By Chris Wiley

Amie Siegel Provenance, 2013

Chris Wileyis an artist and writer. He recently acted as an advisor and catalogue writer for ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’ at the 55th Venice Biennale. A show featuring his work will open at PS1 MoMA, New York, in March.

Amie Siegel Provenance, Simon Preston Gallery, New York
Amid the churn of New York’s largely market-driven landscape, where one can barely swing a dead cat without hitting another anodyne chuck of chicly distressed ‘50s and ‘60s redux art, Siegel’s cerebral show was a cool, clean kick in the head. The show focused almost exclusively on a single video work, which unspooled the lives of various pieces of furniture designed by Le Corbusier for his utopian city project in Chandigarh, India in something like reverse chronological order, from their tony confines in collectors’ homes (and on one mega yacht), through the auction houses that placed them there, the restorers who gussied them up for show, and, finally, the tumbledown city for which they were designed. From the pithy press material (and perhaps this description) the conceit sounds like a fairly dull one, which fits into the mold of countless hoary allegories of Modernist utopianism’s demise. However, the video itself proved unexpectedly poignant, using lush cinematography and careful pacing to embody the elegiac narrative, rather than simply illustrate it.

Mike Kelley, installation view, MoMA PS1, 2013 © MoMA PS1; photograph: Matthew Septimus

Mike Kelley, MoMA PS1, New York
After being roundly disappointed by the iteration of Kelley’s posthumous retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, I found myself questioning the quality of his work as a whole, even against my better judgment. Thankfully, PS1’s epic, compendious exhibition set me right. Could there have been a better venue for this show, after all? For all the show’s triumphs, however, it remains crushingly sad that Kelley couldn’t stick around to see it.

Pierre Huyghe, Centre Pompidou
Unfortunately, I can’t say much about Huyghe’s mid-career retrospective, because I didn’t see it. But it’s certainly the only show this year that had me thinking that it might just be worth the trans-Atlantic flight to go see. Unluckily for me, but luckily for my bank account, reason won out in the end. Huyghe continues to daringly expand the boundaries of artistic possibility, and we are all the poorer in the US for not having a venue in which to watch him do it.

*Other Best Shows I Didn’t See: * *‘Speculations on Anonymous Materials’ Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; ‘The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside’ Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. *

‘James Turrell: A Retrospective’, installation view LACMA

James Turrell, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Far superior to his showing at the Guggenheim, which felt like an Instagram-ready big top circus, Turrell’s survey at LACMA was thoughtful and thorough, and left me something of a believer. While you may not find me loitering around your friendly neighborhood Quaker meeting house any time soon, it was certainly a welcome relief to see an artist earnestly attempting to make spiritually inflected, affective work and managing to pull it off — most of the time — in a manner that made me gasp a little with wonderment, rather than cluck dismissively at its corniness.

New York’s Summer of Los Angeles: Paul McCarthy at the Park Avenue Amory, Robert Irwin at The Whitney Museum of American Art, James Turrell at the Guggenheim, Lynn Foulkes at the New Museum, Ken Price at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Though the shows varied vastly in quality, this summer’s storming of New York’s venerable institutions by artists either based in Los Angeles or, in Turrell’s case, inextricably intertwined with it, signaled that the much-maligned city of the terminal West has finally gained the respect it deserves. Now, perhaps its just the sun stroke talking, but as New York begins to feel more and more like a international playground for the obscenely wealthy, it might be time for artists — especially those who have already managed to gained a foothold in our cut throat industry — to start thinking about getting out of town. The studios are cheaper, there’s sun and sand, and the sushi, when not throbbing with Japanese radiation, is to die for. Sadly, you will have to learn to drive.

Lucas Blalock, Edge of Town (knife block), 2013, archival inkjet print; courtesy Ramiken Crucible, New York

New York’s Autumn of Photography: Lucas Blalock at Ramiken Crucible, Talia Chetrit at Leslie Fritz, Elad Lassry at 303 Gallery, Joshua Citerella at Higher Pictures, Torbjørn Rødland at Algus Greenspoon, David Gilbert at Klaus von Nichtssagend, Annette Kelm at Andrew Kreps, John Houck at On Stellar Rays, New Photography (Annette Kelm, Brendan Fowler, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Eileen Quinlan, Anna Ostoya), MoMA

This fall, as evidenced by the lengthy list above, was a huge one for photography in New York. To make matters even better, almost all of the shows were extremely strong. Among the best: Lucas Blalock’s carefully thought, modest show, whose pleasingly awkward exhibition architecture mimicked his purposely ham-fisted Photoshop manipulations and John Houk’s digitally layered still lives of resonant objects from his past that recall the work of late Jan Groover, updated for the digital age.

The Eric Andre Show, Season 2 Finale
A faux public access talk show beamed in from another dimension, The Eric Andre Show inevitably begins with the show’s namesake kamikazing his way through the set in an explosive of jolt self-destructive physical comedy that leaves you wondering how he avoids landing himself in the hospital. (Answer: he doesn’t.) Generally, when Andre’s Dervish act whirls to a halt, the ravaged set regenerates around him, leaving him huffing an exhausted, all of his efforts seemingly for naught. For the final episode of the show’s second season, however, he is allowed to go on a truly epic tear, which consumes the entirety of the show’s eleven minute run time. Spoiler alert: by the end, Andre winds up crumpled on rubble-strewn floor, having recently been pummeled by a bevy of professional wrestlers, surrounded by competing groups of Crips, Krumpers, and Samba dancers, a buttoned up professor delivering a TED talk, a viral YouTube star vomiting strawberry Quik, an old friend of his from high school who appears to have wandered bleary-eyed onto the set from out of his parent’s basement, and Kato Kaelin, the 1990s most infamous house guest, doing a stand up routine. If you can show me a more anarchic slice of television, I’ll eat my hat.

Laura Owens, ’12 Paintings’, 356 Mission, Los Angeles
Arguably the most important non-museum show mounted in Los Angeles this year, Laura Owens’ blockbuster, which featured 12 monumental new works that deftly mashed up painterly abstraction with Photoshop aesthetics and signaled a radical shift in the artist’s work, also inaugurated one of Los Angeles’ newest and most promising independent spaces. I have artist friends who pilgrimaged to the show perhaps a half dozen times during its lengthy run, finding it alternately quarrelsome (the paintings seemed somehow too ‘correct’, too ‘now’) and inspiring (the optical pop of her faux drop-shadows alone were enough to stand your hair on end), but never boring. I, on the other hand, didn’t make it to the show until the closing party, where I found myself disappointed that I couldn’t make a return trip.

By Carmen Winant

Bennett Simpson speaking at 'Blues For Smoke', the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, L.A.

Carmen Winantis an artist and writer. She teaches at the University of Colorado. Her writing appears in Frieze, Art Papers and The Believer, among others. She is the co-editor of The Highlights Journal.

‘Blues for Smoke’
This Bennett Simpson-curated exhibition, which considered the ethos and aesthetics of blues music through the lens of contemporary art, did what so few other group shows venture: have a palpable thesis, however complicated and contradictory (the 48-artist exhibition opened with a monitor playing Richard Pryer’s 1979 Live in Concert; both the cutting racial jokes and the staccato delivery set the tone for the surrounding work). More group shows should follow this example, challenging the art and the viewers to confront, conform, reject, or otherwise be informed by an idea that stakes a real, if risky, claim in the world. The best artists have opinions and the best curators should too.

Doris Lessing
There has been a resurgence of interest in Doris Lessing occasioned by her death this year. I’m glad because she is vivid and skeptical and fearless.

Detail of the cover of Wayne Koestenbaum’s My 1980s & Other Essays

Wayne Koestenbaum’s My 1980s (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013)
In this collection of essays written over the past decade, Koestenbaum continues to stretch the limits of criticism. He deals in human subjects more than topics, and in this book they include Susan Sontag, Frank O’Hara, Lana Turner, Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Roberto Bolaño and Debbie Harry, among others. Koestenbaum loves the concept of celebrity, though mostly as site through which to channel our simultaneous desires for attention, privacy and humiliation (a WK favorite). Even more importantly, Koestenbaum challenges the relationship between criticism and art − or, rather, the manner in which we so linearly use one to read the other − by bleeding together creative, esoteric, diaristic, and academic forms. (Zadie Smith is the only other essay writer that I can think of working in this elastic mode at the moment.) He takes big risks, and occasionally the center doesn’t hold. For the most part, Koestenbaum, who is also a painter, asks that his writing behave like visual art rather than describe it.

Janet Cardiff The Forty Part Motet, 2001, installation view, the Fuentidueña Chapel in the Cloisters, New York

Some bigger names
I’m not breaking the mold here. Ad Reinhardt at David Zwirner, Ed Ruscha at Gagosian, John Divola at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Janet Cardiff at The Cloisters were all outstanding. Some were even moving.

Brock Enright, Copper Spit, 2013, copper, plastic spit

Some younger artists
The work of several artists stayed with me this year. Each person really deserves their own category but I’ll collapse them here for the sake of space: Carey Denniston and Strauss Borque-LaFrance at KANSAS, Mike Womack at ZieherSmith, Becky Suss at Fleisher Ollman Gallery, Brock Enright at Kate Werble Gallery, Ander Mikalson at Temple Contemporary, Sarah Mattes at Bull & Ram, Chris Domenick, Milano Chow, Julia Bland and Michael Berryhill at Vox Populi, Ofer Wolberger at Printed Matter, Ryan Mrozowski at Pierogi, Zarouhie Abdalian at the MATRIX gallery in the Berkeley Art Museum.

‘Chances With Wolves’ on East Village Radio. Try it out when you’re all alone.

By Silas Martí

Centro Cultural São Paulo, one of the venues of the 10th Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo, 2013; photograph: Carlos Rennó

Silas Martíis a contributing-editor of frieze based in São Paulo, and staff visual arts, architecture and design writer at Folha de S.Paulo newspaper.

While this will be remembered forever as the year the crowds took to the streets of Brazil in the June uprisings, 2013 wasn’t the most memorable in the art scene here. But a few exhibitions gave it some lustre. Without the Bienal de São Paulo, the art circuit in the country’s biggest city becomes a little lazy, as museums and galleries prepare their blockbuster shows to coincide with the big exhibition next September, but some jewels could be found in the white cubes around town nonetheless.

Ending a cycle of lethargy, the Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo this year had its tenth outing – and what an outing. For the first time in its history, the show left the domains of Ibirapuera park to sweep across the city, occupying a range of venues, from the Centro Cultural São Paulo, a sprawling underground gallery nestled between two huge traffic corridors, and even a quaint little apartment with a view of the Minhocão, the overpass that some want to convert into a ‘Paulista’ version of New York’s High Line. The show, which centred on the discussion of urban mobility, was a major success, especially following the heated protests with concerns over the crisis in public transportation.

Sticking to architecture, the controversial edition of the Panorama da Arte Brasileira was another highlight. Curator Lisette Lagnado did away with the usual survey show of emerging artists to create instead a provocation disguised as an exhibition. She attacked the fact that the Museu de Arte Moderna, which hosts the show, has for the past 40 years occupied a building that was meant to be temporary by asking architects and artists to come up with projects for a new museum building, one capable of finally showing its entire collection, mostly invisible due to lack of space. And she got the point across by removing the building’s walls and changing the position of the entrance to reflect the original proposition by Lina Bo Bardi, the architect who refurbished the space three decades ago.

Sesc Pompeia, the venue for the 18th Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc Videobrasil, 2013

At the Sesc Pompeia, a venue designed by Bo Bardi, the 18th edition of the Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc Videobrasil showed signs that it’s time to rethink video’s position in contemporary art, which has become much too hybrid to be classified in terms of medium or technique. The major strength of the show was to include paintings, installations and performances along with the traditional line-up of videos from the so-called global south, or spaces undergoing massive geopolitical transitions. It was a good show all around, but maybe what deserves special attention is the massive on-line catalogue that now allows one to search through the entire history of the festival linking contents from all editions all the way up to now, a major undertaking that shows just how much went on in this field ever since the festival began.

Maria Martins, O impossivel lll (1946); photograph: Vicente de Mello

Some major solo shows also deserve to be remembered. Maria Martins, the Brazilian surrealist sculptor, had a generous review of her entire oeuvre on show at São Paulo’s Museu de Arte Moderna. Beautiful, to put it simply.

Two other historical figures were also remembered. Waldemar Cordeiro and Geraldo de Barros, the masterminds of concrete art in São Paulo, had simultaneous exhibitions. While Cordeiro had his biggest retrospective to date at Itaú Cultural, Barros had his classic 1980s ‘Jogos de Dados’ series displayed in its entirety: 55 works hanging back to back, at Sesc Vila Mariana.

