Towards the end of the poem, Schjeldahl decides that he has no regrets, referring with some affection to the ‘tidy guild’ of art writers. On first reading, this idea of an ordered community felt about right, even comforting, though when I recently came across the line again it seemed less accurate. For one thing, critics – more than artists and curators – tend to work alone; while there are professional bodies, it’s mostly a solo pursuit, a lot of which takes place before any conversation with an editor. And, of course, few critics are only critics: writing is typically supplemented by curating, teaching, freelance editing, assisting artists, bar-tending, or whatever other work is around. I’ve met art critics who moonlight as anything from cricket correspondents to cheesemongers.

While professional hybridizations may be the norm today – try finding an art journal by-line that lists only one activity and one city of residence – working ‘between’ has often been the common mode for the art critic. From poet-critics (Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Frank O’Hara), dealer-critics (Félix Fénéon, Daniel Kahnweiler) and artist-critics (Donald Judd, Robert Smithson), criticism is rarely the sole province of those who best practice it. This continues today: as artist Hito Steyerl notes in her collected essays, she writes during (and between) a string of residencies and teaching positions, a writing environment shaped by flexibility and interruption. Criticism is genetically untidy.

What does the way in which critics define themselves today tell us about how they conceive of their relationship to art and to writing? A recent panel discussion at the ICA in London, titled ‘The Trouble With Art Criticism’ (has there been a writing panel in the last decade that hasn’t alluded to some crisis? Surely any crisis isn’t limited to the domain of criticism?), included writers, editors and curators, but only one of the five participants was identified as a critic. Of course, disavowing the term gets around the thorny issue of whether or not it’s the critic’s business to be dealing in judgements, but with what should it be replaced?

In recent years various contenders have emerged. One popular handle is ‘art writer’, suggestive of creativity rather than sniping, opting for a stance – frictionless and mobile – over a critical position. This is not to be confused with the expanding field of ‘art writing’, usefully ambiguous about whether the subject or the writing is the ‘art’. More cynically, Boris Groys once wrote that after judgement has melted away all that is left is commentary: he favours the epithet ‘art commentator’ over ‘critic’, one who protects the modesty of the art with a ‘textual bikini’. The late Stuart Morgan had no problems with the term critic, but – in a wonderful lecture titled ‘Homage to the Half-Truth’ (1991) – suggested that criticism, or ‘the act of shifting an experience from one language to another’, was closer to translation than to commentary. He perhaps had in mind Susan Sontag’s well-known argument, in ‘Against Interpretation’ (1966), for the impossibility of adequately translating the art work, though I think she would have supported Morgan’s insistence on a continuing attentiveness to language – something for which Groys has little time.

More recently, John Kelsey offered another alternative. Kelsey occupies an unusually multi-hyphenated position, in that as well as producing criticism he is a gallerist (at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York), one who sells the work he produces as an artist (as part of Bernadette Corporation), and is also an editor and professor. There have been occasions when, in a single magazine, he is simultaneously advertiser, reviewer and reviewed, a degree of entanglement he signals by labelling himself a ‘hack’, with its connotations of Grub Street drudgery. This half-serious suggestion, which Kelsey made during a 2007 lecture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, offers a replacement for the critic who is ‘not up to the task of reinventing himself to meet the conditions he’s working under today’ – call it critic 2.0. Tellingly, Kelsey’s strawman is referred to exclusively as a ‘he’, and the version of critical activity that he would rather do away with – dogmatic, predicated on good ‘taste’ – feels haunted by the masculine mandarins of the 1950s and ’60s. But when Rosenberg and Greenberg are invoked as emblematic of a certain kind of monolithic criticism, which they often are, it’s usually forgotten that the former started out as a poet and survived as a sometime ad man, and that the latter began as a customs official with a background in literature. They were both multi-taskers too.

Is there a connection between Schjeldahl’s farewell and Kelsey’s cheerful elegy? Whether implying a tidy guild or a critic who is impeccably disinterested, each account constructs a kind of figure that I’m not sure ever existed: one who is undistracted, part of a pure tradition and devoted to a single pursuit. But if criticism has often been characterized by a lack of codification, perhaps it’s better to think of it as a number of related practices with different goals rather than a uniform field of activity. This untidiness could be a virtue.

When I try to remember what has changed over the past two decades, I keep coming up with the same answer: memory itself. Of course, I have amassed 20 more years of experiences: from the joyful (a mini-pearl found in a mussel in Norway) to the tragic (two friends lost in aeroplane crashes). But I’m speaking here about collective memory, which is not to do with specific events but how we save, retrieve and share them.

Collective memory has often been divided into two categories: orality and literacy (societies without and with writing). Eric A. Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, Frances Yates and even Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), all reflected on the differences between these two modes in forging a link between the past and the present. It’s hard for us to imagine living without writing. But oral societies are not more forgetful, nor do they have poorer memories; they simply have different ways of recollecting, from telling stories to consulting elders.

