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markmaking). A limited depth of ield is generated by blurring marginal curlicues, like maggots breaking away from their collective seething around a deliquescing lump of meat. These peripheral ‘strokes’ evoke yet another source, the most literal: Gerhard Richter’s photorealistic enlargements, from the early 1980s, of his own slashy brushstrokes. These are forensic perusals of photography’s autopsy of the contingencies of expressionistic facture. Brown may aim to launch himself free of his sources, but his work still clearly stems from a particular juncture in British painting, in the mid to late 1980s, when the dominance of the School of London (just prior to the emergence of the yBa generation, in which Brown played a signi icant part) met a burgeoning awareness of what had been going on in Cologne over the past decade and a half. Since then, Brown has sought to reconcile the Lockean empiricism of British art – an abiding preoccupation with primary experience’s categorical claim on truth – with the ironies of continental European post-Pop. Hence his penchant for setting virtuality off brute materialism, as when the gnarly impasto tree of the sculpture Died in the Wool, 2020, is placed next to the painting I have just described, as if we needed the real thing (unsignifying paint) to confront its imagistic alternative in order to ground its lights of fantasy. The sculpture is housed in an immaculate vitrine, its crusts of fatty oil paint re lecting off the glazed inner surfaces – another echo of a clash between the literal and the illusionistic. Perhaps the point is to use the empirical tradition as a springboard, as if into the twinkly outer space of Brown’s marvellous early paintings a er Chris Foss’s looming starships. Richter, as well as being a remorseless taxonomist, is a strict moralist, as rigorous in gauging his distance from his sources as Auerbach, if with an entirely different take on how to represent them. These days, Brown offers Dionysian excess as leverage with which to de ine himself against this stolid background, for which accuracy is truth’s requisite. The past is not to be testi ied to, but to lose oneself in, as if there were no such thing as true memory, only the wish to remake history in the image of the present’s desires and fears. Avoiding the straightjacket of cleaving strictly to other paintings has been productive in resisting the natural gravity of Brown’s sensibility, which is conservative. This exhibition includes a series of drawings, their streaming strokes of ink an equivalent of his painterly mimesis of viscous oil paint. The linearity has carried over into painting. Like an etching’s version of a painted original, storms of ine lines comb monochrome grounds, coalescing and coagulating, to overwhelm the images they both create and obscure. Here, in the structure of his painting, its central conundrum is enacted. Peering into these intricate webs, you try to discern an object, an original, a solid referent, which doesn’t exist because the lines themselves are the thing; but a nagging sense that the whole edi ice must be contingent upon a reality lurking beneath, a fact to be uncovered, suggests that Brown is less the lighty sampler whose image he cultivates than a dogged empiricist searching for a kernel of demonstrable truth in the layers of arti ice in which he entangles himself. Mark Prince is an artist and writer based in Berlin. Bruce Nauman, Falls, Pratfalls and Sleights of Hand (Clean Version), 1993, video Bruce Nauman Tate Modern, London, 7 October to 21 February Have you ever watched yourself disappear out of sight around a corner? It’s a strange experience. Is that really what my hair looks like in pro ile? Does my neck always protrude forward at that angle? Do my trousers it? The uncanny tangles itself with the commonplace. Bruce Nauman is an artist who deals exclusively in this kind of negative space. His vision is a helter-skelter humdrum. Going Around the Corner Piece With Live and Taped Monitors, 1970, which uses strategically placed CCTV cameras to create the experience just described, takes the bald fact of modern surveillance, as well as the contemporary obsession with self-image, and exposes its inherent violence and erotics – would most of us pursue or even kill our doppelganger, or, as a lot of people on Reddit seem to think, would we try to seduce it? In classic Nauman style, this trick is performed with as few tools and as little fuss as possible. Two cameras. Two monitors. One wall. The gap between ‘idea’ and ‘execution’ is as narrow as can be, and huge concepts are communicated through the simplest means. Perhaps the most immediate question raised by Tate’s enormous new retrospective of Nauman’s work is, ‘Why now?’ Or, more pertinently, ‘Why again?’ An exhibition was hosted by Tate Liverpool in 2006, relatively recent in terms of the ‘large solo retrospective’ lifecycle. Nauman’s famous 2004 Turbine Hall installation, the audio piece Raw Materials, returned to Tate Modern in 2017 as part of its ‘Artists Rooms’ series. It is back again here, on the fringe of the exhibition, played out of speakers running down the staircase of Tate’s main building (and therefore only available to visitors without access requirements, a strange and disappointing refusal by Tate to learn any lessons from last year’s justi ied complaints about the Olafur Eliasson show – Artnotes AM429). So, why the continued Tate–Nauman love-in? And why Nauman now? This is an artist who invites revisiting, evasive and fun as he is. Returning to Nauman in 2020, though, his work rings truer than ever, as we watch the western sociopolitical wave destructively crashing back upon itself. The early sculpture, Cast of the Space Under My Chair, 1965, a concrete cube with indentations from the chair under which it was cast, is a deceptively simple reminder of those spaces we forget or overlook at our peril. It just sits there, unnerving in its starkness. Above this grey block hangs the pink-and-yellow neon piece Run from Fear, Fun from Rear, 1972, garishly 34 Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021
