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years – stems from an obsession with how unmoored and isolated these loating lands can be. Throughout his notes and writings, Smithson returns again and again to the lost island of Atlantis, a stand-in for his connection with deep, geological time, and for how the weight of history, myth and nature is such that it might be invisible, but is ever-present beneath our feet. Exhibited here, alongside several ilms and sculptures, are reams of the artist’s drawings, maps and plans for various island projects, some more plausible, more ambitious, than others, the majority of which never happened. In Island of Ashes, a pile of wood burns at sea, while Lake of 32 Islands is almost cute in its utopian vision of neat, numbered islands resembling molehills on a lawn; drawings for forking jetties and island mazes resemble tree forms, branching off in all directions. In one completed project, Mangrove Ring, Smithson planted a circle of mangrove seedlings in the lagoon shallows off the coast of Florida – as he explained in a 1971 interview, ‘Mangroves are called “island makers” because they catch sediment in their spidery roots.’ Upstairs, his imagined islands become wilder, evolving from natural metaphor to the performative aspect of the igure and body. Made from coal, wood, concrete and asphalt, they are allegories for the increasing reach of industry. Drawings from 1970 envisage spiralling, Babel-like towers atop cones of heaped earth, spouts spewing waste out into the surrounding ocean. Another applies his Glass Island proposal across the whole of Antartica, surrounded by poured cement oceans. In a proposal for a sort of mobile island, Smithson planned to ill a barge with yellow sulphur that would travel through the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to the Paci ic. These were not, however, critiques of industrial impact on the environment, such as Olafur Eliasson’s 2018 spectacle Ice Watch London, where viewers were invited to consider their personal relationship with nature. Instead, there is a violence to some of Smithson’s proposals that is also alchemical: his industrial materials and processes represent a pragmatic acceptance of human intervention as a form of nature in itself. He believed there should be ‘artist- consultants in every major industry in America’, a recognition that the system can be better reformed from within. Fi y years later, we are still to learn many of those lessons. The impression of Smithson from this exhibition is of a proli ic and relentless imagination; the occasional coffee-stain and torn edge implies the speed of putting down on paper each new idea. The tragedy of his early death is that many of his works remain provisional, rudimentary – we have to make do with them anecdotally, unmade and on paper, which at times can feel repetitive and insuf icient. To dwell on this, however, would be to miss the point: Smithson’s philosophical writings on the ‘non-site’ of the gallery-based artwork hinges on a conception of the artwork as connected, as if by a thread, to its ‘site’ in nature. Can we treat these drawings, these proposals, as non-sites, even if their realised counterparts never existed? The tropical desert island as a paradisiacal device that pervades our culture suggests that we can – the island, for us and for Smithson, provides renewed hope in the landscape, a rupture between past and future, eventually turning glass back to sand. Phoebe Cripps is assistant curator at the Hayward Gallery, London, and associate curator at Flatland Projects, Hastings. Nalini Malani, Can You Hear Me?, 2020, video Nalini Malani: Can You Hear Me? Whitechapel Gallery, London 23 September to 6 June Can You Hear Me?, Nalini Malani’s irst UK commission, is an immersive theatrical installation comprising more than 88 animations based on her notebooks over the past four years. Issuing from nine video channels, projected multi-coloured drawings and citations illuminate the exposed-brick walls of the Whitechapel’s Gallery 2. A few sound channels emit mainly piano music as well as Malani’s voice so ly reading Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, snippets of which are also projected. Well known outside the UK for her ‘video/ shadow play’ installations combining large-scale video projections with reverse-painted, revolving cylinders made of translucent Mylar, the animations in Can You Hear Me? address key preoccupations, such as violence against women and social injustice, much more straightforwardly; they were made by drawing and writing directly with her ingertips on an iPad. Bitesized citations, some in type, some in script, from poets and writers such as Marcel Proust, Adrienne Rich, Veena Das, Noam Chomsky, Bertholt Brecht and Langston Hughes, to name but a few, are layered with scribbly, but technically adept, graphisms depicting corporeal forms, o en of women, with the immediacy of graf iti. This directness is complimented by the speed at which images and texts appear and disappear, are overridden and erased. At irst, this seems akin to the noise of the infosphere of social and news media. And the rage inferred in many of the animations does indeed stem from Malani’s anger at continuing war crimes in India, Pakistan and Kashmir, a particular reference here being the horri ic case of the gang rape and murder of Asifa Bano, an eight-year-old girl, in Indianadministered Kashmir. As anthropologist Das states, nationalism in India is brutally inscribed on the bodies of women. ‘She was only 8’ is scrawled in vibrant red, its bloody associations being used to dramatic effect throughout the installation, but it is clear that this is less a use of art to create political consciousness than an outpouring of an enraged citizen whose medium is art. Hence the fantasy elements of some of the drawings which imagine Asifa as a wondrous Alice in Wonderland character. This never seems trite as the accretion of graphisms give equal weight to the expression of and testifying to inner feelings, eg boredom during lockdown, and ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘scary’ 32 Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021
