https://antheabuys.xyz Anthea Buys Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:33:22 +0000 https://antheabuys.xyz en https://antheabuys.xyz/Main-Page Mon, 16 Sep 2024 07:47:08 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/Main-Page Click links to view projects︎ {this website is currently under maintenance so parts of it don’t work properly right now} TEXTS: A sample, in changing order of enjoyability 2025 Hinges 2023 Shooting from the hip, or, on being strategically unstrategic2019 -2021 I finally wrote up my PhD&nbsp;2020 &nbsp; &nbsp; ‘Yes to who or what arrives’: Hospitality and Property in Contemporary Art (Excerpt) 2019We Asked For It 2017 Image Drain 2015 Painting in Flat Time (on the occasion of Carl Johan Högberg’s exhibition Shuttlecock, feat. Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar) EXHIBITIONS 2026Magnhild Øen Nordahl and Paul Kuimet: Exploded View, Kai Art Centre, Tallinn 2025-2026 Steven Cohen: Long Life, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town 2021Hedwig Barry: Here is Where We Meet, Nirox Sculpture Park Download catalogue 2017 Image Drain, Tallinn Art Hall, as part of Tallinn Photomonth Biennale download the beautiful poster-catalogue 2014-2017 at Hordaland Kunstsenter (Director)Carl Johan Högberg: Shuttlecock, feat. Bob’s Your Uncle Sports BarJames Webb: XenagogueDineo Seshee Bopape: We need the memories if all our membersToril Johannesen: Oppfinnelsen og avviklingen av øyet The Land After the Exhibition SPACES AND STRUCTURES 2020-2023Owner and director of FORMS Gallery (closed) 2018-2019Co-founder of Weekend Server project space, Bergen, Norway 2014-2017Director of Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway 2012-2013Co-founder of EVIL SON project space, Cape Town OTHER 2026-2027Social Impact Art Prize Fellow (awarded by the Rupert Art Foundation, South AFrica)2025-2026NRF/DSTI-Funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture, University of Johannesburg 2025 Review of&nbsp;Steven Cohen: Long Life by Norman Kleeblatt in the Brooklyn Rail https://antheabuys.xyz/FORMS Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:33:22 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/FORMS FORMS Gallery was a dynamic structure for working with artists.&nbsp; It was founded by Anthea Buys in 2020 and worked closely with ten artists, most of whom were in the early stages of their careers. FORMS drew on gallery, institutional and independent curatorial models, presenting a programme that took shape through a combination of online and in-real-life manifestations. At the heart of this programme were ongoing collaborations with artists who make work that is critically, aesthetically and politically important. <img width="2862" height="1332" width_o="2862" height_o="1332" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b08d0d6face2c39854bf8d49991412cb962bbf3c2dc6ac60a6977bfe7ea07a73/Screenshot-2024-09-16-at-10.26.57.png" data-mid="218121835" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b08d0d6face2c39854bf8d49991412cb962bbf3c2dc6ac60a6977bfe7ea07a73/Screenshot-2024-09-16-at-10.26.57.png" /> <img width="2032" height="1238" width_o="2032" height_o="1238" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bacd030aa654e6c0c82566052930b9fc086880f716d4cf065ef3a20a9f3e7f75/Screenshot-2024-09-16-at-10.30.27.png" data-mid="218121834" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bacd030aa654e6c0c82566052930b9fc086880f716d4cf065ef3a20a9f3e7f75/Screenshot-2024-09-16-at-10.30.27.png" /><img width="2062" height="1388" width_o="2062" height_o="1388" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/992ca824c8d056293318a1f798fd290b3c05ae0ebe40ebd7e54cecdfd1e5567e/Screenshot-2024-09-16-at-10.31.25.png" data-mid="218121833" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/992ca824c8d056293318a1f798fd290b3c05ae0ebe40ebd7e54cecdfd1e5567e/Screenshot-2024-09-16-at-10.31.25.png" /> <img width="2040" height="1392" width_o="2040" height_o="1392" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3aad38a7d3b9b543c7c9efb4ee4d3ed9c645abfb7dea680eb529ceada72fcb47/Screenshot-2024-09-16-at-10.32.07.png" data-mid="218121832" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3aad38a7d3b9b543c7c9efb4ee4d3ed9c645abfb7dea680eb529ceada72fcb47/Screenshot-2024-09-16-at-10.32.07.png" /> https://antheabuys.xyz/We-Asked-For-It Thu, 07 Feb 2019 17:55:19 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/We-Asked-For-It <img width="978" height="523" width_o="978" height_o="523" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cfa52d15d07decf336f115e384e35053b55beaedaab0c587a1e3aea27029139b/sphere-face2-978x523.png" data-mid="59071288" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/978/i/cfa52d15d07decf336f115e384e35053b55beaedaab0c587a1e3aea27029139b/sphere-face2-978x523.png" /><img width="978" height="550" width_o="978" height_o="550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/472c8ca95033f106646e87752727491985815cbabe81a34586c5e17f71ee299a/Velvet-Buzzsaw-Netflix-2019-978x550.jpeg" data-mid="59071287" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/978/i/472c8ca95033f106646e87752727491985815cbabe81a34586c5e17f71ee299a/Velvet-Buzzsaw-Netflix-2019-978x550.jpeg" /> We Asked For It First published here.&nbsp;Netflix has discovered the TV version of the golden ratio: stars, scares, and sex within the first fifteen minutes. Director Dan Gilroy’s parodic horror set in the Los Angeles art world, Velvet Buzzsaw (2019), delivers on all three. The plot, though somewhat beside the point in this film, is as follows: an abused ‘gallerina’ (named Josephina and played by Zawe Ashton) uncovers a hoard of haunted neo-romantic expressionist paintings in the apartment of a deceased tenant in her building. Named Vetril Dease, he becomes the art world’s greatest posthumous revelation, thanks to a cunning gallerist, Rhedora Haze (Rene Russo). From here, the narrative follows a predictable schlock horror arc. The beauty of Netflix is that it makes it feel as if you can watch whatever trash takes your fancy without having to account for it to anyone in your real life. The truth, however, is that, not unlike Velvet Buzzsaw’s savant art critic Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhall), Netflix knows exactly what you watch and how you watch it. Its hugely successful production machinery is a feedback loop built on observation of our collective viewing behaviours. Out of this issues one of the more sobering characteristics of Velvet Buzzsaw: we asked for it. The sex starts out with promise. In the thirteenth minute of the film, a jilted and vengeful Josephina exploits the sexual confusion of Vandewalt – hitherto gay – by drawing his hand between her legs in a drunken post-opening hookup. After a lingering shot of the bewildered critic’s forearm vanishing into the darkness under her skirt, Netflix retreats to a few scattered shots of male rear ends for the rest of the film. This opening reference to Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting The Origin of the World is a bit coarse, but pokes fun at art-historical clichés about the artist’s neutral, disinterested gaze before a nude. The scene also primes the viewer for a recurring motif: arms reaching into orifices and out of paintings. Dease’s haunted paintings’ preferred method of tormenting their victims is through hands that grasp at them from within the picture.Velvet Buzzsaw is pitched as a horror film, a genre in which Netflix is currently excelling commercially. The intended source of fear in the film is the content of Dease’s paintings, expressionistic scenes populated by ghoulish children with sunken eyes, fires, and one particularly mean-looking man who is meant to be Dease’s abusive father. Though unlikely, Dease’s paintings could well have been made after a set design team field trip to Bergen’s KODE 3. The latter is home to a collection of exemplary Norwegian romantic expressionist works, in which Edvard Munch features heavily. The swirling skies in the background of a Dease painting of a family alongside a bonfire are essentially cribbed from Munch’s most famous work, The Scream (1883). The bonfire itself – into which Dease has snuck a human-shaped profile – recalls the midsummer bonfires painted by Nikolai Astrup, by now used to playing second fiddle to Munch in the public domain. This is not the first time Norwegian Romantic Expressionism has made a cameo in schlock horror: The Scream, of course, inspired the killer’s mask in the 1996 film Scream. Nineteenth-century European Romanticism and the genre of horror come from the same cultural moment: the coalescence of scientific developments, colonial ‘discovery’, and naturalist philosophy of the time produced a climate of preoccupation with the unknown. In this respect, the directorial conceit that Dease the romanticist is now a murderous ghost is not out of place Having few other hooks, Velvet Buzzsaw hangs its hopes on a cast of Hollywood A-listers: besides Russo (also Gilroy’s wife), Gyllenhall, Ashton, and Toni Colette, there are Daveed Diggs, Tom Sturridge, Natalie Dyer, and John Malkovich. Sturridge plays Jon Dondon, an obnoxious upstart South African gallerist who prowls art fairs trying to poach artists from blue-chip galleries. Malkovich is the lead poachee: Piers, an artist stuck in a mid-career rut after having quit drinking. Between them, Gilroy’s characters demonstrate the very worst of the art world: price-fixing, insider-trading, museum-bullying, and a bought-off critic who is oblivious to his complicity. What could Netflix possibly want with this crude art world takedown? A lot, it would seem. According to an interview in the Hollywood Reporter, Gilroy says that Netflix gave Velvet Buzzsaw a production budget that was beyond consideration for any of the Hollywood studios he initiatlly approached. In the same intervew, he explains that he had a “very collaborative relationship with Netflix. They were an integral part of the team creating this movie” (italics in the original). Netflix saw a commercial opportunity in the muck lodged in the engine of the art world. That this muck obscures the line between reality and fiction suits contemporary entertainment very well. On-demand TV, altered reality entertainment, and meta-thrillers like the series Black Mirror all rely to some degree on the vanishing of clear-cut make-believe, but also on the viewer’s self-conscious enjoyment of the loss of this clarity. The growth of metafiction into a mainstream genre has happened parallel to the widespread acceptance of the notion of ‘post-truth’ as a category that disavows both truth and lies. To suggest a casual relationship would be to go too far, but the coincidence of the post-truth era and the massive commercial success of metafictional entertainment suggests that there is a new popular tolerance for these related phenomena. In experimenting with metafictional forms and references, Netflix is merely demontrating its ability to read the market. In Velvet Buzzsaw, we see the metafictional in the many, very thinly veiled references to real life art world characters and occurences, as in the film’s big gore moment, the death scene of Gretchen (Colette), a corrupt museum curator who transitions to the more lucrative role of art advisor. Gretchen’s character is a reference to the disgraced former curator of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Beatrix Ruf, who in 2017 was found to be consulting for a private collector alongside her museum position. Gretchen comes to a gruesome end when, on the night before an exhibition opening, she sticks her arm into a participatory sculpture titled Sphere. The work graunches her arm off above the elbow, and she bleeds out. The morning of the opening, the museum guards assume her dead body and the pool of blood are part of the installation and let the crowds in. This recalls a recent milestone in the real art world’s inability to tell truth from fiction, in which a visitor to the 2015 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach was stabbed at the fair and momentarily left for performance art. Velvet Buzzsaw’s confrontation of the commercial art world’s crookedness, particularly in such a mainstream context, might come off as brave, but Gilroy never gives his critique space to develop. Instead, he bounces the plot between farcical villains until most of them are dead. One can feel this cynical resignation in a line delivered by Vandewalt early on in the film: “Critique is so limited and emotionally draining.” There is a distinct sense in the film that criticism, in general, is irrelevant, even silly. Critics are more or less irrelevant to Netflix. Because Netflix saves so much time and money with direct distribution, it can afford to be ‘risk-taking’. Only a very small percentage of the global population’s attention – and only for a few minutes – is needed to make a film profitable. Its success in the post-truth economy goes hand in hand with its greatest triumph: Netflix is post-failure. https://antheabuys.xyz/Shooting-from-the-hip Thu, 02 Nov 2023 11:59:46 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/Shooting-from-the-hip Shooting from the Hip, or, on Being Strategically Unstrategic First published here.