The exhibition in its entirety spanned three spaces: the mezzanine at the top of the stairs which displayed Inscriptions, and two darkened galleries. Inside Gallery 1 was found the multi-screen installation, Reports to an Academy, 2015, a sequence of four video works shown across three of the room’s four walls. Anti-clockwise from right to left were the shelves of an academic library, a stone wall shot on the island of Inis Oírr, vitrines containing stuffed animals from Dublin’s ‘Dead Zoo’, and the white walls of a studio space. Each image of this installation is strikingly still and each space flooded by water, the four scenes each becoming cross-sections of a drowned world. In each screen the water has risen up to a similar horizon line that reflected the space at the top of the image into the space below. Human life appears to have vacated these visions of a beautiful apocalypse composed of gently rippling water and slow-moving clouds that dreamily float through interior spaces. The only signs of life here are a number of relaxed looking birds of prey, an intriguing and recurring motif in Ní Bhriain’s practice.

 
Reports to an Academy was first shown at the RHA, Dublin, in 2015, as four large-scale video projections in a room blacked out with paint. Here at The Dock the whole room was cloaked in bespoke blackout curtains, which stopped light spillages and made the subtle yet evocative soundtrack seem softer. Large LED screens now brought the meticulously composed imagery into sharper definition and the colour was more vibrant. The swathes of a fresh pink fabric, moving ever so subtly in the breeze, were energised, and petrified animals sprang forth from a dense and saturating cadmium yellow. In the current climate of increasingly restrictive budgets, especially for regional arts centres, this financial commitment from director Sarah Searson and her team at The Dock enabled the achievement of these remarkable effects, and should be highly commended.

 
Reports to an Academy evokes the title of Franz Kafka’s eponymous 1917 short story. Kafka’s tale concerns an ape who teaches himself how to be human in order to escape captivity. In the story the ape reports back to an academy on how he effected his transformation. In three of the spaces that make up Reports to an Academy we see animals out of place in rooms reserved for human study. The three interior spaces – the studio, the library, and the museum – seem intimately connected to the research-based art practice from which they are born. This makes the stone wall in a quintessentially Irish landscape seem at odds with the others. However, perhaps this ‘report’ is to an art academy – a museal look back to, and transformation of, painterly traditions. Stone walls feature heavily in the history of Irish art, from Paul Henry’s post-impressionist paintings of the west of Ireland, to the more abstract work of Sean Scully. Though lens-based, Ní Bhriain’s work is remarkably painterly, with a distinctive style untypical of film/video work. In front of this stone wall is an owl perched on a rock which protrudes from the water. In the video to the right we also saw a falcon out of place in the library. These birds of prey reappear throughout Reports…, as does an eagle, and it would seem that the primary function of these birds is to enliven the stillness of each scene. However, these hyper-real compositions, with their recurring motifs of clouds, birds of prey, and bodies of water, are also very reminiscent of the paintings of surrealist painter, René Magritte, to whom I will return.

 
Suspended somewhere between reality and the fictional world of painting, or dreams, the tension between movement and stillness in Reports… was palpable. This gave rise to an inherent difficulty with the experience of viewing this installation, as a cinematic or sequential mode of looking came into conflict with the desire to become more deeply immersed in the meditative pace of each moving image. Gallery 2 suggested one way in which this tension could be resolved. Here we found a bespoke wooden screen, which stood diagonally in the space like a monolith. Projected onto the front and back of this screen were two companion videos, Departure and Window, 2013/14. Now the visual richness of each video could be fully experienced in isolation, whilst they still felt intimately connected as two sides of the same object. Departure and Window were shot in the decrepit disused spaces of the terminal of the old Cork city airport. The same tension between moving image and photographic stillness is at play here, however; while Reports to an Academy reduces video to an almost absolute stillness, Departure and Window are composed of still images which are animated via stop-motion animation and virtual tracking shots. Overlays of shots of the sea and flocks of birds again recall Magritte.

 
Departure and Window again feature a large bird of prey, perhaps an eagle or a hawk, who commands the space. In a poignant moment in Window the bird looks up from the ground and turns towards the camera, cocking its head sideways as if taking in the presence of the viewer. In numerous shots the bird is joined by a fake-looking tree in a pot. This juxtaposition brings to mind Marcel Broodthaers who, like Ní Bhriain, was also invested in museology and surrealist legacies. The eagle was Broodthaers’ infamous emblem for art. It stood for art’s suspect character as a symbol of power and wealth. In the Département des Aigles of his ‘fictional’ Museum of Modern Art, Broodthaers brought together a display of objects and images of eagles captioned with signs that read ‘This is Not a Work of Art,’ directly referencing the famous painting by Magritte, a fellow Belgian, The Treachery of Images, 1928-9. The bird of prey in Departure and Window also has a suspect character. Though seamlessly composed, the highly mediated nature of Ní Bhriain’s works is never concealed as she reverses the operation of Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe by imbuing things from the real world with the illusory quality of painting.

 
This perfectly encapsulates German media theorist, Wolfgang Ernst’s belief that the ‘technologically neutral code’ of photographic technology collapses through digital manipulation, which returns ‘images to a prephotographic quality of painting: that characterised by the painterly brushstroke.’ (Digital Memory and the Archive, 2013) Ní Bhriain consistently exploits the malleable capacity of computer-generated imagery always exposing and never repressing the structure of her medium to the point that Departure boldly displays the green screen itself. Drawing on art historical lineages and painterly conventions, these captivating works give weight to Ernst’s argument that the digital is less a continuation of analogue film/photography, than it is a departure that returns us to painting. Yes, Ní Bhriain’s imagery is treacherous, but it is all the more sincere because of it.

 
Kirstie North is an art historian and independent curator. Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s exhibition, presented in collaboration with Domobaal, London, was on view at The Dock, 8 April – 27 May 2017.

 
In The Nation Loves It, we see an anonymous woman (actor Cathy Naden) walking across a stage of abstract shapes and colours, delivering an address comprised of extracts from various political texts. The film lasts for just under sixteen minutes and Naden’s monologue is at points interrupted by footage of her interacting with the various geometric set-pieces of the initial installation space. In her speech, Naden discusses the forthcoming construction of a building which will purportedly express her nation’s ideals. It will be, she says, ‘like the sun’: ‘shining bright and clear, warming our nation and those around us’, and ‘visible from a great distance’. The building and its construction are clear and overt metaphors for progress and the fortification of national identity, particularly in the face of globalisation.

 
The central irony, of course, is that this speech about cultural uniqueness is gleaned from numerous, almost indistinguishable, speeches of this ilk. The result is that, by weaving together so many threads, we are left with an indistinct blanket statement. Naden refers constantly to ‘our nation’, but there is no indication of which nation this might be. The literal abstraction of the space in the film externalises this indefinability, making it impossible to identify where we are, or when this might be. The only signifier to which we can cling is Naden’s English accent, but even that is destabilising: firstly, we might note that Cibic herself is Slovenian, and so the actress is serving as a literal mouthpiece for both the artist and the many unnamed politicians (and speechwriters) from whom she is quoting; secondly, in popular culture, British accents have long been exported worldwide as the dialects of fantasy worlds, such as in J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.

 
Similarly, while the original exhibition setting included many of the set-pieces from the video in its installation, giving more weight to the idea of a shared physical space between the viewer and the speaker by playfully manifesting the ‘here’ she repeatedly discusses, the film’s isolation at the Crawford makes more obvious the transferability of her words. The unifying rhetoric used by Naden’s character is powerful and persuasive, but it is revealed as just that: empty rhetoric. The speech she gives could be given by any politician, from any political party, in any nation. The amalgamated script, which was edited by writer and artist Tim Etchells, purposely keeps the origins of its words obscure. While we might assume Naden’s character is a benign figure, her affiliations are never revealed, and it is equally easy to imagine these words being used for malevolent purposes.

 
At the heart of Naden’s speech is the idea that, as she says, ‘every nation, every country, every population, no matter how big or small, has its own unique and specific qualities which don’t exist in other nations’. Though this dictum is lampooned – made almost paradoxical by the anonymity of the ‘nation’ in the film – it does highlight the universal search for a tangible, unique identity, and its rhetorical strength cannot be undermined. Indeed, although the piece was originally made in 2015, it is nearly impossible to watch ‘The Nation Loves It’ now without seeing in it the ghosts of recent political events. The piece speaks eloquently to the nationalistic drives that motivated Brexit and Trump’s presidential win, campaigns which hinged on ‘us’ and ‘them’ narratives and promises of re-invigorating a dormant but intrinsic national identity.

 
To a lesser extent, the piece is haunted, too, by the spectre of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Naden’s figure is dressed in a buttoned-up shirt and trousers in the same colours and pattern as the set through which she walks; her hair is severely parted and tied back in an ersatz masculine crop; and her makeup is minimal and natural. Cibic’s choice of a woman to play the key role is significant, and her masculinisation hints at the ways in which women are frequently required to suppress their femininity to be ‘taken seriously’ in politics. In the course of her recitation, Naden repeats certain phrases with differing intonations, re-emphasising certain words or swapping them for more impactful synonyms, in a way that suggests the artificial, studied spontaneity of political rhetoric in general, but also the careful, softening self-editing that is required of female politicians in particular.

 
Punctuating the paragraphs of the speech are scenes in which Naden engages with the extended environment of the original exhibition. Many of these interstitials can be read as playful abstractions of political processes. In one, she scrapes a geometric golden mobile until it creates a tinny cacophony, an audio-visual metaphor for the combined voices of democracy. In another, she strategically arranges triangular shapes on a table to form a larger pattern. Set to electronic background music that is at once nostalgic and futuristic, these cutaways recall the educational films made by the BBC in the 1970s and 1980s, which sought to simplify complicated ideas by explaining them visually.

