By Sam Thorne
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Mark Leckey ‘Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials’ 2014–15, installation view, WIELS, 2014. Photograph Sven Laurent
Books
I read James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955) while holed up in Paris, the weekend of the terrorist attacks. Having spent a traumatizing night hiding in a restaurant several doors down from the shootings on Rue de Charonne, the urgency of Baldwin’s essays on intolerance, race and religion resonated in new ways. Looking back on 2015 a month or two later, my year feels, almost inevitably, to have been one of different proximities, by turns uncomfortably close and blissfully removed.
In terms of books, I’ve been heartened by the young London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions’ impressive run. At the beginning of 2015, I read Mathias Énard’s epic one-sentence novel Zone (Fitzcarraldo, 2014), a fever-dream about the Levant, while I was driving along the opposite edge of Europe, the southwest coast of Ireland. In November, I was happy to see Énard win the Prix Goncourt, and am looking forward to reading Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, also published by Fitzcarraldo. Congratulations are also due to frieze contributor Jason Farago and his excellent quarterly journal, Even, which, now two issues in, features smart, sassy and longform essays, interviews and reviews (full disclosure, I wrote an essay for issue 2). Some other highlights included Peter Stamm, Hilda Hilst, Renata Adler’s collected essays and, of course, Elena Ferrante. In terms of poetry, I was late to both Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio (2014) and Lynn Xu’s Debts & Lessons (2013), both of which I loved.
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Atlanta-based singer/producer Abra whose debut LP
Music
Spending vast quantities of time on the train between Cornwall and London (by my calculations, more than 600 hours, or almost a month!) meant that I listened to a lot of music. So much to mention. In terms of ideas-per-minute, little came close to Dawn Richard’s Blackheart, an R&B opus with grand ambitions; a more modest, but no less impressive, album was the Atlanta-based singer/producer Abra’s debut LP Rose, nocturnal invocations of ’90s R&B. I also did a lot of trawling on Bandcamp, and came across dozens of gems, including releases by 100%, Eartheater, Death’s Dynamic Shroud WMV, Keita, Wished Bone, Katie Dey, and many more besides. Elsewhere, I listened to a lot of footwork, which continues to be fertile territory for a number of young producers: DJ Paypal’s Sold Out, Jlin’s Dark Energy, Zora Jones’s 100 Ladies and Triple Train’s This is Triple Train EP. In fact, there were a whole bunch of EPs I liked: Kelela’s Hallucinogen, Rizzla’s Iron Cages, Nao’s February 15, Sharp Veins’ Inbox Island and Dean Blunt’s uk2uk.
But it was probably a clutch of reissues from the 1980s that I returned to most over the course of the year, first and foremost David Borden’s Music for Amplified Keyboard Instruments, gorgeous early 1980s experiments with synths and counterpoint. I treasured Ellen Fullman’s The Long String Instrument, first released in 1981: clusters of harmonics the Bay Area musician coaxes out of her titular 50-foot stringed contraption, and was thrilled to see her perform as part of the London Contemporary Music Festival in December. More cosmic was Mariah’s Utakata No Hibi, an album of Japanese slow-motion psych-disco; the Brian Eno-produced Days of Radiance by Laraaji; and a charming anthology of recordings by Doug Hream Blunt, a Bay Area guy who started making music after attending an evening class called ‘How to Form a Band’.
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Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Sculpture Museum, Joshua Tree, California
Exhibitions
In August, I drove from Dallas to San Francisco. Visiting the Chinati Foundation, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field and James Turrell’s pharaonic Roden Crater in a couple of days was both incredible and almost too dense to properly think through. It took a few months. My guides along the way were Lucy Lippard’s Overlay (1983), James Meyer’s Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2004), and Philip Leider’s classic 1965 Artforum essay ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’. From New Mexico I headed west, via Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, an experimental town in Arizona, to Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Sculpture Museum, out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Between the late 1980s and his death in 2004, Purifoy filled this plot of eight acres with dozens of assemblages. Wandering dazed, in the unrelenting midday sun, they felt like inventive object lessons in how stepping back from the city can mean more freedom and space. A couple of days later, I felicitously caught Purifoy’s excellent retrospective at LACMA.
Over the course of 2015, I seemed to pingpong between artist-designed buildings and far-out curiosities. The year began with a rain-soaked trudge to Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbarn in the Lake District. It ended with Diego Rivera’s collection of pre-Hispanic artefacts at his Museo Anahuacali, an edifice of black volcanic rock on the outskirts of Mexico City. In between, a hallucinatory day at Padstow’s May Day celebrations led to a visit to the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, which has the best wall texts. (Two favourites: ‘Witches prefer to use natural substances where possible, such as these skin containers for ointments and pomades’; ‘Please do not dislike this skull.’)
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Installation view of ‘Slip of the Tongue’, curated by Dahn Vo at the Punta Della Dogana in Venice, 2015
Probably the best exhibition I saw all year was curated by an artist, Danh Vo, at the Punta Della Dogana in Venice. Subtle, sparse and weird where Okwui Enwezor’s ‘All the World’s Futures’ was hectoring, overstuffed and undifferentiated, Vo’s ‘Slip of the Tongue’ limned a private world of affinities and absences. Full of bodies both decaying and desiring, the exhibition included works by some of my all-time favourites: Alina Szapocznikow, David Hammons, Paul Thek, Lee Lozano. (It also put me onto Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s excellent 2014 Afterall book on the latter’s Dropout Piece.) Another artist-devised show about love and desire was Ugo Rondinone’s moving paean to his partner, the poet John Giorno, at the Palais de Tokyo in the autumn.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Istanbul Biennial, a sequel of sorts to her dOCUMENTA (13), was a let-down. Themed around saltwater, the sprawling exhibition did its utmost to ignore the fact that refugees were washing up along the Mediterreanean coast. And yet… Somehow I keep thinking about it. Partly this was a number of strong pieces – by, among others, Francis Alys and Haig Aivazian – relating in digressive ways to the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. But also it was about the ways in which artists, scientists and spiritualists can find forms for what we cannot see. I loved the photographs of early 20th-century models of the Northern Lights, as well as the illustrations of ‘thought-forms’. These were by the theosophist Annie Besant, an important influence on Hilma Af Klint. The early 20th-century Swedish painter and mystic has now finally got her due, as someone who began to paint non-representational works a number of years before Kandinsky, Malevich or Mondrian, thanks to a major touring exhibition overseen by the Moderna Museet’s Iris Müller Westermann. I was grateful to participate in a conference on Af Klint at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, coinciding with the opening of the show’s final leg.
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‘Carol Bove / Carlo Scarpa’ installation view, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2015. Photograph Jerry Hardman-Jones
Some honourable mentions: Lynda Benglis at the Hepworth Wakefield; the inspired pairing of Carol Bove and Carlo Scarpa at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds; early Mondrian at David Zwirner in London; Glenn Ligon’s ‘Collisions and Encounters’ at Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool; and Nairy Baghramian at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.
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Frances Stark, Behold Man!, 2013, inkjet prints, paint, 192 × 244 cm). Courtesy of the artist and greengrassi, London; photograph Andy Keate
My year was bookended by two very well realized retrospectives of artists devoted to thinking about correspondence, inspiration and, yes, proximity: Mark Leckey’s ‘Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials’ curated by Elena Filipovic at WIELS in Brussels and ‘UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991–2015’ at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Neatly, the latter featured a piece that incorporated an email from Leckey to Stark. It read: ‘Me and Frances both – mechanized and image-ine-ered bodies somewhere between (real) doubt and (potential) ecstasy. Does that mean anything to you?’
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