Waldemar Cordeiro, Valentine’s Day, 1973

Closer to the year’s end, the I*nstituto Moreira Salles* unveiled a major retrospective of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri’s work. Little known in Brazil and in much need of remembrance worldwide, Ghirri’s shots of post-modern Italy and the sheer ugliness of postwar readymade urban design are delightful to see in their full body and colour.

Another show that opened recently is as cerebral as it is enchanting. The Centro Universitário Maria Antonia commissioned a new work by Cildo Meireles. At first glance, it’s an empty room, but once inside one starts to notice the floor isn’t quite flat and the corners of the room are slightly twisted, giving the impression the entire space is being crumpled up. The installation sits between two other shows. One is a retrospective of modernist architect Gregori Warchavchik’s oeuvre and the other is made up of photographs by Mauro Restiffe of the Cícero Prado, one of Warchavchik’s biggest apartment buildings in downtown São Paulo. It’s Brazilian modern architecture rehashed in a single, powerful blow.

And let’s not forget Rio. The Museu de Arte do Rio, which opened this year as the first in a wave of museum inaugurations that will take over the city in the coming years as a countdown to the World Cup and the Olympic Games, has staged some noteworthy shows already. Solo exhibitions by Yuri Firmeza and Berna Reale were both breathtaking, the first for opening a new stage in this artist’s restless research into architecture and performance, and the second for giving this newcomer from Belém a major show in the country’s former capital.

Also at MAR, a massive show narrating the development of experimental art in the northeastern state of Pernambuco (‘Pernambuco Experimental’) is one of the most amazing experiences of the year in Rio. In a sense, this seems to be the moment for Pernambuco to shine, not only in the visual arts but also in film.

Hilton Lacerda, Tatuagem, 2013, film still

Hilton Lacerda’s debut as director with Tatuagem, a movie about an experimental theatre troupe during the heaviest period of the country’s dictatorship has shaken the Brazilian film scene with one of the most powerful pictures since the re-establishment of the country’s film industry in the 1990s, coming just one year after Kleber Mendonça’s O Som ao Redor, a powerful investigation of Recife’s new middle class.

So what am I looking forward to next year? For one thing, I’ll be keeping my eyes open for whatever next comes out of Pernambuco. Second, the Bienal de São Paulo, curated by Charles Esche, promises to be the next big thing on the horizon here.

By Tyler Coburn

Kristin Sue Lucas performing a reading of Refresh (2007) at 'Visions of the Now' festival, Stockholm, 2013. Photograph: Märta Thisner

Tyler Coburnis an artist and writer based in New York. His current project, NaturallySpeaking, will be included in ‘La Voix Humaine’ (Kunstverein Munich, 2014) and published in You Are Here: Looking at After the Internet (Cornerhouse Books, 2014).

On Saturday, 25 May 2013, Kristin Sue Lucas performed a cold read of Refresh (2007), her successful petition to change her name to Kristin Sue Lucas. Facing the audience of the Visions of the Now festival in Stockholm, the artist recited her appeal to the Supreme Court of California, and (rather appropriately) Robert Whitman phoned in the judge’s replies. The cold read offers a reminder of the prescience of the petition, as Lucas’s submission to legal process for the purpose of self-renewal not only reflects a desire consigned to speak in the voice of a juridical subject, but a desire already delimited by the parameters of the online world. Writing about the project in Fillip, Chris Fitzpatrick and Post Brothers read Refresh as a parasitical work, noting that ‘in its noisy obstruction, the parasite reinvents the host, becoming an integral part in the system by forcing it to reorient whatever message the host transmits.’

This argument effectively captures Lucas’s engagement with statutory procedure; making a case for her parasitism vis-à-vis the Internet, however, requires a redrafting of our conception of the host. If the critical dissonance of the parasite stems from its status as an uninvited guest, for example, then what relevance does this figure hold for a field in which we are always invited, necessarily welcome: when the very sustenance of the host depends upon our inclusion?

Lucas’s piece thus provides a helpful ground to consider recent attempts by artists to render themselves uninvited, unwelcome – to assume a mode of relation that, via Fitzpatrick & Post, might ‘reveal the system’s dependency on logics of exclusion.’ This claim by no mean presupposes a standard tactic, though overinvestment and obfuscation have been among those recently discussed. Erica Scourti’s Life in Adwords (2012-13) pursues the former: over the course of nearly a year, the artist e-mailed daily diary entries to her Gmail account, later making webcam recitations of the suggested keywords that each entry generated. Scourti’s flat performance reiterates the affectless operations of the Google AdWords algorithm, even as periodic mention of stress, anxiety and romantic ails allude to an ever-more tenuous subjectivity.

Human Readable Type, developed by Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström and R. Lyon as part of the exhibition ‘尸Γσ₠§§㏌⅁’, ‘The Ends of the Library’ series, Goethe-Institut Library, New York

An exemplary case of obfuscation can be found in the Human Readable Type (2013), conceived by Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström and R. Lyon and available for download at www.humanreadabletype.com. Substituting roman letters for homoglyphs, this keyboard layout renders text illegible to automatic search processes. Humans may also have some reading difficulties: the type looks like the result of a chance encounter of Wing Dings and the Fluxkit – to striking effect. For the exhibition ‘尸Γσ₠§§㏌⅁’, as part of ‘The Ends of the Library’ series at New York’s Goethe-Institut Library, the artists deployed the type in a love letter, as well as a list of trigger words for NSA’s Echelon programme. Responding to this diptych on Rhizome, Brian Droitcour wrote, ‘[l]ove and affects are a kind of non-information […] opaque to a search algorithm.’ Parasitically interfering on the plane of machinic legibility, then, also allows the other facets of human communication to pass undetected: no signal and all noise.

Erik Wysocan, (By whom will these keepers be kept?), 2013, installation view at Laurel Gitlen, New York

There were other highlights from the year that don’t figure cleanly into the above discussion, but nonetheless deserve mention: from investigations of the ancient and neoliberal re-makings of value, respectively, in Erik Wycosan’s Paris Spleen at Laurel Gitlen, New York, and Pedro Neves Marques and Mariana Silva’s Environments at e-flux; to Amie Siegel’s latest film, Provenance (2013), which bears a methodological affinity to recent works by Lucy Raven and Maryam Jafri, reminding that the objects of the world (whatever their present philosophical redetermination) produce both economic and cultural effects in their long routes from manufacture to consumption. Following his authoritative history of Californian Ideology, Fred Turner has recently published a new book, The Democratic Surround, which endeavors to revise trenchant accounts of American liberalism in the early Cold War years. Turner has a great sensitivity to the entailment of technology, culture and politics; looking ahead, Lance Wakeling’s film project Field Visits for Chelsea Manning, as well as The Otolith Group’s sequels to Medium Earth, promise to bring this sensitivity into practice.

By Declan Long

Jesse Jones, The Other North, 2013, film still

Declan Longis co-director (with Francis Halsall) of the MA Art in the Contemporary World programme at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, Ireland.

Quite a lot of art that mattered to me in 2013 was shown in Derry, during its UK City of Culture year. Exhibition programmes there were consistently ambitious and involving, often dealing with complex legacies of conflict in powerful, unexpected ways. Jesse Jones’s ‘The Other North’ at CCA Derry/Londonderry (a gallery until very recently led by the hyper-energetic curatorial duo of Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh) was an undoubted highlight. Jones took the transcript of an ‘encounter therapy’ group from 1970s Northern Ireland and transported it to South Korea, where local actors re-staged the conversation. The resulting film was a captivating, radically estranging account of ‘Troubles’ trauma. Santiago Sierra’s ‘Veterans and Psychophonies’ at Void Gallery was another jolting address to these histories. His response to the aftermath of violence in Northern Ireland was – guess what? – manipulative and provocative. But it was a forceful response to military force that kept some of us debating for days. Best of all though was Willie Doherty’s ‘Unseen’ at the newly created City Factory Gallery. This stunning survey of the Derry-native’s stark and unsettling photographs and films gathered key works from the past 30-or-so years, as well as presenting Doherty’s extraordinary recent film Remains for the first time in Ireland. The latter is a culmination and intensification of many of Doherty’s ongoing obsessions – it’s a masterpiece of anguished post-conflict storytelling.

Phil Collins, The Meaning of Style, 2011, 16mm film still

Elsewhere in Ireland, Phil Collins’s exhibition at The Model in Sligo successfully stressed the uplifting qualities of this brilliantly mischievous artist’s work. In Dublin, there were quite a few solo projects of real depth and distinction. These included: standout, idiosyncratically intelligent shows at Mother’s Tankstation by Berlin-based Irishman *Fergus Feehily and Dublin-based Frenchman Aurélien Froment; evolving, open-ended conceptual scenarios at Project Arts Centre conceived by Mario García Torres and Céline Condorelli; strange and beautiful studies of curious, marginal characters by Ben Rivers and Francis Upritchard at the Douglas Hyde Gallery; and striking explorations of the meaning of things by Aleana Egan and Sam Keogh at Kerlin Gallery. It’s worth noting too that another string of exciting solos will be a feature of the 2014 programme at the recently re-opened Irish Museum of Modern Art: among them, I’m looking forward to shows by Hélio Oiticica, Sheela Gowda, Haroon Mirza, and Irish artists Duncan Campbell, Dorothy Cross and Isabel Nolan.

Sarah Lucas. ‘SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble’, 2013, installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London; courtesy: Whitechapel Gallery, London; photograph: Stephen White

An Irishman in London surely contributed a very early addition to many ‘best-of’ lists: Gerard Byrne’s exhibitions at The Whitechapel and Lisson gave a great sense of this marvellous artist’s range in re-presenting obscure historical material. He undoubtedly gained many new fans – let’s call them Team GB – from these terrific London shows. Closer to the end of the year, Sarah Lucas’s ‘SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble’, again at the Whitechapel, was a dirty-minded delight: hilarious, disturbing and touching all at once. (I’m not sure, overall, I saw a better exhibition all year.) A related spirit reigned at ‘Mindfuck’, a selection of Bruce Nauman classics at Hauser & Wirth, which had the intended titular effect. While Blind, an amazing, eye-straining film by John Stezaker at The Approach almost made its title a subjectively experienced reality. Christopher Williams offered a more critically detached challenge to vision at David Zwirner, but it was no less engrossing for that. A major survey of his work at MoMA in 2014 (curated by Roxanna Marcoci) should be worth the price of a plane ticket. Other UK shows I loved this year included Becky Beasley’s ‘Spring Rain’ at Spike Island in Bristol: an intricate and suggestively intimate mixture of photography, sculpture and literary reference. And the sculptural conversation between Manfred Pernice and Martin Boyce at the two Modern Institute galleries in Glasgow (albeit a conversation held with a wide car park in between) was also a fascinating one.

Nikolay Bakharev, Relationship #73, 1994-97, gelatin silver print; courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York © the artist

Venice favourites included everybody’s favourite Camille Henrot: despite the pressure and pace of needing to see everything while there, her film Gross Fatigue contained multitudes, meriting more than one viewing. Among others in ‘The Encyclopaedic Palace’ worth standing still for were Cathy Wilkes, Eva Kotátková (soon to show at Project in Dublin in 2014), Phyllida Barlow, Helen Marten, Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva, Channa Horwitz, Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Maria Lassnig. Cindy Sherman’s photo-archive stood out with startling immediacy too. For some reason, lots of the photos in Massimiliano Gioni’s show were quietly compelling – Nikolay Bakharev’s Russian bathers, Vivian Sassen’s obscured African faces, Eliot Porter’s birds, Christopher Williams glass flowers– steadying contrasts, maybe, to some of the more wildly eccentric visions on display.

Among the alarmingly few books I made it through this year, two accounts by gifted literary stylists of the work of pioneering geniuses became summertime obsessions: T.J. Clark’s Picasso and Truth, and David Peace’s Red or Dead (on the life of paradigm-shifting Liverpool boss Bill Shankly). Newly published books of lectures and letters by, respectively, Borges and Calvino (Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature and Italo Calvino’s Letters, 1941–1985) will continue to be mined for insights for years to come. Similar value applies to Adam Phillips’s latest collection One Way and Another. Not all of these essays are new, but as he might well say himself, reading old essays by Adam Phillips is one of the ways that we find to discover what types of new essays we are really seeking… The too-sudden death of Seamus Heaney returned me and many people I know to his poetry – more complicated, uncertain and unsettling than the easy soundbites often suggest – but also to his essays. His wonderful analysis of Elizabeth Bishop in The Redress of Poetry is another ongoing touchstone.