A few examples may be helpful to understand not only orality and literacy but also their deep incompatibility. Storytellers in oral societies use a host of techniques – exaggeration, repetition, rhyme – to make stories easier for their listeners to recollect and to retell. An exaggerated fishing tale is more memorable than the dull facts of a modest catch; repetition drives any point home. Rhyme also helps: ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ sticks in your mind more readily than, ‘In the long run, consistent work is more productive than rushed efforts, in sewing and other tasks.’ Literacy makes such mnemonic techniques unnecessary because everything can be written down. Moreover, in a literate world, exaggerations can be errors or even lies; repetitions seen as redundancies; rhyming consigned to poetry alone.

One of the deepest incompatibilities is in the saving of past events. In orality, sharing – the telling and retelling of stories – is the key to preservation; any event taken out of circulation and stored away would be irreversibly consigned to oblivion. By contrast, literacy stores things that are supposed to last, whether in paper archives or digital ones – which brings us back to the transformation of collective memory over the last two decades. Is digitization oral or literate? When Havelock, Ong, McLuhan and Yates were writing – roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s – computers were generally understood to be an extension, if not an intensification, of literacy: more words and numbers to be stored on microchips instead of paper (although Ong glimpsed a ‘secondary orality’ in electronic technology). By the 1990s computers started to realize their full potential and developed from isolated databases into mobile handheld devices with amazing multi-tasking and communication abilities.

I believe that digitization is not only changing collective memory but also recombining orality and literacy in a new and often explosive manner. Despite their deep incompatibility, there were always traces of orality in literacy, long before computers were invented (think of jokes, which are funnier when told in person than read in a book). Orality lost its legitimacy for collective memory to literacy but never entirely disappeared. Now digitization – especially online social networking – creates novel hybrids, whereby literate elements suddenly appear in oral settings and vice versa.

For example, there is no such thing as authorship – or copyright – in orality because the tales are continually being retold by new tellers. There doesn’t seem to be much place for authorship and copyright online, where texts are continually being circulated by new users: not retold but recommended, re-tweeted or even plagiarized. The oral tales retold the most become the cornerstones of collective memory, just as the online sites with the most hits get the most attention, although the information can be as trivial as dog tricks. Oral societies don’t have the interiorized, private subjectivity proper to literacy; Facebook doesn’t either.

Such hybrids are explosive because they bring the constant circulation of orality to the eternal storage of literacy. Like orality, digitization shares; like literacy, digitization never forgets a single detail, however compromising it may come later in life. In a way online digitization subjects literacy to the rules of orality, despite the computer’s dependence on reading and writing skills. The move from typewriter-like keyboards to touchscreens may just reflect the end of literacy’s reign over orality as our primary way of saving, retrieving and sharing events.

frieze is a testimony to many changes over the last two decades, which are explored in this anniversary issue. But by hitting the news-stands at the dawn of online digitization, the magazine captures the transformation of collective memory: a seismic shift from a predominantly literate model to an infusion of orality into literacy. Just as classicists once read Homer not only for the poetry but also to grasp the shift from orality to literacy in ancient Greece, so art historians may some day read frieze not only for the art but also to grasp the impact of digitization on art writing and history. I’m no clairvoyant, but some characteristics already stand out, such as the equal value placed on a critic’s personal narrative (oral storytelling) and theory (philosophical literacy). Of course, the rest is for a columnist of the future to figure out.

What was the first piece of art that really mattered to you?
My early memory of art is of revolutionary posters. They had a very strong impact on me as a child.

If you could live with only one piece of art what would it be?
I have no favourite piece of art. I am more interested in the artist than in the work.

What should change?
What should stay the same?
Everything should change and everything should stay the same.

What could you imagine doing if you didn’t do what you do?
Imagination is part of what I do now. If I didn’t do what I am doing today I would have no imagination.

What is your favourite title of an art work?
Untitled.

What music are you listening to?
I never listen to music.

What do you like the look of?
I like the look of anything. Everything is interesting to me.

What images keep you company in the space where you work?
Normally we don’t have any images in our working space – with one exception: a list of the names and birthdates of 5,000 students who died in the earthquake in Sichuan in 2008 is posted on one wall.

The experience of visiting ‘Introspective’, Richard Hamilton’s extensive and - so he claims - final retrospective, is one of having visited the Science Museum of Pop - or a vision of how such a museum might appear in, say, 50 years time. The impact leaves you giddy for days, concussed by the sensation of having seen the modern world explained - the whole trip, from the vivacity of early Rock and Roll to the frozen, lunar stillness of a world cocooned in technology and media.

Now 81 and working on the second volume of his visual autobiography, Hamilton delivered a definition of Pop art back in 1957 that has yet to be improved on or updated - nothing less than the anatomy of Mass Age culture. His list of Pop’s defining adjectives - including ‘Transient (short-term solution)’, for instance, and ‘Expendable (easily forgotten)’ - comprise an understanding of both the symptoms and the consequences of an increasingly accelerated culture. He had already pronounced the ambient nature of the total Pop environment in his ‘Fun House’ installation created for the Independent Group’s 1956 exhibition ‘This Is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, London - a work that briefs the viewer with Hamilton’s vision of the post-1946 consumer age as a kind of unyielding bombardment of slick, gaudy, eroticized signifiers - at once seductive and disruptive.