page 35
thoughts, in conjunction with the voices of others such as George Orwell’s ‘Either we all live in a decent world or nobody does’ and Rich’s ‘A thinking woman sleeps with monsters’. These citational inferences are where the installation’s kinship with social media is most apparent, in that, generally, and more acutely during lockdown due to increased far-right invective and racial injustice, many concerned but overwhelmed citizens turn to poetry and literature for some understanding and comfort. However, in the supposedly democratic hive thinking of the Twittersphere, the sharing of one’s literary inds, while freely distributed, though corporately owned, disappear into the ether. For an artist to delineate and project into gallery space the phrases and doodles that preoccupy them renders a different kind of attention. Initially, I found the speed of Malani’s animations frustrating as I wanted to read the text and scrutinise the images, but I began to relax when I realised that they would be repeated at least three times in each animation sequence and then again as part of the loop cycle. By this time, however, not only was it still not possible to stabilise the reading/viewing process, but this seemed to be the point: that is, acceptance of being immersed in a world, whether real or virtual, in which only fragments of sense are grasped and only brie ly, the difference here being that this intangibility becomes part and parcel of a material space of reception. One of the more minutely stable images was a self-portrait while reading Marcel Proust, Malani as if a stand-in for the solitary readers who assemble in the gallery, their passage through that space casting shadows that add to the work’s countering of omniscient worldviews. Reinforcing the connection to online space, Malani has uploaded the animations on her Instagram account where each one can be played singly. Missing is the superimposition and layering of ‘information’ as well as the dispossessing nature of immersion in a gallery space. Thinking about the difference between these two spaces of reception, I recall Roland Barthes’ preference for the ilm still over cinematic narrative, as the former allowed him to possess the image whereas ilm’s mobility exceeded his control. Can You Hear Me? displaces this fetishistic Barthesian spectator, creating instead the multifarious nature of being captivated by a continuous lux of words and imagery. Although Malani is the director and choreographer, her animated graphisms signal her own imbrication in what she calls a ‘compendium’ of global image worlds. Art can mimic the speeds and lows of this compendium, but it retains a humanising difference to them. While the sound channels seemed underused in the installation, Malani’s audience cannot but hear the resounding force of her scripto-visual voice. Maria Walsh is author of Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks, Bloomsbury, 2020. Glenn Brown, ‘And thus we existed’, installation view Glenn Brown: And thus we existed Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 31 October to 23 January John Ashbery once wittily described his friend Elizabeth Bishop as ‘a poet’s poet’s poet’. Put the same recessive twist on the term post-modernist and it might apply to Glenn Brown (Interview AM325). His sources are as multifarious and compounded as the densely woven textures of his compositions. Secondariness – art’s prerogative since the 1970s – is not only a de ining condition, but a vice to launt, then overcome. Pre-emptively, Brown seeks to ensure the continuing charge of his art by reframing the corpus of art history as a withered corpse, which it is his purpose to resurrect. With more than 30 years of output behind him, his own work has gradually come under the purview of this hindsight, investing the process with new layers of solipsistic irony. Brown’s identity has also shi ed over the decades from the nerdy fan, avidly poring over images of his idols’ work, to the historical lâneur, liberating himself from the thickets of nostalgia with the verve of his posturing. These are countervailing impulses – the one to home in, the other to break away. There are further contradictions: his ornate, antique picture frames are grand reversals of Postmodernism’s indefatigable questioning of the artwork’s self-containment. Conversely, the gallery walls – here painted in plummy shades of burgundy and petrol-blue – absorb these self-contained objects into a wraparound sign for the stuf iness and decadence of tradition, more gentlemen’s club than museum cabinet. But for all its theatricality, this is art rooted in a sense of allusion, not only as evocation, but trace. The head and shoulders composition of The Crystal Escalator in the Palace of God Department Store, 2020 (Brown’s titles are still baroque confections, as likely to reference a post-punk anthem as mimic the title of some late-Romantic literary dirge), recalls one of Raphael’s coyly homoerotic images of rapt, cherubic youths, eyes raised to the heavens, as much as Brown’s own earlier reworkings of Frank Auerbach’s gestural portraits of the raised head of Juliet Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.), in which the moment the portrait is inally clinched seems to coincide with the resolute jut of her jaw. In Brown’s bust, such vital connections between picture and model have receded under dizzying degrees of mediation. The swirling forms which adumbrate the igure are simultaneously ringlets of hair, curdling lesh and the sumptuous brushstrokes portraying them (as represented by Brown’s entirely self-effacing Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021 33