Album cover of David Bowie’s The Next Day, 2013

Lastly: a little music. The surprising returns of Bowie and My Bloody Valentine brought tears of joy – and relief at the glorious quality of their new work. For other new things I relied heavily on the wise counsel of The Quietus, surely the best, most challenging and entertaining, online music magazine. This year, the following records have been on repeat while I’ve been working (or pretending to work): Stellar Om Source, Joy One Mile; Oneohtrix Point Never, R Plus Seven; Laurel Halo, Chance of Rain; Holden, The Inheritors, Julia Holter Loud City Song; Forest Swords, Engravings; Bill Callahan, Dream River; and Juana Molina Wed 21. Maybe the single song I’ve wanted to hear on the radio more than any other was Drake’s ‘Hold On, We’re Coming Home’– my experience and understanding of which was typically expanded by a predictably eye-opening review by the ever-trenchant Mark Fisher.

By Tyler Coburn

An audience member performing a reading of Kristin Sue Lucas's Refresh (2007) at 'Visions of the Now' festival, Stockholm, 2013. Photograph: Märta Thisner

Tyler Coburnis an artist and writer based in New York. His current project, NaturallySpeaking, will be included in ‘La Voix Humaine’ (Kunstverein Munich, 2014) and published in You Are Here: Looking at After the Internet (Cornerhouse Books, 2014).

On Saturday, 25 May 2013, Kristin Sue Lucas performed a cold read of Refresh (2007), her successful petition to change her name to Kristin Sue Lucas. Facing the crowd at the ‘Visions of the Now’ festival in Stockholm, an audience member recited the artist’s appeal to the Supreme Court of California, and (rather appropriately) Robert Whitman phoned in the judge’s replies. The cold read offers a reminder of the prescience of the petition, as Lucas’s submission to legal process for the purpose of self-renewal not only reflects a desire consigned to speak in the voice of a juridical subject, but a desire already delimited by the parameters of the online world. Writing about the project in Fillip, Chris Fitzpatrick and Post Brothers read Refresh as a parasitical work, noting that ‘in its noisy obstruction, the parasite reinvents the host, becoming an integral part in the system by forcing it to reorient whatever message the host transmits.’

This argument effectively captures Lucas’s engagement with statutory procedure; making a case for her parasitism vis-à-vis the Internet, however, requires a redrafting of our conception of the host. If the critical dissonance of the parasite stems from its status as an uninvited guest, for example, then what relevance does this figure hold for a field in which we are always invited, necessarily welcome: when the very sustenance of the host depends upon our inclusion?

Lucas’s piece thus provides a helpful ground to consider recent attempts by artists to render themselves uninvited, unwelcome – to assume a mode of relation that, via Fitzpatrick & Post, might ‘reveal the system’s dependency on logics of exclusion.’ This claim by no mean presupposes a standard tactic, though overinvestment and obfuscation have been among those recently discussed. Erica Scourti’s Life in Adwords (2012-13) pursues the former: over the course of nearly a year, the artist e-mailed daily diary entries to her Gmail account, later making webcam recitations of the suggested keywords that each entry generated. Scourti’s flat performance reiterates the affectless operations of the Google AdWords algorithm, even as periodic mention of stress, anxiety and romantic ails allude to an ever-more tenuous subjectivity.

Human Readable Type, developed by Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström and R. Lyon as part of the exhibition ‘尸Γσ₠§§㏌⅁’, ‘The Ends of the Library’ series, Goethe-Institut Library, New York

An exemplary case of obfuscation can be found in the Human Readable Type (2013), conceived by Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström and R. Lyon and available for download at www.humanreadabletype.com. Substituting roman letters for homoglyphs, this keyboard layout renders text illegible to automatic search processes. Humans may also have some reading difficulties: the type looks like the result of a chance encounter of Wing Dings and the Fluxkit – to striking effect. For the exhibition ‘尸Γσ₠§§㏌⅁’, as part of ‘The Ends of the Library’ series at New York’s Goethe-Institut Library, the artists deployed the type in a love letter, as well as a list of trigger words for NSA’s Echelon programme. Responding to this diptych on Rhizome, Brian Droitcour wrote, ‘[l]ove and affects are a kind of non-information […] opaque to a search algorithm.’ Parasitically interfering on the plane of machinic legibility, then, also allows the other facets of human communication to pass undetected: no signal and all noise.

Erik Wysocan, (By whom will these keepers be kept?), 2013, installation view at Laurel Gitlen, New York

There were other highlights from the year that don’t figure cleanly into the above discussion, but nonetheless deserve mention: from investigations of the ancient and neoliberal re-makings of value, respectively, in Erik Wycosan’s Paris Spleen at Laurel Gitlen, New York, and Pedro Neves Marques and Mariana Silva’s Environments at e-flux; to Amie Siegel’s latest film, Provenance (2013), which bears a methodological affinity to recent works by Lucy Raven and Maryam Jafri, reminding that the objects of the world (whatever their present philosophical redetermination) produce both economic and cultural effects in their long routes from manufacture to consumption. Following his authoritative history of Californian Ideology, Fred Turner has recently published a new book, The Democratic Surround, which endeavors to revise trenchant accounts of American liberalism in the early Cold War years. Turner has a great sensitivity to the entailment of technology, culture and politics; looking ahead, Lance Wakeling’s film project Field Visits for Chelsea Manning, as well as The Otolith Group’s sequels to Medium Earth, promise to bring this sensitivity into practice.

By Laura McLean-Ferris

Mike Kelley, 'Day is Done', 2005-06, installation view at MoMA PS1, 2013. © 2013 MoMA PS1; photograph: Matthew Septimus

Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator currently based in New York, where she most recently worked on Performa 13. ‘Geographies of Contamination’ an exhibition she has curated with Alex Scrimgeour and Vincent Honoré opens at DRAF, London on 31 January. ‘#nostalgia’, a multi-artist performance that she has conceived for Glasgow Sculpture Studios will take place during Glasgow International 2014.

Exhibition:
Mike Kelley at MoMA PS1, New York

To watch several hours of the vast 36-part video and installation works that comprise Mike Kelley’s Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (2000-13), is to open multiple chambers of emotion and conceptual space, which is exhausting, exhilarating, depressing and often hysterically funny, and showing these works in the rooms of PS1, a former school, was perfect. Each film or installation is based on a found photograph of costume parties, skits, plays and shows from high school yearbooks. In each case Kelley extended the initial scene of the image into a longer performance that riffs on the photograph’s meaning at face value. Instead of playfulness these moments of socially licensed surreality among school children become a claustrophobic reality, which allows the image to be somehow interrogated beyond what would be normally reasonable, tearing the veil onto another reality lurking within. A seductive crooning vampire laments his troubles getting women and endless recourse to masturbation, a group of gymnasts with black eyes and white faces skip around a gymnasium singing ‘chugga chugga chugga!’ ad infinitum, a hooded girl at a talent show explains that she has embraced Satan due to her total lack of God-given talent before being pelted with rotten tomatoes, whilst teenagers posing for photographs speak, without expression, of the pain and sadness of their lives, or the druggy, sparkling beauty of their thoughts. Horrific, tender and comic, these works are also analogies for the skewing, mind altering powers of memory – tiny rooms of the mind that have closed in at the edges, and from which there is little possibility of escape.

Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, 1987. Photograph: Jason Mandella

Exhibition:
Gretchen Bender, ‘Tracking the Thrill’ at The Kitchen, New York

Nine years after Gretchen Bender’s death, the artist’s exhibition at The Kitchen seemed as though it could have been made yesterday, so closely was it attenuated to the strange digital constructions of corporate logos television clips and the way that these communicate so much about a society when they are cut away from their source and allowed to fly free. It is a cold, chrome-plated world that one sees though Bender’s eyes in works such as Total Recall (1987), projected on a huge wall of monitors – endless visions of the earth, metallic triangles flying through space, and anonymous crowds moving through urban environments. It’s intriguing to think about a generation of artists who attempted to infiltrate the entertainment industry rather than commenting from the outside – the paranoia in Bender’s title sequence for the TV show America’s Most Wanted, for example, is sketchy, frenetic and disturbing, but its difficult to say whether it comments on the paranoia or the age or simply adds to it. I have always loved the combination of Robert Longo’s men in suits flying through the air in the music video for New Order’s ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ to the words ‘Every time I see you falling, I get down on my knees and pray’, but it took this exhibition to reveal that the power of this video really lies in Bender’s sketchy, anxious editing, particularly in the verses, allowing the falling men to convey exhaustion and relief. I wondered, following this exhibition, whether there is space for the work of the editor to come forward in the same way that the curator has in recent years.

Liz Magic Laser, Stand Behind Me, 2013, included in ‘The Magic of the State’, Lisson Gallery, London

Exhibition:
‘The Magic of the State’, Lisson Gallery, London and Beirut, Cairo

As cracks are increasingly appearing in contemporary economic, societal and political structures, it was hugely enlightening to see an exhibition tackling the historical questions that have troubled societies for centuries, such as ‘The Magic of the State’. This interesting collaboration between a young not-for-profit in Cairo and Lisson, the stately London commercial gallery, featured artists such as Liz Magic Laser, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, and Christodoulos Panayiotou, who were attempting to locate the places in which power moves and sticks when societies are being formed and broken – in money, magic, abstraction, political theatre and in individuals themselves. Also this year, Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘l’Ange de l’Histoire’* at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, which included a selection of contemporary artists such as Lili Reynaud-Dewar (also in the Lisson show), Isabelle Cornaro and Carol Bove, attempted a similarly long view, considering the fragment or piece of debris as an opening into a history.

Music:
18+

Smeary, draggy and sexy, 18+ (an anonymous male/female duo) have the kind of vocal delivery that suggests that they nearly couldn’t be bothered, despite the fact that their subject matter (as the name would suggest) is almost exclusively fucking. Their videos take place in Second Life-style environments – exploring a virtual house, or a spaceless, floating, half-rendered ruin. As a trailer for their contribution to Oo, the Cyprus/Lithuanian pavilions at the Venice Biennale, their music video cut between perfume ad clips and a digitally rendered film of giraffes queuing for a diving board and then leaping into swimming pools, twisting and turning through the air in a spectacular, delightfully unrealisable fantasy. Their full, non-interventionist appropriation of Lana Del Ray’s video for ‘National Anthem’ for standout track ‘Rebirth’ is a gloriously appropriate move, taking Americana popstar’s unapologetic channeling of fantasy that appears to arrive half dead in her mouth, and dialling it up to the next level. ‘Hooooooow, do you that?’ the female vocalist drawls, as the camera lingers on Del Rey’s vision of herself as First Lady to all presidents.

Audio:
Lexicon Valley

The chatty, NPR-style radio show has many appealing forms, but this year I have branched away from the general to take in a few more specialist audio shows, my new favourite being Slate’s intermittently appearing language podcast Lexicon Valley, presented by Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo (a man who read former congressman Anthony Weiner’s sex texts and couldn’t help but wonder: ‘just when did “bend you over” become a sex phrase?’) Among the most sparkling episodes is ‘A Needle Pulling Thread’: devoted to the word ‘so’ and its sudden arrival at the beginning of conversational sentences and responses to questions over the past five years. Far from being a neutral conversational filler, ‘so’, it emerges, has arrived due to its ‘agenda’ feel, and the way that the word also acts as a ‘fast forward’ button giving the sense that we are arriving in a conversation that is already underway. As a speech pattern, in fact, it can be traced back to Silicon Valley techspeak via Michael Lewis’s 1999 book The New New Thing, a long form study of the blossoming California tech industry at the end of the 20th century. It made its way into common speech via the helpful explanations of many awkward individuals discussing technology on platforms such as TED talks, and has ended up as a tiny linguistic carrier of computing in our mouths, a subtle companion to the smartphones in our pockets.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/07/24/anthony_weiner_bend_you_over_fantasy_when_did_bending_people_over_become.html

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/31/reviews/991031.31anderst.html

Book:
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner’s dazzling The Flamethrowers arrived like a sudden romance, in that it gave me everything that I wanted but didn’t know I needed, to such an extent that in the end I felt it had been written for me and me alone. Though the novel rips through various parts of the 20th century, it is the central protagonist Reno (so called after her home town) the brightly burning motorcycle girl trying to make it in the art world of 1970s SoHo, who gives the novel its incendiary quality, and who acts as the hungry, observant outsider that lights the world around her. It is Reno’s ideas about speed, film, drawing, ambition and passion that throw the ideas of Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta Clark and others into a kind of sharp relief that I cannot imagine being achieved via the non-fictional form, and which incisively revealed the both immense possibilites of this era in New York, as well as its trappings and failings. Perhaps it’s enough to say that I stopped bothering to turn over the corners of pages containing beautiful imagery, phrases or ideas at page 26 because I had already turned over five, and could suddenly see what I was in for: an outlandishly sexy, novel driven by ideas, art, rubber, gasoline and spirit that offered as many ways to think about art, history, industry and class war as it did about ambition, youth and the experience of falling in and out of love.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’, 2013

Film:
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Speaking of blazing female protagonists and class wars, it would seem remiss not to mention the latest instalment in the The Hunger Games series, which is perhaps the mass-market, pop-cultural equivalent of The Flamethrowers. As the central characters of teen novelist Suzanne Collins’s dystopic future world struggle with their impossible task of murdering one another whilst retaining their humanity, the protagonist Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is also beginning to take on that strange, cipher like quantity occasionally ascribed to a young woman – the mascot, the emblem, the figurehead, of a revolution. As the starving, oppressed populations in the outer regions of this world became entranced by Katniss’s wedding dress it was impossible not to think of Kate Middleton, her spectacular wedding in 2011 and the riots that followed in London just a few weeks later. I’m not sure if it means something significant that one of the year’s most popular films was a tirade against spectacle powered by a call to class war – whether the film is precisely the spectacle that it claims to rail against or a powerful comment on the present is ambiguous – but nonetheless it was a perfectly pitched blockbuster for 2013.

