Art Newspaper

The leading Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli says that he is facing criminal charges in Tehran after he was barred from travelling to London last weekend (2 July). Tanavolis passport was confiscated by border officials at Tehrans Imam Khomeini International Airport; he was subsequently unable to attend a talk on 3 July at the British Museum.

Tanavoli, who divides his time between Tehran and Vancouver, says in an email: Yes, I am accused by the police. The accusations are that my art is based on 'spreading the falsehood' and 'creating public anxiety'. On 10 July I went to court with my lawyer and I was given the above allegations. The artist may face a fine or possibly imprisonment. 

As certain elements of the Iranian regime push for closer relations with the West, other forces within the government push back. And often it is the artists, whose work is well known across Iran's borders, who get caught in the crossfires, says a source close to Tanavoli. As Iran tries to open up tourism and business channels to the West, such moves are chilling. Officials at the Iranian embassy in London declined to comment.

Tanavoli is known for pioneering a new form of Pop art in Iran in the 1960s. Next March, an exhibition dedicated to the artist, entitled The Lion in Iran and the Art of Parviz Tanavoli, is due to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran.

Meanwhile, the lecture at the British Museum, which focused on Tanavolis book European Women in Persian Houses, went ahead without the artist. The book, published by IB Tauris, examines why wealthy households in Iran at the turn of the 20th century collected and incorporated prints of glamorous, unveiled European women into the architecture of houses and residences. 

The northern UK city of Hull was a sea of blue this weekend (9/10 July) as more than 3,200 people braved the North Sea chill in their birthday suits for Spencer Tunicks latest mass nude art installation. The participants, painted in four fetching shades of blue, gathered at dawn across landmark sites such as the Scale Lane swing bridge and Queen's Gardens. Tunicks Sea of Hull photographs, which draw on Hulls maritime heritage, will be shown next year at Ferens Art Gallery during the UK City of Culture festival. One of our very own TAN team members, head of sales Kath Boon, bared all in the name of art. I want to support the City of Culture initiative, she says, adding: It was a humbling experience; there were people of all shapes and sizes. I was in a lovely shade of blue but after four hours naked in the streets of Hull, I was actually turning blue with cold.

The staff reshuffle at Sothebys continues with the announcement that Helena Newman, the auction houses worldwide co-head of Impressionist and Modern, will also assume the role of chairman of Sothebys Europe, joining fellow chairmen Oliver Barker, Mario Tavella and Philipp Wrttemberg. Newman conducted the Impressionist and Modern sale at Sothebys London on 21 June; she is only the second woman ever to take an evening sale, the first one being Melanie Clore, also at Sothebys, in 1990. 
 
Meanwhile, James Mackie, who has run the Impressionist and Modern evening sales at Sothebys Bond Street, London, has been made head of the Impressionist and Modern department in London. Replacing him as head of the evening sales is Thomas Bompard, formerly of the Impressionist and Modern department in Paris. 
 
Newman who has been at Sothebys since 1988, is one of the few veterans left at the company, which has seen high-profile figures depart including Henry Wyndham, the former chairman and auctioneer, and Alex Rotter, the former global co-head of contemporary art. Clore, previously co-chairman of Impressionist and Modern art, resigned in February, and has since announced that she is launching a London-based business with Wyndham in the autumn, which will help clients source works and manage their collections.
 
Meanwhile, the company has made a notable museum hire, tapping Eric Shiner, the former director of the Pittsburgh-based Andy Warhol Museum. He will join as a senior vice-president of Sothebys Fine Arts division, the new department headed up by the recent star hires Allan Schwartzman and Amy Cappellazzo, whose Art Agency Partners firm was bought by Sothebys in an $85m deal. 
 
 

The Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli, who was last week banned by Iranian authorities from travelling to London for a talk at the British Museum, speaks about his work from the 1960s and 1970s during a visit to London last year. The pieces were included in Tate Moderns The World Goes Pop (17 September 2015-24 January 2016) exhibition.     


For more on Parviz Tanavoli, see Leading Iranian artist accused by authorities of disturbing the peace

Less than two weeks before the US presidential election in November, a powerful self-portrait by Frida Kahlo standing astride the US-Mexico border will go on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Part of the exhibition Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950 (25 October-8 January 2017), co-organised with the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, the work could be seen as a timely witness to the anti-immigration rhetoric of politicians such as Donald Trump, who said during his campaign that he will force Mexico to build a border wall.

Made when she was just 25 years old, Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932) shows a defiant Kahlo in a pink dress holding a Mexican flag in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She stands on the pedestal between an industrial American landscape of skyscrapers and factory smokestacks (marked Ford and obscuring the US flag in a haze), and a Mexican desert of ancient ruins, Mesoamerican objects, native plants and a skull. The two countries shared roots are treated with similar irony, with plants reaching deep into the soil on the Mexican side and electric wires dangling into the dirt north of the border.

Kahlo in Detroit
Kahlo painted the work in the US, while her husband Diego Rivera was finishing an ambitious mural project at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She had just suffered a miscarriage, and longed to return to Mexico. While Rivera continued to chase success in the US with new commissions for murals across the country, Kahlo was distressed by what she saw in North America.

The roots of her anti-capitalist sentiments are somewhat explained in an introductory catalogue entry by the curator Matthew Affron, who notes that Mexicos 1917 Constitution was a crucial influence on the countrys artists in the early 20th century. That documentstill in effect todayaffirmed national ownership of natural resources, a progressive labour code, universal public primary education, and the separation of church and state, Affron writes.

