I hope, feature on the Christmas wish lists of many of my students. Ned Beauman birthed a new sub-genre, the south London corporate thriller-cum-chemical romance, in his characteristically clever novel Glow, while also writing some wonderfully odd journalism, such as this piece on New York’s Westminster Kennel Club dog show: http://ow.ly/FIAvs. Set in a Damien Hirst-less alternate universe, Jonathan Gibbs’s fictional history of the yBas Randall, or The Painted Grape was ecstatically reviewed by the British broadsheets, providing another hit for Norwich-based indie publishers Galley Beggar Press to follow Eimear McBride’s 2013 A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing. (Full disclosure: Gibbs is the husband of my mother’s cousin’s daughter – nothing like keeping these lists in the extended family). Will Wiles’s sophomore novel The Way Inn fused J.G.-Ballard-meets-Alan-Partridge musings on chain hotels with Lovecraftian horror to intriguing cut-and-shut effect, while listening to Lorrie Moore read from her short story collection Bark at London’s Purcell Room was one of my highlights – literary or otherwise – of the year.

Simon Bill, Milk Churns, 2002. Courtesy: BALTIC

TV, FILMANDPODCASTS
HBO’s True Detective was superb, right up until the final episode, in which slow burn nihilism gave way to hackneyed sub-Thomas Harris horror. Ultimately more satisfying was The Leftovers (also HBO), an almost unbearably bleak post-rapture drama, and the second season of BBC America’s enormously fun genetic engineering dramedy Orphan Black. In the cinema, The Grand Budapest Hotel was the best film that Wes Anderson has made for years, while Guardians of the Galaxy became the new benchmark for superhero movie making, eschewing Christopher Nolan-style grandeur for a kind of Tarantino-goes-family-friendly take on the space opera. British standup Richard Herring continued to issue podcasts of brilliant comic invention. Like his (rightly lauded) former double act partner Stewart Lee, he is at heart a formalist, although Herring cakes his rigour in a thick layer of hilarious, schoolboy smut. Alongside millions of others, I’ve found myself waiting breathlessly for each new episode of This American Life’s podcast Serial, in which a real Baltimore murder case is investigated in weekly installments. The format is so simple – and so arresting – it seems incredible that it has not been tried before.

Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014

MUSIC
Ten tracks that kept me company during 2014: Rick Ross ‘Sanctified’; Todd Terje (feat. Bryan Ferry) ‘Johnny and Mary’; St. Vincent ‘Digital Witness’; Future Islands ‘Seasons (Waiting on You)’; Taylor Swift ‘Out of the Woods’; Beyoncé ‘Drunk in Love’ (the Feb ’14 Kanye remix); M.I.A. ‘Double Bubble Trouble’ (that video!); Caribou ‘Can’t Do Without You’; War on Drugs ‘Red Eyes’; FKA Twigs ‘Two Weeks’.

LOOKINGFORWARD
Tino Seghal at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Roger Hiorns curating a show themed on bovine spongiform encephalopathy (or mad cow disease) at the Hayward Gallery, London; Elizabeth Price’s Contemporary Art Society Award show at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Mary Ramsden at Pilar Corrias, London; Charles Avery at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Ronald Cornelissen at Tropicana Rotterdam, Christian Marclay at White Cube Bermondsey; Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island, and Adam Thirlwell’s novel Lurid & Cute.

Mary Ramsden, Remote, 2014, oil on board; courtesy: Pilar Corrias, London

By Jonathan Griffin

Samara Golden, 'Thank You', 2014, Installation view at 'Made in LA', Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

How many enemies will I make if I say that 2014 was not a stellar year for art in Los Angeles? It’s true though. I put it down to a regathering of energies, a time for taking stock and inaugurating fledgling ventures. Many column inches have been lavished on the ongoing explosion of L.A.’s gallery scene but at this point we have less to show for it, in terms of memorable exhibitions, than one might expect. All is promise for 2015, but in 2014 there were relatively few major chords.