Dr. Warren Hern at his Boulder, Colorado clinic. Still from Martha Shane and Lana
Wilson, After Tiller

Film:
After Tiller

Following the murder of Dr George Tiller, one of only five doctors to provide third-trimester abortions in the entire United States, documentary makers Lana Wilson and Martha Shane followed the practices of the remaining four – two women and two men. To make a sympathetic and candid portrait of the deeply passionate doctors, who nonetheless have daily struggles with the moral implications of their decisions (not to mention continuous death threats and picketing) is extraordinarily difficult, and the filmmakers resist simplifying the issue at every turn. To say that this is contentious territory in an ongoing battle over the bodies and rights of women in the US is a ridiculous understatement, but the film is a huge contribution which will likely push the conversation forward… oh, all of a couple of millimetres. But how difficult a feat that is. It’s an incredibly sensitive (albeit draining) piece of work that leaves one with a sense of the horrendous hopelessness of women who find themselves in situations in which no decision is the right one. And unforgettable are the sounds of tears and the shots of their grief-stricken hands, anxiously gripping and ripping paper tissues.

Others: ‘Manet: Return to Venice’ at Palazzo Ducale, Venice; Camille Henrot’s showstopping Grosse Fatigue at the 55th Venice Biennial, various writing by Chris Krauss, Steve McQueen’s retrospective at the Schaulager, Basel; Isa Genzken at MoMA, New York, and Ragnar Kjartansson’s S.S. Hangover at the Venice Biennale.

Looking forward:

At the time of writing I am yet to see the Pierre Huygue retrospective at the Pompidou, which I’m very excited about but I was also very glad to hear that the French artist will be the focus of New York’s Artists Institute next year. I was lucky to work with Cally Spooner on her musical And you were wonderful, on stage for Performa 13 which is as enjoyable for its analytic smarts about the as it is for its jazz-hands showtunes, so I look forward to seeing how the work develops when it moves to Tate Britain in 2014. In Munich I hope to see ‘La Voix Humaine’ at Kunstverein Munchen, an exhibition on the voice, which includes the work of Amelie von Wulffen, Tyler Coburn, Cecile B. Evans and R. Kelly. Plus Becky Beasley’s ‘A Slight Nausea: An Interior’ at South London Gallery; Ed Atkins at Kunsthalle Zurich; Glasgow International, and the Whitney Biennial.

By Milena Hoegsberg

Sonja Krohn, _Kjemp Ikke Alene Mot Krisa_, 1975, poster. Included in 'Hold stenhårdt fast på greia di. Norwegian art and feminism 1968-89', Kunsthall Oslo. © the artist and Kunsthall Oslo

Milena Hoegsberg is a curator and writer, currently Acting Chief Curator at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK), Norway.

My picks, in loose alphabetic order with many gaps:

A is for all left out& for anticipation. As 2013 comes to a close, I am all too aware of all that I did not manage to experience (notably for example the Carnegie International, which, from a distance, would seem to deserve it’s good reviews). But I am also excited about what is underway in the field including the Whitney Biennial and Manifesta in St. Petersburg, Russia, as well as exhibitions slated for 2015: the Black Mountain College exhibition at ICA Boston, and solo exhibitions of works by the Charles and Ray Eames at The Barbican, London and Barbara Kasten at ICA Philadelphia.

Bauhaus Party, ‘In Spite Of The Night’: Phil Collins, Daniela Kinateder, and Simon Will with students from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Photograph: Milena Hoegsburg

Trevor Paglen, ‘Untitled (Reaper Drone)’, 2010, c-type print

‘global aCtIVISm’ at ZKM in Karlsruhe, which runs until March 2014. I have not yet seen the exhibition, but plan to attend the seminar devoted to cross disciplinary exchange of ideas on the role of the citizen in performative democracy January 24-25, 2014. As uneasy as art is sits in relation to activism, it seems a really important topic to continue probing.

‘Hold stenhårdt fast på greia di. Norwegian art and feminism 1968-89’, curated by Norwegian artists Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen (also responsible for one of Oslo’s better art zines, ALBUM) at Kunsthall Oslo. The exhibition unearthed some historical Norwegian works, many overlooked or forgotten, and which I’d never seen. The clever Norwegian title translates something like “hold tightly on to your stuff”!

Jack Goldstein,‘Underwater Sea Fantasy’, 1983/2003, film still. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne and the Estate of Jack Goldstein

Labour on show at Tate Britain: in the piece Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973-75 by artists Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Mary Kelly, and an exhibition devoted to Sylvia Pankhurst (part of the ‘Spotlight’ series; on show until March 2014), which includes a research work by artists Hester Reeve and Olivia Plender.

Ryan McNamara, ‘MEƎM: A STORYBALLETABOUTTHEINTERNET’, 2013, performance. Photograph: Milena Hoegsburg

Rediscovering or re-appreciating older work through the lens of the present: Barbara Hammer’s films; the video Martha Rosler reads Vogue from 1982 (seen on a holiday visit to MACBA, Barcelona); Hilma of Klimt at Moderna Museet; the experimental photography and colorful stage designs of prolific Bauhaus artist Xanti Shawinsky which, due to a legal battle, have not been on view for over two decades. In the safe hands of a newly founded estate, the avant garde artist’s imaginative work is has just begun to pop up in various international exhibitions.

Camille Henrot, ‘Grosse fatigue’, 2013, film still

Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden. Maria Lind’s curatorial energy never ceases to amaze and this project, initiated in 2013, is one I hope to follow closely in 2014. (http://www.tenstakonsthall.se/mobiles/?en#tensta-museum-reports-from-new-sweden)

Visual and popular culture distractions that seemed insistent in surfacing when I was trying to recall the past year: selfies (notably of Danish prime minister Helle Thorning, Barack Obama and Tony Blair, and the unnecessary and sexist commentary that they gave rise to online) and the newcomer ‘belifies’; twerking; art world instagramming; JZ at Pace (and not least Jerry Saltz review of it) and, more recently, the undo attention given to Kanya West’s video for Bound 2 (see Jerry Saltz again), and the overdue blog entries devoted to why a sexual predator like photographer Terry Richardson still gets hired to do major fashion jobs.

New year’s wishful thinking: more time to see more and for research and thoughtful production for myself and my colleagues in 2014!

By Barbara Casavecchia

Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Pays Barbare, 2013 (Prod. Les Films d'Ici)

Film and video

In the official era of Accelerationism, I guess I’ve grown to crave, more and more, the slow pace of cinema. This last year was generous with me.

Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Pays Barbare, 2013

Pays Barbare (2013) by Milan-based duo Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian premiered at Locarno Film Festival, after years of manic editing. Based on found footage and photos, it opens onto unseen images of the dead body of Mussolini in Piazzale Loreto among the disconcerting smiles of a cheering crowd, and then reconstructs the planned brutality of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia. A film about the present, despite the archival framework.

Dora Garcia, The Joycean Society (2013). Since thirty years, the members of Zurich’s Joycean Society read together Finnegans Wake, discussing every word; once they are done, they start all over again, thus echoing the circularity and endless interpretations of the book. Live, human, oral, subversive Encyclopaedic Palaces to get lost in.

Michel Auder’sStories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs at Kunsthalle Basel provided a full immersion. I’ve forgotten the title of Auder’s latest film I saw at the nearby Stadt Kino during the Art Basel days: very small crowd, lots of beauty, masterly editing, sampling, cutting, pasting and quitting, over and over again.

John Akomfrah, The Unfinished Conversation (2012), that I saw at the Sharjah Biennale. On three screens, the story of Stuart Hall, unfolding along a brilliant reflection on the formation of (personal, political, social) identities and subjectivities. And what an amazing soundtrack!

Alberi (Trees, 2013), by Milanese filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino started its tour as an installation at PS1 in New York in spring, to arrive in Milan at ex-Cinema Manzoni (as part of the FilmMaker festival) only in late November. Shot in a small village in Basilicata, Southern Italy, it brings back the myth of the Green Man from ancestral times, blending together humans and nature.

As many others here, I’ve enjoyed the artist films and video brought to my screen by Vdrome (an online platform of screenings curated by Edoardo Bonaspetti, Jens Hoffmann, Andrea Lissoni and Filipa Ramos). Andrea Lissoni has just been appointed as Film and International Art Curator of Tate Modern, so please stay tuned.

Something to read

Raffaella Perna, Arte, Fotografia e femminismo in Italia negli anni Settanta, (postmedia books, 2013). Italian only, sorry guys, but one could buy it just for the pictures: a small book on photography, feminism and the conflicted, corrosive representations of the female body in the 1970s. Bad girls’ irony rules.
I’m looking forward to postmedia’s reprint of Service: A Trilogy on Colonization by Martha Rosler, three short stories on food production and consumption. More Semiotics of the Kitchen, please.

Two thoughtful books on art, communities and relational dynamics, great to tackle together: Anna Detheridge, Scultori della speranza. L’arte nel contesto della globalizzazione (2012) and Chantal Pontbriand, The Contemporary, the Common. Art in a Globalizing World (Sternberg Press, 2013).
A fascinating essay on the history of distraction. Petra Löffler, Bodies of Distraction, in: Bianca Maria Pirani, Thomas S. Smith, Body and Time: Bodily Rhythms and Social Synchronism in the Digital Media Society (2013, Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

The thick book accompanying the much disputed When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013 (Prada Arte, 2013) is a goldmine, with hundreds of documentary photos and essays on Szeemann’s legendary exhibition, the readymade and the current vogue of re-enactments by Germano Celant, Dieter Roelstraete, Claire Bishop, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Francesco Stocchi, Boris Groys, Mary Anne Staniszewski, Charles Esche, Christian Rattemeyer, Anne Rorimer, Jen Hoffman, Benjamin Buchloch, Gwen Allen, Chus Martinez, Terry Smith, Jan Verwoert and Glenn Philipps. Positively heavyweight.

Exhibitions

Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, Massimiliano Gioni’s pièce de résistance at this year’s Venice Biennale kept resurfacing in so many ways, both good and bad, that it’s still very much alive in my head, with Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen (2013) and Sharon Hayes’ Ricerche: three (2013) at the forefront as subtle forms of resistance to the seduction of the new.

Many of my favorite solo shows (or individual works), this year, were by women artists. My sincere apologies for the dumb reductionism, and all my thanks to Leonor Antunes, Tauba Auerbach, Trisha Baga, Petra Cortright, Thea Djordjadze, Aleksandra Domanovic, Isa Genzken, Camille Henrot, Judith Hopf, Helen Marten, Marisa Merz, Giulia Piscitelli, Samara Scott, Marinella Senatore, Lorna Simpson, Jo Spence, Sturtevant for the experience.

For the enthralling play of words and objects: Pavel Buchler’sNo Returns at Vistamare gallery in Pescara (special mention for Parole on Probation [parole means ‘words’ in Italian], a print from the series Honest Work [2013]) and Shimabuku’sSomething That Floats, Something That Sinks at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Some Italian notes

Diego Perrone’s twin monumental sculptures in cast glass for his show Il servo astuto (2013) at Museion in Bozen, half abstract and liquid, half anthropomorphic and solid, were a tactile feast.

Two solo shows by Nicola Martini proved the maturity of his formal explorations on the nature of materials – cast glass, colophony, marble and concrete, in Nervo Vago at Museo Marino Marini in Florence; cast glass and photosensitive bitumen of Judea at gallery Kaufmann Repetto in Milan. In both cases, borders between sculpture and architecture were uncertain.