It still feels as though this is tomorrow. Hamilton’s mixed-media work seems the product of a near future age - a post-art age, perhaps - when aesthetics, science, ethnography, satire, requiem, celebration and humanism have been merged without the self-consciousness of dogma into a living, philosophical survey of humankind’s relationship with the pleasures and perils of advanced technological consumerism. Hamilton’s art describes the tension between our appetite for the compensatory pleasures of modern living - our hunger for glamour, celebrity, and the sheer aesthetic gorgeousness of a refined, product-led culture - and the ways in which our desires are duped by those same obsessions. He both celebrates the fetishized surface of Mass Age culture, and is busily at work within its contradictions - creating an epic narrative of modern experience, the principal theme of which, perhaps, is the relation of technology to desire.

You can find this in such early work as Man, Machine and Motion (1956) - with its almost Kraftwerk-like, ‘mensch maschine’, interpolation of the machine becoming one with human beings - and in Hamilton’s reconstruction and mesmeric typographical interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23) - a body of work made between 1966 and 1999. There is in Hamilton’s fascination with the taut, almost erotic relationship between a notion of robotics and human physicality - sensuality, even - the foundation of his ultra-modernity as an artist. Like several of the other founding pioneers of Mass Age culture - Marshall McLuhan and Roland Barthes to name just two - he presents an acuity and an aesthetic which seems not only to have anticipated the flamboyance of much postmodernism, but already assigned such thinking to its place in a white, chilled museum of contemporary thought and culture.

In Hamilton’s ‘Swingeing London 67’ series of oil on canvas screenprints (1968-9), for instance, we see the whole parade of celebrity and media - but as it might be reported from the 22nd century; such frozen images of modernity - his ‘Richard’-branded objects, Carafe (1978) and Ashtray (1979) share this chilled poise in relation to advertising - establish an aesthetic in Hamilton’s art in which we seem to see the present from the future. We are at once immersed in the contemporary experience of the world, and disengaged from its cultural baggage: rock stars and fashion models, hotel lobbies and domestic technology, turd-inhabited advert-style sunsets and pristine computers - they all achieve an eloquence in Hamilton’s art which speaks of the contract between our aspirations, empathy, and inner notion of an index of modern signifiers.

But Hamilton is also never still; a great artist in the classical tradition, he endlessly tests and refines his work. Even his work from the 1960s seems more modern - more in tune with tomorrow - than most of today’s ‘contemporary culture’. (His 1968 design for the sleeve of the so-called White Album by the Beatles remains one of the most aggressively modern artefacts ever produced - not unlike the music it housed.) Underpinned by the joyous intellectualism of his lifelong obsessions with James Joyce and Duchamp (pretty much the architects of Modernism) Hamilton’s career to date comprises a body of work created over 55 years that comes across as the diagrams, working models and machines that seem to define both the world we live in now and the one that we may yet live to inhabit.

It’s all there: the coming to terms with the supremacy and immediacy of surface; the conversion of the artist into an ambiguous brand; the identification of glamour as perhaps the most determined form of social energy; the usefulness of transgressive or absurd imagery, its potency increased by the meticulous punning on materials and contexts; the adaptation of technology to aesthetic purpose; the role of selective vision in a culture of information anxiety and visual stress; the rhetoric of irony; the seductions of colour and the erotics of form. Above all, Hamilton conjures with the power of absence (that which is hidden, obscured or removed) and the refined capacities of montage - a directive that may have been what led one of his former students, the singer Bryan Ferry, to remark in 1975 about his own conversion of Pop art into art Pop, ‘I am, you might say, a collagiste’.

Hamilton’s most iconic work - Interior 1 (1964) for instance, or the monolithic twin canvases of The Citizen (1982-3) - become a means of appreciating the force and generosity with which some of his lesser-known pieces become so compelling, and so articulate of the modern world, and how his ‘Lobby’ paintings from the late 1980s, as much as his ‘Fashion Plate (cosmetic study)’ series of mixed-media collages from 1969, maintain a creative chemistry that fuses the cold sheen of freshly minted machine parts with sumptuous painterly aesthetics. The dynamo of Hamilton’s art appears to be the maintained and controlled collision between the sensual and the mass-produced. As such Hamilton inhabits the pre-history of Postmodernism and convergence culture with an almost uncanny acuity, prophesying time and time again the devices and directions in which visual culture is most likely to proceed.

Ultimately, particularly through his profound relationship with the art and ideas of Duchamp Hamilton emerges as the great philosopher-scientist of the modern age: an artist inventor of undimming good humour, whose work provides the soul with strength to face a not too terrible hereafter.
 
 

It’s hard to know where to begin.

Elaine Sturtevant made Warhol Empire State, a black and white film, in 1972. Although I have never seen it, to remake Warhol’s most notorious, ‘unwatchable’, and purely conceptual movie is an act of great, breathtaking beauty - in a way not unlike Douglas Sirk’s making of Imitation of Life (1959) anew. Warhol Empire State situates Sturtevant’s project in terms of contemporaneity; what is seen and unseeable; what causes thinking and what passes unthought.