A couple of high notes were museum shows that arrived in Los Angeles after first receiving wide acclaim in Europe: Mike Kelley’s astonishing springtime retrospective at MOCA, a home-coming parade poignantly missing its king, and Pierre Huyghe’s current retrospective at LACMA. Exhibitions like these really drive home how ambitious contemporary art can – and should ¬– be. They raise the bar for everyone.

People often complain about the smallness of the Los Angeles art world. (I think they’re wrong, by the way. Its problem is not size but insularity.) One advantage of the community’s seeming compactness, however, is that it often creates opportunities for repeated viewing of artists’ work. I rarely make my mind up the first time I see something new.

Not coincidentally, several of my highlights from 2014 are artists whose work cropped up twice or more through the year. Samara Golden went from strength to strength in 2014, first with a brilliant, topsy-turvy installation at Night Gallery titled ‘Mass Murder’, then with a keynote piece for the Hammer’s ‘Made in L.A. 2014’ biennial that reportedly depicted everyone she knew in Los Angeles. (A work that did not help the city’s reputation either for smallness or insularity.) Now PS1 MOMA in Queens, New York, is showing the most ambitious installation of her career, The Flat Side of the Knife (2014).

In January, a gust of fresh air blew through Southern California with the inauguration of a new art fair, Paramount Ranch. Largely thanks to the extensive rolodexes of its organizers, gallerists Robbie Fitzpatrick and Alex Freedman and artists Pentti Monkonnen and Liz Craft, some of the world’s smartest young galleries turned up at a wild west movie set, an hour out of town, with suitcases stuffed full of art.

It was at Paramount Ranch that I first encountered the living sculptural environments of Max Hooper Schneider, who showed an anatomical model of a uterus with live newts inside it, blue-lit and spilling mist. Selected by Milan-based curatorial outfit Several Flames, his space (a wooden shack) also contained retro-futuristic airbrush paintings of sexy chrome robots by Hajime Sorayama. Schneider popped up again a few weeks later with a solo exhibition at Gallery 169 in Santa Monica Canyon featuring a suspended whale skeleton cast in home-made phosphorescent resin. In September, he showed some sculptures (one featuring a live Emperor scorpion) in a dystopic group show called ‘Bathymetry’ at Del Vaz Projects, a new space operated out of a west L.A. apartment. A month later, he had a solo show (titled ‘THE POUND’) at Jenny’s, one of the city’s most promising alternative project spaces-cum-commercial galleries.

Max Maslansky, Dancers III (Twin-Size Bed), 2013

Schneider wasn’t the only artist to surface repeatedly in 2014. Max Maslansky won a lot of new fans with the selection in ‘Made in L.A. 2014’ of his luminous, soft-edged paintings of 1970s porn stills. He returned a short while later with a solo exhibition at Five Car Garage, another fleet-footed commercial project space run by the dealer Emma Gray.

Maslansky, like almost every artist of note in L.A., was included in 356 Mission’s ‘Another Cats Show’ (a smart-Alec follow-up to an Alex Katz show) which managed to be better than it sounds. One painter whose work leapt out from the melee was Joshua Nathanson, also a winning inclusion in the group show ‘Little Messages for Modern Shut Ins’, curated by Olivan Cha and Eli Diner at Aran Cravey.

What else? Offsetting the preponderance of dudes on my list so far, the tidy two-woman show ‘Wives’, featuring Petrova Giberson and Sam Moyer at the project space Patrick Gomez for Sherriff, was refreshing in its stark economy. As was, for different reasons, the micro-exhibition at LACMA of portraits by self-taught Gullah artist Sam Doyle, who painted on corrugated iron and scraps of wood. A very different stripe of self-taught artist is the Kentucky-based John Tweddle, whose scallop-edged canvases were the best thing that Kayne Griffin Corcoran showed all year.