In Antigrazioso, the section curated by Luca Lo Pinto at Palais de Tokyo in Paris for the massive group show Nouvelles Vagues, Tupac’s hologram and the photos of Medardo Rosso made a hell of a (ghostly) couple.

Boy With a Bucket by Andrea Kvas at Gallery Chert, Berlin: painting as a foldable, unfoldable, mobile, palpable and reckless presence inside the space.

Looking forward to Micol Assaël’s unpronounceable ILIOKATAKINIOMUMASTILOPSARODIMAKOPIOTITA at Hangar Bicocca in Milan and a lu tiempo de… by Pádraig Timoney at Museo MADRE in Naples, next February.

By Robert Barry

Opera Comique's production of 'Written on Skin'. Photo: Julien Etienne

Robert Barry is a freelance writer and composer from Brighton, England.

My highlights from 2013 include:

Daniel Keller ‘Lazy Ocean Drift’. Installation view at New Galerie, Paris

New shows in Paris by Daniel Keller (‘Lazy Ocean Drift’ at New Galerie), Pierre Huyghe (at the Centre Pompidou), and Philippe Parreno (at Palais de Tokyo).

Opera Bastille’s production of Leoš Janáček’s The Makropulos Case (1925) and Opéra Comique ‘s production of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin (2012).

Yola Fatoush’s new album ‘Up Out of It’

New records by Oval, Yola Fatoush, and DJ Marfox.

Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘La Grande Bellezza’

New films by Paolo Sorrentino (La Grande Bellezza), Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers), Abdellatif Kechiche (Blue Is the Warmest Color), and Nicholas Winding Refn (Only God Forgives).

Hannah Hoch, opening in 2014 at Whitechapel Gallery, London

In 2014 I am looking forward to:

The Hannah Höch show at Whitechapel Gallery, opening in January, and *Lars Von Trier*’s new film, Nymphomaniac.

By Kirsty Bell

Frantisek Kupka, View from a Carriage Window, c. 1901

1. Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly, MOMA NY

Technicolour computer chip diagrams, turn of the century fantasy by Czech artist František Kupka, Odilon Redon’s painting of a rock, and many other wild, unexpected gems, in a closely-packed hang in which art and thought felt suddenly urgent, and the 4th dimension close at hand.

2. Hilma af Klint, A Pioneer of Abstraction, Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
The complete body of work of this visionary artist, presented fully formed as if had lain dormant for a century, which was not exactly the case but not far from the truth: when she died in 1944, she stipulated that her work was not to be exhibited until 20 years after her death. Even now almost 60 years later, it feels uncannily fresh and prescient.

3. Textiles Shows in Monchengladbach, Wolfsburg and Bielefeld

A glut of shows devoted to textiles provided the opportunity to luxuriate in surface texture: rarely exhibited works by Bauhaus weavers Gunta Stölzl and Annie Albers; three dimensional yarn sculptures by ‘fibre artists’ like Sheila Hicks; exuberant, experimental hangings by the Sofie Dawo, a Professor from Saarbrucken who never exhibited during her lifetime; and Beryl Korot’s ‘Text and Commentary’, an unlikely juncture between weaving and video art that baffled fans of both when shown by Leo Castelli in 1977. See also Nick Relph’s recent show of weavings at the Chisenhale Gallery. There is something in the air.

4. The Encyclopedic Palace, Venice Biennale
This year’s generally lackluster national pavilions were countered by Massimiliano Gioni’s smoothly articulated exhibition, The Encyclopedic Palace: the Biennial as Pleasure Dome. So many unusual things to marvel at, so many old favourites to enjoy again, so many new players to discover, their works presented to their best advantage. A gliding sweep from the mind of the outsider to the age of hyper-connectivity.

5. Loretta Fahrenholz’s Ditch Plains

Ditch Plains Teaser from vitakuben on Vimeo.

6. Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts. Essays on Artists and Writers.
Apart from the hilarious 1994 title essay on the enigma that is David Salle, the essay ‘A Girl of the Zeitgeist’ on Ingrid Sischy and the politics of Artforum offers a fascinating insight into art criticism in the eighties. All night editing sessions with petulant writers seem a world away from today’s fast-as-you-can, edit-free blogosphere.

7. Resin works by Michaela Eichwald in ‘Some End of Things’ at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and Silberkuppe, Berlin

An amputated hand cast in clear resin contains the floating debris of the working day: pins and needles, bottle caps, scraps of food. Haunting and compelling counterparts to Eichwald’s ever vaster and denser paintings. Her internet site, uhutrust.com, is one to visit regularly.

8. Wolfgang Tillmans’ ‘Central Nervous System’ at Maureen Paley, London, and ‘Silver’ at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin
After an interim period of global roaming and surface scanning, Tillmans has come to a stand still again and sharpened his focus to its utmost intensity. In this pair of pendant exhibitions he devotes each to a single theme for the first time, and the results shine with an almost religious conviction. In London, the all-consuming love of an individual in two floors of intimate portraits; and in Berlin, an equally passionate love of color, accident, process and technique in the abstract ‘Silver’ works.

9. ‘Not Yet Titled. New and Forever at Museum Ludwig’, Cologne

Clear, erudite and invigorating, Philip Kaiser’s rehang of the Ludwig Museum collection was a majestic emancipation in which the exhibited works scored an effortless victory over the usually overwhelming 1980s architecture. With a Louise Lawler retrospective expertly woven into it, it must make the new director’s departure after just one year even bitterer for the Rheinland.

10. 2013 Carnegie International

As I won’t make it to Pittsburgh to see the show, I’ve contented myself with reading the catalogue instead. The introduction by curators Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski had me hooked with its heartfelt eulogy on art as troublemaker: ‘Contemporary art is more than trophies on the wall, assets in a portfolio, or a conquest stored away in a safe. It takes a high form of troublemaking to transform our thinking, if not our lives.’

By Milena Hoegsberg

Sonja Krohn, _Kjemp Ikke Alene Mot Krisa_, 1975, poster. Included in 'Hold stenhårdt fast på greia di. Norwegian art and feminism 1968-89', Kunsthall Oslo. © the artist and Kunsthall Oslo

Milena Hoegsberg is a curator and writer, currently Acting Chief Curator at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK), Norway.

My picks, in loose alphabetic order with many gaps:

A is for all left out& for anticipation. As 2013 comes to a close, I am all too aware of all that I did not manage to experience (notably for example the Carnegie International, which, from a distance, would seem to deserve it’s good reviews). But I am also excited about what is underway in the field including the Whitney Biennial and Manifesta in St. Petersburg, Russia, as well as exhibitions slated for 2015: the Black Mountain College exhibition at ICA Boston, and solo exhibitions of works by the Charles and Ray Eames at The Barbican, London and Barbara Kasten at ICA Philadelphia.

Bauhaus Party, ‘In Spite Of The Night’: Phil Collins, Daniela Kinateder, and Simon Will with students from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Photograph: Milena Hoegsberg

Trevor Paglen, ‘Untitled (Reaper Drone)’, 2010, c-type print

‘global aCtIVISm’ at ZKM in Karlsruhe, which runs until March 2014. I have not yet seen the exhibition, but plan to attend the seminar devoted to cross disciplinary exchange of ideas on the role of the citizen in performative democracy January 24-25, 2014. As uneasy as art is sits in relation to activism, it seems a really important topic to continue probing.

‘Hold stenhårdt fast på greia di. Norwegian art and feminism 1968-89’, curated by Norwegian artists Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen (also responsible for one of Oslo’s better art zines, ALBUM) at Kunsthall Oslo. The exhibition unearthed some historical Norwegian works, many overlooked or forgotten, and which I’d never seen. The clever Norwegian title translates something like “hold tightly on to your stuff”!

Jack Goldstein,‘Underwater Sea Fantasy’, 1983/2003, film still. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne and the Estate of Jack Goldstein

Labour on show at Tate Britain: in the piece Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973-75 by artists Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Mary Kelly, and an exhibition devoted to Sylvia Pankhurst (part of the ‘Spotlight’ series; on show until March 2014), which includes a research work by artists Hester Reeve and Olivia Plender.

Ryan McNamara, ‘MEƎM: A STORYBALLETABOUTTHEINTERNET’, 2013, performance. Photograph: Milena Hoegsberg

Rediscovering or re-appreciating older work through the lens of the present: Barbara Hammer’s films; the video Martha Rosler reads Vogue from 1982 (seen on a holiday visit to MACBA, Barcelona); Hilma of Klimt at Moderna Museet; the experimental photography and colorful stage designs of prolific Bauhaus artist Xanti Schawinsky which, due to a legal battle, have not been on view for over two decades. In the safe hands of a newly founded estate, the avant garde artist’s imaginative work is has just begun to pop up in various international exhibitions.

Camille Henrot, ‘Grosse fatigue’, 2013, film still

Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden. Maria Lind’s curatorial energy never ceases to amaze and this project, initiated in 2013, is one I hope to follow closely in 2014. (http://www.tenstakonsthall.se/mobiles/?en#tensta-museum-reports-from-new-sweden)

Visual and popular culture distractions that seemed insistent in surfacing when I was trying to recall the past year: selfies (notably of Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Barack Obama and Tony Blair, and the unnecessary and sexist commentary that they gave rise to online) and the newcomer ‘belifies’; twerking; instagramming (one of the more enjoyable visual distractions); JZ at Pace (and not least Jerry Saltz review of it) and, more recently, the undo attention given to Kanya West’s video for Bound 2 (see Jerry Saltz again), and the overdue blog entries devoted to why a sexual predator like photographer Terry Richardson still gets hired to do major fashion jobs.

New year’s wishful thinking: more time to see more and for research and thoughtful production for myself and my colleagues in 2014!

By Matthew Rana

Still from Malak Helmy's 'Records from the Excited State – Chapter 3'

Matthew Rana is an artist, critic and poet. In 2014, Torpedo Press will publish his chapbook, ‘The Theory of the Square: A Comedy’. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

Still from Malak Helmy’s ‘Records from the Excited State – Chapter 3’ (2012)

Malak Helmy, ‘Records from the Excited State – Chapter 3’ (2012), 64th Berlinale, Berlin
Shot in different locations along Egypt’s north coast, artist Malak Helmy’s short film is all colour and mood. In it, Helmy trains her lens on the time produced by economies of leisure: lush, empty and unresolved.

Juan Downey, ‘Una utopía de la comunicación’, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
Downey’s work around systems theory, networks and ideals of connectivity – from his early GRAV-influenced experiments, to the Video Trans America project and quasi-ethnographic fieldwork done while living with the Yanomami tribe – offered a timely antidote to the exhaustion and cynicism that surrounds ‘post-internet’ buzz.

Matthieu Saladin’s ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’‘ at CAC Bretigny

Matthieu Saladin, ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’, CAC Bretigny
Based on a missing track from Sly & the Family Stone’s 1971 album of the same name, this one-year project dealing with concepts of withdrawal, silent rebellion and ‘immaterial’ forces, instigated a series of agonistic relations; collective spaces can sometimes take shape in confrontation.

Loretta Fahrenholz’s ‘Ditch Plains’ at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

Loretta Fahrenholz, ‘Ditch Plains’, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin
Filmed in post-Sandy New York and made in collaboration with the Ringmaster dance crew, Fahrenholz’s dark and dystopian work raises uneasy questions about race and privilege within a post-human framework. Among them: what forms of subjectivity are supported in contexts where acceleration and disaster have become the norm?

Looking forward to 2014…:

Audiatur Poetry Festival, 3–5 April, Bergen, Norway
Curated by artist Karl Larsson and writer Paal Bjelke Andersen, the 2014 festival will be organized around interdisciplinary approaches and the question of how a practice of institutional critique might be articulated within the field.

Lisa Robertson, ‘Cinema of the Present’, Coach House Books
Robertson’s 9th book is one long poem, ‘a gate made out of bejeweled barrettes, artificial peaches, a rotary phone.’

By Milena Hoegsberg

Sonja Krohn, _Kjemp Ikke Alene Mot Krisa_, 1975, poster. Included in 'Hold stenhårdt fast på greia di. Norwegian art and feminism 1968-89', Kunsthall Oslo. © the artist and Kunsthall Oslo

Milena Hoegsberg is a curator and writer, currently Acting Chief Curator at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK), Norway.

My picks, in loose alphabetic order with many gaps:

A is for all left out& for anticipation. As 2013 comes to a close, I am all too aware of all that I did not manage to experience (notably for example the Carnegie International, which, from a distance, would seem to deserve its good reviews). But I am also excited about what is underway in the field including the Whitney Biennial and Manifesta in St. Petersburg, Russia, as well as exhibitions slated for 2015: the Black Mountain College exhibition at ICA Boston, and solo exhibitions of works by the Charles and Ray Eames at The Barbican, London and Barbara Kasten at ICA Philadelphia.