&nbsp; One thing I loved about working in the old Security Building on Commissioner Street, Johannesburg, was telling people about the chicken fat in the basement. The basement of the Security Building had once housed the storied nightclub Jamesons, a place where, in the 1980s, young subversives socialised across racial lines. A fabled loophole in the liquor act enforced at the time meant that the bar was able to sell alcohol to black and white customers alike. It was an important place, particularly for young white liberals, where politics was practiced through radical sociability. It also did a roaring trade in fried chicken, the residual evidence of which was several deep-fryers still, in 2009, filled with oil and rimmed with thick brown chicken-scented grease. It was as if they had been abandoned mid-fry and left, like the legacy of Jamesons, to an apocryphal future with no custodian. Built in 1929, the Security Building was all but condemned by 2009, when Phillip Raiford Johnson and I started (and shortly thereafter ended) the project space Cloak &amp; Dagger on the first floor. Falling apart and stripped of its art deco finishes on every level but ground and the rooftop, the Security Building was the perfect place in which to revive the spirit of the patrons of Jamesons: we, like them, were white and a little bit punk, rolling cigarettes under streetlights and being political merely by hanging out. Cloak &amp; Dagger was really an extension of this hanging out. It was a “gallery” with zero strategy, plans, programme or infrastructure, and virtually no money. The rent for Phillip’s repurposed studio was R1200 per month. We split it and barely kept track of the other costs associated with putting on “shows”: paint, petrol, neon tubes, screws, screenprinting and beers, because there might not have been a flushing toilet at our openings but there certainly was beer. The opening of our first/only exhibition was grand: the place thronged with art people, people neither of us had invited, friends thrice removed. One proper gallerist who had turned up tried to buy a work by Dan Halter. We told him it wasn’t for sale, only because we hadn’t gotten as far as pricing any of the works. We were shooting from the hip, and there seemed to be an appetite for it. In the weeks after the opening no one came to the exhibition. Our enthusiasm similarly waned, and before we could bring ourselves to make exhibition number two, the building was sold to a property developer. We arrived one day to find the entrance boarded up. I have never written about Cloak &amp; Dagger, but now that I do, I recognise it as the beginning of a pattern in my career: a compulsion to make project spaces that had no hope of ever being sustainable. After Cloak &amp; Dagger was EVIL SON (2012), a footnote to blank projects, located in an adjacent building in Woodstock, Cape Town. EVIL SON really started with the name. The Michael Stevenson gallery over the road had just rebranded as Stevenson, and the old “MICHAEL STEVENSON” signage, a collection of individual aluminium letters, was dumped in a skip. While I should have been doing actual work at blank projects, where I actually worked, I raided the skip. After playing with various partial anagrams of MICHAEL STEVENSON, including ELVIS, STEVE and SCAM, EVIL SON presented itself as the most viable name for the dubious initiative. I can’t remember exactly who was there for this genesis moment. Part of shooting from the hip is not looking too hard at who’s around you. But Josh Ginsburg, now Director of the A4 Arts Foundation, and artists Kyle Morland and Jared Ginsburg were memorable co-conspirators. EVIL SON lasted a little longer than Cloak &amp; Dagger, and even made it to the Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm in 2012, but in time it too faded out of existence. Next was Archipelago (2015-2017), which occupied a corner of the foyer of Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen, Norway, where I worked as director from 2014 to 2017. Thanks to public funding and an institutional context, this project space lasted a whole two years and many more exhibitions than either of its predecessors. And after that was Weekend Server (2017-present), a Bergen-based project space sans space, which I cofounded with Scott Elliott. I said farewell to Weekend Server in 2019, finally conceding that my credit card could no longer sustain my lifestyle of shuttling between Bergen and Johannesburg. Scott remains in charge of what is now a viable project, funded occasionally by the Bergen municipality. There is a common thread in all of these projects, save for Archipelago: my own money, or at least my ability to access money. Though by no means plentiful, and often actually belonging to the bank, my money has made it possible for me to experiment with art spaces with very little consequence (besides my eventual financial ruin) or need for accountability. It is this freedom which has made it possible for me to experiment curatorially, to create opportunities for artists, (no matter how fleeting) and to develop an internal critical framework for negotiating institutionality. In other words, without Cloak &amp; Dagger in 2009, I never could have run Hordaland Kunstsenter in 2014. There are of course other vectors, besides money, which need to be acknowledged. My education was broad and omnivorous. Early in my career I had opportunities to travel. Along the way I was mentored, if inadvertently, by Matthew Krouse, who had been the arts editor at the Mail &amp; Guardian, where I landed a regular writing gig. In a similar vein, I have had many prescient, adventurous and odd collaborators, most of whom also turned out to be great teachers, friends and resources. All of these factors trained me to make exhibitions, texts, projects and spaces that I, and hopefully others, found stimulating and fulfilling. Things could have panned out differently. I might have hunkered down in my museum job at the Iziko South African National Gallery – an engagement which lasted 11 frenzied months in 2011-2012 – until retirement. This has been the strategy of some of the beleaguered institution’s staff. Predictably, I left impulsively, but my turbulence saved me (and the museum) from what would certainly have been a life of friction. On reflection, I owe my career as a curator to an entirely unstrategic “strategy” of restlessness: a hunger for the next project, the next adventure, the next institution. It has always been about the next thing, and not this one. It’s something I will address with my next therapist, but this compulsion to move forwards has been a tremendous source of energy and creativity. This is how I lived my twenties and the first half of my thirties. And – to return to money – it would have been impossible had it not been for a small but powerful financial buffer between me and life. I come from a line of lightly aspirational working class grunts, so this buffer has never been substantial or luxurious. But I always knew that if I spent all my rent money on art stuff I would be able to return to the parental roost. This is white privilege, and it enabled me to bumble and burn my way through doing what I love. The art world needs to find – or indeed to make – more buffers, ones that don’t merely correlate with historical privilege. Calls for transformation are really calls for the redistribution of security and access, because without security and access, the stakes of creative labour are simply too high. In other words, if you’re going to shoot from the hip you need to be able to miss. https://antheabuys.xyz/Art-and-Blockchain Tue, 14 Apr 2020 13:08:43 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/Art-and-Blockchain <img width="978" height="652" width_o="978" height_o="652" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44c1be9764cb092535ec99aedbf323934025ae05ab727df0a1dc73ef633e69ff/JLT_Banner-978x652.jpg" data-mid="66916038" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/978/i/44c1be9764cb092535ec99aedbf323934025ae05ab727df0a1dc73ef633e69ff/JLT_Banner-978x652.jpg" /> <img width="1922" height="1080" width_o="1922" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f64113cf2180274577e450a9287653a5b7756ed6607dae2318758ad80e56b57d/DukeRiley_NECI-filmstill_11.png" data-mid="66915771" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f64113cf2180274577e450a9287653a5b7756ed6607dae2318758ad80e56b57d/DukeRiley_NECI-filmstill_11.png" /> <img width="2000" height="4957" width_o="2000" height_o="4957" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7bb39b35386674bc159fd512f38b3ea9f566a3b8c61d3e0ca2c41b4feb6cc884/Warhol-14-small-electric-chairs.jpg" data-mid="66915784" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7bb39b35386674bc159fd512f38b3ea9f566a3b8c61d3e0ca2c41b4feb6cc884/Warhol-14-small-electric-chairs.jpg" /> The New Fabric of Everyday Life First published here.&nbsp; The destiny of blockchain art is the financialisation of artists themselves. In January 2020, after close on six months of wormholing in Reddit threads, I found Montrose Dawkin. This is the nom de guerre of a self-described “small time art collector and crypto geek,” who in the summer of 2018 spent close to USD 20,000 (EUR 17,500) on a fraction of Andy Warhol’s 14 Small Electric Chairs (1980) in the world’s first blockchain art auction. Dawkin and ninety-nine other ‘investors’ were invited to bid on fractions of a 31.5 per cent share of the Warhol, a work that had failed to achieve its reserve price of USD 4 million (EUR 3.5 million) on a Bonham’s contemporary art auction in 2016. Each of the new owners has their shares in the painting represented by tamper-proof digital certificates stored on the blockchain of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. They will retain their shares even if the rest of the painting is sold at a later stage. Blockchain, to hazard a definition, is a decentralised, publicly visible network of cryptographic transaction records which are near impossible to alter after the fact. One of the best definitions I have come across is courtesy of Hacker Noon: “Like DNA, which is a record of genetic transactions and mutations that spread as life expanded across the earth, blockchain too is a record of transactions, spreading across the internet as more people use cryptocurrencies.” Blockchain allows cryptocurrencies to be traded anonymously and legitimately, but is also useful for storing other kinds of transactional information. In this respect, it is the backbone of an enormous and highly competitive new international economy. The Warhol auction is old news in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, but if Dawkin is to be believed, this is the first time an auction bidder has spoken to the art press. “Why the lag?” I ask Dawkin over email. “Initially I couldn’t see how this was such a big deal for the art world. How is art different from any other financial instrument? But the fact that this sale could happen with cryptocurrencies is significant,” they said. “Now I own this part of