reviews

Shirin Neshat Yu Honglei Matthew Barney Mathaf Museum / Doha Antenna Space / Shangai MONA / Berriedale (Tasmania)

Shirin Neshat’s show at Doha’s Mathaf is Yu Honglei’s “Fat Mouse” looks like a At an epic six hours, River of Fundament called “Afterwards.” It might have been primitive land infected by space-age (2014) is an operatic film that combines better titled “Beforehand,” so heavily does aesthetics. Three spheres on tripods, each scripted scenes with three elaborate live it insist on the Iranian-American artist’s 1.5 meters in diameter (Mud Ball 1, Mud performances that took place across Los “glory days” of portraiture, blithely ignoring Ball 2, Mud Ball 3, 2014) recall Eero Aarnio’s Angeles, Detroit and Brooklyn between her more compelling narrative work. famous “Ball Chair,” yet possesses the 2007 and 2013. Loosely based on Norman At the exhibition’s physical core is the texture of crude pottery. There is also a line Mailer’s book Ancient Evenings (1983), the viscerally dramatic video Turbulent (1998): of totem poles made of bright green wigs (A film sees the transmigration of the human a static man in white sings to a theater full Week of Hers, 2014) that formally suggest soul as symbolized by three American of men on one screen, a black-clad woman Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. In automobiles that are ritualistically destroyed whirls and wails in emptiness on the other. a work inspired by Wolfgang Laib’s piece and transformed. The monumental Behind this gallery hangs Women of Allah of the same title (Rice House, 2014), three sculptural “remnants” of these staged (1993–1997), the photographic series of metal objects sit on a light olive-yellow actions, along with a series of drawings, gun-touting, chador-wearing, calligraphy- block: a long house, an eight ball, and an vitrines and storyboards, make up a large- clad women that arguably propelled Neshat architectural structure formed by a sphere, a scale exhibition at MONA. Traveling from to fame. It is flanked by two newer series cube, a pyramid and disks. Like Rice House, the Haus der Kunst, Munich, this version of “clustered” portraits: “The Masses” from Woman in Venice and Fat Chair adopt the is distinctly unique; Barney included fifty The Book of Kings (2012), based on 10th- same (non-linear) logic and methodology; pieces from the museum’s impressive century Persian poet Ferdowsi’s dynastic they start with reproductions of works of collection of Egyptian antiquities. chronicle Shahnameh; and Our House is the same name by Alberto Giacometti and Considering that the film will only on Fire (2014), rows of on-the-brink-of- Joseph Beuys. Yu’s animation Take a Walk be screened four times in Hobart and is tears portraits of Cairo residents allegedly (2014) is shown; is built upon an audio inextricably linked to the show, the eight recalling their tragic losses during the collage of music by Michael Jackson — “storyboard vitrines” are an essential revolution, the amplified sentimentality whose images haunt the video — it is also component and demonstrate the multitude undercut by interspersed shots of calligraphy- an art history test: images of contemporary of historic and cultural references at covered feet bearing coroner’s tags. artworks, pop up along with the music. play. The delicate drawings also serve The Neshat hallmarks are all here — Summoning the “king of pop” does not to map the project’s conceptual arc. the muted body language, the deft veils merely celebrate the long affinity between The sculptures reveal a new aesthetic of calligraphy, the raw black-and-white art and pop culture, but also acknowledges sensibility in which the artist departs starkness, the murkiness of interpretation. how the production of contemporary from his characteristic use of petroleum And yet “Afterwards” is hollow: after the art is often similar. Institutionalization, jelly and thermal plastic and embarks narrative flourish of Neshat’s feature mass production and over-interpretation on an intense exploration of ancient and film Women Without Men (2009), of images and discourses in art lay the experimental casting processes. First and these portraits seem flat, formulaic. ground for predigested prescriptions and foremost a sculptor, Barney essentially The curation does little to help. The highly aesthetic standardizations. The mechanism translates the narrative of Ancient Evenings symmetric layout is “based on the binary is demonstrated by Yu’s Untitled (2014) through a material progression, starting structure 10101,” boasts the catalogue — thirty-eight A5 images resembling with base metals like iron and zinc, moving text. And while Neshat’s work springs from children’s flash cards, with names and through the alloys to copper and bronze, considerations embracing such binary images of banal objects on them. With such eventually reaching brass. The blackened oppositions — black/white, public/private, objects, we seldom question the seamless bronze Canopic Chest (2009–11) was traditional/modern, male/female — the show matching of the signifier and the signified. cast with the remains of the front of the fails to plumb the very ambiguities that arise Their qualities and contexts are exhausted 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial from the from these tensions. It’s as if these subtleties once they appear and disappear in banality first act, while Crown Victoria is a zinc cast have been mathematized out of the space, and functionality. The overexposed of the third vehicle’s undercarriage. flattened into platitudes, cornering Neshat’s images of artworks are is the same: the A highlight is four new sculptures created vision into an unfortunate predictability. art vanishes behind its own images. Yu’s using a primitive water-casting process. The Ultimately, Afterwards functions like appropriation of existing works accelerates resulting cavity-filled “heads” sit atop MONA’s ornamental calligraphy to the eyes of this exposure and gives it a Lefebvre-ish ancient Egyptian coffins, reminding us of the non-Farsi speakers: it hints at meaning, rhythm — a repetition and difference. perpetual cycle of creation, destruction and but at the same time deprives us of it. regeneration that is at the core of this project. by Venus Lau by Kevin Jones by Lucy Rees

100 — january / february 2015