 
Often humorous (‘I’m very glad – I’m very…thrilled? I’m VERY thrilled – I’m proud – I’m proud to be here’, Naden rehearses) and always visually appealing, Cibic’s film is both playful and serious. Its installation in the Crawford cleverly restages the destabilisation at the core of the film in a way that emphasises its underlying conceit, while also giving it a more slyly satirical – even, perhaps, nihilistic – slant that feels particularly appropriate for our current moment.

 
Jasmina Cibic’s The Nation Loves It was on view, 30 March – 8 July 2017.

 
Curated by Emma Chambers at Tate Britain, the exhibition brings together more than a hundred of Nash’s paintings, drawings, prints and photographs to explore how he negotiated key modernist ideas through his art, writing, and relationships with other artists. It is underpinned by an expanded approach to British art that allows Nash’s active engagement with international modernism in the 1930s and 1940s to unfold. This aspect of the exhibition sparks a dialogue with the modernist collections of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, which are on permanent display on the ground floor of the Sainsbury Centre. Moving away from the focus on ‘masterpieces’ often associated with this collection, it draws out some of the experimental ideas that artists were exploring in this period.

 
The exhibition is spread across the four spaces of the Sainsbury Centre’s subterranean galleries. It moves comfortably between Nash’s intensely personal experiences of his environment, his official duties, and his contributions to public debates about the conditions of modernism. The opening room takes the title of one of Nash’s most famous wartime paintings as its theme, We Are Making a New World (1918). It brings together the paintings that secured Nash’s public recognition in 1918, subtly pointing to tensions between his role as an official war artist and his horror at the devastation that he experienced. For example, while the emphasis of the display is on the desolation expressed in Nash’s original paintings, the inclusion of We Are Making a New World as the cover image of the Propaganda Bureau’s publication series ‘British Artists at the Front’ (1918) reminds us that his works were used to promote the war effort.

 
The second section of the exhibition steps back to examine Nash’s earliest works, focusing on the symbolism that he invested in his studies of the landscape, particularly of trees. In a series of drawings and watercolours made between 1911 and 1918, groupings of trees take on a significance and personality that are difficult to pin down. The connections are Nash’s own, introducing a personal mythology of place that he continues to develop in his later works. The shattered, burnt out trees of his official wartime paintings become part of a more private, spiritual engagement with his environment.

 
This was extended in his depictions of the English landscape in the 1920s and early 1930s. A number of these well-known paintings are included in this part of the exhibition, which spreads across a long thoroughfare connecting the opening room with the main gallery spaces. As the exhibition opens out into the first of these two large galleries, the focus shifts to Nash’s experiments with depicting found objects and architectural spaces.

 
The selection of works in this gallery mark out the impact that surrealism had on Nash’s work in the 1930s and the extent to which he aligned himself with international modernism in this period. Nash’s concern with ‘The Life of the Inanimate Object’ provides a particularly fascinating insight into this, explored here through a series of paintings, photographs, assembled sculptures and written accounts from the mid-1930s. Nash’s enthusiasm for a life force that he considered to be present in inanimate objects develops an attitude to his surroundings that was already evident in his earlier work. From the early 1930s Nash’s attachment and personification of particular landscapes extended to inanimate objects and architectural features. He began arranging what he described as ‘object-personages’, including found pieces of driftwood, stone, bone and fragments of furniture. Working closely with the artist Eileen Agar, with whom he had developed an intense relationship in 1935, Nash experimented with juxtaposing his object-personages to create photographs, collages, sculptures and paintings. The inclusion in this exhibition of Agar’s works from this period of collaboration affirms the significance of this relationship for Nash. However, it also reveals a levity and imaginative playfulness in Agar’s work that Nash’s compositions lack. His works retain a solemnity and sense of restraint that he addresses directly in his account of ‘The Life of the Inanimate Object’, written for the publication Country Life in 1937. While he describes his approach to found objects as ‘inevitably imaginative’, he does not ‘allow the prompting of the unconscious to lead me beyond a point of defensive control’. Nash’s focus was on engaging with the object itself, with releasing an inherent spirit, what he described as the mystery of ‘the living inanimate’. His references to ‘primitive’ art as a source for understanding this concept nod towards the discrete dialogue between this section of the exhibition and the Sainsbury’s diverse collection of objects from around the world, many of which were acquired in this same period.

 
Nash’s role as a public spokesman, articulating the concerns of the modern movement is also given prominence in this part of the exhibition. His contribution to and promotion of the artists’ group Unit One in the early 1930s and The International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936 are both given significant space. These projects locate Nash as part of an international network of avant-garde artists. They also usefully open up the impact that Nash’s own interpretations of surrealism had on the perception of this movement amongst the British public. The final room of the exhibition returns to Nash’s treatment of the landscape, bringing together a selection of the paintings that he made in the last decade of his life. While there are continuities with the concerns of his early works, Nash’s approach to the landscape had clearly been transformed by the new ideas and possibilities presented by surrealism. His paintings take on a more obviously dream-like, mystical quality. Totes Meer (1940-1), Nash’s evocative painting of wrecked warplanes, engulfed in the waters of a bleak, moonlit seascape, is shown here alongside his photographs of the dump site in Oxfordshire where the piles of twisted debris from the Second World War had captivated his imagination. The work was commissioned by the Ministry of Information and is recognised as one of the most important paintings of the Second World War. Again, this exhibition does not dwell on this aspect of Nash’s reputation. It sets this seminal work in a broader context, successfully drawing together the different ideas that were at stake for Nash as he sought to express a deep, emotional response to his immediate surroundings.

 
Paul Nash was on view until 20 August 2017.

 
The curators acknowledge the continued possibilities of concrete and the legacy of the style which became known as Brutalism – an unfortunate translation of the French ‘béton brut’ or raw concrete. Brutalism came to signify the architectural intransigence of large social, educational and cultural complexes which were radical for their time but became jaded and fell into disrepute by the 1980s. With concrete currently experiencing a renaissance, the curators identified the duality of expressive aesthetics and ‘Human Modernism’ as an underlying concept of contemporary architecture. The exhibition was inspired by both the problematic legacy and the potential of concrete for the present. Ranging across all media, the works were installed in the rectangular, high-ceilinged Kunsthalle space. A number of approaches were discernable, from architectural and social legacies to more formal responses.

 
Large concrete buildings privileged circulation and functional uses for idealistic and practical reasons, but with negative social results. Tobias Zielony’s slow photo animation of the Le Vele di Scampia (2009) complex in Naples subtly revealed drug dealing and other covert activities. The Mexican collective Tercerunquinto’s photographs Gráfica reportes de condición (2010-2016) explored segregation in public and private spaces, with overlaid graffitied texts as an inventory of social discontent. Mona Bonvicini’s photographs of modified real estate advertising slogans into graffiti on boundary walls in desolate spaces. Add Elegance to Your Poverty (1990/2016) substitutes for ‘property’, highlighting psychological pressures in a divided city such as Berlin, which implicitly accepted social-deprivation chic as a marketable image.

 
Liam Gillick’s wall projection showed paired views of Thamesmead, a planned satellite town near London. Stanley Kubrick filmed key scenes of A Clockwork Orange (1971) here. That film reinforced the dystopian reputation of anonymous new suburbs. Gillick’s Pain in a Building (1999) video doesn’t point to anything specific, but hints that little has changed since this town was built. It remains a clean, quiet but slightly depressed place. Ingrid Marten’s video Africa Shafted: Under One Roof (2011) wore its pain more openly. The Ponte City Apartment tower in Johannesburg rises to 54 floors built around a hollow inner core. Eight soaring elevator shafts daily transport residents of many different cultural origins. Filmed in this claustrophobic space, the multitude of interactions, voices and languages, and the generally low-light edgy atmosphere, all point to the failed idealism of this building and stoic human resilience in a vulnerable, degraded, space. Also observing the urban terrain, Susanne Kriemann’s circular wooden panopticon showed aerial views of extensive Swedish post-war social housing projects interspersed with nature shots, taken with a Swedish Hasselblad. This iconic camera was first used for aerial reconnaissance, which the artist sees as mirroring the investigative gaze of modernity.

 
A more current re-imagining of urban space by Heba Amin used video and voice recordings of the Speak2Tweet platform, which enabled protestors in Cairo to post news before the overthrow of Egyptian President Mubarak in 2011. Tom Burr’s Brutalist Bulletin Board (2001) documented student unrest at Yale University in 1969, when Paul Randolph’s iconic Art & Architecture Faculty building was set alight. A contemporary essay by architectural historian Vincent Scully about the architect noted that a building which is ahead of its time ‘puts demands upon the individual user that not every psyche will be able to meet’. In Scully’s view, despite Randolph having introduced more varied materials and personal spaces than had his functionalist counterparts in the 1950s, the regulatory and restrictive character of such buildings ensured that they remained a space of political contestation. Burr’s visual narrative of revolt also contained images relating to Jim Morrison’s arrest for ‘offending public morals’ during a 1967 concert.

 
An interest in concrete structures per se inspired Werner Feiersinger’s photographs, which record the cosmopolitan commitment underlying 1960s / ’70s Italian architecture, focussing on both the massive sculptural qualities of bridge supports but also the overgrown barren undersides. Thomas Demand’s photomontage Brennerautobahn (1994), recreated these structures as pristine cardboard models, as if to suggest that imagined versions of great motorway flyovers won’t harbour the urban and social impacts that complicate the initial idealism. The idea chimes with those of Robert Smithson’s 1967 photo-essay ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’: structures which had become relics of a once dominant idea, could be reimagined through the passage of time. Annette Kelm’s photographs House on Haunted Hill (2005 / 2016) examine Ennis House (1923), a ruined Frank Lloyd Wright building near Los Angeles. Coated in textile-style blocks and built in the Mayan Revival Style, it is now considered a preservable ruin. Similarly, Isa Melsheimer displays a series of excellent coloured gouache depictions of now demolished or ruined modernist buildings by eminent architects of the era, including Stirling, Gordon, Kiessling and Bancroft. Her Possibility of a Ruin (2016) sculptures, in which fragile ceramic forms are placed within concrete moulds on plinths, are a part-homage, part-reinterpretation of these buildings.