Bauhaus Party, ‘In Spite Of The Night’: Phil Collins, Daniela Kinateder, and Simon Will with students from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Photograph: Milena Hoegsberg

Trevor Paglen, ‘Untitled (Reaper Drone)’, 2010, c-type print

‘global aCtIVISm’ at ZKM in Karlsruhe, which runs until March 2014. I have not yet seen the exhibition, but plan to attend the seminar devoted to cross disciplinary exchange of ideas on the role of the citizen in performative democracy January 24-25, 2014. As uneasy as art is sits in relation to activism, it seems a really important topic to continue probing.

‘Hold stenhårdt fast på greia di. Norwegian art and feminism 1968-89’, curated by Norwegian artists Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen (also responsible for one of Oslo’s better art zines, ALBUM) at Kunsthall Oslo. The exhibition unearthed some historical Norwegian works, many overlooked or forgotten, and which I’d never seen. The clever Norwegian title translates something like “hold tightly on to your stuff”!

Jack Goldstein,‘Underwater Sea Fantasy’, 1983/2003, film still. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne and the Estate of Jack Goldstein

Labour on show at Tate Britain: in the piece Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973-75 by artists Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Mary Kelly, and an exhibition devoted to Sylvia Pankhurst (part of the ‘Spotlight’ series; on show until March 2014), which includes a research work by artists Hester Reeve and Olivia Plender.

Ryan McNamara, ‘MEƎM: A STORYBALLETABOUTTHEINTERNET’, 2013, performance. Photograph: Milena Hoegsberg

Rediscovering or re-appreciating older work through the lens of the present: Barbara Hammer’s films; the video Martha Rosler reads Vogue from 1982 (seen on a holiday visit to MACBA, Barcelona); Hilma of Klimt at Moderna Museet; the experimental photography and colorful stage designs of prolific Bauhaus artist Xanti Schawinsky which, due to a legal battle, have not been on view for over two decades. In the safe hands of a newly founded estate, the avant garde artist’s imaginative work is has just begun to pop up in various international exhibitions.

Camille Henrot, ‘Grosse fatigue’, 2013, film still

Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden. Maria Lind’s curatorial energy never ceases to amaze and this project, initiated in 2013, is one I hope to follow closely in 2014. (http://www.tenstakonsthall.se/mobiles/?en#tensta-museum-reports-from-new-sweden)

Visual and popular culture distractions that seemed insistent in surfacing when I was trying to recall the past year: selfies (notably of Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Barack Obama and David Cameron, and the unnecessary and sexist commentary that they gave rise to online) and the newcomer ‘belifies’; twerking; instagramming (one of the more enjoyable visual distractions); Jay Z at Pace (and not least Jerry Saltz review of it) and, more recently, the undue attention given to Kanye West’s video for Bound 2 (see Jerry Saltz again), and the overdue blog entries devoted to why a sexual predator like photographer Terry Richardson still gets hired to do major fashion jobs.

New year’s wishful thinking: more time to see more and for research and thoughtful production for myself and my colleagues in 2014!

By Ellen Mara De Wachter

10 x 10 Meters, 'Human Forestry' (2012). Photo by Tanel Rander

I’m sitting with artist Eva Labotkin in the offices of the Estonian Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Tallinn. Labotkin, a small, birdlike woman with wispy blonde hair is telling me about a performance she and her artist collective 10 x 10 Meters did in October 2012 in Helsinki, Finland, a city just a two-hour ferry ride away from Tallinn. The collective, named after the standard dimensions of a black-box theatre, is made up of a core group of six Estonian artists who put on Fluxus-style performances ranging from humorous interventions in the fabric of everyday life to art-world oriented actions delivered with pointed social critique.

It’s hard to imagine Labotkin in the situation she describes, but she has a video documenting the action. It shows a large dump truck offloading a pile of enormous wooden logs on the pavement outside Kiasma, the contemporary art museum in Helsinki. The artists, dressed in Soviet-style navy blue work wear are rolling the logs into the museum and up the ramp to the galleries, while Tanel Rander, one of the group’s members and a qualified lawyer, reads the manifesto he has written for the occasion. Before they get to the exhibition space, things get complicated, and a cast of Kiasma workers starts to panic, telling the performers they have to leave immediately and take their logs with them.

Human Forestry is a microcosm of labour relations between Estonia and Finland played out in real time. Estonians are the largest immigrant population in Finland, their numbers having overtaken those of Russians in 2010. With between 30,000 and 40,000 Estonians living in Finland, most of whom are young and working for low wages, Finland, as Labotkin puts it, ‘gets much of its human resources from Estonia’. Finland has a healthy social welfare system, an area in which Estonia is sorely deficient, making immigration an attractive prospect for young Estonians. As an artistic allegory of this situation, Kiasma’s rejection of Human Forestry and its symbolic materials – the logs were considered by 10 × 10 Meters to represent ‘units of labour’ – is symptomatic of the conflicted attitude of the Finns towards their recently arrived labour force.

Migration, in relation to both Estonians emigrants and non-Estonians living in the country is a popular theme among artists working in Estonia. It is one of several complex issues relating to the national and cultural heritage of post-Soviet republics. I discovered that it is almost impossible to write about contemporary art in Estonia without referring to historical specifics, so my knowledge of Estonian history is gleaned from my conversations with artists and curators. The Estonian Republic gained independence twice in the 20th century: first from the Russian Empire in 1918, after which it was a sovereign state until the Second World War, when it was occupied by the Nazis in 1939–40. And then from the Soviets, who occupied the country from 1940 until the end of the war, and immediately incorporated it into the Soviet Union. Estonian feelings towards the Second World War and its outcomes are understandably mixed. The Russians may have liberated Estonia from the Nazis, but the Soviet era does not appear to have left many happy memories among the people I met during my visit.

The Russian population of Estonia is about 320,000 – roughly a quarter of the country’s population of 1.3 million inhabitants. Since the collapse of the USSR, former Soviet citizens who are not of direct Estonian parentage are considered stateless and are issued Estonian Alien Passports. Photographer Tanja Muravskaja’s ‘Estonian Race’ project (2010) deals with the concept of a pure Estonian race, or what she calls ‘the right Estonian’, emphasizing the moralistic tone of such debates. Her series of close-up portraits of young male Estonian soldiers shows them as exceptional specimens of threatening male beauty. Muravskaja has Ukrainian parents and underwent the process of naturalization herself, although she is resigned to the fact that she will never be the ‘right’ kind of Estonian.

There is currently a lively debate around how the cultural sphere in Estonia ought to mark the centenary of its first independent Republic in 2018. Some feel that the country is ready for an international biennial such as Manifesta. Estonia’s chequered history and present-day geopolitical issues might be fertile terrain for this peripatetic institution that thrives on latent conflicts and loaded histories, and attracts international attention and visitors. But hosting Manifesta is a costly endeavour, and the Estonian government may prefer to spend its anniversary budget to support local artists.

To me, it seems that the prospect of hosting Manifesta stands to do more for the city, which still needs to convince locals that contemporary art at its best attracts tourism and provides a platform for constructive debate. However, Estonia may still have a problem with promoting critical art that posits a serious critique of nationalism and other issues facing the country. When Kristina Norman represented Estonia at the Venice Biennale in 2009 with her work After-War (2009), it was only after an extremely difficult time during which the Estonian Internal Security Service asked her to abandon her project, part of the work itself was confiscated by police during a public performance, and the national media demonized the artist for interfering with accepted narratives about the Second World War. Norman’s work investigated a troubling incident in 2007 in which the monument to the liberators of Estonia, sited on Freedom Square and a popular meeting place for Russians, was relocated to a cemetery on the periphery of the capital, provoking riots throughout the city. This debacle suggests that there may still be some way to go before the popular understanding of successful art accommodates healthy and creative dissent. Happily, the young artists and curators I met in Tallinn look to be working hard to move things in this direction.

_Ellen Mara De Wachter _

By Bert Rebhandl

David Markson

Bert Rebhandlis a journalist, writer and translator based in Berlin. He co-founded and co-edits Cargo magazine.

David Markson: Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)

This great novel of American postmodernism came out in German for the first time this year (translated by Sissi Tax, an Austrian poet living in Berlin). It’s a brilliant, fundamental counter project to any kind of ‘stream of consciousness’ – because thinking consists of splinters.

Andrew Bujalski: Computer Chess (2013)

A comedy about the beginnings of the digital age, and the point at which computers outsmart humans – shot in a kind of Nam June Paik/Vito Acconci look, keeping innovation close and fakes closer.

Želimir Žilnik: Kenedi Trilogy (2003-07)

I discovered these half-documentary films about the Kosovo Romani Kenedi Hasani in the exemplary series Cineromani at Berlin’s Zeughaus Cinema. Serbian film director Želimir Žilnik, one of the great ‘marginals’ of World Cinema, tackles a tough issue: the existence of a people who have been excluded amidst so-called European integration.

Jonathan Glazer: Under the Skin (2013)

This film based on Michel Faber’s eponymous novel about an extraterrestrial sent to the Scottish Highlands to harvest human hitchhiker flesh (considered a delicacy on her planet) is great, extravagant cinema, projecting male desire for submission onto the body of Scarlett Johansson.

A pro-European Union protest in Ukraine, 2013 (photograph: Archiwum Wasyla Łopucha)

Euromajdan

In 2012 I visited Ukraine for the first time for the European football Championships, Euro 2012. Since then I have been there numerous times. Personally I don’t know any other place where the tip-over from a supposed new democratic state, post-1989, into a neo-feudal domain for oligarchs is more glaringly visible. Not that the European Union is actually that far removed from such conditions, but it’s certainly still better than a KGB-style tariff union.

By Jonathan Griffin

James Turrell, Akhob (2013)

Jonathan Griffinis a contributing editor of frieze and a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

I’m just going to have to assume that, even if you didn’t actually see either ‘The Encyclopaedic Palace’ at the Venice Biennale or the 2013 Carnegie International, you’ve already formed your own critical opinions of both and, like me, you deem them to be, on the whole, excellent. Ditto Rachel Kushner’s blazing novel The Flamethrowers. Good.

If you live in the USA you probably also saw a James Turrell show somewhere in 2013. You may not have seen, however, the Turrell installation that is currently viewable (by appointment) on the fourth floor of the Louis Vuitton store in Crystals, the luxury Las Vegas shopping mall. Despite its risible location, Akhob is, astonishingly, an even finer Ganzfeld environment than the one currently drawing crowds at LACMA’s retrospective. As over-exposed and uneven as Turrell may be right now (and his cluttered and half-hearted Vegas monorail station, a few feet from Louis Vuitton, is a dispiriting case in point), it would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge Akhob as a highlight of my year, as Turrell on his A-game remains pretty hard to beat.

Judith Bernstein, Fucked by Number (1967/2013), installation view, ‘Keep Your Timber Limber’, ICA London, 2013

A bracing tonic to Turrell’s sublime metaphysics, if one were needed, could be found in Judith Bernstein’s ‘Cuntface’ paintings, shown in September at The Box, Los Angeles. In year of outstanding shows at this gallery, the 71-year old Bernstein’s large scale day-glo depictions of angry genitalia howling in cosmic space were hard to forget: a sight for sore eyes and a boost for a weary soul. Equally indelicate was Bernstein’s giant charcoal drawing Fucked by Number (1967/2013) in Sarah McCrory’s riotously sexy show ‘Keep Your Timber Limber’ at the ICA, London. Joyce Pensato, another ornery septuagenarian New Yorker, put timid younger artists to shame with her solo exhibition of new enamel paintings and site-specific charcoal wall drawings at Santa Monica Museum of Art titled, for no good reason, ‘I Killed Kenny’.

It’s hard to believe it has only been a year since formerly scrappy artist-run space Night Gallery relocated to spanking new and enlarged premises in an unprepossessing area south of Downtown Los Angeles. After an elegant inaugural exhibition by recent grad Sean Townley, their programme really kicked into gear with the feel-good So-Cal survey that was the group show ‘Made in Space’, curated by Laura Owens (as if she didn’t have enough on her plate having just unveiled the show of her career in a specially reconnoitred warehouse studio-cum-ongoing project space) and fellow artist Peter Harkawik.