real-world history and I paid for it with what a lot of people think is pretend money.” Initiated by the blockchain startup Maecenas, the Warhol auction was a watershed moment for the art market. Although in this case access to the auction was exclusive, the model seems to promise a more accessible art market down the line. Potential buyers who could never possibly afford to buy a whole artwork can benefit from value accrual in the secondary market by easily buying relatively affordable shares in a work. The sale was also the first time buyers were able to use Maecenas’s native ART currency tokens in a real-world transaction. In late 2019, Maecenas announced the listing of the ART token on the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. This is a platform on which different cryptocurrency pairs can be exchanged and, through a lattice of exchange relationships, new tokens like ART acquire value relative to more established currencies. This means that in addition to buying infinitesimal shares in works of art, you can also trade in the art market indirectly by buying and selling ART tokens. The financialisation of art is not a new phenomenon, although many collectors, curators, and artists still balk at the idea. And not without good reason. Artworks which come to be represented by cryptocurrency tokens can, fairly directly, increase in value as the token performs better in a general crypto market. Likewise, a general crypto market crash could result, less directly, in an artwork “bottoming out,” that is, drastically and suddenly losing value. If we thought auctions were volatile for the art market, this is worse. History and institutionality come to mean very little for the value of artworks, which instead become pegged to the self-referential performance of a very particular kind of market. In pragmatic terms, this is just how money works in the age of crypto. In existential terms, ART probably shouldn’t be confused with art. What (else) does blockchain mean for the art world? In 2019, the Internet succumbed to a rash of listicles promising that blockchain technology would revolutionise the art market, if not the art world (and it is important to distinguish between the two). Besides easy financialisation, blockchain offers a secure conduit for recording the provenance of artworks. This is perhaps the most talked-about application for blockchain technology in the art world, and appeals especially to secondary market dealers, who regularly contend with the spectre of erroneous or fraudulent record-keeping. Because blockchains are essentially made of stored information, it is possible to use this technology to create tamper-proof digital certificates of authenticity. Put simply, producing a fraudulent transaction record in a blockchain is very difficult. In a post-truth world, blockchain might be the closest thing we have to independently validated fact. The problem, however, is that if an incorrect record is inserted into a provenance blockchain, it is just as difficult to correct. A situation like this could arise when, for example, future information disproves an earlier provenance detail. The other problem with the provenance revolution is that it assumes that blockchain is impossible to hack. It’s not impossible; it’s just not easy right now.For those of us who won’t be jettisoning money, real or otherwise, into secondary market speculation, it might be hard to see the relevance of all this. But there are reasons to pay attention to blockchain technology beyond the possibility of financial gain. Blockchains are networked between people behind computers, and although these people are anonymous and decentralised they still constitute a voluntary community. Blockchain communities parallel important forms of voluntary collectivisation and self-organization in historical and contemporary art, which, like cryptocurrencies, have been attempts to redistribute critical or economic power. There is an isomorphic relationship between these forms of community, and in a few special cases the structure and etiquette of blockchain communities informs that of real-world artists’ platforms. A new web-based organisation called the Decentralized Autonomous Kunstverein (DAK), for instance, is an experiment in how the logic of decentralisation and self-organisation might be applied to an art institution. Still in the phase of accepting “proto-members,” the DAK is a voluntary members’ organisation, like a brick-and-mortar kunstverein, that uses funds raised from members to commission and ‘host’ new artworks, exhibitions, and related events. Because the organisation is not physically based anywhere, projects can take place anywhere in the world. Decisions about where and how this happens are made through democratic voting processes and without the influence of a central curatorial voice. Programming decisions are aggregated and curating becomes a function of group behaviour in service of DAK’s core values (according to its website): “individual sovereignty, decentralized collective governance and non-coercion.” What about the artists? Not all institutional gestures are this earnest. In December 2017, a web project called The Distributed Gallery launched by announcing it would auction off a “readymade” token by Richard Prince that consisted of one Ethereum token. This went viral, and for a moment the art world thought, not implausibly, that Richard Prince had extended his forays into appropriation to cryptocurrency. This wasn’t helped by Prince, who equivocally denied knowing what blockchain is, but didn’t deny having made the work. It turned out to be a joke (though one of Prince’s galleries referred to it as a “scam”) but it sparked an important question: what does blockchain technology mean for artistic practice? More and more artists are grappling with this question, and experimental gallery structures are emerging around blockchain-based practices. On its website, the New York gallery and “art production platform,” Snark describes blockchain as a “nascent artistic medium,” the raw material of a genre or movement in the making. Snark, which is listed as a gallery on Artsy, works with artists to realise projects which use blockchain technology in ways that are essential to the artwork, and then sells these through the same process of tokenisation as the Maecenas auction.An instance of this is the work In The Darkest Hour, I Am By Your Side (2019) by American artist Duke Riley, currently on sale in fragments on the Snark website. This work is a three-channel film about a Samsonite suitcase equipped to breed bedbugs and which doubles as a diorama of a luxury hotel room – a sly reference to news reports in August 2019 of a rumoured bedbug infestation in a Florida resort owned by Donald Trump. On screen, digital bedbugs crawl all over the grid that divides the central channel of the film into purchasable fragments. Each fragment is sold as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain and is made publicly visible only once purchased. This means that the full film will only be viewable once all the fragments have been bought through Snark. The work thus relies on a decentralised collective mass-action mimicking the logic of blockchain technology itself. Ultimately, perhaps because our understanding of blockchain is so closely linked to money, it seems difficult for blockchain art – if we can call it that – to escape the financialisation model. Even so, few examples seem willing to acknowledge that the destiny of blockchain art is the financialisation of artists themselves. For Swedish artist Jonas Lund, this is an inevitability worth embracing. Lund has created the Jonas Lund Token (JLT), a cryptocurrency that can be earned by fulfilling certain “bounties,” actions that are beneficial to the artist’s career. Writing a review of a Jonas Lund exhibition for Artforum can earn you 100 JLT, while posting a work by Lund on Instagram and using the appropriate hashtag gets you between 0.001 and 5 JLT. In many cases, the final reward is discretionary and varies based on a combination of your own prominence and influence in the art world and that of the platform on which the career-enhancing action takes place. JLT buys you the right to interfere in Lund’s artistic practice by voting for different proposals for new works and exhibitions. Although difficult to quantify, Lund says the impact of the JLT on his practice so far has been positive. “It has created a community around my work and practice that helps combat the loneliness of the artist studio,” he wrote in an email interview. That said, he doesn’t buy the idea that blockchain will revolutionise the art world: “It’s a slow-moving beast that isn’t exactly open for disruption.” For curators, blockchain might be something of a death knell, an infrastructure that finally takes authorial and institutional power out of the hands of the few who currently decide the fate of the many. For Lund and artists like him, this is simply part of the new fabric of everyday life. https://antheabuys.xyz/Thenji Tue, 14 Apr 2020 13:32:22 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/Thenji <img width="4266" height="3548" width_o="4266" height_o="3548" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/edbbdd3d1b892b6ff039345485d59ba07311b718840f2ca5546c6e44a7ff4e92/TNN-The-Judges_2019_103x125cm_oil-on-canvas.jpg" data-mid="66918051" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/edbbdd3d1b892b6ff039345485d59ba07311b718840f2ca5546c6e44a7ff4e92/TNN-The-Judges_2019_103x125cm_oil-on-canvas.jpg" /> Artist imagines a world in which black excellence is not seen as an exception First published here.&nbsp; Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi tells Anthea Buys about her powerful solo show, 'Gymnasium', and why she refuses to pander to the 'alien narrative'. For artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, the art world is like a gymnastics tournament. The people who matter most – artists – bend over backwards for recognition, and the ones doing the recognising are still, overwhelmingly, white audiences and king-makers. In the world of gymnastics, the unprecedented skill of African-American athlete Simone Biles has altered how the sport itself functions. For a young, black, female athlete to ring such changes in an arena that has been dominated by white bodies and voices is, sadly, exceptional. In art, despite there being many a Biles, transformation is slower still. When I visited Nkosi in her studio a few weeks before the premiere of her first ever solo exhibition, she was racing to complete a series of paintings of scenes from competitive gymnastics. Titled Gymnasium, her latest collection of paintings and video will be exhibited at Stevenson in Johannesburg from 26 March, and will be available for viewing through an interactive online 3-D viewing room accessible from the gallery’s website. Gymnasium&nbsp;imagines a world in which black excellence is not seen as an exception. The subjects in her paintings, from gymnasts warming up, to cameramen, to crowds of onlookers, are all black, a move that highlights the conventional whiteness of the sport and its audiences. The seated black audience in the work Audience (2020), for instance, was adapted from a reference photograph of an all-white audience, simply because pictures of crowds of black people at leisure – never mind crowds of black people at gymnastics competitions – are hard to come by. The enduring whiteness of gymnastics may seem arbitrary, but it is in fact deeply rooted in right wing ideology. Following the Great German Gymnastic Festival of 1933, presided over by Hitler himself, it became the most popular sport in Nazi Germany. Combining grueling physical exercises with elements of ancient German dance, artistic gymnastics was believed to be the technique by which the Nazis would produce an elite squadron of Aryan uber-bodies. Gymnastic performances were propaganda, proud demonstrations of the physical prowess of the master race. This is why painting black gymnasts scrutinized by black judges and performing for black audiences is a poignant re-imagining of the past and the present, and