 
Few of the works sought to actively reinterpret the theme in this manner, David Maljković’s slide projection with sound being another exception. A crudely built installation of grey shelving, photographs and projections, A Long Day for the Form (2012), set up photographic colour interventions against the uniformity of concrete structures in Novi Zagreb, a typical former Eastern Bloc city. Seeking a specific visualising role for the artist, his interventions emphasise the prevailing grey of the actual surroundings and show the ‘the emptiness of failed utopias’. This project pointed the artist-viewer to a way through the thematic material. A progression from paradise to total ruination was very well done in Cyprien Gaillard’s 16mm film Cities of God and Mirrors (2009). Filmed in a nostalgic 1970s glow, it recalls a spring break by American college students at a Mexican holiday complex, a modernistic building mimicking nearby Mayan pyramids. Dreamy footage of visual pleasure with disco-ball effects gradually descends into an all-consuming implosion, reinforcing the theme of ruination in an age of vacuous pleasure.

 
Focussing on play, Sofie Thorsen looked at the art-in-architecture playground projects of 1950/1960s Vienna, which were developed as a foil for public art-education. Most of these have disappeared. Modified steel play frames provided abstract-formal props for casually-wrapped inject prints recording the urban planning vision here. In a similar vein, Jakob Kolding’s installation addressed the ambitions behind political and social utopias. Cut-out montages of grey figures in glass cases hinted at masquerade and staged roles, while framed constructivist-style black and white collages depicted young people appropriating suburban areas for their own activities.

 
Several artists concentrated on the formal qualities of concrete. Isa Genzken’s Luke (1986), a punctured smooth block of concrete, stood elegantly on a metal stand. Olaf Metzel’s green egg-carton facade cladding recreated a similar project from Documenta 8 (1987). Heidi Specker’s photographs were minimalistic interpretations of EUR, near Rome, a fascist-era project which became a film location for Antonioni and Fellini, and is now a residential and business district. In Jumana Manna’s Government Quarter Study (2014), three circular stelae with reliefs were full-size jesomite reproductions of entrance columns in the brutalist-style Government buildings in Oslo. Symbolic of the optimism of the Nordic Welfare State, these buildings were targeted by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011. Debate continues on whether to preserve or demolish them. Manna also integrates the work of Mark Boyle, Secretions: Blood, Sweat, Piss and Tears (1978), four formally-staged photographic studies which emphasise the abject materiality of the body in allusions which could refer to the skin and life of such buildings. Kasper Akhøj’s chunky bush-hammered sculptures recall the socially radical approach of the Escola Paulista architects in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s, whose ‘alternate discourse of concrete’ reflected the social and political revolution of the time. There were similar formal presentations of urban experience by Klaus Weber, Maximilian Pramatarov and Hubert Kiecol. Karsten Födinger pushed the sculptural aspect by inserting a complex wooden criss-cross frame within a large concrete mould, probing the relative weight of both materials. Idealism isn’t entirely secular either. Andreas Bunte’s two films were a panegyric to concrete as the raw material of many post-Vatican II sacred spaces. And then there is concrete’s blunt functionality, shown in Miki Kratsman’s photographs of Israeli security checkpoints and public safety shelters. Finally, Ron Terada’s double-sided billboards at nearby Karlsplatz (2006/16) drew attention to the signal effect of certain words or signs placed in an unusual context. The texts ‘Concrete Language’ and ‘See Other Side of Sign’ acted as a clever play on both the sign text and the material.

 
Given the original idealism underlying Brutalist architecture, a critical focus on its societal impacts was an obvious outcome of this exhibition. While this was well achieved, by choosing artists to address the theme it was also inevitable that the works would be assessed not only for their critique of the legacy of concrete, but also for its potential for new ways of making or looking at art or architecture. With a few exceptions, most of Béton’s presentations seemed satisfied to document this legacy and its impact. This seemed like a missed opportunity to reactivate the potential of concrete for the present, to find new crossover points between functional and aesthetic possibilities. A less comprehensive presentation might have assisted in leaving space for investigating new crossover points between art and architecture.

 
A more open-ended approach to the use of concrete was taken in Brute Clues at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. An awkwardly shaped, wooden platform accessed by four steps, was hemmed in by an angular concrete wall 80cm high. This structure occupied over a third of the gallery space from wall to wall. Behind the concrete wall, the wooden platform edged over a perfectly-still blue pool, which could also be viewed at water level through a narrow slit under the platform, by accessing a low-ceilinged undercroft through a trapdoor.

 
This was an uncomfortable experience as it wasn’t possible to stand up properly. The whole structure hindered the usual experience of the space, creating an autonomous new work with no apparently useful purpose. It could be contemplated from a slim raised plastered bench attached to the walls and spanning the opposite side of the gallery. The three artists – Tom Watt, Tanad Williams and Andreas Kindler von Knobloch – aimed to create, according to the exhibition’s accompanying text, ‘a structure for engagement and a repository for their own individual approaches to art-making’, setting out to upset ‘the hierarchies of display in a white-cube context’. Based on field work in the South-Western USA, unidentified, leftover structures and ruins in desert and coastal sites, led the artists to develop the theme around architecture. Built interruptions in the desert inspired the use of concrete, in particular a dam structure found in Joshua Tree. These were depicted somewhat obliquely on six postcards recording photographs taken at the visited sites. By not pointing to a definitive denotation of this structure as a piece of architecture – a stage, a dam, a platform or an excavation – a more open-ended interpretation, in terms of an object between art and architecture, was possible.

 
A ‘homage’ or ‘monument’ to time spent travelling in the USA, the ‘take it or leave it’ approach of this installation was refreshing in its optimistic use of concrete and other materials. Raising more questions than answers, this intervention was a timely experience in light of the Béton exhibition and a general revival of interest in Brutalist architecture (as witnessed by a Jonathan Meades’ 2014 documentary and a number of blogs). This otherwise functional platform seemed apparently useless in the gallery setting. A patio of pristine failure, it seemed to aim to be nothing more than an autonomous new structure confined within the space. The most useful conclusion of this collaboration is that it pointed to the value of an open-ended non-specific approach to future possibilities, in contrast with the often counterproductive functionality and ease of circulation aimed for in Brutalist architecture.

 
Béton was on view 25 June – 16 October 2016, Brute Clues, 2 September – 29 October 2016. The Béton exhibition booklet is available at http://kunsthallewien.at/application/files/2914/ 6667/6680/Beton_BOOKLET_EN.pdf).

 
A thicket of bare branches makes an irregular framework for a scattering of tiny, olive-coloured leaves. As well as the framework of branches, Leaf contains a window frame. We look through the window to a street outside, or maybe it’s a courtyard – the tree obscures our view so it’s difficult to be certain. In the quizzically titled Bosporous, also composed through a window frame, a calligraphic smearing on the dirty glass collapses the space between the frame and the blurry distance beyond. In Red line, Istanbul the windows of a white van are covered in soapy suds, its front end sharply cropped by the picture plane. Something awful has happened here, or something banal, and we’re not sure which is worse. Made while travelling in the Balkans, Turkey and Iran, the no-man’s-land these images construct is a territory of layers and obfuscation. Despite the befuddling obscurity – perhaps because of it – this cryptic territory is a compelling place. Look over here, it seems to say, like some wily old crone out of Beckett, look over here, and see nothing.

 
No one circles the void quite like Beckett, but I sense a kinship with the Foxrock nihilist all the same. In Men in park, two figures are lying together under a tree. We see them from an elevated vantage point, boots off and disheveled, amongst the remnants of a frugal meal. Vladimir and Estragon, asleep between the acts. The figures appearing elsewhere are typically alone, in shadow, or in reverie. They are identified as ‘Man’, or ‘Woman’, or alternatively by given names. Some situations appear spontaneous, while others feel more composed. In an atmosphere of slippery unease, it’s difficult to distinguish between friends and strangers, the set-up and the surreptitious.

 
The claustrophobic Man in car conveys the intimacy of the familiar, while the aforementioned Tina by the bridge, Serbia feels more like a chance encounter. ‘Celia’ appears twice. In Celia looks out the window, she is wistful, a naked waif wrapped inside a gauzy curtain. In Celia talks by the door she is a pensive young widow, leaning in line with the doorframe, all in black. Accepting these ‘Celias’ are one and the same (in the shadows, who can say?) she is the closest thing this un-showy show has to a star. Mary on the other hand, arms crossed before a curtain of beige leatherette, shares the limelight with a box of Cheerios. Though naturalistic, this downbeat milieu is ultimately a fabricated one. The artist (interviewed in the exhibition catalogue) views the everyday world as ‘fundamentally a stage with props’. Freewheeling reality is frozen into a series of ambiguous tableau.

 
While allusions to the stage invoke theatre – and my comparisons with Beckett re-enforce this – the dramatic influence most evident in the work comes from the cinema (in essence, accelerated photography). The sepulchral lighting and skewed angles of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa find a visual echo in two images named Shadows of plants inside a window. Abbas Kiarostami might be a more topical influence. The late Iranian auteur, like Costa, liked to mix fact with fiction, folding real people and events into his constructed mises-en-scène. In the final minutes of Close-up (1990) two men ride through the busy streets of Tehran on a motorcycle. Filmed from inside a van, the moving image is variously fractured and obscured, the camera’s changing viewpoint seeming to mimic the ambiguous gaps and overlaps of the narrative itself. Laurence Cunnane’s still images can also feel oblique to the main event, but his method of image-making is less determined by a narrative sense. Like a persistent but badly briefed gumshoe, his attention seems drawn away from the action, discounting obvious clues in favour of seemingly innocuous detail.