‘Made in Space’, 2013, installation view, Night Gallery, Los Angeles

For ‘Made in Space’, Owens and Harkawik convened some unexpected, cultish oldsters (Peter Shire, Eric Orr, Derek Boshier and Marcia Hafif among them) as well as younger names who, one feels, were this New York, would have already sold out several solo shows by now. But if this were New York, the show seemed to argue, they wouldn’t be making this work in the first place. Josh Mannis, John Seal, Joshua Callaghan and Patrick Jackson were among the most memorable.

Patrick Jackson, by the way, currently has the must-see show in Culver City: a three-level installation in the oddly-proportioned gallery that Francois Ghebaly opened next to a car muffler shop in 2010. Ghebaly has now relocated to a huge building next to Night Gallery, but before he says goodbye to Culver City for good, Jackson has staged what is probably the best show in the space’s history. A false floor fixes an idiosyncratic architectural feature of the gallery and provides a Saturnalian underfloor space through which visitors can clamber, stooped, to inspect Jackson’s splendidly ugly giant mugs and other ceramic vessels. Up on a mezzanine, overlooking the main space, a realistic but jet black figure of a child stares down out of frighteningly empty eye sockets.

I hope it is not disloyal to my adopted city to admit that my favourite show of the year might well have been ‘GANG BUST’, featuring paintings by William Copley and Bjarne Melgaard, at Venus over Manhattan in New York. Melgaard curated the show under the aegis of his quasi-corporate alter-ego Big Fat Black Cock Inc. (Sorry if you’re reading this, Mum.) Copley’s extraordinary paintings from the 1950s–80s were hung along with Melgaard’s contemporary homages to CPLY (as he signed his work) on walls emulating the ones on which Copley installed paintings by Man Ray and Max Ernst when he opened a gallery in Beverly Hills in 1948. It closed after six months and Copley sold almost nothing. But that’s another story.

By Dan Fox

Michael Smith, Busman’s Holiday Retreat Revue, performance at The Performing Garage, May 1981; courtesy: the artist, photograph: Kevin Noble.

Dan Foxis co-editor of frieze and is based in New York.

Anatole Broyard once joked that ‘Everyone wants to see himself as disappointed – it’s the influence of modern art.’ That was in the 1940s, way back when modern art was a catalyst for critical dissatisfaction with the world. In 2013, for me it was often art itself that was disappointing. I’ll probably have my membership of the International Echo Chamber of Critical Consensus revoked for saying this, but if, in my lifetime, I don’t see another exhibition of anodyne abstractionist pootling in the foothills of art history, or artists raining $$$ to make spectacular high brow amusement park ride installations, or curators getting meta-masturbatory about re-staging conceptual art exhibitions from the 1970s, it will still be too soon. But hey, don’t listen to this misery guts. According to Hyperallergic, art critics in 2013 top the list of most powerless groups in the art world.

Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13), performance still; courtesy: The Kitchen, New York; photograph: Paula Court

But that’s enough Grinching. 2013 was no write-off. W.H. Auden reportedly said that the art of living in New York City lay in crossing the street against the lights. Michael Portnoy’s 27 Gnosis at The Kitchen, New York, attempted to cross the street against the lights, do a pirouette halfway, then pull a wheelie in reverse gear down an adjoining one-way street, and for that I doff my hat to him just for even thinking about trying. I missed its original presentation at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel last year – with only 27 people able to attend each performance, it was oversubscribed when I visited – so I was curious to see the New York reboot. Staged in a lilac-coloured auditorium shaped like a lemon squeezer for alien giants, 27 Gnosis was a truly hilarious mock game show that spliced parodies of critical theory with dance, fashion, music and sci-fi-inspired tomfoolery. Portnoy and Ieva Misevičiūtė played bossy pan-dimensional beings who invited their audience to take language for a walk, blindfold it, dose it with strong hallucinogenic drugs and let it wander naked in the jungle until it could no longer remember its name. An imaginative work about the act of interpretation, 27 Gnosis was the most memorable art experience I had this year. If I am looking forward to anything in 2014, it is to be surprised like I was by this.

The dense Sarah Lucas retrospective at the Whitechapel, London, fused old work with new in eye-popping ways that gave me pause for thought about that moment in 1990s British art; that period everyone has been so studiously trying to avoid eye-contact with for the past decade. Stepping back another decade or two, a small exhibition of work by Jo Spence at White Columns, New York– touring from Studio Voltaire and SPACE in London – provided a raw, if a little didactic, insight into 1970s British feminist photography. And whilst we’re still inspecting the rear-view mirror, my fingers and toes are crossed in hope that I will get to see the first major survey of Amy Sillman’s paintings at the ICA Boston before it closes at the start of 2014. The opportunity to see a rare performance of Juan José Gurrola’s 1971 play Monoblock– pieced together by Mauricio Marcin and Fernando Mesta for Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy’s 9th Bienal de Mercosul in Porto Alegre– opened me up to an intriguing period in Mexican art and performance. ‘Rented Island’, curated by Jay Sanders at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, did the same for certain underappreciated figures in the city’s 1970s downtown theatre and performance scenes; standout works included Ericka Beckman’s films, and the tragicomic brilliance of Michael Smith, whose first UK solo show is opening at Tramway, Glasgow, next spring. I was mesmerized by Florian Hecker’s visual-auditory-olfactory performance CD – A Script for Synthesis, co-presented by Performa and the Guggenheim Museum, which made me think of a philosophy seminar crossed with an opera by Iannis Xenakis on the set of Logan’s Run. A superb exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons and ‘ultimate’ black paintings organized by Robert Storr at David Zwirner, New York, in December should have been compulsory viewing for any aspiring artist in today’s over-heated art world: here was an artist who took his work deadly seriously, yet had enough of a sense of humour and distance on the industry itself to not get hopelessly lost in showbiz.

Ben Wheatley, A Field in England (2013)

In cinema, I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, a 1980s period comedy set in a bleak Nowheresville hotel, observing a computer chess tournament and encounter group therapy session unfold alongside each other. Shot in streaky, dull grey colours using vintage Sony tube video cameras, and soundtracked by the hum of the hotel air-con units and gentle folk music, Computer Chess evoked a world of comic awkwardness, political paranoia and proto-tech boom nerdery that resonated with the NSA surveillance revelations unfolding out in the real world. Ben Wheatley’s sumptuously photographed psychedelic English Civil War film, A Field in England , told the tale of a group of army deserters and alchemists high on magic mushrooms looking for buried treasure in, well, a field in England. With nods to vintage British rural horror – Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw– A Field in England also spoke indirectly to the country’s youth subcultures of the late 20th century: 1970s free festivals, New Age Travellers camped in west country fields, convoys of kids searching the countryside at night in search of illegal acid house parties in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The most haunting and unforgettable re-release of 2013 was Shirley Clarke’s extraordinary Portrait of Jason– a verité study of performer and hustler Jason Holliday, shot across 12 hours in the Chelsea Hotel, New York, in 1967.

Shirley Clarke, Portrait of Jason (1967/2013)

The year saw some fine reissues in music too: The Zaragoza Tapes 1981–82 gave us the playful, scratchy sounds of obscure UK DIY band BonaDish, whilst the reissue of Cabaret Voltaire’s album Red Mecca was a reminder of the inventiveness of British electronic music of the same period. A Last Discovery, by Finis Africae, was a new discovery for me; a Spanish group emerging from the aftermath of Franco’s Spain, combining new wave chops with African and Latin influences. 2013 saw the sad passing of Tabu Ley Rochereau, the great Congolese singer – do yourself a favour and track down a copy of the anthology of his music, The Voice of Lightness 1961–1977. Keeping with the retrospective theme, I was impressed by Bob Stanley’s melancholy and exhaustive book *Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop*; the history of pop music from the 1950s through to the early 2000s, and what Stanley deems the end of the pop period as a significant cultural force.

It wasn’t a bad year for new music either. Top of my list was Daniel O’Sullivan and Alexander Tucker’s LP Glynnaestra, made under the name Grumbling Fur. A rich album pairing Eno-esque melody with the ghosts of early ‘90s electronic music, it’s standout track was ‘The Ballad of Roy Batty’, which managed to turn Rutger Hauer’s famous soliloquy from Bladerunner into a seriously unshakeable earworm of a ballad. Despite sounding deeply indebted to the late, great Country Teasers, I enjoyed Fat White Family’s debut, Champagne Holocaust for sheer attitude and the band’s gleefully horrible approach to making music videos.

Dean Blunt’s inventive solo debut The Redeemer was notable for being a bleak and fragmented album about bleak and fragmented relationships. English Heretic’s Anti-Heroes and Clapper is Still by Way Through were both albums about the British landscape, although wildly different in tone and texture. English Heretic’s vision is frightening, occult, pessimistic, whilst Way Through are far more sonically optimistic, yet sceptical about the changing character of the countryside and how it is represented. Also this year I got a kick out of: Kelela, CUT 4 ME, My Bloody Valentine’s m b v, and Mathew Sawyer & The Ghosts’ Sleep Dreamt a Brother.

Many notable figures died in 2013 and many notable things will be said of them. But I must mention the sad loss of artist, writer, curator, and teacher Ian White at the tragically young age of 41. Ian brought many people together, and was one of those rare, special figures who remind you why you ever cared about art in the first place and why – even when you feel that art’s letting you down, and the circus around it seems out of control – you must not give up. The world is a poorer place without his intelligence, integrity, humour and kindness, but his example lives with all those lucky enough to have known him.

Onwards

By Emily Pethick

Eli Weinberg, Crowd Near the Drill Hall on the Opening Day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956. Times Media Collection, courtesy Museum Africa, Johannesburg.

Emily Pethickis director of The Showroom, London.

In 2013 I saw a number of exhibitions, events and art works that were impressive in their approaches to embedding art within wider social and political contexts and in widening the scope of what an exhibition can be and include, in many cases growing out of long-term collaborative research and commitments.

Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke’s exhibition ‘Whole Earth – California and the Disappearance of the Outside’ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, departed from the first published image of the Blue Planet, guiding the viewer through a tight thesis that traversed shifting perceptions of the world, nature, technology, connectivity and outsider positions through a wide array of art works, literature, music and film clips, brilliantly displayed by Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik (Jesko Fezer, Anita Kaspar, Andreas Müller).

‘The Rise and Fall of Apartheid’ at Haus der Kunst, Munich, was an immensely detailed historical overview of the pictorial response to apartheid, including photo essays, reportage, social documentaries, photojournalism and art, creating a powerful visualization of the complexity and violence of apartheid, the resistance movements against it, and its legacy.

‘A Cinema of Songs and People’ at Tate Modern, London, curated by The Otolith Group, was an intensive three weeks of films by, and discussions with, Indian documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, addressing issues of nationality, warfare, religion, community, gender, caste and class. Most striking was the epic three-hour Jai Bhim Comrade (2011), following India’s Dhalits over 14 years, showing the complexity of the caste system and the creative forms of resistance to it through poetry and music.

At the Reina Sofía in Madrid, ‘Losing the Human Form: A Seismic Image of the 1980s in Latin America’, curated by the collective Red Conceptualismos del Sur, explored the tensions between art, politics and activism through an immense array of documentary material and art works; ‘Minimal Resistance’, looking at artistic spaces of resistance in the late 1980s and early ’90s; and Alejandra Riera’s solo exhibition, ‘The Poetics of Incompleteness’, situated in a vaulted basement, incorporating writings and photographic archives of Meya Deren, and documentation of an action to create an opening of daylight in the museum.

‘The Temptation of AA Bronson’, 2013, installation view, Witte de With, Rotterdam

‘The Temptation of AA Bronson’ at Witte de With, Rotterdam, created a unique approach to both an artistic practice collaboration, including works by Bronson and collaborations with other artists, as well as his collections of queer zines and archival material. It was refreshingly unafraid to bring personal relations into public and to sidestep exhibition conventions, including the scattering of dried sage leaves across the upper floor, creating an intense aroma.

Grant Watson’s exhibitions at Iniva have consistently created original inroads into specific cultural and political moments. ‘Keywords’, curated with Gavin Delahunty, approached works from the Tate collection from the 1980s through the lens of Raymond Williams’s book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, looking at how changes in the meaning of words reflect cultural shifts. Elsewhere, ‘Tagore’s Universal Allegories’ presented two fantastic installations by Anna Boghuigian and Goshka Macuga as part of a long-term project responding to the legacy of Indian poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore, whose work, amongst other things, addressed decolonization and experimental pedagogy.

Two exhibitions in London focused on unlearning: Jakob Jakobsen’s ‘antiknow’ at Flat Time House, created a pedagogical theatre of unlearning and the limits of knowledge, which was beautifully orchestrated with sound and video works taking you through the domestic spaces of the house. Annette Krauss presented the ‘Hidden Curriculum’ archive at Whitechapel Gallery, charting collaborative projects with students in numerous schools that take a critical look at institutional structures that shape behaviour and knowledge through interventions, proposing other forms of navigation and learning.