In 1991, Sturtevant presented an entire show consisting of her repetition of Warhol’s ‘Flowers’ series. It was not the first time (although what ‘first time’ means in terms of seeing and re-seeing art is important to consider) she had investigated the flash and physics of encountering this work. In the mid-60s, she asked Warhol for the original silkscreen with which he had made his ‘Flowers’ - an image he appropriated, not uninterestingly, from a Kodak ad - to make hers. Warhol gave her the screen. At a later date, after being bombarded with questions about his process and technique, Warhol responded: ‘I don’t know. Ask Elaine.’ As Sturtevant puts it: ‘Warhol was very Warhol’. 1

This is a complicated statement. How did Warhol get to be ‘very Warhol’? How does one come to recognise - see, consider - a painting, film , or anything by Warhol once he and everything he’s done are slated only to be ‘a Warhol’? It is Sturtevant who knows how to make a Warhol, not Warhol. It is Sturtevant who allows a Warhol to be a Warhol, by repeating him. Copy, replica, mimesis, simulacra, fake, digital virtuality, clone - Sturtevant’s work has been for more than 40 years a meditation on these concepts by decidedly not being any of them.

Strangely absent from most histories of Pop and Conceptualism, her work has important ramifications for the understanding of both movements. It is as if Sturtevant, with a radical pragmatism, observed and considered so intensely the art of her contemporaries that her gaze burned through to its core. Study Sturtevant’s Stella for Picabia (1988). If the initial response is to see ‘a Stella’ and recall his famous 1962 dictum ‘what you see is what you see’, then to avoid vertigo upon figuring out that the painting is not by Stella, the viewer must hold on to everything usually thought about Stella and consider what it would be for all of it not to be what it was. Sturtevant discerned a way to present what you cannot see as what is seen. In no small part due to her being positioned as the original appropriator, and because she has made Sturtevants of certain Duchamp pieces, her philosophical consideration of her contemporaries and of contemporaneity has been short-changed. If Stella is a crucial impetus, so is Lichtenstein - in particular his amazing painting Image Duplicator (1963). She looked into, through, and beyond the eyes beaming out from Lichtenstein’s image. She eyed the science, the fiction, and the possibility of the sci-fi interlocutor’s demand: ‘What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?’ Sturtevant’s project has been to pragmatically demonstrate what she knows, and how and why how what she knows operates.

In ‘Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art,’ the final essay of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999), Thomas Crow examines the necessity of interrogating the ‘assumed primacy of visual illusion as central to the making and understanding of a work of art’, and focuses on how Sturtevant ‘acutely defined the limitations of any history of art wedded to the image.’ 2 Sturtevant’s project questions the primacy of visual illusion - not by marking a point in the 60s when this became necessary, but by her repetitions demonstrating how aesthetics has, all along, been structured and determined by whatever is understood to be the non-visual, the non-retinal - the unseen and thought. Through her exploration of the underpinnings of what the encounter and/or physics nominated as ‘art’ is, she dematerialises the primacy of the object and of the visual, but not by abandoning the object, the methods of its making, or even visuality itself; this is why her work is stranger and more promising than even Crow suggests. She provides immanence - and it’s contrafactual. Sturtevant has written: ‘It is imperative that I see, know, and visually implant every work that I attempt. Photographs are not taken and catalogues [are] used only to check size and scale. The work is done predominantly from memory, using the same techniques, making the same errors and thus coming out in the same place. The dilemma is that technique is crucial but not important.’ 3 Crucial that she paints, makes, does - but not important, crucial ‘to find a way to use an object that would not present itself as an object, that would at the same time talk about the structure of aesthetics as the idea.’ 4 Not exactly jettisoning the history of art, she always illuminates the potential of art’s contemporaneity - which partly explains, for example, why she repeated a Muybridge (a study of a woman - Sturtevant - walking with hands on hips) in 1966, as well as Warhol Flowers in 1964-65, 1969-70, 1990, and 1991. From Duchamp Fresh Window (1992), to Beuys Fat Chair (1974), Lichtenstein Happy Tears (1966-67), and Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (1997), Sturtevant repeats works for the necessity of a catalytic recognisability, sparking an investigation of what allows ‘art’ to be, so that the entirety of the structure of art is reconsidered horizontally not linearly. 5