page 37
communicating the close relationship between sex, taboo and violence. Other major neons appear elsewhere in the show, notably Hanged Man, 1985, in which a monochrome neon igure leaps into colour, hanged but with a large erection. The huge One Hundred Live and Die, 1984, in which 100 phrases each including the word ‘live’ or ‘die’ light up in random sequence, has a room to itself and feels like a doomsday clock. The random and threatening overlapping of language is more alarmingly effective in the video piece Anthro/Social (Rinde Spinning), 1992, in which nine large close-up images of the actor Rinde Eckert’s head spin incessantly shouting ‘feed me’/ ‘eat me’/ ‘hurt me’/ ‘anthropology’/ ‘sociology’. Tuning in to these words amid the garbled noise, we hear fundamental human needs expressed alongside useless-seeming systems of study. The exhibition is curated to allow all eras of Nauman’s long career to overlap and interact. This non-chronological format enables the sound of Violin Tuned D, E, A, D, 1969, a ilm in which Nauman plays a violin whose strings are tuned to this ominous chord over and over in slashing movements, and which bleeds over several rooms, to be offset by an implacably huge iron sculpture, Musical Chairs, 1983. The audio becomes a staccato threat to the two chairs hanging either side of massive Richard Serra-esque girders. Nauman’s claim that ‘anything created in the studio is art’ means that the works are disparate, and an exhibition resisting chronological or thematic groupings risks leaving visitors a little lost. It’s worth it, though, to allow creative juxtapositions, such as Going Around the Corner appearing next to Double Steel Cage Piece, 1974, a cage-inside-a-cage in which viewers are, in another sense, ‘trapped in a loop’. The exhibition opens with Mapping the Studio II, 2001, hours of nighttime footage inside Nauman’s studio. Nothing happens. The exhibition closes with Falls, Pratfalls and Sleights of Hand (Clean Version), 1993, in which magic tricks are attempted and failed. Nothing happens. The exhibition’s arc is from the mundane to the magic and back again, a itting, maddening tribute to Nauman and, perhaps, our current historical moment. If the joke of Going Around the Corner Piece is that we can never quite catch up with ourselves, you can trust Nauman to eventually make the exact opposite joke. In the 2015 ilm Walks In Walks Out, the artist is shown installing his own ilm Contrapposto Studies, 2015–16, which itself consists of Nauman re-enacting his 1968 ilm Walk with Contrapposto. It sounds complicated, but this in inity-mirror vision of the self is as simple as a man standing in front of a projector. For a moment, the light tricks you into thinking he’s in the room with you. Several layers of reality and history collapse into one pinched space. Every Bruce meets every other Bruce. But the artist has aged 50 years. There’s mortality amid the mirth. As 2020 continues to eat itself, the fun and the fear of Nauman reminds us that if we keep chasing ourselves around corners, eventually we’ll catch up. Will we like what we see? Adam Heardman is a poet and writer based in London. Books Ken Hollings: Inferno – A Genealogy of Trash Culture Ken Hollings’s Inferno: A Genealogy of Trash Culture, the irst book in a forthcoming trilogy of trash culture, is an expansive and deeply personal roadmap to the cultural artefacts of 1960s American underground cinema. Written in the format of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Hollings guides us as Virgil through the landscape of both low-budget exploitation cinema as well as queer transgressive ilmmaking of the 1960s via Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger and Russ Meyer, amongst others. Hollings uses the architecture of Hell as a sole means of organising the material through a 1960s timeline in ‘micro-essays’ – the closer one travels to the end of the decade, he writes, ‘the nearer to the frozen core of Hell readers will ind themselves’. Hollings’s strategy is informal and ideational; he does not approach the period with concern for academic or historical context, but, rather, he is intent on exploring and preserving the essence of ‘trash’ and oppositional aesthetics through his writing. The work functions as a dynamic rummaging of remnants of alternative culture’s past, serving to connect various alternative movements rather than tending to what, importantly, might differentiate them. Hollings uses low-budget, trash, sexploitation, underground and camp interchangeably, alongside accounts of biker gangs and surfers, seemingly to unite these genres and subcultures through an aesthetic and political opposition to the ‘mainstream’ rather than by working towards an identi ication of their unifying characteristics. The artists and ilmmakers covered may be transgressive and culturally resistant for various distinct reasons – access to funding, their relationship to queer identity, obscenity law, youth, feelings of disenfranchisement – but Hollings demonstrates that they are, above all, dependent on dominant society to inform their adversarial sensibilities. There is no doubt that the Inferno is imbued with Hollings’s own joyful obsessions with the period. He identi ies an episode of Flash Gordon as his entry point into trash aesthetics and ideology, pointedly suggesting Inferno, book cover Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021 35