a kind of anti-propaganda, a purging of the remnants of white power ideology. &nbsp;“What I’ve wanted my work to do for a long time is to talk about power,” Nkosi offers. “And power is about voice, who gets to talk and who doesn’t, and who gets space to be heard or remembered or just to be.” For years Nkosi has found it hard “just to be” in an art scene that has kept her somewhat on the periphery. Born in New York to exiled South African and Greek-American parents, and educated between South Africa and the United States, she has always moved between worlds. Even her artistic practice has been a constant negotiation between genres, with her output divided between painting, video, and collaborative social intervention. Nkosi is prolific. But without the long term backing of a gallery, which gives artists a degree of visibility that is difficult to generate on their own steam, the ascent of her career has been sluggish. Briefly represented by the Seattle-based Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, she had no footprint locally other than her studio in Johannesburg’s Victoria Yards. South African galleries flirted, inviting her onto group exhibitions, but until six months ago none had committed to representation. Now Nkosi has joined the stable of Stevenson, a leading&nbsp; South African gallery for contemporary art, and, perhaps inevitably, her visibility is catapulting. Given that she was featured in a solo booth presentation at the art fair Frieze New York in 2019, and that Artnet.com named her painting Routine (2019) one of the top six works in the fair, it seems a staggering oversight that Gymnasiumis only Nkosi’s first solo exhibition. In October 2019, taking a step to ameliorate the lapse, the prestigious Africa Centre in New York premiered a new mural commission based &nbsp;on three paintings, all from 2019, The Judges, Tally and Fault. How is it, in light of this international attention, that Nkosi has remained relatively obscure in her chosen home country? Just as there’s more to professional gymnastics than having the right coach, there are more complex dynamics in play than gallery representation. As a black painter influenced by formalism and working in a minimalist vein, she is an anomaly in an art market that has fallen in love with, on the one hand, the expressive abstraction of painters like Meshack Masamvu and Portia Zvavahera (also represented by Stevenson), and, on the other, the symbolically overdetermined figuration of Yinka Shonibare MBE and Kudzanai Chiurai. Nkosi’s problem seems to have been that she does not fulfill one of these two narratives – the black artist as expressionist or the black artist as symbolist – &nbsp;in the white imagination. “For me white audiences play such a major role in the art market,” she says. “Black artists have been making all kinds of work for a long time, but the thing that gets consistently foisted upon us is that we have to make this accessible to a white audience via your particular ‘alien story’, your black story, your other story.... It feels like it needs to have that exoticism in order for it to be consumable and interesting.” Nkosi’s work is an antidote to the alien story. We see the figures in her paintings in various states of preparation and waiting, the banal moments outside of the main event. These are universal slices of time, ones we can all relate to at some level. Nkosi’s athlete, now stretching, now embracing a teammate, is the everywoman. Unlike her earlierHeroes series, which consists of portraits of people, both iconic and unknown, admired by the artist, the figures in her new paintings are faceless. These anonymous “portraits” are ciphers that anyone can imagine their way into. This is because black experience is relevant to everyone, to “the world”, in Nkosi’s words, not just to discourses about blackness. “When we’re talking about blackness, let’s complicate it,” she says. “Let’s talk about what blackness is revealing more broadly. Let’s talk about how thoughts coming from people of colour are complicating the world.” View Gymnasium here. https://antheabuys.xyz/Scripted-Engagement Tue, 14 Apr 2020 13:41:55 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/Scripted-Engagement <img width="1440" height="893" width_o="1440" height_o="893" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bc58e5d57815841ce00b0c4790d0b86d14c871ce94d7d9a2377b970a00b64d7c/Screenshot-2020-03-29-at-21.03.17.png" data-mid="66919947" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bc58e5d57815841ce00b0c4790d0b86d14c871ce94d7d9a2377b970a00b64d7c/Screenshot-2020-03-29-at-21.03.17.png" /><img width="5876" height="3976" width_o="5876" height_o="3976" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0fad4134f08ae7d6d00a2f52b90ebaefac4775e971875ced0fefe87450f4d3c9/Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" data-mid="66919766" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0fad4134f08ae7d6d00a2f52b90ebaefac4775e971875ced0fefe87450f4d3c9/Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" /> <img width="1903" height="988" width_o="1903" height_o="988" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/efa5f008fe463399b9206e4de120d436d2b544a163aa73281d71af8205648065/Screenshot-2020-03-25-at-11.23.27.png" data-mid="66919946" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/efa5f008fe463399b9206e4de120d436d2b544a163aa73281d71af8205648065/Screenshot-2020-03-25-at-11.23.27.png" /> Scripted Engagement First published here.&nbsp; The rush to make online substitutes for events derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic promises an influx of viewing technologies that approximate real life. One of the great pleasures of living near the southern tip of Africa is that I miss all of the world’s major art fairs. Too far away, too unpleasant, and over too quickly to justify the travel, the blockbuster art fairs – Art Basel, Frieze, and the Armory Show in particular – are on my horizon as flies buzzing vaguely against a window pane. For a different echelon of the art world, one that does turn up at fairs, nothing is more important than being there, than having travelled to be there, than always travelling to be everywhere. It was, therefore, a major blow to Art Basel Hong Kong and its entire nomadic ecosystem when the global COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the cancellation of this year’s fair, which would have taken place from 19 to 22 March. Art Fair Week in Hong Kong is this art scene’s vital international moment. Every year, for the week leading up to and including Hong Kong’s two concurrent art fairs, Art Basel Hong Kong and Art Central, the city swells with collectors, gallerists, curators, and artists from all over the world. In the absence of this possibility, Art Basel Hong Kong attempted to replicate the international moment digitally by moving the entire fair online. 234 galleries participated in this scheme – 95 per cent of the original cohort that signed up for physical booths – creating virtual exhibitions in standardised online viewing ‘rooms’ accessible from Art Basel’s website. After the statutory two days’ VIP preview (some protocols are inviolable), anyone anywhere in the world could peruse the fair for free until 25 March. With the escalation of COVID-19 since early February, when Art Basel Hong Kong announced the cancellation of the fair, many other platforms around the world have followed suit, conjuring up online-only versions of their derailed exhibitions and events. At the same time, the platform Google Arts &amp; Culture, which hosts virtual manifestations of some of the world’s leading museums, is enjoying a revival. This is accelerating a trend of virtualisation whose apex many might have thought was still years away. Though digital mediation has become an indispensable tool for the art world, never before has it so explicitly tried to approximate ‘real life’. Online shopping The obstacle of distance now removed, and the repellant crowds no longer a factor, I was out of excuses. I began my tour of Art Basel Hong Kong with a visit to Kurimanzutto, the first in a list of participating galleries that was reshuffled daily. With spaces in Mexico City and New York, Kurimanzutto boasts a formidable roster of artists that includes Haegue Yang, Danh Vo, Gabriel Orozco, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Kurimanzutto’s Art Basel Online exhibition was a group show of new and unseen work by gallery artists, a fairly typical art fair offering. But the translation of one homogenous format to another fell flat. The works were presented in an ‘installation view’, a standardised in-situ digital mockup that included a wooden bench for scale, as well as by cropped and detail images of each work on its own. Short texts presented alongside the work offered interpretive and contextual information, an attempt to compensate for the conversations that might have arisen during a visit to a physical booth. A particularly successful manifestation was Tiravanija’s work on paper, Untitled 2018 (我们在同一片天空下做梦吗)(2018), a piece that, given its dimensions and contrasting colour, translates well on the screen. But views of other pieces, like Vo’s Untitled (Les grands voyages), 18 (2014–2015) were woefully deficient, for no other reason than the gallery seems not to have documented the work adequately. Departing from Kurimanzutto, other galleries’ presentations followed the same format: group shows displayed piece by piece, some representations good, others bad, with that infernal wooden bench in just about every shot. Over two thousand artworks were shown in this manner, worth an estimated total value of USD 270 million (EUR 246 million). One would think that big ticket pieces might not make it into an online viewing room, especially such a dull one, but five works priced at over USD 1 million (EUR 912,000) each were presented, including Nam June Paik’s Sfera / Punto Elettronico (1990), listed for USD 3 million (EUR 2.7 million). Art Basel’s foray into the online-only fair merely confirms what a few galleries have known for some time: if collectors are willing to buy work from a trusted gallery off a PDF, a more sophisticated online offering is a potential gold mine. Scale is no longer the constraint it can be in physical exhibitions, and, particularly when it comes to large works, an astronomical amount of money is to be saved on shipping. Gallerist David Zwirner has been ahead of this curve, offering works for sale in online-only presentations, including on Instagram, for the past three years. According to a recent New York Times article, his online sales have increased by 400 per cent in the last year alone. Artsy’s analysis of Art Basel and UBS’s newly released report The Art Market 2020, states thatonline sales of art accounted for 9 per cent of the total market of USD 64.1 billion (EUR 58.2 billion). This is lower than the general online retail market share, but only by 5 per cent. This means that while only 14 per cent of shoppers are willing to spend what are comparatively small sums of money online, 9 per cent of all art buyers spend substantially on works they have only seen in the form of a digital reproduction. The online mediation of artworks stands in for the works themselves so effectively that it has a tangible impact on the global art market.Manet in Street View I remember long ago studying a reproduction of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) in an art history textbook, in black and white no less, and feeling a kind of vertigo. This work was important; it contained beautiful ideas, and even if I couldn’t relate to it physically, it changed how my 18-year-old self thought about the world. Some years later, I saw Olympia in real life, at Musée d’Orsay, and though I had expected to be overwhelmed, to have some kind of transcendental experience, the prevailing feeling was an anxiety that I was not having profound enough an experience. Looking at the work in physical proximity was overshadowed by the imminence of no longer being able to look at the work in physical proximity. Today, it is possible to look at a high definition reproduction of