years – stems from an obsession with how unmoored and isolated these loating lands can be. Throughout his notes and writings, Smithson returns again and again to the lost island of Atlantis, a stand-in for his connection with deep, geological time, and for how the weight of history, myth and nature is such that it might be invisible, but is ever-present beneath our feet. Exhibited here, alongside several ilms and sculptures, are reams of the artist’s drawings, maps and plans for various island projects, some more plausible, more ambitious, than others, the majority of which never happened. In Island of Ashes, a pile of wood burns at sea, while Lake of 32 Islands is almost cute in its utopian vision of neat, numbered islands resembling molehills on a lawn; drawings for forking jetties and island mazes resemble tree forms, branching off in all directions. In one completed project, Mangrove Ring, Smithson planted a circle of mangrove seedlings in the lagoon shallows off the coast of Florida – as he explained in a 1971 interview, ‘Mangroves are called “island makers” because they catch sediment in their spidery roots.’

Upstairs, his imagined islands become wilder, evolving from natural metaphor to the performative aspect of the igure and body. Made from coal, wood, concrete and asphalt, they are allegories for the increasing reach of industry. Drawings from 1970 envisage spiralling, Babel-like towers atop cones of heaped earth, spouts spewing waste out into the surrounding ocean. Another applies his Glass Island proposal across the whole of Antartica, surrounded by poured cement oceans. In a proposal for a sort of mobile island, Smithson planned to ill a barge with yellow sulphur that would travel through the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to the Paci ic. These were not, however, critiques of industrial impact on the environment, such as Olafur Eliasson’s 2018 spectacle Ice Watch London, where viewers were invited to consider their personal relationship with nature. Instead, there is a violence to some of Smithson’s proposals that is also alchemical: his industrial materials and processes represent a pragmatic acceptance of human intervention as a form of nature in itself. He believed there should be ‘artist- consultants in every major industry in America’, a recognition that the system can be better reformed from within. Fi y years later, we are still to learn many of those lessons.

The impression of Smithson from this exhibition is of a proli ic and relentless imagination; the occasional coffee-stain and torn edge implies the speed of putting down on paper each new idea. The tragedy of his early death is that many of his works remain provisional, rudimentary – we have to make do with them anecdotally, unmade and on paper, which at times can feel repetitive and insuf icient. To dwell on this, however, would be to miss the point: Smithson’s philosophical writings on the ‘non-site’ of the gallery-based artwork hinges on a conception of the artwork as connected, as if by a thread, to its ‘site’ in nature. Can we treat these drawings, these proposals, as non-sites, even if their realised counterparts never existed? The tropical desert island as a paradisiacal device that pervades our culture suggests that we can – the island, for us and for Smithson, provides renewed hope in the landscape, a rupture between past and future, eventually turning glass back to sand. Phoebe Cripps is assistant curator at the Hayward Gallery, London, and associate curator at Flatland Projects, Hastings.

Nalini Malani, Can You Hear Me?, 2020, video

Nalini Malani: Can You Hear Me? Whitechapel Gallery, London 23 September to 6 June Can You Hear Me?, Nalini Malani’s irst UK commission, is an immersive theatrical installation comprising more than 88 animations based on her notebooks over the past four years. Issuing from nine video channels, projected multi-coloured drawings and citations illuminate the exposed-brick walls of the Whitechapel’s Gallery 2. A few sound channels emit mainly piano music as well as Malani’s voice so ly reading Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, snippets of which are also projected. Well known outside the UK for her ‘video/ shadow play’ installations combining large-scale video projections with reverse-painted, revolving cylinders made of translucent Mylar, the animations in Can You Hear Me? address key preoccupations, such as violence against women and social injustice, much more straightforwardly; they were made by drawing and writing directly with her ingertips on an iPad. Bitesized citations, some in type, some in script, from poets and writers such as Marcel Proust, Adrienne Rich, Veena Das, Noam Chomsky, Bertholt Brecht and Langston Hughes, to name but a few, are layered with scribbly, but technically adept, graphisms depicting corporeal forms, o en of women, with the immediacy of graf iti. This directness is complimented by the speed at which images and texts appear and disappear, are overridden and erased.

At irst, this seems akin to the noise of the infosphere of social and news media. And the rage inferred in many of the animations does indeed stem from Malani’s anger at continuing war crimes in India, Pakistan and Kashmir, a particular reference here being the horri ic case of the gang rape and murder of Asifa Bano, an eight-year-old girl, in Indianadministered Kashmir. As anthropologist Das states, nationalism in India is brutally inscribed on the bodies of women. ‘She was only 8’ is scrawled in vibrant red, its bloody associations being used to dramatic effect throughout the installation, but it is clear that this is less a use of art to create political consciousness than an outpouring of an enraged citizen whose medium is art. Hence the fantasy elements of some of the drawings which imagine Asifa as a wondrous Alice in Wonderland character. This never seems trite as the accretion of graphisms give equal weight to the expression of and testifying to inner feelings, eg boredom during lockdown, and ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘scary’

32

Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021

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