Sturtevant had her first her solo show in 1965 at the Bianchini Gallery. It included Sturtevants of Warhol’s ‘Flowers’, a Johns ‘Flag’, an Oldenburg shirt, a Segal sculpture, a Rauschenberg drawing, a Stella concentric painting, and a Rosenquist. When she redid the show a year later in Paris, there was a difference: ‘the gallery was locked at all times, making the show visible only from the street.’ 6 Originally most of her artistic peers supported her work, and even sceptical critics often applauded what they interpreted to be her savvily making fun of the artists and art of the moment, showing how ridiculous contemporary art was by doing something even more absurd. The climate began to shift when, in April 1967, she repeated The Store of Claes Oldenburg at 623 E. 9th St., a few blocks from where Oldenburg had made his Store on E. 2nd St. By the mid-70s, as Christian Leigh has noted: ‘What had at first been laughed at and appreciated for all the wrong reasons [...] quickly turned to anger, rage, mistrust, and misunderstanding on a collective scale.’ 7 After her 1974 Beuys exhibition at Onnasch Gallery, New York, Sturtevant ‘made a slow and conscious decision to stop making work. A theoretical stance rather than a defeated withdrawal, she felt that the combined hostility could only dilute and dissipate the power of her work.’ 8 Some have interpreted Sturtevant’s withdrawal as a repetition of Duchamp’s silence, his abandoning art for chess-playing and breathing. Her work would not be seen again until the 1986 White Columns show in New York.

Sturtevant as Beuys, walking down the street for the frontispiece of her 1992 Württembergischer Kunstverein survey, or with a pie in her face for Study for Beuys Action (1971); as Duchamp, in Duchamp’s Wanted (1969), or covered with shaving cream curved into devilish horns for Duchamp’s Man Ray Portrait (1966); as Cranach’s Eve with Robert Rauschenberg as Adam for Duchamp’s Relache (1967). John Miller has been the only writer to identify an inherent Feminist critique as part of Sturtevant’s project. This is something the artist denies, although she suggested such a possibility in a letter to Francis M. Naumann, writing that her intention ‘was not to anger anyone but rather “to engender polemics”, to “give visible action to dialectics”, and “to narrow the gap between the visible and articulate”.’ 9 I would want to question her choice of the word ‘engender’. While Sturtevant’s project is not limited, nor reducible, to an investigation of how the concepts of ‘genius’ and ‘original’ are conditioned by ‘gender’, I do believe that her work concerns the polemics of engendering and its relation to being, identity, and selfhood. To one critic who inquired whether it is ‘important that you do the work of exclusively male artists?’ Sturtevant replied: ‘Oh no, that question!

It never dawned on me. My choices were made on another level.’ 10 She has made a work by Yvonne Rainer, but when pressed on whether she saw gender/biography as having little to do with her project, or if there were a fluidity about the imaginary that overwhelms/disregards gender/biography, she responded: ‘Surely you don’t want me to reiterate. Gender discourse has nothing to do with the work. Why agitate? Why bring it up? A[nswer]: desire & drive to/for surface + flacks probing issues.’ To bring the issue to a complete halt, she added: ‘These questions are not for you/you.’

Miller situates Sturtevant provocatively in the tradition of the dandy, but unlike the numerous male artists who ‘cultivate a persona infused with artifice in order to project an aura of exceptionality, their female counterparts tend to concentrate on selfhood itself as artifice, foregoing Romantic pretensions of genius.’ Miller invokes Wilde’s aperçu - ‘it is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything’. He goes on to describe Sturtevant: ‘By raising the challenge of an artistry divorced from the production of new imagery, she calls closer attention to art as discourse than before, making it, rather than the art object per se, the subject of connoisseurship.’ 11

How gender appears and disappears (part of the body’s difference, the body as difference), how it can be destabilised by looking like exactly what it is not, potentially analogises some of the ways Sturtevant’s repetitions work. She has written that it is Duchamp’s ‘reluctant indifference [...] his repetitive indifference, lack of intention, non-commitment - a sort of throwing away; letting it all go’ which has captivated her most, not his objects. Sturtevant’s words beautifully repeating, yet not exactly repeating, continue: ‘What Duchamp did not do, not what he did, which is what he did, locates the dynamics of his work. [...] The grand contradiction is that giving up creativity made him a great creator.’ 12 She concludes that ‘how Duchamp lived contains the functional totality of his work.’ Despite her own indifference to biography, her own appearance as difference - somewhat Rrose Sélavy-like - in certain of her works, and given her most recent pieces focusing on the body as object (using parts of nude bodies collaged with objects - such as a breast juxtaposed with the top of the Empire State building), Sturtevant begins to provide a trenchant commentary on identity and self. 13 On the back of a recent catalogues, over the image of a glorious fuschia field and a rising Batman figure, appear the words ‘Body, Objects, Image’. Sturtevant has said that the work concentrates on the ‘cybernetic overload, the danger of rejecting objects, about “having” instead of “being”.’ 14 The announcement card for a concurrent show at Air de Paris had World Cup soccer players kicking the ball, and on the verso the Adidas logo; both recto and verso were diagonally crossed by the phrase: ça va aller (everything’s going to be all right). She wrote to me about this card: ‘Simply put & it is simple: mass culture is art and not reverse’.

Some of the redefinitions and reversals are perhaps more ominous. Her video in the Paris show, Copy without Origins, Self as Disappearance (1998), demonstrates how her work has never been historical (nostalgic homage) but proleptic. The video examines ‘our cyberworld making copyright a myth, origins a romantic notion; with self as information, and identity as disappearance.’ If the body is an object, how does one object if one wishes to, and what occurs if virtuality dispenses with the need for bodies altogether, everything seemingly electronic, light and immaterial? To consider the questions raised by Sturtevant’s work, appalling or enthralling, remember Warhol’s automatonism, his body as invisible sculpture, absence; think about the human as only an affect or effect, a device of the aesthetic. See the number of Sturtevant yous, the number of Sturtevant mes making up whoever me is. Self and being as immanent contrafactions.