Olympia on Google Arts &amp; Culture, one of the most powerful and centralised online tools for looking at historic art. Revisiting this old flame, I zoom in and examine the cracks on the painting’s surface. I note the absence of Olympia’s fingernails. I linger on the variegated blacks of the cat’s fur. I close my laptop for the night, and the next morning when I open it up, Olympia’s cat is still there, stretching. I can simply resume my looking. Olympia has not gone anywhere. I have the luxury of looking at the work on my own terms and with a proximity, albeit simulated, that would never be possible in the museum itself. And yet, something is missing in the experience. Without my body being in the room with the painting, I lack a sense of scale and heft; I miss out on the way the light lands on Manet’s distinctive flat black. I neglect to worry about the insufficiency of my looking. Google tries to simulate the experience of being in a room with an artwork with its Street View functionality, a feature native to Google Maps. An interior transposition of Google Maps’ Street View, this enables you to navigate certain museum interiors just as you would click down a street. In principle, it’s a revolutionary idea, but it just so happens that the Street View of Olympia is blocked by an insurmountable pillar. A glitch in the stitching together of this particular view makes it impossible to get around the pillar to see the painting in context. This underscores the limitations of viewing art virtually: you are beholden to someone else’s potentially careless recording efforts, but also, more nefariously, to a handling of the medium in which your freedom to ‘move’ is curtailed by Google’s script. Google has – just through this feature – the power to decide the terms of engagement with culture. Digital phenomenology Though restricted, and restrictive, in these ways, Google Street View was the first in what has become a considerable market for 3D capture and viewing technology. The world of contemporary art is lagging in its uptake of these tools, but in the future a 3D ‘recording’ of an exhibition may well become the standard for exhibition documentation. Many commercial galleries in Europe have already embraced this possibility thanks to a platform called Artland. Designed to facilitate the buying and selling of art, Artland enables galleries to document and present fully navigable 3D recordings of their exhibitions, which can be published online and in Artland’s native mobile app. One hundred and fifty galleries currently use the product, which, according to Artland CEO Mattis Curth, significantly improves their prospects of receiving sales enquiries. Commercial expediency may be necessary to get a novel product like this into circulation, but its potential far outstrips sales. Artland’s 3D exhibition recordings are compelling viewing in their own right. The user experience is cleaner than Street View and the amount of detail captured makes a convincing case for the virtual translation of physical artworks. For people who can’t get to exhibitions in person because of, say, quarantine, this is the best substitute so far. Moreover, Artland’s 3D recordings continue to exist after their physical counterparts have closed, forming an archive of exhibition content that could be of great value to exhibition historians of the future. “It is clear that there is massive untapped potential in a resource like this,” Curth said in an email interview. “It is already by far the largest [3D] library of modern and contemporary art exhibitions in the world.” All our experiences of artworks, even physical ones, are mediated. And all mediation can be reduced to the insertion of something – paper, a lens, a screen, museum protocols – between us and the artwork. The digital mediation of art will only become more ubiquitous as the technology grows in sophistication. This will embed in visual culture a practice of seeing that is not comparable to being physically present with an artwork, but that nonetheless ‘counts’ for many people as a kind of digital phenomenology. The trouble comes when we rely, as we increasingly do, on digital representation for most – or even all – of our knowledge about art. This deepens the ‘googlification’ of contemporary life, the mediation of everything from our whereabouts to our spelling by corporations. Though a product like Google Arts &amp; Culture makes documentation of thousands of artworks available to anyone who uses Google, seemingly ‘democratising’ our access to art, it is not neutral; it selects for us and entrenches an overwhelmingly European narrative of art history, as well as a contemporary culture that has no incentive to question this. In this respect, Google is another gatekeeper of culture, shaping discourse just as museums, curators, collectors, and patrons have for centuries. The difference between Google and a museum, however, is that Google is at your fingertips. Its influence is far wider than that of any museum, no matter how popular. https://antheabuys.xyz/Category-Error Fri, 24 Jan 2020 12:15:49 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/Category-Error Category Error Sunset in the city of Johannesburg is a blade falling on a chopping board, a whip and a thunk that allows two severed halves of life finally to fall away from each other and wobble on their rinds.&nbsp; White people go from car to house and lock their doors, make wood fires and secret themselves from the creeping dark, and black people walk on the streets, from their jobs in the suburbs and the shopping centres, to stand in queues to board taxis (whites call them “death traps”; we need our own cars), which will spit them out on an arterial road, from which they will walk, now in the swollen night, to their homes. This is today. During the apartheid years, the journey was much longer, or much shorter. The law shut people of colour out of the cities and suburbs after dark, and a daily commute of four hours each way was not uncommon. Busses were crowded by 3am, half the night’s sleep dragging bodies over bad roads on hard seats. We see these bodies, folded, heads thrown back, mouths open, in David Goldblatt’s images from “The Transported of Kwandebele” series from 1989. Those who commuted in this way were for the most part miners, construction workers, hard laborers, cleaners in banks and municipal buildings&nbsp; -&nbsp; &nbsp;people who had no business remaining in the white world once their labour had been extracted for the day. Black domestic servants suffered the opposite curse. They were typically given quarters on their white employers’ properties, so that they were available for an early start on the dishes and on call all night. Their barracks were cold cells separate from the house, with an outside toilet with no seat, a view of the washing line. Beds propped up on bricks next to broken mirrors discarded from the main house. Their children were far away, in rural places the apartheid government called “the homelands”. During these years David Koloane began to do something impossible: create opportunities for black artists in South Africa to exist in an art scene. This was a radical undertaking, given that culture was seen as the preserve of whites, and the few artsits of colour who were acknowledged were so on the basis of their enjoyment by the white market. Koloane had educated himself as an artist in the early 1970s through apprenticeships to Louis Maqhubela and later to Bill Ainslie. Concurrently he worked as a school teacher, driven by a desire to smuggle art into the educational experience of the black youth he taught. The apartheid education system made no such provisions for black learners, who were instead subjected to a curriculum that prepared them for careers of servitude. In 1977 he co-founded the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA), a collective that established the first gallery in South Africa where black artists could legally show their work.[1] He went on to help establish the Thupelo Workshop, a professional residency-oriented network affiliated to the Triangle International Artists Workshops, first in South Africa and then in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Namibia. &nbsp;Later, in 1985, he completed a diploma in Museum Studies at the University of London, before returning to South Africa to continue teaching, writing and practicing as an artist. However, perhaps his best-known infrastructural contribution to the art field in Southern Africa was the establishment of the Bag Factory Artists Studios. In 1991, together with Robert Loder and Ricky Burnett, Koloane started the Fordsburg Artists Studios, as it was then called, in a predominantly muslim residential area on the western edge of Johannesburg city.[2]The prupose of the organisation was to provide black artists with work spaces amongst their peers, an opportunity that was absent prior to their initiative. Koloane still spends each day in a small studio at the Bag Factory, working alongside seasoned and young artists alike. &nbsp; Koloane was born in 1938 in Alexandra township, a sprawling peri-urban area reserved for black wokers serving Johannesburg. There were many such places surrounding the cities, reserved for different racial groups, and the level of neglect applied to them usually correlated to the skin tone of their inhabitants. Apartheid was rolled out on the basis of a bizarre ranking system in which, for example, Indian South Africans fared better than ‘coloured’ or black South Africans. The townships consisted - and many still do – of sections of small houses surrounded by thousands of shacks, informal constructions made from scraps of wood and metal. The townships were seldom serviced with water or sanitation, &nbsp;and certainly under apartheid were equipped with electricity &nbsp;where police surveillance necessitated street lights. Many of these conditions prevail in these areas today. The history of the artistic depiction of black life in apartheid South Africa is shaped by the biases of its white authors, and so it is difficult to know if painted township scenes became as popular as they did because of the selective visibility of work by black artists or because of these artists’ organic influence. Though he predates the proliferation of townships, Gerard Sekoto painted the places in which he lived and circulated – first Sophiatown, a racially mixed enclave west of Johanneseburg – and later informal settlements that might easily have been part of a township (an example is Street Scene, 1941-42). Two decades after Sekoto, Ephraim Ngatane rose to some prominence as a painter of township scenes, and his protégé, Dumile Feni, was reputed to have been called “Goya of the townships”.[3]This was despite the minimal occurrence of township scenes in Feni’s work. Just as “jazz” had become a catch-all category for music by black composers in the United States, “township art” in South African parlance was work made by black artists, even if it had little to do with actual townships. It is this tradition that contextualises the township environments that appear in many of Koloane’s paintings and drawings, particularly in his night scenes from the 1990s and early 2000s. Koloane’s township is characterised by obscurity, by its refusal to offer the viewer a glimpse into a place and an atmosphere that earlier artists had treated as an aesthetic motif. His work merley suggests built structures, rather than plotting them out perspectivally. His buildings are stacked vertically, as if the depth dimension of the scenes he paints is tilted at a steep incline (particularly in his cityscapes produced in recent years, for example the 2016 painting Mongrel in the City). &nbsp;At the same time, he often buries structures under layers of lines scratched over each other to create an impenatrable, opaque surface, like a thick smog or the absolute darkness of a moonless township night. In the Mgodoyi series (approx. 