 
Kiarostami’s denouement is animated by flowers, carried by one of the men, pink blooms flowing through the final frames like a pulse. Flora is prominent here too, a cast of cultivated greenery vying for equal billing with its human and non-human counterparts. In the anthropomorphic Bag of cut grass, a stuffed plastic bag looks like a slumped body, divesting its contents through a gaping mouth. In Plants inside a restaurant colour slides from the broad leaves of a rubber plant and melts into a psychedelic haze. The plant in the eponymous Plant inside a bank pirouettes between a glazed screen and a corporate visage, a curiously animated interlocutor. The word ‘inside’ appears often, the photographer, separated from his subjects by a series of interceding layers, is on the outside looking in.

 
In his prose work, Ill Seen, Ill Said Beckett writes of things too closely watched, ‘who move to preserve their distance’. Writing about these self-effacing prints – responding to Beckett’s crone – they also refuse to be pinned down, moving to preserve distance, or to conjure Sontag again, moving ‘against interpretation’. Perhaps it’s okay to preserve distance, to understand that not everything is understood. The viewer, like the photographer, is also on the outside. As night encroaches his scene, Beckett writes how, ‘The light leaves to be desired’. At rest from looking, and the search for meaning that goes with it, the eye preserves its hunger.

 
Samuel Laurence Cunnane was on view 29 September – 9 November 2016.

 
Given that the ability to manipulate shape, space and text is dependent on the materials employed, it’s not surprising that written poetry, visual or otherwise, has tracked advances in the technologies of dissemination, and existed alongside the other worlds created by these advances, advertising and media particularly. Interesting too is the implicit assumption of the universality of the visual experience versus the localised particularity of language that an idealised belief in new technologies can bring.

 
European medieval manuscript culture shared some of this same idealism with its desire to spread the Word, and the realities were just as complex. Be it Rabanus Maurus’s De laudibus Sanctae Crucis or Celtic illuminated manuscripts, the idea existed that patterning, image and shape could deepen a text’s meaning and help convey its message as well as impress a viewer. Susan Connolly engages with this rich point of contact between traditions in Bridge of the Ford (2016). She identifies the book’s main influences as the early monastic manuscripts of Lindisfarne, Durrow and Kells, alongside well known modern Concrete poetry practitioners bpNichol, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dom Sylvester Houédard. The manuscripts she names are some of the finest examples of insular art in existence, characterised by lavish decoration and the use of exuberant colour. Nichol, Finlay and Houédard form a trio of writer-artists whose own idiosyncratic exuberances challenged assumptions concerning the relationship between writing, textuality, visual expression and, in Finlay’s case, landscape itself.

 
Visually, Connolly’s pieces are generally symmetrical and favour a plain and straightforward font and design. She states her preference for Courier New in her preface, citing its equal spacing and connection with typewritten Concrete poems. Shading at the level of individual letters is a notable feature, a technique favoured at different times by her more modern influences. In so doing she neutralises the ostentation of her exemplars, preferring simplicity and straightforwardness over intricate complexity. ‘The Sun Artist – At the Cross of Muirdeach, Monasterboice’, exemplifies her approach. The subject is another example of elaborate Insular art. The Christian essence of the Cross (light versus dark, good versus evil, judgement verses forgiveness), and the viewer’s physical encounter with this specific cross, are distilled to two short lines of verse. These lines are then neatly patterned on the page, with a diamond/triangle shape dominating.

 
Many of the pieces constitute an initial re-presentation of or homage to the subjects of the poems. As a homage to places and works of art they succeed, insofar as my initial reaction was to want to go and visit the Monasterboice Cross, or Tara, or the Lindisfarne Gospels, or Drogheda even. There’s an interesting connection here too to Hamilton-Finlay, whose text-made-sculpture works became part of landscapes. The energy in Connolly’s works is often closely bound to what the page cannot do, namely make manifest these physical objects or places. There is much to be explored here. Yet the inclusion of transcripts of the words of the poems at the bottom of many of the pages, along with notes, is problematic. The decision lessens the visual impact of the works and is akin to the poet explaining the poem’s meaning rather than allowing the work to speak for itself. This tentativeness continues into Connolly’s examination of the Boyne Valley and Drogheda. Conceived as a journey along the Boyne River, I found myself instead ferried between straightforward wordlists and more visually aware pieces, wondering where my attention should be – with the names themselves, or the patterns Connolly creates with them. Perhaps this is the aim. But it’s interesting to consider an incorporation of the paratextual within the visual. And Connolly’s obvious care and visual meticulousness could be well suited to a more thoroughgoing delve into the etymological roots of her subjects. These landscapes and artefacts, familiar to us through tourism brochures and marketing campaigns, could be made other once more. A poem like ‘What day and night will make of you’ for example, succeeds confidently within the form’s terms, the shading and diagonal repetition of the phrase, along with the open-ended questioning of the statement itself, gathers to itself a pointedness that can only be encountered by seeing the poem on the page.

 
Connolly’s book is a journey from sacred object to the page. The transition from performance to publication is one of the central concerns in Aodán McCardle’s IS ing (2011). Having seen McCardle perform, ‘translation into printed text’ is an intriguing proposition, with as many pitfalls as possibilities to negotiate. The recorded sources of the poems are included on a CD. The performances, when listened to, retain a sense of time and space, a thereness. In a short preface, he states the book is not a ‘replacement for listening to those performances’, but rather ‘a response to them and a transition from them’. A preface that predefines the poems (and signals a possible future web edition) risks negating the book itself. So, in its way, does the inclusion of the recordings. But it helps orientate the reader toward the central energy of the book, a sense of restlessness seeking repose. The interstitial nature of the reading experience, moving between actual book, remembered performances, recorded voice, and imagined future projects, fruitfully scatters the reader’s desire for cohesiveness. This in turn feeds directly into one of the book’s central themes (“howwords can be true”) and is furthered mirrored in the book’s various typographical styles.

 
McCardle’s formal control and intellectual rigour lead to a perturbed self-investigation. Again and again we return to the word ‘belonging’. What do we do with a sense of belonging when there is nothing to belong to? Or when we distrust belonging in the first place? Aware that to speak involves an immediate enmeshment in the socio-political world, the poems work to find the various limitations of performance, voice, text, and media while seeking something that may suffice to answer this question. Fatherhood is the focus as McCardle reflects on the Self that these boundaries create. Doubt is explicitly stated throughout the book. This collision is central, with the visual aspects of the text, the overlays, justifications and fragmentations stretching the page, generally seeming to signal that there are limits to what can be said here. Personal limits too. The non-linguistic is considered (‘we move/ we touch’ ‘what do you think of this copulation/clarity the ability to conduct electricity’) but underlying the whole text is a sense of pathos in the impossibility of a fiercely imagined intimacy with that which you love.

 
Perhaps it’s no real surprise then to see Saint Augustine mentioned, if only in passing. More fruitful would be to read McCardle against Julian of Norwich, who in turn, influenced by Pseudo-Dionysius and the via negativa, offers an intriguing counterpoint. And indeed Julian’s manuscripts, rough, over-layered, almost asemic, existing in multiple exemplars of uncertain origin, paradoxically suffused by faith and doubt, bring to mind McCardle’s own compositional methods and resulting broken openness. Beckett, another figure mentioned by McCardle and an undoubted influence, had time for the medieval mystics and would perhaps concur. As he put it in conversation with Charles Juliet: ‘Yes . . . I like . . . I like their. . . their illogicality. . . their burning illogicality [. . .] that burns away filthy logic’.

 
Visually, Frances Kruk’s lo-fi frags in-progress is the most spacious of the texts considered here. Largest, too, in terms of page count, within the book white space and clarity of typesetting predominate. It feels at first as if it’s possible to read the pieces quite rapidly, with the quickening pace in keeping with the speed of thought encountered in the poems. ‘Surge’, ‘swarm’ and ‘swell’ are words found in these poems that help describe the initial reading experience. Page turning too becomes foregrounded in the process in a way that is hard to quantify at first, beginning perhaps simply as a haptic companion to the kinetic energy at play.

 
This pace is intermittently interrupted by collages created by Kruk. These sometimes incorporate words or phrases from poems just read or to come. However, they may be more correctly considered as visual poems themselves rather than interpretations of the written poems. Titled as a group ‘Basement Songs Seen Here as Collages’ they also offer an alternative method of encountering the written poems.
Collage suggests a way of effective assemblage of the half broken and glimpsed images throughout the book, not for examination or analysis but for further contemplation, as another way to dwell upon Kruk’s themes. It allows you perhaps to pose the question ‘Where am I?’ or ‘What is happening here?’

 
And Kruk’s book does feel like a form of travelogue at times, a journal of internal encounters that find reflection in the external world. No surprise to see Dante’s circles of Hell evoked in both the collage ‘the unknown variables all of which lie and are profuse’, and surreally in the poems: ‘Circles/& circles of pigs fed evidence/piece by piece…’, ‘in the woods/in the music of dwarves’. Fairy-tale and allegory become entangled. Though the book is separated into sections, the poems are not a procession of isolated incidents but rather one thoroughgoing attempt to speak pain, the ‘white hush of pathological ellipses/slammed into a fuzz’. The desire to quickly turn pages suddenly makes sense – it’s a desire to accelerate past the discomfort and escape. The visual elements then arrest the reader in the best possible way, placing a hand on the shoulder to remind one to slow down and feel what is occurring in the language. The Divine Comedy has been treated, by Frances Yates, as a form of allegorical memory palace. Kruk’s internal peregrinations could be considered a journey through an unsettling subterranean equivalent, where the pained flesh becomes word:

My shake is quiet, the wound sound I
have no hate I have no hate
sugar with an angel’s zeromouth I wish
to question vertebrae til they puke
their secret ice

 
The books reviewed here grapple with various forms of duality. Of these, common to all three is the struggle to express feeling and emotion within the confines of a narrow white page. In differing ways, the page as container does not suffice. Connolly’s work urges one out into the landscape, McCardle toward the sound of the human voice, Kruk inward to the physical body. The visual elements utilised by all three specifically fit these personal investigations. An uncomplicated idea at heart, visual and spatial experimentation, fittingly becomes for the reader an aid to reaching their limits of verbal interpretation.