Every word she wrote to me was a facsimile. It’s hard to know where to begin.

Daido Moriyama is a digital flâneur, a street photographer who doesn’t look through a viewfinder, but through the small screen on his camera. Writing in the exhibition catalogue of ‘Daido Tokyo’, his current exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, the eminent Japanese artist describes his extreme sensitivity to place: walking in Shinjuku by night, ‘I find myself flinching for some reason, even though nothing particular has happened. Shadow-spirits squirm amid the darkness of the back streets, under the lights and neon signs. The sight line of the small camera in my hand picks up the sensitive, insectile reactions of these wraiths, like electrical impulses.’

Daido Moriyama, from the series ‘Tokyo Color’, 2008-15, C-type print, 112 x 149 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

‘Daido Tokyo’ translates these instincts into two series of photographs, one in colour (‘Tokyo Color’, 2008–15), one in black and white (‘Dog and Mesh Tights’, 2014–15), in a fascinating study of the properties of each. Although Moriyama has worked in colour photography since the 1970s, this is his first major exhibition devoted to the medium. After photographing his native Osaka, Moriyama decided to turn his lens on Shinjuku, a red-light district in western Tokyo filled with bars and strip-clubs, which he calls ‘a formidable den of iniquity’; though he can’t admit to loving the place, it has an undeniable hold on him. ‘The more chimeric and labyrinthine it is,’ he writes, ‘the more powerfully its enigmatic magnetism captures me.’

‘Tokyo Color’ is a series of 86 chromogenic prints in smudgy, saturated tones, presented unframed on large pieces of poster-board, highlighting the impressionistic, anti-technical side of Moriyama’s practice. He has an eye for the industrial sublime: the rust stains on the side of a stucco building, silver air-ducts snaking down its façade (making Renzo Piano’s Centre Pompidou look like a sanitized Playmobil of a building by comparison); the baroque, almost abstract, snarl of wires on a telephone pole, of all colours, patterns and sizes. Looking at it, you have to wonder: how does this mess form a system, or make possible any kind of communication?

These images of urban decay and disarray are juxtaposed with images of nature – tangled tree branches next to furry yellow fruit; ivy climbing a building above a junkyard of discarded refrigerators, ovens and other large appliances. Some of the images are lurid, even sensationalist: a woman removes her jeans to reveal her thong, a man is seen in dark profile against a red background; they self-consciously announce themselves as ‘photos of Tokyo’s seedy underbelly’. Far more difficult to parse is the small bathtub filled with neon purple water, or the giant gold (fake) spider behind a window, looking set to devour the city.

The second part of the exhibition is a series of black and white photographs converted from digital colour, ‘Dog and Mesh Tights’. Projected in four floor-to-ceiling panels, the photographs change every five seconds or so, from left to right, like pages being turned in a book. As in the colour photographs, Daido plays with surfaces and networks, occasionally capturing the (often deprived) people who live within them. Soda machines, backs of buildings, forgotten Christmas decorations – the city offers the camera a rich landscape of textures. In the background is a lively soundscape; occasionally it goes quite quiet and all you can hear is bird-call, a five o’clock song that echoes across the four panels, unifying these different spots in the city. But the constantly shifting series of photographs means you can never dwell on anything for long; Daido’s lens momentarily captures parts of the city that are hard to look at but his gaze quickly shifts us on to the next image. It’s a cruel mirror of the way we live in cities, seeing more than we want to, forever looking away.

London’s Vitrine, after flirting with an additional, more orthodox location in 2012–15, has reverted to showing behind a 16-metre glass frontage on Bermondsey Square. (The gallery will open a new space in Basel in April.) It’s not an obvious setting for sculpture – though viewable 24/7 from the street, works can’t be seen in the round – but Jamie Fitzpatrick relishes it as a stage-like setting for his inherently theatrical work.

Fitzpatrick received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in 2015 and has recently been included in significant group shows including ‘UK/Raine’ at Saatchi Gallery and Bloomberg New Contemporaries. It’s easy to see why he has drawn attention: there’s an in-your-face swagger to his artfully messed-up figures in wood, wax and polyurethane foam and their intermittent motorized movements draw further surprised attention. His visual language originates in a critique of public sculpture, which Fitzpatrick sees as having lost historical context: as the great individuals represented fade from the collective memory, statues remain as general symbols of systems of social privilege.