1993-4) the township vanishes into the thick, unlit night, while packs of stray dogs have the run of the streets. They fight and play,&nbsp; and search for food scraps, guarding a territory that they occupy illegitimately. They are forgotten, left to fend for and govern themselves, and their survival is directionless. Mark Atwood, the master printmaker who produced the Mgodoyi series with Koloane at The Artists’ Press, explains, paraphrasing Koloane, that the dogs in these works could be read metaphorically, as an insight into the ongoing inequality that maps race onto geography. Attwood writes, “Wild mangy dogs scavenge on the streets of the Black townships whilst overweight pampered dogs bark and threaten one from behind fences in White suburbia”.[4] In other words, the “dogness” experienced by these different categories of dog reflects the distribution of privilege according to race and, by extension, location. The tendency in both critical and commercial circles has been to read Koloane’s work through the lenses of metaphor – according to which the work is pedagogical – and historical (Western) expressionism. The latter is the linchpin offered to contextualise Koloane’s characteristic rough, scribble-like line, as if gestural rendering were always the physical outworking of an inner state. Koloane is, after all this time, a pedagogue, but it sells him short to suggest that he is either a moralist or a sincere expressionist. On the one hand the dogs, when read metaphorically, elicit our pity, but on the other they are wiley, self-organising and ungovernable. They represent only so much common ground, with us and with each other, and we would be remiss to think we understand their motives, emotional lives or intelligences. To be clear, Koloane is not suggesting that the dogs are metaphors for black people, and nor am I. The dogs are there precisely to warn us of the pitfalls of applying knowledge across situations that might not be comparable. In this respect, looking into the thicket of black lines of the Mgodoyi works and seeing angst and frustration with the legacy of apartheid is a kind of category error. It takes the narrative of German expressionism and stuffs it into a social, stylistic, intellectual, and ethical crucible where it is not only a clumsy fit, but also an uninteresting one. This is perhaps the most important contribution Koloane makes to art in Southern Africa, even though it is largely invisible. He insists (but subtly) on the specificity and untranslatability of aesthetic productions, a position that is hostile to a tradition of interpretation built around the polarities of representation and expression. This is perhaps put most succinctly through a final metaphor, one that took half a century to find its traction in the art of South Africa: Koloane’s township is not a place that can be surveyed, or learnt about by white culture consumers, or mined for atmosphere or visual intrigue. It is somewhere from which the outsider is regarded, and the outsider is clearly you, the viewer. &nbsp; [1] Linda Givon, who founded the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in 1968, was known to include the works of black artists in her gallery programme, although this was done clandestinely.&nbsp; The Reservation of Separate Amenities act of 1953 enforced that people of different races were prohibited to use, work in, or participate in shared activities in any space, public or private. The law was repealed in 1990 (An archived Associated Press article from the LA Times provides a helpful overview of the Separate Amenities Act: http://articles.latimes.com/1990-06-20/news/mn-222_1_separate-amenities-act. Last accessed 21 July 2018) [2] These events were recounted by Koloane in an interview with the author on 15 May 2018. [3] Dolby, Joe. ”Dumile Feni”, in Hayden Proud (ed), Revisions: Expanding the narrative of South African art. Unisa Press: 2006. P 174. [4]Capitalizations author’s own. Attwood, M. ”David Koloane”,&nbsp; The Artists’ Press&nbsp; (website). https://www.artprintsa.com/davidkoloane.html, last accessed 18 July 2022. https://antheabuys.xyz/Painting-in-Flat-Time Tue, 14 Apr 2020 19:36:56 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/Painting-in-Flat-Time <img width="794" height="530" width_o="794" height_o="530" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c69e98fa29d255d7ae689f22d96ae83dfb4e8a64494e0534eab6016f634d3ca5/carljohanhogberg_shuttlecock04.jpg" data-mid="66973039" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/794/i/c69e98fa29d255d7ae689f22d96ae83dfb4e8a64494e0534eab6016f634d3ca5/carljohanhogberg_shuttlecock04.jpg" /><img width="794" height="530" width_o="794" height_o="530" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/683c198415a400e6ea7d1615aae0fce916e457348d5d8a21d83e78fc1ecdd0d5/carljohanhogberg_shuttlecock05.jpg" data-mid="66973037" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/794/i/683c198415a400e6ea7d1615aae0fce916e457348d5d8a21d83e78fc1ecdd0d5/carljohanhogberg_shuttlecock05.jpg" /> Painting in Flat Time Carl Johan Högberg was the best chess player in Eskilstuna, Sweden - and by far, when not in the company of his nearest opponent and friend, a journalist named Lund. There was only one cafe for intellectuals in Eskilstuna, a state of affairs brought about by the presence of intellectuals there and almost nowhere else. And like their dog-eared, soft-spoken peers, Högberg and Lund haunted the place, subsisting on drip coffee, cigarettes and occasional Twix bars. Chess is a sport well-suited to this regimen. Less so golf, which is another of Högberg’s Eskilstuna diversions, one he reserves for family when he visits home from Amsterdam. For those who truly wish to spurn health, there are the golf cars to shuttle you from hole to hole while you smoke and eat Twix. But in my mental construction of this part of his life, Högberg walks. &nbsp;He and Lund left the flats of the old steel town for university many years ago, one to become a painter and the other a writer, one to Amsterdam, the other to Stockholm. To paint or to write in the age of (or shortly preceding) selfie sticks and the socially acceptable use of the abbreviation, “tl;dr” - web shorthand for “too long; didn’t read” - you have to be impervious to the world’s fatigue of your medium. Particularly since it comes not from too much exertion towards writing or painting, but from too little effort at any one thing. I hardly need to write it again: we glide over information, consuming it as if we were waterfowl skimming the surface of a pond for insects. Our use of the internet probably agitates these Anitidaean tendencies, but this was a problem for the people of Euro-America already before 1967, the year that Guy Debord published La Société du Spectacle. &nbsp;Painting and writing and their appreciation demand a different pace, one more in keeping with chess, or golf, or, for that matter, badminton, the sport whence Högberg’s exhibition “Shuttlecock, feat. Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar” at Hordaland Kunstsenter (January - March 2015) takes its title. &nbsp;A shuttlecock is the feathered projectile badminton players keep airborne by hitting it to each other across a net. It can leave a racket faster than a tennis ball can, but once it catches the air it swoops in a buoyant arc, led by its round rubber nib, until the receiving player relaunches it from her racquet. It flies fast and slow from the same stroke, but the nib must never touch the ground. The player who eventually, inevitably, lets the shuttlecock fall loses a point to her opponent, and the next rally begins. &nbsp;Badminton originated India under British colonial rule in the early 1800s.&nbsp; It was at that time called “Battledore and Shuttlecock”, and was played over a piece of string rather than a net, and with a real feathered shuttlecock. In the amateur garden badminton sets I grew up with in South Africa, the shuttlecock was made of plastic, with imitation feathers. The authentic shuttlecock is believed to have been adopted from a Japanese game called Hanetsuki, in which a bright knot of feathers is batted between wooden paddles. Thanks to countless Ukiyo-e woodblock prints depicting women poised to tap the “hane” (the transliteration of the Japanese word for the shuttlecock) rather gently, so as not to sweat profusely on the kimono, it is easy to imagine Hanetsuki as badminton’s reticent ancestor. But if Wikipedia is to be believed, Hanetsuki had an insect-repelling purpose as well. Traditionally, or so I read, girls would play the game at New Year with the belief that the player most able to keep the shuttlecock in the air would have superior protection against mosquitoes in the coming year. &nbsp;In the endless, labyrinthine ambulation the internet has made of “research”, I could follow the arc of the shuttlecock far and high, and possibly never touch the ground. The point of trailing through this material, however, is to demonstrate that the postures and gestures that have become conventions of sports are in fact embodiments of history, incarnations of traces that have all but become invisible, washed out by the banality of sport as entertainment. &nbsp;The choreography in sports, this embodied archive of scripted movements a player must learn in order to be doing a particular sport at all, is always there. This entwining of history, banality and politics in the equipment and performance of sports has been a recurring&nbsp; Högberg’s work before. In 2010, to mark the culmination of his time at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, Högberg held a solo exhibition entitled “Health Through Sports”, a reference to a photo-collage by Max Ernst titled&nbsp; La Santé Par le Sport (1920). This is an unforgettable image, though it is one of Ernst’s lesser known.&nbsp; In it a classically proportioned male nude statue holds a golf club in his left hand and the skull of an alligator in his right. His face is covered by a crocheted butterfly, an image culled from another source, and his genitals are hidden by a crude stone fig leaf. With his face and his penis covered, and only a tally of ideals for a body, he is radically depersonalized. It doesn’t seem fit even to call him a “he”. &nbsp;For Hitler and Mussolini, the depersonalized athlete was the model subject of the fascist state. Italian football blossomed under Mussolini, and Hitler famously commissioned filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl, whose Nazi propaganda films he had grown to love, to make a feature-length film of the 1936 Olympics in Germany. While Ernst’s athlete came some time before this moment in European politics, the friction between the different components of this image antagonize a much older convention: the Platonic ideal of the “warrior-athlete”, the ideal citizen of Plato’s Republic. The warrior-athlete is not only physically adept, but he is mentally “alert” and cultured as well, since his regimen of training is complemented by poetry and music. He is the paragon of health and resilience, and therefore makes a fine Guardian in Socrates’s hypothetical city. Hitler’s prejudice against the physically disabled in Nazi Germany reflects his association of physical ability with political superiority, in keeping with this ancient convention. Art was coopted into this project as well. Beginning with the Stockholm Olympics in 1912 and&nbsp; until London in 1948, the sporting contests of the Olympic games were complemented by art competitions in various disciplines, and the total medal count of each nation at the end of the games included medals awarded in the art categories. Given Hitler’s well-documented enthusiasm for art, he embraced this as an opportunity to demonstrate to the world the excellence of the Aryan race in all the classical fields of human accomplishment. Ernst’s La Santé Par le Sport has functioned as a totem of resistance to this ideology in Högberg’s work, and its influence - indeed the influence of Ernst in general - is visible in his use of unlikely juxtapositions or ‘mash-ups’, his restrained palette, and in his sensibility for dreamlike and uncanny scenography. The latter is very effectively suggested through the disruption of time in his paintings. In the 2014 work Idla, two young women are practicing the synchronized gymnastic activity