 
Susan Connolly’s Bridge of the Ford was published by Shearsman Books, Bristol in 2016; Aodán McCardle’s IS ing by Veer Books, London and Surrey in 2011; and Frances Kruk’s lo-fi frags in-progress by Veer Books in 2015.

 
The exhibition, one of the last initiated under Tate Britain’s daring former director Penelope Curtis, celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized sex between consenting adult men in England and Wales; and the ‘Foreword’ to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition begins, bravely, with a coming out story of Tate’s chairman, Lord Browne of Madingley.¹ Tate’s current director, Alex Farquharson, then briefly explains the adjective at the heart of the show, queer, suggesting that, whilst it risks anachronism, it signals and celebrates the “diversity and ambiguity” of the show’s “artist-protaganists”.² Queer is an umbrella term further explored by curator Clare Barlow’s introduction, which explains how the show focuses on a wide range of “same-sex or gender-variant desires, lives, cultures, identities” and “perspectives”, ranging across the “‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’, ‘trans’ and ‘asexual’”, as well as on experiences and abstract, non-figurative representations beyond the explicitly “sexual” and “erotic”, such as “friendship and kinship”, and, in the case of its asexual and grey-sexual subjects, “outside the framework of sexuality” altogether.³

 
To make that possible, Queer British Art focuses on a wide range of canonical and marginal queer artists, designers, sitters and collectors, as well as queer aesthetic categories, including the camp and kitsch, the flamboyant and balletic, the androgynous and explicit, and the theatrical and masquerade, in essays and catalogue entries sometimes addressed, more generally, at “our audience” and sometimes, more happily, at “our number” “as queer people”.⁴ But how queer is queer British art in the period between the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy in 1861 and the partial decriminalization of sex between men in 1967?

 
In a now canonical, Fall-Winter 2005 special issue of the journal Social Text, David L. Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz collectively pondered: what’s queer about queer studies now? And, in many ways, I’m inclined to agree with their answer: certainly not being white, cis-male, and gay, at least in the eyes of a secular, liberal mainstream, if there’s now any such thing in this moment of renewed religious fundamentalisms of various stripes. After all, we live in a pornotopian age in which pretty much every possible queer sexual perversion is available online at the click of a button, and, as we learn from the catalogue timeline, in which more homonormative gay people have been able to get married since the passing of the 2013 Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, and civilly partnered following the earlier, 2004 Civil Partnership Act.⁵ In addition, trans folk have been able to request new birth certificates specifying their preferred gender since the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. Queer employees have been able to take their prejudiced bosses to court thanks to 2003 Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) legislation. Teachers and local authorities have been able to ‘promote’ homosexuality since the repeal of Section 28 in England, Scotland, and Wales in 2003. Same sex couples have been able to apply to become adoptive parents since 2002, and to serve in the armed forces since 2000. And willing participants, over the age of sixteen, have been able to have sex, and indeed group sex, since the passing of the Sexual Offences Amendment Act of 2000, just like their straight peers, of the same age. And the list could go on.

 
As a result of legislation of this kind, according to Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz, LGBTI identity is now best understood as a “mass-mediated consumer lifestyle” that forms a part of a broader “queer liberalism”; and, rather than continuing with a queer theory that sounded suspiciously like a “metanarrative about the domestic” and extra-marital “affairs of white homosexuals”, we would do better, as potential political radicals, to focus our attentions on the “triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of the welfare state”, on “public debates about the meaning of democracy and freedom”, on questions of “citizenship and immigration”, and of the human and non-human “in all their national and global manifestations”. After all, Muñoz, Halberstam, and Eng contended, “queer studies” has to be “more than a history of gay men, a sociology of gay male sex clubs, an anthropology of gay male tourism”, and a “survey of gay male aesthetics”.⁶

 
So, with Halberstam, Eng, and Muñoz’s critique in mind, what might it mean, queer and now, to think queer theoretically about British art in the wake of the Brexit decision, and queer British art in the weeks after the triggering of Article 50? After all, if queer theory was, at its origins, about asserting our perverse, often apparently self-defeating difference from the consensual, liberal mainstream, what could be more queer, in both the minoritising and perverse, potentially self-defeating sense, than the desire of the so-called United Kingdom to differentiate itself from a liberal European legal and cultural mainstream?

 
But, say, for the sake of argument, that we remain interested in the possibilities of queer sexuality, in the sense of a variety of eroticisms that a neo-liberal mainstream still find perverse and potentially intolerable? Where would we look for those in the queer British art in the period from 1861 to 1967?⁷ And what might happen if we return to the term queer some of its more illiberal and uncivil former bite, as an adjective and an accusation that, for example, used to frighten even someone whose work was as sexually daring as film-maker Derek Jarman,⁸ rather than joining in the project of what queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called, as early as 2003, the “strategic banalisation”, not to mention, marketization, of “gay and lesbian politics”;⁹ and rather than using the adjective queer, as the curators of the exhibition do, as a “fluid term for people of different sexualities and gender identities”.¹⁰ Which is to say, what might it mean if I, in the rest of this article, refuse more recent uses of the term queer as a way of presenting mostly white homonormative homosexuality to a mainstream liberal audience in an acceptable guise, with just a frisson of historical radicalism left within the term to season up its fifty shades of gay?¹¹

 
With that in mind, and following Sedgwick’s 1993 suggestion, we might start by looking at something that barely figures in the exhibition: at the British empire, or at the “broader map of queer British art history”, with all of its “exoticism”, “imperialism”, and “colonialism”; as the catalogue briefly puts it.¹² Or, as Sedgwick herself put it, at “the ways that race, ethnicity, [and] postcolonial nationality criss-cross” with questions of gender and sexuality “and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses”; “using the leverage of ‘queer’ to do a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration” and “state”, through which the “gravity” as well as the “gravitas”, which is to say, the meaning, but also the center of gravity” of the term queer “deepens and shifts”.¹³

 
Here we might think about a little-known ‘Victorian’, if that’s the right word, Indian silversmith, Oomersee Mawjee, whose work is not included in the show, and his c.1890, 14-inch-high silver statuette, Narcissus, in particular, which was based on an antique 1st Century BCE to 1st Century CE prototype in bronze, first unearthed in Pompeii in 1862.¹⁴ From a European queer perspective, we might think about Mawjee’s mythological figure as a profitable speculation capitalizing on the emergence of competing models of male same-sex erotic identity in the late nineteenth century; a statuette addressing a long-familiar, antique Greek model of sexuality based upon beautiful-boy love; and a newly emergent homosexual identity based on a love of the same, the homo in homosexuality, wonderfully emblematized by Narcissus’ masturbatory self-rapture. (We might also read Simeon Solomon’s late, similar, difficult-to-gender heads, which are in the show, in the same light, as a new conceptual preoccupation with the ‘homo’ politics of sameness).¹⁵

 
But what of Mawjee’s location in the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian province of Kutch? This suggests a different history, of the arrival of Alexander in South Asia around 326 BCE, and of the emergence of Classico-Buddhist Gandharan sculpture as a result. With this in mind, we might think about Mawjee as an example of the empire sculpting back, as well as making a pink pound from the imperial and queer metropole; as a sculptor emphasizing that anything that European sculptors in bronze could do, South Asian sculptors could do better, in silver; and suggesting that rather than male Indian subjects being the effete ones, a period stereotype, it was the classically educated Europeans who were the benders.¹⁶

 
In thinking about the possible queer vanguards of British art history in the period from 1861 to 1967, however, the most obvious place, perhaps, to start looking would be in at least the Victorian period’s notorious child love. Here, I think, we might recall the aesthetics of a Lewis Carroll, a Julia Margaret Cameron, an Edward Onslow Ford, and a John Everett Millais, who are absent from the show, as well as a Henry Scott Tuke and a Wilhelm von Gloeden, who are present in it. After all, these artists all produced images which today look inescapably pedophilic to just about everyone, but which function as a kind of open secret of Victorian art history; which is to say, images which everybody knows about, but hardly anyone, but Carol Mavor and James Kincaid, are brave enough to talk about; a product perhaps of the modern category of homosexuality seeking to differentiate itself from the ancient exemplar of ancient boy love.¹⁷

 
A third place we might look for something ongoingly queer in the British art of the period from 1861-1967 is in the area of consensual, queer, by which I mean same-sex, and so, therefore, unlikely to be reproductive, adult incest. Here, a notorious late-nineteenth-century aunt and niece couple, or queer authorial individual going by the pseudonym Michael Field, alluded to in the exhibition, obviously come to mind; a couple one legal category too queer for the already quite liberal British law that says you can have consensual sex with your first cousins, should you want to.