(loudly) chomp, chomp, chomp is a three-part play written by the artist, with its sculptural protagonists set against the backdrop formed by the ten-page script, which has been printed onto giant sheets. According to Fitzpatrick’s text: ‘A GENTLEMAN of some standing has been unsaddled from his HORSE. This fall has left him in a state of irrecoverable illness. A NURSE has been charged with the job of facilitating him back to health.’ The text behind the tableau informs us that the horse, having borne a historically important man for some centuries, has taken the chance to bite his burden, who has been thus reduced to legs and a head. The meal has given the horse severe indigestion. The nurse has no sympathy for the animal and concentrates on a plan to fill the gaps in her master’s flesh with manure. The horse, though, resists the urge to defecate and so she beats it. The horse gives in eventually, but seems to escape – whether into death or the distance isn’t clear – at the end of the scene. The stage is flecked with excremental brown lumps and every now and then the nurse’s mouth gapes, the horse’s jaw chomps and the gentleman presses a comically long nose against the window as though both thumbing it at us and mocking our noses-against-glass voyeurism

Fitzpatrick ridicules what he terms ‘the arrogance of permanence’ in the gentleman – and, by implication, authority figures in general – by establishing multiple contrasts with the conventions of memorial statuary. His figure is elevated by neither horse nor pedestal; is made mostly of transitory and base materials with a shoddy, even ugly, aesthetic; has exaggerated proportions and missing body parts; is confined behind glass; makes twitchy, cheekily irreverent mechanical movements; and acts out a demotic text.

All of this generates some energy, but neither approach nor theme is particularly new. The aesthetic is a mash-up of Paul McCarthy and Phyllida Barlow, and the pomp of historic statuary is both an easy target – who, now, upholds the colonial values it typically embodies? – and one which has been widely tackled. Consider, for example, the work of Hew Locke and Folkert de Jong, or the commissions for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, almost all of which have had an aspect of such a critique. Moreover, MeeKyoung Shin’s Written in Soap – A Plinth Project in Cavendish Square (2013–ongoing) – which recreates the site’s original but long-gone sculpture of the Duke of Cumberland in soap – is a more direct way of addressing the mutability of history’s judgements about who is important.

Nonetheless, Fitzpatrick mashes up his sources up with verve and brio, and puts a fresh emphasis on the theatrical. The artist has spoken of plans to create audio texts for his acting sculptures, for example, which might suit more direct and current political content. Certainly, it will be interesting to see where he goes from here.

The second edition of the Van Abbemuseum’s exhibition series ‘Positions’ presents four significant bodies of work by artists interested in the relationship between art, art history and current political events. Chief curator Annie Fletcher has invited Anna Boghiguian, Chia-Wei Hsu, Nástio Mosquito and Sarah Pierce to present their investigations into techniques of storytelling and forms of testimony. The conversation among them does not emerge from a shared concern; instead, it represents individual instances of upheaval, revolution and trauma from multiple perspectives. 

‘Positions #2’ opens with a dimly-lit room featuring Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau (2015), one of two films by Taiwanese artist Hsu. The film reassesses the forgotten histories of veterans of the Chinese civil war (1927–50) who fled to a tiny village on the Thai-Burmese border, and ended up working for the CIA against the communists. Using the ruins of the former CIA office as a stage, masked Thai puppeteers recreate an ancient myth, narrated by a priest who temporarily worked as a CIA spy. The story serves as an allegory of the men’s loss of identity and their recurring entanglement in the intrigues of global politics.

Pierce’s Gag (2015) recuperates the debris from the museum’s previous exhibition to create what looks like an exploded, three-dimensional El Lissitzky design. Evoking deconstruction and reconstruction, and bridging disparate art-historical references, Pierce displays an eclectic sense of history. As its title suggests, the work explores the ability of artists to voice the political – or not – through the use of the tableaux, a display strategy employed by revolutionary Russian artists like Lissitzky, but also by artist Alice Milligan, whose radical yet overlooked tableaux vivants played a significant role in the Irish Revival of the early 20th century. The proximity of aesthetics and history is equally at hand in Meaning of Greatness (2006) and Intelligence of the Measured Hand (2011), in which Pierce investigates concepts of mastery and originality through the work of Eva Hesse and Joseph Beuys respectively. Pierce’s meticulous recreation of Hesse’s Untitled (Rope Piece) (1970) hangs from the ceiling, along with archival material from the Kent State University shootings of 1970 and student drawings by Pierce’s mother, who worked around the same time as Hesse. The work enacts a kind of forensic examination of the cultural and political conditions that define and frame an artist’s practice.

Four enormous rooms painted in shades of bright yellow and pink are dedicated to the work of Caïro-born Boghiguian – by far the most enthralling position in this exhibition. Poetry permeates Boghiguian’s work, which is the fruit of her constant wanderlust. Firmly resisting white cube conditions, the work demands display formats that reinforce its tactile, earthly nature. Although The Salt Traders (2015) recently premiered at the Istanbul Biennial in the form of a large installation, ‘Positions’ focuses on the extraordinary series of coloured drawings that trace the history of salt in political liaisons, as a vital mineral, and even as the source of revolution. A new installation, inspired by a failed bombing attempt in Paris in 1995, acquires added poignancy in light of the recent events in Paris.