By Ed Atkins

Jana Euler, Analysemonster, 2013, acrylic on canvas

As ever, I listened to Graham Lambkin more than anything else. In particular, an album with Jason Lescalleet called Photographs (2013). The domestic field recording/improv thing Lambkin’s been honing for years, reaches an incredible pitch of intimacy and reverie here. Landmass-scaled tones arrive abruptly, simply, at a kitchen table in Folkestone at teatime; a Church of England hymn folds back and drifts off in the back of a taxi, the indicator segueing into a pensioner’s carriage clock. Loss is it’s great subject and also its material, in that the scale of the thing – temporally, sonically – encounters experience and its vital irrecuperability, celebrating the vicissitudes of memory through a kind of emphatic now that cannot be retrieved, and is all the more extraordinary because of it. That, and an insistence on the public quotidian mapped through personal document – something that Richard Dawson’s album Nothing Important (2014) shares. In fact, the two sets of musicians (Lambkin/Lescalleet and Dawson) are in many ways twinned, not least in how they stir up a profoundly political sense of British life, written into its relations, cultures and aesthetics. Both albums are so, so moving, perhaps because they’re so totally, radically apart from the rhetoric of contemporary British politics. Theirs is an affective politics that intones the pain of the government’s systematic destruction of the very structures their music is formed of and through. Which, of course, is precisely the thing which provides hope, even as it eulogises its passing. Drunk on a flight back to London, I listened to the titular song from Nothing Important, and cried.

Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet, Photographs, 2013

Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams (2014) is an amazing collection of essays. It presents empathy in so many expository modes, that the book feels pretty much allegorical as a whole. Certainly its ethical demands are essential, and the life it seeks via encounter after encounter with lives on various precipices – not least the author’s own – is utterly worth following and empathising with. In a similar vein (to Jamison, but also Lambkin/Lescalleet and Dawson), I had lots of conversations with people about earnestness, autobiography and style in literary writing. I suppose loads of people did, beginning with all that fizz around Karl Ove Knausgaard, then back to Tao Lin et al. Benji by Mark Kozelek in his Sun Kil Moon guise transcended banality with the same sort of de-stylings, if made fantastically bathetic by being sung. Ben Lerner seemed part of it, though his askance realities are riddled with change, with an attention to the utopian, that makes them hopeful, even as they convincingly document a world scabbing over entirely. His most recent novel, 10.04 (2014), is wonderful. Still, those men telling the truth, albeit thinly veiled in fiction, hunting for a reset button to render all those apparently pompous excesses – style, narrative, etc. – redundant, and return us to a place before such moves seemed like demonstrations of privilege. I exaggerate. But there is something about men telling the truth that feels like a desperate attempt at re-establishing lost ground: trying to re-colonise the episteme, truth via different means. It feels suspiciously like a way to get back to something we might have been trying very hard to be rid of.

Richard Linklater, Boyhood, 2014

I watched lots of movies, but I want to say something about the one I particularly disliked, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), because it relates to thoughts above on white men and truth, and because almost everyone else seems to think it’s some fucking amazing, groundbreaking conceptual artwork. It’s not. The fact that it was filmed over years, and that the boy grows, is held up as some extraordinary and extraordinarily serious, worthy bedrock of inexhaustible critical, structural validity; something to excuse, apparently, its defeated banality: its boring, whimsical meh. In reality, Boyhood appears to be the work of a rambling but immovable ideologue who requires stolid, structural concepts to mirror his politics, wedded as they are to unreconstructed ideas of what’s normal, how self-centred we are, how that’s basically ok, and how we might erase history and shrug at the sun. Boyhood‘s lives are homogeneous in their emotional incapacity and, at most every turn, their untruth, their fiction.

Jana Euler, Nude climbing up the stairs, 2014, acrylic on canvas

Elsewhere, Jana Euler’s exhibition ‘Where the Energy Comes From’ (2014) at Kunsthalle Zürich was pretty incredible. What the paintings managed to straddle, so did the show: literal schema of a social or political concept; ingenuousness regarding the performance of that schema (the paintings performed– they are discrete protagonists); a beautiful sense of humour; and radically, totally explicit, explication, through a kind of blunt pedagogy that completely retards certain critical gropings.