 
But even Michael Field looks comparatively exogamous when you take seriously the queer possibilities hidden in the plain sight of a canonical artist surprisingly absent from the show, Clementina Lady Hawarden, whose entire oeuvre, almost, represents a wonderful advert for consensual, butch-femme, or femme-femme, love between not just women, but sisters, as photographed by their mother; queer possibilities that might make anyone but a stone butch blush.¹⁸

 
For me, however, perhaps the most interesting queer category suggested, but not quite presented, by the show is the question of bestiality. With bestiality in mind, it is immediately noticeable how few animals appear in the exhibition.¹⁹ There are a few pet pussy cats and the odd horse, but there’s precious little other life on earth to be seen. Of course, just about everyone is wearing some kind of animal product, with some delighting in an ostrich feather boa, others in the sensation of a pearl necklace. But there’s not a seagull in sight, even in the coastal scenes of Tuke, or a fish swimming by, in Duncan Grant’s depictions of bathing in the Serpentine. Indeed, at a glance, I counted just three significant exceptions to this anthropocentric rule: Walter Crane’s canvas, The Birth of Venus (1877), with her flock of doves; Edmund Dulac’s wonderfully perverse joint 1920 portrait of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, complete with peacock feather, partridge, bat, bunny, and kingfisher; and, always the most sexually radical example, Simeon Solomon’s 1864 Sappho and Erinna. Here we find, under the deliciously masturbatory gaze of a female statue, our female friends accompanied by a lone deer, the colour of Sappho’s dress, peering out of the picture; a pair of lovebirds closely paralleling the position of our Sapphic lady poets; and a black crow, the colour of Sappho’s hair, squawking merrily away behind her; and thus an image daringly identifying Sappho and Erinna with nature, and not so much, I think, to suggest, in the words of Lady Gaga, that they were just born that way.

 
Now, the absence, from the exhibition, of nearly all life on the planet, apart from the human, should give us ecological and ethical pause, given our context of unprecedented species extinction, and given the literally billions of animals that disappear each year in the service of the meat- and dairy-industrial complex. But the scarcity of non-human animals from the exhibition makes a certain conceptual and historical sense in a period which saw, in Foucault’s words, the disappearance of the sodomite, who had always been understood as a “temporary aberration”, and the emergence of the homosexual who was “now a species”; a species significantly differentiated by species, from the earlier Judaeo-Christian category of sodomy, which also included bestiality, which might explain why two of the other potential identity categories emergent in the same period as homosexuality – the last quarter of the nineteenth century – “zoophiles and zooerasts” again failed to catch on.²⁰

 
But what would it mean if we now reimagined our sexual identities being additionally predicated on a species? And what would rethinking the category of bestiality from a queer theoretical perspective, and vice versa, offer us and our fellow mammals? After all, you don’t have to be a vegan to recognize that lots of us are, if not actually fucking animals, then at least having animals fucked for us, at one remove, all the time, in terms of the forced insemination – and rape is the word we normally use for this – of literally millions of mammals every year in the service of the meat- and dairy-industrial complex. And what is the difference between having another animal ejaculate on or in you and swallowing down, again without its consent, I hasten to add, another mammal’s rump, breast, or milk, which requires animal murder on a daily genocidal scale? In short, and to follow the work of feminist-vegan theorist, Carol J. Adams, what are the queer sexual politics of meat, fish and dairy, and what are the vegan politics of homosexuality?²¹ And what might ridding even queer human sexuality of its anthropocentrism do to change this? My quick answer to that question is twofold: animals might become more vulnerable to even more kinds of unconsenting sexual assault, or they might be newly recognized as the victims of a whole range of more crimes against their consent.

 
But, in saying all of this, we need to be careful. After all, if, according to Sedgwick, “one of the things that queer can refer to” is the moments of meaning when the “constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically”; and if queer may refer to the “very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, [p/]leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! Queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified man or lesbians who sleep with men, or … people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such”;²² it is also significant that “there are important senses in which ‘queer’ can signify only when attached to the first person”; indeed “that what it takes – all it takes – to make the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first place”.²³

 
And that might give us pause for thought. As a result, we shouldn’t imagine, in advance, that we’ll have much of a clue about who, or what, we might find ourselves lined up with under the banner of queer in the future, especially since the Anglo-American axis of evil, stretching from Trump to May, and beyond, has everywhere employed, with remarkable success, a rhetoric of queer tolerance to justify its own imperial and neoliberal projects. Recall, for example, the Conservative Party’s brilliant ‘liberal’ advocacy of gay marriage as a way of distracting us from its neoliberal policy of destroying the welfare state; and of the American right’s invocation of women’s and queer rights to justify its bombing campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan in the name of fossil fuel extraction and consumption.

 
What’s queer about queer British art now? Answers on a postcard please.

 
Queer British Art, 1861-1967 was on view at Tate Britain until 1 October 2017.

 
NOTES
1. Clare Barlow, ed. Queer British Art, 1861-1967 (London: Tate, 2017), 6.
2. Barlow, Queer British Art, 7.
3. Barlow, Queer British Art, 11-12, 15, 96, 121.
4. Barlow, Queer British Art, 6, 69.
5. In 2003, Lisa Duggan described “the new homonormativity” as a “politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption”. For more, see Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 50.
6. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Introduction’, Social Text 23.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2005), 1-18. But caution may be required here, since gay male cultural and historical studies had barely got going before it was claimed to be anachronistic. I am grateful to Heather Love and Ben Nichols for encouraging me to think more carefully about this.
7. In this, I follow Laura Doan’s provocation, in the catalogue, that “we shortchange ourselves if we do not approach queerness in visual representation as an opportunity to enter another sexual universe”, “unlike the present” and “radically unlike our own” (Barlow, Queer British Art, 50, 53).
8. Barlow, Queer British Art, 97.
9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 13.
10. Claire Barlow, ‘Why is the word ‘queer’ in the exhibition title?’,
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/queer-british-art-1a861-1967?gclid=COfl-KPwvNMCFa4K0wodGksOuA
11. I am grateful to Melissa Gustin for putting me on to the phrase fifty shades of gay. For a variety of more aggressive versions of what queer might be, see Michael Warner, ed. Fear of A Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). But in making such a rhetorical move, we need, again, to take note that what might be rhetorically at stake in 2017, during the Trump presidency, is almost certainly not the same as what was at stake in the early 1990s. Then, at least in the US, queer acting up occurred in relation to the desire to provoke morally a conservative, religious-right majority. In 2017, by contrast, it is the President of the United States himself who now most often employs an erotically-challenging, moral-majority-baiting rhetoric. I am grateful to the editors of the journal for calling my attention to this unwanted, but suggestive parallel.
12. Barlow, Queer British Art, 97. 13.
13. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 9.
14. Whilst the statuette was widely recognised as Narcissus in the nineteenth century, it has since been reclassified as a Dionysus.
15. For more on the way in which male homosexuality in Europe remains riven with competing models, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
16. The emphasis on white, middle- and upper-class artists or subjects and the absence of empire in the show is, perhaps, the result of the fact that Queer British Art followed quickly on Tate’s landmark 2015 Artist and Empire exhibition. For examples of potentially queer imperial art in that catalogue, see Alison Smith, David Blayney Brown and Carol Jacobi, eds, Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (London: Tate, 2015), 141, 147, 197. For more on queer (white) liberalism and the politics of race across the four continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, see David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialisation of Intimacy (Durham: Duke, 2010).
17. For more, see Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham: Duke, 1995), and James Kincaid, The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
18. For more see, Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). For more on the ways in which female eroticism is not very hidden in plain sight in the nineteenth century, see Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

19. The catalogue does, briefly, consider a number of “queer relations to nature”. For example, see Halberstam’s discussion of “flowers and landscapes” and “vegetation and the unnatural”. Halberstam is also critical of “the human” as a default category of analysis (19-20, 23). Linsey Young quickly discusses the “interaction between the body and the natural world, the beach, rockpools and the garden”; whilst Andrew Stephenson is interested in “Mediterranean and Aegean landscapes” and “the coastal landscapes of Brittany and Cornwall”, in “open air queer cultures” as well as lives “close to Nature” amongst “queer ‘back to Nature’ enthusiasts”, as well as the potential pastoral pleasures of “goats”, “lemons”, “oranges”, “corn”, and “fig-leaves” (130, 132-133, 135, 142). The aptly named Francis Bacon, finally, emerges as someone interested in the ways in which the “male body is both venerated and reduced to the status of animal”, and who was invited to live “in a corner” of his lover Peter Lacy’s cottage “on straw” where he “could sleep and shit” (161, 164).
20. Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (New York: Random, 1980), 42-44. For more on the inter-relation of homosexuality and bestiality in this period, see Jens Rydstrom, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For more on sodomy as a category, see Jonathan Goldberg, Reclaiming Sodom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
21. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990). See also Annie Potts and Jovian Parry, ‘Vegan Sexuality: Challenging Heteronormative Masculinity Through Meat-Free Sex’, Feminism and Psychology 20.1 (2010), 53-72.
22. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8.
23. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 9.

 
Alcazar Duarte’s installation is composed of three kinetic sculptural pieces reminiscent of the work of Alexander Calder. Each piece is made up of horizontal metal bars from which hang DVD cases with LED lights inside – the darkened exhibition room is illuminated mainly by these lights – and translucent images have been inserted into both sides of the cases. In this way the DVD cases work as a kind of light-box. The pictures hang and float in the space: 3D clouds of images you navigate through, moving as you walk, playing with the combinations in the space. The presentation is playful while at the same time impeccable, content and presentation uniquely complementing each other.

 
On the wall, in big letters written by the artist in a child-like chalk script, can be read:

Tonight Los Tigres del Norte in town families celebrate the flavours of our cousine while listening to mariachis a song of our times the Narco corrido plays in the hills caught on fire this morning for 15 pesos take a photo with a large iguana who has been charming crocodiles since 12 Tamacú well known by everyone is that no one bathes on that beach it is full with fisherman and their boats don’t tell anyone every thursday with Pozole your photos could be used by drug dealers will sing until the sunset after the canicula we don’t grow avocado anymore with 30% chance of high winds.