called Idlaflickorna on a beach at night. They are each passing a ball from hand to hand, and their image is captured in the instant that both balls are suspended in mid-air. The general time and place in which they are frozen is post-war Sweden, but they are also caught in a time closer to the present. They exist inside a photograph, whose edges are conspicuously treated in the painting. This photograph is attached to something - a dossier of&nbsp; studio research material? -&nbsp; by a large paperclip. In this painting we see three layers of suspended time - the frozen activity of the girls’ gymnastic practice, the suspended time of the photograph, and the time of the action of painting, painstakingly presented to us by the trompe l’oeil paperclip. Although time is one of the parameters that distinguishes a sporting event from the more nebulous temporality of practice (one can be in a state of practice, honing skill over time, while doing other things. One can practice by thinking, as well as by doing) time is also meted out by the repetitive or sequential physical actions that characterize many sports. In Zadie Smith’s recent micro-novel The Embassy of Cambodia (2014) an anonymous badminton game takes place behind the high wall of the Cambodian Embassy in a gentrifying London suburb. The protagonist, Fatou, sees the shuttlecock flying back and forth in the same way everyday&nbsp; that she passes the embassy on her way to a public swimming pool. The story leaves open the possibility that the continuous “Pock! Smash!” of the anonymous players’ strikes indeed never stops, like the heart that goes on pulsing without our needing, or even being able, to tell it to. Like a heart, or its mechanical counterpart, the metronome, the flying shuttlecock in The Embassy of Cambodia moves the story along in time, indifferent to the fate of its characters, which has the effect of making their fate all the more urgent for the reader. Less obviously, many of Högberg’s paintings also count out time through repetition and temporal compression. Sometimes this happens purely pictorially, as in an untitled monochromatic painting from 2010 which shows a badminton service staggered into its composite moments, in what appears to be a contracted time-lapse recording. The tonality of the image is inverted so that it has the quality of a photographic negative in which a burst of shots taken in the instant of this action are all exposed in one frame. This painting gives us the ability to see the time, all at once, that contains the story of how to hit a shuttlecock. The choreography of this tropic action can be compressed in the work so that we feel time differently, spatially. &nbsp; There is an analogy to be drawn between the compression of time in this painting and the historical flattening represented in images found on the internet. No matter the particular pictorial content of images found online, they participate in a process of sorting based on search engine update frequencies, information mining and tracking, and our search habits. Therefore, the images that we come across as we search or browse the web correlate less to a proximity to the present than they do to our behaviour. Particularly in the case of historical research, according to&nbsp; Ina Hellsten, Loet Leydesdorf and Paul Wouters, search engines “reconstruct the pasts [sic.] in very different terms”. Of course, the online image searches also give rise to the possibility of chronologically diverse images appearing alongside one another so that, in a very obvious way, we are able to see the traces of different moments in time simultaneously before us. But as Hellsten et al write, it’s more complex than this: search engines behave as the “clocks of the internet”, measuring time through an array of user interactions. Like other time-telling devices, they are able to alter our perception of time, just as a slow analogue clock extends seconds, and eventually hours, for us. Search engines dredge the past into the present, realizing “the present as a collection of extended presents that can exist in parallel on the Web. In other words, time is being represented as realities that coexist in space”. In this light, what may feel like fortuitous finds on the internet are in fact governed very little by chance. What appear to be random juxtapositions arising in search results are in fact reflections of past behaviours, our own and those of a vast collective of Web users. This cybernetic ‘collective unconscious’, if you will, is depersonalized in that it belongs to not one among us, and yet it determines, subliminally, our psychosocial experience of the online world. It may be a stretch to compare internet memes to Jungian archetypes, but, as a more modest proposal, it is conceivable that the collective unconscious of the web informs the conscious, interpersonal circulation of contemporary myths and fantasies, and that the viewing and mental retention of images plays a crucial role in this. The efficacy of chance - or its algorithmic avatar - in internet research is the analogue of that most prized trope of Dada and Surrealist art, the absurd.&nbsp; For Dada artists, chance facilitated juxtapositions of words, images and sound that were so foreign to the existing horizons of meaning as to seem nonsensical. As&nbsp; Richard Heulsenbeck writes in his Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, “In dada [sic.], anything was possible, everything was loose and left to chance. Dada, in both its moral reactions and its artistic insights, was able to combine definiteness with indefinite possibility…”.&nbsp; When surrealism, or at least a crude version thereof, began to treat the ‘nonsense’ as symbols and symptoms under the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, or at least a crude version thereof, the radicalism Dada brought about was muffled by a giant drooping breast of overdetermination. Apart from costing money at the printer, this historical detour serves to lay the groundwork for thinking about how Högberg paints, and why he paints what he paints. In Shuttlecock… there is a coming together of the precarious chance processes of old-fashioned, analogue happenstance, and of the internet search. This is exemplified in the paintings The Impossibility of Tickling Oneself I and II (2014), a pair, rather than a diptych, that stages an impossible badminton game between a badminton coach with a face transplant and his own mirror image. The coach - the body in this instance - is Dr. Jürgen H. Ranzmayer, the author of several instructional books about badminton. The source of his image is an old, yellowed book Högberg keeps in his studio as reference material. &nbsp;The face, though, is digital - or it is now. It belongs to the Swedish jazz pianist Jan Johansson, who famously interpreted a number of Swedish folk songs for jazz, and less famously, composed a soundtrack for gymnastic exercises. Released in 1965, the vinyl LP was accompanied by an an instructional guide to various exercises, and bore the title Rädda Sverige (Rescue Sweden). The image that Högberg uses in The Impossibility of Tickling Oneself I and II, which is also used in the 2013 painting JJ, appears on the Swedish Wikipedia page for “Jan Johansson”. It is clearly a high resolution scan of a much older, analogue photograph, or possibly a scan directly from a negative. It is possible to enlarge the picture enough to see bits of dust and thread and scratches on the ‘original’. Interestingly, though, the provenance of the image - it’s dates of capture and release in the analogue world - are absent from its new internet home, and have been replaced by a “file history” that makes it possible to see when the image was uploaded, and by whom, and where else it is hosted online. Hito Steyerl calls this displacement in an image’s history,&nbsp; “the bruises” of an image. These bruises “are its glitches and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers. Images are violated, ripped apart, subjected to interrogation and probing. They are stolen, cropped, edited, and re-appropriated. They are bought, sold, leased. Manipulated and adulated. Reviled and revered”. While Shuttlecock… broaches the subject of the incredible shifts in how we relate to images today (and also some of our ancient, habitual experiences of them), it does more than just this. It questions the space and substance of the image, and its ideological dimensions, and suggests that our relation to images is more than observation; it is participation. The integration of the Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar in the exhibition stages this participation. The bar is an imitation of the Bob’s Your Uncle bar at the Amsterdam Kunstverein, and is realized at Hordaland Kunstsenter in partnership with the Kunstverein. But this collaboration was not institutionally driven - Högberg imported Bob’s Your Uncle and the Kunstverein into his exhibition environment as if he were ‘copying’ and ‘pasting’ it (as one does digitally) from the original in Amsterdam. The copy has a fair resemblance to the original Bob’s Your Uncle bar, but its relocation, its integration into the exhibition, and its coexistence with the paintings, produce a dissemblance that is unsettling. This “interplay of operations” suggests to me that the Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar is itself an image. As Rancière argues, and as is abundantly clear in Högberg’s work, an image is not only “the simple relationship that produces the likeness of an original: not necessarily a faithful copy, but simply what suffices to stand in for it”. But it can also be an “interplay of operations that produces what we call art:… precisely an alteration of resemblance”.9 In this instance, it is an alteration of resemblance in which we can, and do, participate. Our ability to patronize the Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar, to sit on the chairs and participate according to the conventions of bar attendance, is a helpful metaphor for what is happening as we look at and think about the works in Shuttlecock…, and, more broadly, when we consume, share, alter and dwell on images in other spheres of life. For Steyerl, this participation is a crucial step to overcoming a stultifying over-association of images with representation and representability. “To participate in an image—rather than merely identify with it—could perhaps abolish” a fraught relation with popular misrepresentation, or even with the idea that it is in the nature of images to represent. https://antheabuys.xyz/Yes-to-who-or-what-arrives Tue, 14 Apr 2020 13:57:32 +0000 Anthea Buys https://antheabuys.xyz/Yes-to-who-or-what-arrives [1] I have used the word ‘genre’ here rather than the more conventional ‘medium’ in order to accommodate multidisciplinary and cross-medium artistic practices that are concerned primarily with participation or community. [2]The nomenclature of ‘work’ in this genre is contested, with different authors naming it differently, while each variance reflects individual critical priorities. Clare Bishop, for instance, has called it ‘participatory art’ (Bishop 2012), while Grant Kester prefers to speak about ‘dialogical’ art (Kester 2004, 10). In each case, these differences in naming also circumscribe the author’s field of reference, excluding potential examples not strictly relevant to the particular discussion. My intention at this point is the opposite: to indicate a very general field of influence on institutional programming by art concerned with the ‘inter-human’ encounter (this adjective is used by Nicolas Bourriaud [Bourriaud 1998, 6]). [3] Bergen Assembly is a triennial exhibition held in Bergen, Norway. The inaugural event was held in 2013.&nbsp; [4]The Situationist International famously called for the integration of art and everyday life. Through practices such as psycho-geographical exploration and mapping of their immediate surrounds, they imported activities such as walking, map-making and psychological interpretation. The presumed power of the artist was brought into particular focus in the late 1960s in Europe and America through the ‘institutional critique’ movement, which was identified with artists such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers and Andrea Fraser, amongst others. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson’s 2009 collection, Institutional critique: an anthology of artist’s writings, offers a thorough overview of this field. [5]Notably, the credit information in the exhibition showed a familiar disparity in the quantity of biographical information given about Neto and his co-authors. The label of the work included the following information: ‘Ernesto Neto: * 1964 Brazil, lives in Rio de Janeiro / Huni Kuin, or Kaxinawá, indigenous people living in the Brazilian state of Acre, and in Peru, the Amazonian forest’ (exhibition label, np). This replicated the convention in modern European ethnographic museology of giving the tribal and broad geographical provenance of cultural objects collected from non-European, and especially rural and pre-industrial, societies, rather than the names of the individual creators. [6]I use the term ‘Eurocentric’ to refer to canonized Euro-American art, instead of the more commonly used adjective ‘Western’, because the latter term fails to acknowledge, on the one hand, the centrality of European art in canonical art history, and on the other, the continuing centralization of the global art world’s intellectual and commercial power in Europe. [7]This work was formerly known as the Dorchester Projects, and is still sometimes referred to using this title. [8]Constant used only his first name in professional contexts; this essay follows the convention by referring to him as ‘Constant’. [9] See Simon Sadler’s The Situationist City (particularly pages 25‒26). [10] Constant’s work has been the subject of a fairly recent survey exhibition entitled New Babylon: To us, Liberty, coproduced by the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag and the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid (Reina Sofia, 20 October 2015 - 29 February 2016; Gemeentemuseum, 28 May - 25 September 2016). [11] Derrida introduces this idea in relation to the invisible, non-physical presence of technologies such as the internet, email and satellite transmissions that cut across the physical thresholds separating private and public space. For Derrida the transgression of boundaries entailed in this spatial duality leads to reflection on an aporia, the inevitable vulnerability of these thresholds, their necessary solicitation of transgression. In addition, however, Derrida begins to enunciate thought-provoking observations about the spatiality of transmission technology (the Internet, satellites, etc.), as well as the implications for our understanding of mobility and the ontology of intangible entities, among other notions. While it does not lie within the scope of this essay fully to explore such concerns, Derrida’s sense of the relationship between technology and hospitality resonates strongly with Constant’s hypothesis that future technologies would demand a revision of theories of mobility, privacy and the uses of space. ‘Yes to who or what arrives’: Hospitality and Property in Contemporary Art Since the late 1990s art concerned with relational encounters and positive social change has come to be recognized as a genre of contemporary art,[1]achieving visibility even on the least public-spirited of mainstream platforms at contemporary art fairs and at commercial galleries. Under the extensive influence of what we might provisionally call ‘socially-engaged art’,[2]many contemporary art institutions have in recent years begun to address the topic of hospitality as a means of interrogating the relationship of the professional art community to its perceived outside. Either implicitly or explicitly drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notions of hospitality, as presented inOf Hospitality and On Cosmopolitanism, a spate of public programming in museums, galleries, academies and alternative spaces has appropriated such terminology with a view to signalling an activist concern for audience development, a ‘radical’ break with a notion that the world of contemporary art is hermetic and unwelcoming. In 2012 the SMART Museum of Art at the University of Chicago organised the exhibition Feast: Radical hospitality in contemporary art, which focused on ‘sharing food and drink to advance aesthetic goals’ (Feast 2012, np). More recently, freethought, a collective of scholars commissioned as co-Artistic Directors of the 2016 Bergen Assembly, organised a public lecture by curator Laurence Rassel entitled ‘On Radical Hospitality’.[3] The latter was held at the Hordaland Kunstsenter (Hordaland Art Centre) in Bergen in December 2015. However, far from being radical, the appropriation of the tropes of hospitality is inherited from established artistic practice. The invitation of everyday life into the rarified sphere of culture – in which gesture artists have often assumed the role of host and regulator of the presence of ‘non-art’ content in their work – can be traced as far back as twentieth-century European modernism;[4]such practices persist to the present day. It is not unusual to find contemporary artworks in which the artist literally plays host to non-artist others, who are invited (and sometimes coerced) to participate in situational works as actively contributing guests or as ostensible co-authors. The recent Venice Biennale of Art, entitled ‘Viva Arte Viva!’, offered us a highly visible example: an installation called Um Sagrado Lugar (A Sacred Place) (2017). Credited to the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin (an indigenous people from Brazil and Peru), this installation occupied a central place in one of the two main exhibition venues, the Arsenale. Neto created a nest-like environment in which visitors to the exhibition were invited to ‘hang out’, in the words of New York Times reviewer Holland Cotter (Cotter 2017, np), and participate in discussions and religious ceremonies conducted by Huni Kuin representatives. Following Cotter’s description, Neto invited members of the Huni Kuin as part of the work to be present in the installation for the duration of the biennial’s preview and opening days. Dressed in traditional ceremonial attire, these individuals were both Neto’s guests and second tier hosts (Neto himself being the primary host) to exhibition visitors during this exclusive period of the biennale’s presentation (ibid). Neto’s objective was problematically unclear: on the one hand he used his invitation to the privileged platform of the Venice Biennale to extend access to this social setting to the Huni Kuin group. At the same time, their presence as his guests was tightly circumscribed: their proper territory was his installation; while occupying this space, they were expected to demonstrate an indexical relationship to their ostensibly real home, their villages is rural Brazil and/or Peru.[5]Instead of disrupting traditional divisions, Neto’s solicitations were premised on a form of hospitality that is highly conditional and serves to reify a preconceived narrative of the redemptive power of art. Neto’s piece is but one recent example of an endemic preoccupation in Eurocentric art since the twentieth century.[6]Drawing on a selection of historical and contemporary examples since the mid-twentieth century, this essay considers the engagement of art with the concept and practice of hospitality. The incursion of the theme of domestic hospitality into the field of art is itself an enactment of the idea that contemporary art extends an invitation to its outside. However, at both the normative and the reflective level, some of the most prominent instances of hospitality-as-art fail to move beyond appropriations in their interrogation of the conventions of hospitality itself. The examples considered in this discussion all identify homes or house-like spaces – that is, enclosed, built environments to which access is limited – as the contested ground of social interaction. And in each case, the power of the artist to ‘[intervene] in the condition of hospitality’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 149), to grant access to an otherwise prohibitive space, is contingent on a relationship to the private property market (even if as a disavowal). In Theaster Gates’ Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative (DAHC) (2009-ongoing)[7], for example, the artist purchased an abandoned two-storey house in a depressed neighbourhood of Chicago and refurbished it as ‘a site of community interaction and uplift’ (Gates 2016, np). While living in an old shopfront next door, Gates created a library, a slide archive and a ‘soul food kitchen’ for use by residents of the area (ibid). According to Gates’ website, the project ‘empowers community members to engage in the movement of radical hospitality by physically transforming their surroundings and filling them with beautiful objects, diverse people and innovative ideas’ (ibid). &nbsp; Decades earlier, in 1974, Gordon Matta-Clark made the now-famous intervention Splitting in a house that was purchased by his dealers as a property investment and was soon to be demolished. Rather than using this site to offer hospitality to a community, Matta-Clark sliced the house in half, rendering it effectively uninhabitable, and casting a shadow on the values of conviviality and belonging that are associated with the home. Both Gates and Matta-Clark treat the house as a site marked by ethical positions. However, while Gates affirms the ethical duty of the master of the house to promote the wellbeing of his guests, Matta-Clark challenges the grounds of this mastery by literally cutting across the thresholds of the master’s domain. In both cases, probing the relations between host and guest, private and public, as played out through metaphor, allusion and other non-literal means, is shadowed by a real, inflexible jurisdiction: access is governed by ownership. This uneasy collusion of capital and critique emerges from, and speaks to, a ubiquitous culture of private wealth, in which the concept of home is entwined with that of ownership. However, whether guided by Marxist politics or other positions, there are artists who have explored systems of spatial and social relations that disavow the notions of property and entitled access. In his long-term project entitled New Babylon (1956-1974), Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys (hereafter ‘Constant’)[8]proposes an alternative to the separation of private and public space in the service of work and the accumulation of wealth. In line with a critical position common amongst his contemporaries (including those belonging to the Situationist International, of which he was a founding member), Constant maintained that postwar (European) cities were being designed to accommodate private automobile transport and a hierarchical division of labour.[9]Constant experimented with an array of spatial and architectural arrangements for a future form of urbanism in which rights of movement and abode would not be contingent on the ownership of property or on the related powers of permission and invitation. Presented through a collection of sculptures, speculative maps, drawings depicting ambiguous architectural environments and descriptive texts, New Babylon remained an intentionally unrealized (and unrealizable) work of spatial and social transformation.[10]This speculative city of the future would rely on technology to automate all forms of functional labour, and this same technology would enable freedom of movement on an unprecedented scale. In contrast to works by Theaster Gates and Gordon Matta-Clark, in which hospitality is staged or subverted in the context of privileged access, New Babylon proposes the irrelevance of private property, and therefore of its most potent symbol, the house. This unsettles the conventional terms of hospitality, through what Derrida calls a ‘“derange[ment]”’ of ‘the trace of a frontier between the public and the non-public, between public or political space and individual or family home’ (Derrida and Doufourmantelle 2000, 49‒50).[11]