The exhibition’s timeliness is even more palpable in two daunting installations by Angolian musician, performer and artist Nástio Mosquito. Ser Humano (2015) is a compilation of found footage showing black bodies pushing at the fences of undisclosed borders, overlaid with a dark, pulsating soundtrack, and political lyrics projected on the floor. Mosquito’s vanguard practice attempts to revive the written word, which he feels has become increasingly devoid of meaning. Language, for sure, remains a powerful artistic tool, resurfacing throughout the exhibition as a historical corrective, or the repository of lost memories. Despite the absence of an overarching theme, ‘Positions’ dwells on the shifts and collisions that continually affect us, delivering unorthodox stories as alternative histories.

What images keep you company in the space where you work?
I used to have a Straight To Hell poster on the wall of my last solid workplace. It was an amulet against squeamish homophobes.

What was the first piece of art that really mattered to you?
It wasn’t a single work, but two solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London: Mariko Mori in 1998 and Shirin Neshat in 2000. Seeing seminal works by non-Western women was exactly what I needed at the time.

What is your favourite title of an artwork?
The only favourites I have are exclusively in the food and beverage department.

What do you wish you knew?
All the languages in the world.

What should change?
A lot, but let’s start with cultural and racial hegemony.

What should stay the same?
A lot, but let’s go with flora and fauna and the general environment.

What could you imagine doing if you didn’t do what you do?
Teaching.

What are you reading?
The New Jim Crow (2010) by Michelle Alexander.

What music are you listening to?
An amazing Bedouin genre that I will refrain from naming for fear it will be plundered by net-savvy children.

A key figure of the creative community in and around downtown New York from the 1960s until his death from AIDS-related illness in 1987, Peter Hujar photographed scenes that seem at once highly composed and intensely matter-of-fact. His works focus with unflinchingly crisp detail on the gritty and avant-garde subcultures he navigated throughout his adult life. Taken between 1963 and 1985, the small and resolutely square black and white photographic prints in ‘21 Pictures’, on view at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, reveal Hujar’s broad range of interests and abilities, their dark tones suggestive of subdued intimacy.

It feels reductive to call these prints ‘black and white.’ The array of silvers and greys in Parked Car, Brooklyn (1976) and Lower Manhattan from the Harbor (1976) are exemplary of the expansive spectrum in Hujar’s exposures. The tonalities and textures of the silver gelatin prints remain rich in these scenes dating back more than half a century. 

Among several nude male portraits is one featuring Hujar’s one-time lover, the artist Paul Thek, riding a large taxidermy zebra in parody of a martial equestrian statue (Paul Thek, Nude, Astride Zebra, 1965). Another, Bruce De Sainte Croix (1976), captures its subject nearly centred within the frame, staring at his unabashedly erect penis with seeming appreciation. Other close-up studies include a young John Waters, supine and dreamy-eyed, and an equally relaxed if still thoughtful Susan Sontag, also reclining. Divine is photographed starkly glamorous in all white at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Madeline Kahn’s tense pose and dark shroud seem shamanistic in a photograph from 1981. 

Candid portraits of cross-dressing artists such as Divine and Ethyl Eichelberger capture the subjects’ bodies in motion with a high degree of poise. Wrapped in encompassing dress and headscarf, Divine appears like a large modernist sculpture moving through dark space, while Eichelberger self-consciously emulates the sentimentality of Victorian portrait photography by posing as a grieving woman in Ethyl Eichelberger as Auntie Bellum (1983). Hujar’s formalist approach simultaneously amplifies and allays the social contraventions of his sitters. His images directly confront troubling and transgressive subjects such as death, uninhibited sexuality and non-normative gender expression.

Elegiac depictions of mortality recur throughout the exhibition. The vanitas of Broken Dishes, Newark (1985), for instance, shows a bleak tableau of chipped and piled plates next to overturned cups, while Palermo Catacombs #2 (1963) captures a single skull resting in the gauzy trappings of its owner’s final costume, the crepuscular light of the underground catacombs making both figure and ground appear flat and abstract.

Time, meanwhile, has turned many cultural taboos from Hujar’s era into cultural norms. His contemporary Robert Mapplethorpe has become celebrated for the transgressive subjects of some of his photographs as well as for the polish with which they are depicted. If the sight of a bullwhip up Mapplethorpe’s ass still startles, neither the displayed sexuality of Mapplethorpe’s or Hujar’s nudes nor the gender deviance of Hujar’s drag performers provokes the kind of charge they once did. Both photographers produced images of subjects that were knowingly outré (nude men engaging in sexual acts) but also of figures already accepted by the cultural mainstream (Kahn and Diana Vreeland). Presented side-by-side in fine art contexts, these disparate subjects become equally appreciable for their formal, even classical beauty.

In Hujar’s pictures, it is the intimations of mortality that remain most striking: the leftover food and human remains, the fading vitality of celebrities and artists on their deathbeds. Seen now, these photographs recall the waning of countercultural movements that seethed in Hujar’s time, at least until the 1980s, when AIDS ravaged the artistic community of New York, claiming the lives of the artist and most of his subjects. These photographs are poignant traces of the social and cultural difference that Hujar embodied, as well as signs of its passing.