 
The text, making a dialogue with the pictures, lays out the main themes explored in the photographic series in a poetic way, making us sink into an imaginary world composed by bits and pieces of ‘reality’, like a collage of items picked straight from sites of popular culture. We find ourselves immersed in the cultural obsessions, paranoia, passivity and obsession of a particular place – Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo, two towns in the state of Guerrero, México – its collective subconscious and political situation. The photographic act always has something of the character of a taking of notes – note after note as what is in front of the lens changes, some notes no more than a punctuation mark – and Alcazar Duarte has arranged a poetic mélange of such notes, like a graphic novel, perhaps, one with just about enough text to transform the meaning in the images, completing them.

 
A young girl dressed as a princess, at what is probably a wedding; little girls on a beach, next to an image of a multitude of crocodiles hanging out by the water; a horse struggling to stand up, or falling; the beach again, and again; images of policemen, soldiers, checkpoints and carnival; youth, water, pools, the societal separation of women and men, colors and greyness; baptism, dreams, commerce, idleness – metaphors, perhaps. There’s an ‘ambiguity and tension that floats in the air’, as Alcazar Duarte writes. It’s what is not in the pictures that takes shape, what lies between the images, the spaces between the floating clouds: an invisible movement, an invisible threat, and the fragmented narrative, both in the text and the pictures. There are glimpses of military action and crime scenes or the remains of them, coexisting with an appearance of holiday and festivity, a focus on recreational activities that could be seen as a humorous celebration of life. There’s also a feeling of displacement in the series, a struggle with belonging and identity, reflecting Alcazar Duarte’s feelings as a British-Mexican – something parallel to the cinematographic themes explored again and again by Jim Jarmusch since his Permanent Vacation (1980).

 
The photobook exhibition, Second Edition, is complementary to the installation: seven books selected by the artist, all of them connected in different ways to her work, exploring similar subjects (different territories in Central and South America, childhood and nostalgia, etc.). Every book shows a different approach to its exploration of the subject, from poetical or conceptual (e.g. London-based Venezuelan Betty Laura Zapata’s X-Ray [2014]), to the straightforward photojournalistic work of Misha Vallejo’s Al Otro Lado (2016) – shots of everyday life in an Ecuadorian village on the border with Colombia, founded by refugees from the conflict of the FARC guerillas with government forces.

 
Also displayed in Second Edition is the book that Alcazar Duarte produced with the same title as the installation: the series transferred into book form. The book is divided into four independent sections that can be interleaved, creating multiple possibilities for combining and rearranging the pictures, following a similar idea to that governing the installation. At one level this opening of random possibilities and granting of power of organisation to the viewer points again toward childhood and game-playing. But it also makes me wonder if there is a further suggestion, one of an essential randomness or irrelevance to existence, especially when defined by acts of violence. This many-leveled show, of course, leaves the question open.

 
Monica Alcazar Duarte: Your Photographs Could Be Used by Drug Dealers was on view 16 September – 15 November 2016.

 
A key figure in the avant-garde London Film-makers Co-operative in the 1970s, McCall’s earliest films are documents of outdoor performances, represented here by Landscape for Fire (1972). The film records a field of small fires systematically kindled in the darkness, and neatly marries the elemental with the haute-modernist grid format. McCall has described Landscape for Fire as the catalyst for his light projections. The experience of making the work prompted him to investigate the processes of film – to look at the sculptural qualities of projected light rather than simply to think of film as a means of documenting his performances. And so the now legendary Line Describing a Cone was devised in 1973.

 
Frame by frame, a thin, arcing line gradually coalesces to describe a complete circle. Over the course of thirty minutes this line of light traces the circumference of the circle as a projection on the far wall while the beam takes the form of a cone of sculpted light. The rigorous geometries described by the projected beam recall the mathematical rigour of Fred Sandback and Sol LeWitt, while the (seemingly) tangible line extending through space chimes with the material and spatial interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark or Brian O’Doherty. But while Line Describing a Cone occupies this territory between drawing and sculpture, McCall himself describes these solid light projections as performative works of minimal cinema, where the screen is eliminated and audience is cast as the performer or participant. As McCall articulated in an interview event conducted in Lismore Town Hall in April, Line Describing a Cone is ‘a film that happens in the present tense, in the audience’s own space, where they are invited to turn their back on the screen and to look instead into the three- dimensional void – and watch this three-dimensional cone growing in space.’

 
What is exhibited in Lismore Castle Arts, however, is Line Describing a Cone 2.0 (1973 – 2012). When McCall originally began showing these light sculptures in the 1970s, his venues were often grungy warehouse spaces, where people could (and did) smoke, and the air was thick with dust. This palpable atmosphere allowed the beam of projected light to manifest as a tangible thing, taking on weight, allowing him to cast lines and seemingly solid planes out of the air. However, as his work moved into more traditional gallery spaces, and the air became cleaner, the light works became less easy to realise. It was only in the 1990s, when he discovered hazer machines – a kind of dry ice emitter – that he could re-stage and revisit these works, this time using digital projectors rather than 16mm film. The haze machines lend the light works a distinctively aestheticized quality in comparison to (what I imagine to be) the rougher magic of the 1973 iteration. The controlled emission of oil- or water-based fluids imbue the projected light with a gorgeous, mobile surface quality, like flumes and eddies of watered silk.

 
All of this imparts the work with a certain uncanny glamour; the impalpable is made apparently solid as air is given a weight and density, like an aesthetically seductive fog that haunts the room. The affective impact is beguiling and the performative aspect of the work is still very much in evidence – children dance in and out of the sheets of light, and people dip their fingers in the beams. Swell (2016) picks up where Line Describing a Cone left off in 1973, and one could argue that there is little development between the two works, bar the fact that digital technology allows him to achieve more intricate and complex progressions. One could also argue that the formal simplicity of Line Describing a Cone, its gradual evolution of the cone of light, familiar from cinema projection, has a satisfying conceptual neatness, whereas the later work is more elaborate, but re-treads much of the same ground. These works are utterly spectacular, with all the ramifications this word implies in terms of size, scale and visual pleasure – and they are achingly beautiful, aligning sheer sensuality with satisfying rigour – but the overwhelming sensory impact induces an almost narcotic effect, as borne out by the nearly hysterical, physical joy exhibited by the visiting children. A certain nagging, curmudgeonly voice whispers that this veers close to a mere entertainment, but it is a wholly transporting one at that.

 
The curators have chosen works that neatly bookend McCall’s career so far – Landscape for Fire (1972) is counter-posed with Crossing the Elbe (2015), a massive public intervention in Hamburg. Here, McCall’s beams are writ large against the sky as arc lights carve the city into quadrants in a way that could only be fully appreciated from the air. There are also inevitable connotations here with search lights and the Allied bombing of Hamburg during the Second World War. Arguably, each of these works stages drawing as performance. This is made explicit in a rather po-faced (tongue in cheek?) Five Minute Drawing (1974/2008), staged before an audience. Here, McCall and an assistant carefully affixed sheets of paper to the wall, fastidiously adjusting the angle of a taut length of string before snapping it against the paper to leave a sharp charcoal trace, to resounding applause. This piece seems somewhat arch and a little flat in comparison to the spectral poetics of the solid light works. The difference seems to stem from the lack of interactive possibility; Line Describing a Cone and Swell extend a beguiling invitation – to play with light made palpable. That work of such economy can be alternatively categorised as ultra-minimal cinema, solid light sculptures, or interactive installation, testifies to the continuing richness of McCall’s interdisciplinary practice.

 
Anthony McCall was on view, 2 April – 15 October 2017.

 
Perhaps in response to the general feeling that the massive Rauschenberg retrospective presented at the Guggenheim in 1997 would have benefitted from more editing, MoMA’s lead curator, Leah Dickerman, aided by both her curatorial team and by the artist and film-maker Charles Atlas, has been more stringent. This approach is at odds with some aspects of Rauschenberg’s own modus operandi, but for this kind of show – which was hardly going to be wanting for work to include – that was a good thing.

 
The exhibition nevertheless still brings together over 150 of Rauschenberg’s works, and amongst them many of his most iconic statements, organised across eleven galleries. The selection was augmented by an exceedingly well measured sprinkling of pieces by artists with whom Rauschenberg had lived, worked or otherwise collaborated: Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Weil, Sari Dienes, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, Hazel Larsen Archer, John Cage, Billy Klüver, and a wide array of dancers and choreographers (Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, etc). Charles Atlas, who was also stage manager for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for ten years or so, enlisted here as curatorial collaborator, was entrusted with the task of editing and installing the film footage of Rauschenberg’s many performances and dance collaborations.

 
The works themselves are supplemented by some illuminating wall texts: there are main panels for each room plus numerous ‘in focus’ texts accompanying specific works. There’s also an audio guide, the text of which has been made available on the MoMA press website, in which Dickerman offers brief explanations and introduces an impressive series of interviews with figures close to the artist: Christopher Rauschenberg (his son), Susan Weil, Calvin Tomkins, Julie Martin, and David White, for example, and, indeed, with Rauschenberg himself. There are other events and performances on the programme too, footage of which can be viewed on the MoMA website.

 
As in London, MoMA’s exhibition is arranged broadly chronologically, beginning with the work that the artist produced at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and stretching to a handful of pieces from the 1990s, plus just one very late inkjet dye transfer work from 2005, before the show ended with a small final room dedicated to the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), which ran 1984-1990. While inclusive of the broad trajectory of the artist’s more-than-sixty-year career, however, Dickerman and her team have not sought to challenge the prevailing sense that Rauschenberg’s most consequential contributions were made in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s.