Christian Nyampeta’s ‘How To Live Together’ at Casco evolved through his months of living in Utrecht during which he developed a thoughtful approach to creating exchanges with a wide range of local residents and groups, producing sculptural and functional objects and basic goods for use, including beer, soap, bread and writings that situated these actions within a broader philosophical context.

Looking forward
I am looking forward to seeing how two new organizations in London evolve: Mayday Rooms, which is dedicated to vulnerable archives and historical material linked to social movements, experimental culture, and marginalized figures and groups, operating in a new space on Fleet Street; and Open School East, based in a former library in De Beauvoir Town [co-founded by frieze associate editor Sam Thorne], which is building a critical programme for 12 associate artists with a commitment to concurrently forging exchanges within their local neighbourhood.

Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden, 2014

In Stockholm, Tensta Konsthall’s long-term project ‘Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden’ will unfold over the coming months, mining the heritage of the neighbourhood with more than 40 artists, architects, local associations, performers, sociologists, cultural geographers, philosophers and others.

‘Control. Stephen Willats. Work 1962–69’ opens at Raven Row in January, focusing on a formative period in his work in which he was absorbed in diverse theoretical and philosophical influences including cybernetics, behavioural, learning and advertising theories, created early forms of interactivity, and established himself as a ‘conceptual designer’.

Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism (2009) has been helpful in thinking through the complexities and contradictions of contemporary conditions under capitalism, his new book, Ghosts of My Life: Writing on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, is soon to be published by Zer0 Books, addressing, amongst other things, what Franco ‘Bifo’ Beradi refers to as the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ – something to look forward to!

By Shanay Jhaveri

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe (1918–1919), palladium print, included in 'African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde', The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2013

Shanay Jhaverilives in Mumbai, India, and London, UK. He is the editor of Outsider Films on India: 1950–90 (2010) and Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design (2013).

Annually, when having to tell the story of the year gone by, I become half trusting of myself. My telling turns to a gathering of personal predilections, rather than an ordered recounting, stained by the very moment of teetering on the precipice of the year end, with the curious need to be urgent, discerning, contemporary and timeless all at once. A set of selections that look to announce participation, and perhaps even a viewpoint in cultural conversations. However, inevitably with the passing of time, those ideas and ideals are subject to elaborations, revisions and extensions. In the light of future days and afternoons, once dismissed experiences and works assume new kinds of import and prominence, calling for a rethink, allowing prior aesthetic judgments to be amended and expanded. It is under this projected spectre of the possible, provisional, variable and even arbitrary heart, resisting calcification, I offer some staccato notes from 2013, shuttling between a changing present and a shifting past.

Curated by Yaëlle Biro, ‘African Art, New York and the Avant-Garde’ at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art was a compelling show which in meticulous detail traced the journey of some 40 African artefacts in the 1910s and 1920s. Rustled up from French and Belgian colonies, congregated in Paris, these were then presented in New York to collectors and tastemakers where they were finally acquired. The show’s accomplishment lay not only in its evocation of the transnational character of the art world, in the opening decades of the 20th century, but also in the suggestion through the use of vintage photographs (by Charles Sheeler and Alfred Stieglitz, including a highly erotic image of a topless Georgia O’Keefe from 1918–19, posing with an anthropomorphic spoon from the Ivory Coast) which pictured these African objects in galleries and private homes, as to how they were actually being considered and understood at the time. Transnational networks of interaction were at the heart of another, slightly more empirical, but relevant show ‘Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of Cosmopolitan Avant-Gardes’, mounted at the Bauhaus campus in Dessau, Germany. The focus of this presentation was a reconstruction of an exhibition that took place in Calcutta in 1922, in which works by Bauhaus masters were shown alongside Indian artists at the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore. The proposition of these two shows, their precise inquiries, historical leanings, indicate the active unbinding of modernism as being exclusively the domain of the West, and the rightful recognition of it as always having been a global affair, one characterized by multiply flows and exchanges across borders, making room for re-imaginings of the international.

‘Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of Cosmopolitan Avant-Gardes’, installation view, Bauhaus, Dessau; photograph: the author

A carry over from 2012 (which I had the privilege of viewing for the first time in the context of the very engaging show ‘After Year Zero: Geographies of Collaboration since 1945’ curated by Annett Busch and Anslem Franke at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin) is John Akomfrah’s mesmerizing and wholly affecting The Unfinished Conversation (2012). This three channel piece which takes cultural theorist Stuart Hall as it subject, simultaneously folds in images of significant events from the 20th century, set to a jazz score, plaintively asking how identities are formed, where they come from, how they interface with historical narratives and how these narratives are constructed. A story of identity is also at the core of Ketaki Sheth’s sensitive new book A Certain Grace: The Sidi, Indians of African Descent (Photoink, 2013). Yet, Sheth’s project is not to present a comprehensive study of a community of Indians of African descent in the state of Gujarat. Her images – all rendered in square format – are mostly quiet portraits of women, men and children looking directly at the camera, or averting their gaze, sometimes eyes cast down. Rory Bester in his afterword for the book describes the photographs as being ‘without a jealous desire for ‘African-ness’, for reminders and affirmations of physical likeness, cultural resemblance or ritual mirroring. But at the same time, they are never less than a buried sense of Africa, waiting if unknown, diffident if recognized. Sheth’s photography is intimate to the particular politics of acceptance that so often circumscribes a sense of home – one that for Indians of African descent is so distinct from movements and migrations to and from Africa.’

Luther Price, Mother (Revised), 2002

Living life is not easy: loss, fear, pain, doubt, ill health, disappointment and death are inescapable. Connecting with these emotions and psychological conditions was unavoidable at the profile on Luther Price organized with the artist by Light Industry’s Ed Halter, at the 59th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. The programme consisted of three screenings, a mix of Super 8, 16mm and slide projections, the acme being a midnight screening of Clown (1991) in a disused part of Oberhausen train station, and a double projection of his infamous Sodom (1994). The most moving instant for me came in the form of a portrait of his mother, titled Mother (revised) (2002). A few months later, I was confronted with a personal loss that continues to overwhelm me. Now, still negotiating with the pain of that parting, and associated trauma, Price’s works, while reminding me of how excruciating it is to be alive, are also comforting in their eloquence, humanity, and honesty. Another invigorating experience was Sadler Well’s staging of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Drumming (1998). Raw and full of energy, conceived to a score by Steve Reich, the complex choreographic configurations were performed with incredible ease and grace by Rosas’s 12 dancers in strikingly understated white costumes. Simply astonishing. Gorgeous compositions of vastly different tenors, Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument: Shemonmuanaye (Awesome Tapes from Africa) and Raul Lovisoni and Fracesco Messina’s Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo (Die Schachtel), both reissues, have helped me reflect, and also provided me with ample comfort.

Ketaki Sheth, Zahida against the monsoon sky, Jambur (2006); courtesy: Photoink, New Delhi; photograph: © Ketaki Sheth

Back home in India, across the year, unexpectedly, to my delight, a series of shows elected to mine neglected material histories and marginalized artistic practices. ‘Between the Lines: Identity, Place and Power’ curated by Lina Vincent Sunish at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai showcased the artist and photographer Waswo X. Waswo’s collection of Indian prints. The exhibition drew attention to a history of printmaking on the subcontinent, largely regarded as a lesser art form. This was followed up by a much over due retrospective of pioneering printmaker Krishna Reddy at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, co-curated by Professor Anant Nikam and Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma of The Clark House Initiative, Mumbai. Serendipitously, two shows on collage in the Indian context, stretching from the 1930s to the present, found themselves in conversation with one another, Jhaveri Contemporary’s ‘Considering Collage’ and Chatterjee and Lal’s ‘Cut and Paste: Popular Mid 20th Century Art’. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya hosted a show of the forgotten painter Mohan Samant. Drawings by the overlooked Maharashtran painter Prabhakar Barwe were displayed at Percept Art, Mumbai. This exhibition was accompanied by the release of an English translation of his Marathi book Kora Canvas. Hopefully, this will prompt a closer consideration of his oeuvre.

O.P. Sharma Geeta Kapur (1963); courtesy: Ram Rahman

In Delhi, it was the much acclaimed Nasreen Mohamedi retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, curated by Roobina Karoda that spanned the length of the entire year. Ram Rahman continued to edify, lecturing and curating on contemporary Indian photography. Last year, he shone a spotlight on the architectural photography of Madan Mahatta, and this year at the second edition of the United Art Fair he managed to do the same with J.H Thakker, Ram Dhaija and O.P. Sharma. Of his finds, and in my appreciation, the most beautiful is a theatrical studio portrait of the critic Geeta Kapur in 1963, by Sharma. Rahman, should also be credited for co-curating ‘The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989’ at Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, an exhibition that sought to highlight a history of contemporary artist led protest in India, promoting artistic freedom and celebrating secular, egalitarian values. Also, this year is one of remembrance, when two painters I admire immensely, were cosmically brought together; 2013 marks the ten-year anniversary of Bhupen Khakhar’s death, and is the centenary of Amrita Sher Gil’s birth. Their legacies are a constant inspiration.

Krishna and Radha in a Moonlight Tryst, c.1775, included in ‘The Body in Indian Art’, BOZAR, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2013

The Indian show that towered over all was ‘The Body in Indian Art’ curated by Dr. Naman Ahuja at BOZAR, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels as part of the Europalia International Arts Festival. Ambitious, impressive and motivating, not since the 1982 Hayward exhibition ‘In the Image of Man’ has such a vast array of Indian masterpieces been brought together, majority of which had been loaned from provincial museums across India. Knowing the agony of Indian bureaucracy, grim museum conditions, and outdated import-export laws, the ability to get these objects to Brussels was a triumph in itself. Ahuja’s exhibition did not directly concern itself with the physical, corporeal body, but instead fixated on a greater understanding of it within Indian culture, through death, the cosmic, the heroic, the ascetic, the supernatural, rebirth and finally rapture. Works from different time periods, religions, and geographical contexts were placed next to one another, across eight rooms, but with an acute awareness that did not collapse the distinctions between them, preventing a lapse into a homogenous view of India. The breadth of the show was dizzying, amongst the earliest material were intriguing copper anthropormorphic forms circa. 2nd-1st millennium BCE, ranging to powerful modern and contemporary pieces like Sheela Gowda’s Draupadi’s Vow (1997) and Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Basanti (1993). The show held many revelations for me, and was an immensely edifying experience.

Poster for Alain Guiraudie’s L’inconnu du lac* (Stranger by the Lake, 2013)

In the last room of the show that elaborated on the body in states of rapture I chanced upon a work, The love play of Radha and Krsna (from Gita Govinda), ascribed to a master of the first generation after Nainsukh, c.1775-80 which reminded me of another miniature I saw during Asia week in New York, it was also of a Radha Krishna tryst in the moonlight. Similar, both were incredible in their sensuality. The image in the exhibition along with another image illustrated in the excellent catalogue where the lovers have exchanged their clothes, as well as body gestures and mannerism, alluding to the body’s possibility to completely lose the ‘self’ to the ‘other’, a transference enacted through rapturous love, are exhilarating. Amorphous desire is also at the heart of Alain Guiraudie’s thrilling film L’inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake, 2013). The entire movie unfolds at one location, a secluded lakeside in France, a gay cruising spot. Rarely, has a film lensed explicit sex and naked male bodies with such frankness. Gloriously shot in natural light, with a meaningful use of widescreen, precisely edited, Guiraudie engenders a tense atmosphere. Eroticism and danger, pain and pleasure, are made to mingle with one another, overlap and intertwine, with the results that are daring and riveting.

As for 2014, fashion already has me there: Miuccia Prada offers a most seductive vision, at her Spring/Summer menswear presentation, with a set named ‘Menacing Paradise’. Prada’s tropical ideal was a dark place, full of threat, pitched just as the sun goes down, and the lurid lurks amongst the palm trees. We have a love story: men and women with a hint of sweat stalked around in luscious tropical prints, silken blousons and generously tailored trousers, to excerpts from the Body Heat soundtrack, only to be interrupted by Tangerine Dream. Sultry and sexy, but probably the greatest provocation for the coming year, or rather for any year was rendered by the irrepressible Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons during the women’s Spring/Summer 14 presentations. Of the show, Kawakubo’s husband Adrian Joffe explained, that she could not think of anything new, so she decided not to make any clothes. What audience members were left to mull was a series of elaborate creations, that walked down an elevated runway, under a swinging single spotlight, each to their own individual piece of music. Audacious, and extraordinary. Perhaps, every so often we need to clear the decks, to really challenge ourselves.