markmaking). A limited depth of ield is generated by blurring marginal curlicues, like maggots breaking away from their collective seething around a deliquescing lump of meat.

These peripheral ‘strokes’ evoke yet another source, the most literal: Gerhard Richter’s photorealistic enlargements, from the early 1980s, of his own slashy brushstrokes. These are forensic perusals of photography’s autopsy of the contingencies of expressionistic facture. Brown may aim to launch himself free of his sources, but his work still clearly stems from a particular juncture in British painting, in the mid to late 1980s, when the dominance of the School of London (just prior to the emergence of the yBa generation, in which Brown played a signi icant part) met a burgeoning awareness of what had been going on in Cologne over the past decade and a half. Since then, Brown has sought to reconcile the Lockean empiricism of British art – an abiding preoccupation with primary experience’s categorical claim on truth – with the ironies of continental European post-Pop. Hence his penchant for setting virtuality off brute materialism, as when the gnarly impasto tree of the sculpture Died in the Wool, 2020, is placed next to the painting I have just described, as if we needed the real thing (unsignifying paint) to confront its imagistic alternative in order to ground its lights of fantasy. The sculpture is housed in an immaculate vitrine, its crusts of fatty oil paint re lecting off the glazed inner surfaces – another echo of a clash between the literal and the illusionistic.

Perhaps the point is to use the empirical tradition as a springboard, as if into the twinkly outer space of Brown’s marvellous early paintings a er Chris Foss’s looming starships. Richter, as well as being a remorseless taxonomist, is a strict moralist, as rigorous in gauging his distance from his sources as Auerbach, if with an entirely different take on how to represent them. These days, Brown offers Dionysian excess as leverage with which to de ine himself against this stolid background, for which accuracy is truth’s requisite. The past is not to be testi ied to, but to lose oneself in, as if there were no such thing as true memory, only the wish to remake history in the image of the present’s desires and fears.

Avoiding the straightjacket of cleaving strictly to other paintings has been productive in resisting the natural gravity of Brown’s sensibility, which is conservative. This exhibition includes a series of drawings, their streaming strokes of ink an equivalent of his painterly mimesis of viscous oil paint. The linearity has carried over into painting. Like an etching’s version of a painted original, storms of ine lines comb monochrome grounds, coalescing and coagulating, to overwhelm the images they both create and obscure. Here, in the structure of his painting, its central conundrum is enacted. Peering into these intricate webs, you try to discern an object, an original, a solid referent, which doesn’t exist because the lines themselves are the thing; but a nagging sense that the whole edi ice must be contingent upon a reality lurking beneath, a fact to be uncovered, suggests that Brown is less the lighty sampler whose image he cultivates than a dogged empiricist searching for a kernel of demonstrable truth in the layers of arti ice in which he entangles himself. Mark Prince is an artist and writer based in Berlin.

Bruce Nauman, Falls, Pratfalls and Sleights of Hand (Clean Version), 1993, video

Bruce Nauman Tate Modern, London, 7 October to 21 February Have you ever watched yourself disappear out of sight around a corner? It’s a strange experience. Is that really what my hair looks like in pro ile? Does my neck always protrude forward at that angle? Do my trousers it? The uncanny tangles itself with the commonplace.

Bruce Nauman is an artist who deals exclusively in this kind of negative space. His vision is a helter-skelter humdrum. Going Around the Corner Piece With Live and Taped Monitors, 1970, which uses strategically placed CCTV cameras to create the experience just described, takes the bald fact of modern surveillance, as well as the contemporary obsession with self-image, and exposes its inherent violence and erotics – would most of us pursue or even kill our doppelganger, or, as a lot of people on Reddit seem to think, would we try to seduce it?

In classic Nauman style, this trick is performed with as few tools and as little fuss as possible. Two cameras. Two monitors. One wall. The gap between ‘idea’ and ‘execution’ is as narrow as can be, and huge concepts are communicated through the simplest means.

Perhaps the most immediate question raised by Tate’s enormous new retrospective of Nauman’s work is, ‘Why now?’ Or, more pertinently, ‘Why again?’ An exhibition was hosted by Tate Liverpool in 2006, relatively recent in terms of the ‘large solo retrospective’ lifecycle. Nauman’s famous 2004 Turbine Hall installation, the audio piece Raw Materials, returned to Tate Modern in 2017 as part of its ‘Artists Rooms’ series. It is back again here, on the fringe of the exhibition, played out of speakers running down the staircase of Tate’s main building (and therefore only available to visitors without access requirements, a strange and disappointing refusal by Tate to learn any lessons from last year’s justi ied complaints about the Olafur Eliasson show – Artnotes AM429). So, why the continued Tate–Nauman love-in? And why Nauman now?

This is an artist who invites revisiting, evasive and fun as he is. Returning to Nauman in 2020, though, his work rings truer than ever, as we watch the western sociopolitical wave destructively crashing back upon itself. The early sculpture, Cast of the Space Under My Chair, 1965, a concrete cube with indentations from the chair under which it was cast, is a deceptively simple reminder of those spaces we forget or overlook at our peril. It just sits there, unnerving in its starkness. Above this grey block hangs the pink-and-yellow neon piece Run from Fear, Fun from Rear, 1972, garishly

34

Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021

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