 
This is not to say that other later moments do not carry potency here: Room 8’s sequence of three large-scale works from the Cardboards series (1971-72) together with Glacier (Hoarfrost) (1974) and Sor Aqua (Venetian) (1973) was powerful, and the bent, buckled, and busted Gluts (1986-87), oddly animate ruins salvaged from America’s troubled oil and automobile industry, also look impressive. Nevertheless, the amount of wall space given over to the zipped-together and interchangable Hiccups (1978) seemed to me too generous, and the corporate scale of the later photographic dye transfer and screen-print-on-metal works (only sparingly represented here) reaffirmed the sense that the artist was at his best when his material means were more limited. Contrariwise, for me some of the more puckish small-scale gestures from the 1960s do not stand up to very much scrutiny: apart, perhaps, from Warhol’s note of genuine irreverence I wouldn’t much care whether the Moon Museum got attached to the Apollo 12 spacecraft or not; the telegrammed ‘conceptual portrait’ of Iris Clert (1961) carries none of the risk and reverberation of the earlier Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953, also on show here); and – and this is perhaps a more controversial judgement – for me both of the famous performance-paintings, First Time Painting (1961) and Gold Standard (1964), only go to demonstrate just how much Rauschenberg’s combines gained from having hung around his studio for a while.

 
Especially welcome in New York, as in London, are the complete set of the rarely-seen XXXIV Drawings for Dante’s Inferno (1958-60), very happily accompanied here by print-outs of Michael Sonnabend’s original summaries of Dante’s cantos, with which the drawings were first shown at Leo Castelli Gallery, and which recently turned up in the Castelli archives in Washington D.C., having long been thought lost. Rauschenberg’s drawings were indeed intended as illustrations, and throughout the 1960s were exhibited with written commentaries relating them to Dante’s poetry, to aid viewers’ engagement. Charles Atlas has also done a great job of energizing the experience of video footage that is not always in itself very compelling: his visually and conceptually inventive display of the Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering events (1966) has the audience move around the various performers, navigating a series of screens mounted on forest pipes, in a neat and appealing solution. Indeed, sound and dance pervade, nuance and enliven the exhibition compellingly throughout.

 
A big Rauschenberg show offers MoMA a fabulous opportunity to deploy its uniquely rich resources: a supreme collection of American art from the 1950s; large, flexible, and absolutely state-of-the-art exhibition spaces; the capacity to bring on board a whole host of key figures from Rauschenberg’s immediate circle; and archival and research holdings matched by few other modern art institutions (one contender, though, is San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which will be this exhibition’s third and final destination).

 
Two particular aspects of Dickerman’s curation should be singled out for special praise: firstly, the decision to introduce works by other artists, and the manner in which this has been done; and, secondly, the subtlety and precision with which she has enriched our understanding of key artworks by letting certain formal and visual correspondences do their own kind of work (in this sense she is importantly responsive to Rauschenberg’s method). While there are many examples throughout the show – and particularly early on, when you feel Dickerman is most sharply engaged – the full force of the curatorial intelligence was particularly strongly felt in the two rooms that constituted what Peter Schjeldahl has described as the exhibition’s ‘beating heart’: those covering the period from 1954-1960.

 
In Room 3, Red Paintings and Early Combines, the potent pell-mell of Charlene (1954, also in London), was joined by both the airier Rebus (1955) and the joyfully freestanding Minutiae (1954), neither of which was at Tate. Above Minutiae, unobtrusively installed, was a projection of Atlas’s footage of the Cunningham dancers moving around the combine, in a performance also called Minutiae. These major statements were accompanied by a rich and garrulous Red Painting, and by Bed (1955), Short Circuit (1955), and both Factum I and Factum II (both 1957).
More than this, though, Dickerman was able to exploit the museum’s extraordinary holdings to make interventions of great visual and conceptual precision: the hanging of Jasper Johns’ Target with Four Faces (1955) next to Short Circuit, for example, was not only a visual coup, but also served to subtly dramatize the theme of intimate collaboration: the face that Johns cast to make his work was that of Rachel Rosenthal, a close friend of Rauschenberg and Johns, and Short Circuit itself once contained a miniature Johns Flag – when it was stolen it was replaced by the current Sturtevant replica – and a small work by Susan Weil. Likewise, across the room and to the left of Rebus are three drawings by Cy Twombly from 1954, very similar to that found on the surface of Rebus itself. With Bed in the same room, the romantic entanglements of Rauschenberg, Twombly and Johns are hinted at too, perhaps, but this dimension of Rauschenberg’s life is consistently downplayed throughout the presentation, in keeping with all three artists’ own comportments but rather problematic given the wealth of recent scholarship on the topic. (The only explicit mention of Rauschenberg’s homosexuality is found in the audio guide commentary on the museum’s own majestic Canyon [1959].)

 
Other noteworthy interventions arrive in the first two rooms, where, for example, Rauschenberg’s early photographic experiments at Black Mountain College are accompanied by works by his teacher, Hazel Larsen Archer, as well as by Cy Twombly and Aaron Siskind; and Automobile Tire Print is joined in Room 2 (another high point) by Sari Dienes’s impressive pavement rubbing, SoHo Sidewalk (c.1953-55), which was a revelation to me but had been introduced to New York audiences by a major Drawing Center presentation of Dienes’ work in 2014. Rauschenberg’s mature forays into performance in the early 1960s are displayed together with works by Johns, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Marcel Duchamp; and the room of silkscreens – as if having nine of the best of them together wasn’t enough – also featured Andy Warhol’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Rauschenberg Family) from 1962, on loan from Washington. These kinds of curatorial moves, carried off with both subtlety and precision, were simply not available to the curators at Tate.

 
That said, the selection of the ‘friends’ included, and, indeed, the decision to include friends only, rather than work by other kinds of artistic peers and influences, is not neutral. Firstly, and perhaps surprisingly given Dickerman’s expertise in the area, very little mention is made of works of the earlier European avant-gardes. In fact, little consideration is given overall to the non-American influences on Rauschenberg’s formation, although the exhibition catalogue fills this in to some extent. Duchamp’s presence is not registered until the room dedicated to ‘Performance and Objects’ in the 1960s, whereas in fact the major Dada show that he curated for Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 had been a powerful influence on Rauschenberg. Indeed, he and Johns had travelled to Philadelphia to visit the Arensberg Collection in 1958. In a similar vein, there is no mention of Kurt Schwitters, a clear precedent for Rauschenberg’s aesthetic, who was represented in the aforementioned 1953 Dada show, and whose major presentation, again at Janis, Rauschenberg had seen (and loved) in 1956. There is no reference to the visit that Twombly and Rauschenberg made to Alberto Burri’s studio while in Rome in 1953, or indeed the Burri exhibition mounted at the Stable Gallery later that same year, which Rauschenberg himself had photographed; nor again, later on, is attention paid to the striking parallels between Rauschenberg’s Cardboards and Venetian series and developments in European art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even though Sor Aqua (1973) strongly recalls the work of Joseph Beuys and the Cardboards align powerfully with the principles and materials of Arte Povera artists working in Italy.

 
The exhibition’s conceptual framing also tends to lean away from the controversies that Rauschenberg’s works provoked. Little sense is given of the hostile tenor of almost all the reviews he received until 1959 or so (the main exception was the poet Frank O’Hara, who also figures in the exhibition, albeit briefly and, in the main instance, tragically). In the 1950s Rauschenberg’s works were largely read as so many neo-dada pranks and personality gestures (indeed, this objection is still voiced today, most recently by Jed Perl, writing in the New York Review of Books this May). It also served as a lightning rod for an only very thinly veiled homophobia pervading sections of the New York critical establishment, which was of course also rampant throughout the country at large. Perhaps it is not reasonable to expect this kind of content to be included in the show itself. However, some address to the way in which what Lawrence Alloway once called Rauschenberg’s ‘flair for the drastic’ was, at least early on, rarely seen as benign could have been useful here. So too, perhaps, could some sense of the ways in which the artist in fact fell out with many in his closest circle too, especially after his win at Venice in 1964 (itself very controversial, both at home and abroad).
MoMA’s Rauschenberg retrospective coincides with the museum’s major presentation of Louise Lawler’s work, Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW. In what was presumably a knowing move, the exhibition includes her Persimmon and Bottle (1993/2010), in which Rauschenberg’s silkscreen Persimmon – itself on view next door – is shown, radically cropped, installed in its collector’s apartment. Taking my cue from Lawler, I want to end this review by panning out a little and brushing the celebratory tone somewhat against the grain.

 
Two further exhibitions recently on view in New York also featured works by Rauschenberg, and can be thought of as kinds of brackets to the current retrospective. The first speaks to the artist’s New York formation: Melissa Rachleff’s acclaimed show at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City 1952-1965. Including a Rauschenberg combine painting, the exhibition and its excellent catalogue convey the extraordinary energy and diversity of the downtown art scene at that time, also highlighting how most of its players are now long forgotten. The second exhibition was presented in the Christie’s showrooms in Rockefeller Plaza, just a few minutes walk from the MoMA: for ten days or so visitors were able to browse the lots for the Postwar and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, which was to be held on 17 May. In the end the star performer in the sale was Cy Twombly’s raucous Leda and the Swan (1962), which was sold for $52,887,500. Rauschenberg’s own Drawings for Dante’s 700th Birthday, made to be reproduced in a special feature of Life magazine in 1965, was one of only a handful of lots to achieve considerably more than double its highest estimated value, finally selling for $2,887,500. This juxtaposition could obviously be the start of an (admittedly fairly familiar) polemic concerning the conversion of downtown grunge into uptown money, as well as concerning an important aspect of the function of major museum retrospectives today; yet its elaboration seems unnecessary here, given the figures. Nevertheless, when assessing the celebration of a modern American master of this calibre and reputation it is useful to keep such dynamics in view, alongside the very considerable achievements of Dickerman’s excellent exhibition itself.

 
Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends was on view at MoMA until 17 September and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will be on view 18 November 2017 – 25 March 2018.