The border painting is not Kahlos only sour gaze toward the US in the show. The show in Philadelphia also includes My Dress Hangs There, a picture of a dress suspended against a jumbled background of images of American vulgarity and industrial waste. The painting is as grotesquely raw as any work by John Heartfield or Kurt Schwitters. She began it in 1933, when Rivera was at work on murals for New Yorks Rockefeller Center that were destroyed because Rivera insisted on including a portrait of Lenin.

Great Depression
Despite her wry take on the clash of cultures, Kahlos self-portrait and the other 290-plus works in the Philadelphia show are a record of co-operation between the two countries during a difficult time, the Great Depression. Further underlining the continued links, Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States is now in the collection of Manuel and Maria Rodriguez de Reyero of New York, while My Dress Hangs There is owned by Femsa, the company that bottles Coca Cola in Mexico.

Can a Mexican paintingeven one painted in the USmake a difference in US politics? Pennsylvania is a swing state, with a close balance between Democrats and Republicans, and Kahlo probably has a more predictable approval rating with American audiences than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. An exhibition of her work last year at the New York Botanical Garden in The Bronx, attracted more than 525,000 visitors.

We will not know the reaction to Kahlos work in an election year, nor what Trump will think of the artist, whose mother was mestiza (mixed race), and who often wore native Mexican dress. Andr Breton, the French poet and founder of Surrealism, had his own term for Kahlos art: a ribbon around a bomb.

Botanical historyand, all right, Wikipediaposits that Christopher Columbus brought back the first pineapples to Spain from their native South America, thus making the pineapple the first bromeliad to be introduced by humans outside of the New World. The global cultivation, and symbolic importance, of the ananas comosus is the subject of a summer exhibition opening today at Londons Tiwani Contemporary gallery (8 July-13 August). The Pineapple Show promises to mine, expose and invent new narratives around the pineapple. It will explore the fruits many histories as well as its cultural, emotional and psychic resonances, taking on issues of labour and luxury, power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, language, gender, hair, memory and otherness: all issues that have emerged from meditations on this fruit and are expressed through the bodies and practices of the artists involved. Most of the artists featured in the showJowhor Ile, Odili Donald Odita, Perrin Oglafa, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Johnson Uwadinmahail from Nigeria, with a handful of other international names such as Elizabeth Colomba, Ian Delen, and Ayana Evans. The show was curated by Zina Saro-Wiwa (her gallery in Port Harcourt, NigeriaBoys' Quarters Project Spaceis behind the fruity show).

The German upper house of parliament today (8 July) passed a law aimed at tackling illegal trafficking in looted antiquities and protecting German national heritage, introducing what dealers call the most stringent import and export restrictions on cultural objects in the world. 

The Cultural Property Protection Law faced opposition from art dealers and collectors as it wound its way through the legislature. By 4 July, more than 48,000 citizens had signed an internet petition calling for the preservation of private collecting. Dealers said private collectors were already moving valuable works abroad before the laws passage to avoid the new regulations.

A group of 11 former directors of major German museumsincluding Herwig Guratzsch, ex-director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig and Christian von Holst, former director of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, warned in an open letter to the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament, that the exodus is already underway, the damage is already enormous and cannot be reversed.

For culture minister Monika Grtters, the law is Germanys commitment to live up to its responsibilities for mankinds cultural heritage nationally and internationally. It is, she says, an imperative given the destruction of heritage in conflict zones like Iraq and Syria and evidence that terrorists are using revenue from the illegal trade in archaeological objects to fund violence.

She argued that Germany spends billions in tax money to promote culture. It is therefore a matter of course that we should protect and keep our own cultural heritageincluding the few cultural objects that are deemed to have national value.

Under the Cultural Property Protection Law, any cultural goods above a certain value and age which vary according to the type of object can only be exported with permission from authorities in the 16 German states. Any archaeological items offered for sale need to be accompanied by an export licence from the country of origin, though collectors secured a last-minute exemption from this rule for coins. The law also eases the repatriation of looted articles to the country of origin.

The Action Alliance for Cultural Property Protection (AACPP), a newly formed organisation which lobbied the German parliament to reject the bill, has called for the immediate creation of an internet portal envisaged in the law to clarify what documentation is needed to import art objects from specific countries. Without a database it is impossible to ensure legal security when importing cultural goods, the group says in a statement.

Classic week in Londonthe European art markets last hurrah before the summer breakhas seen some promising results at the evening auctions, with several records set for artists with notable works consigned, though bidding was thin at Sothebys. 


Sothebys was up first, on 6 July, with a 43-lot sale that carried a modest estimate of 20.4m-31.2m. The evenings hammer total was an underwhelming 13.8m (16.5m), with a sell through rate of 65%. Alex Bell, the international head of the Old Masters department, said its a funny time, referring to the post-Brexit atmosphere. Despite the low total, however, the sale saw bidders from more countries than this time last year. 


The sale broke eight artist recordsfor Jean-Etienne Liotard, Marten van Cleve the Elder, Niccol di ser Sozzo, Pacino di Bonaguida, Barthel Beham, Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, Dominic Serres and a still-life by Jan Brueghel the Elder. 


The Dutch Old Masters dealer Johnny Van Haeften secured Van Cleve the Elders Outdoor Wedding Dance (painted after 1570) for a record 880,000 (1.1m with fees; est 100,000-150,000), while the Italian dealer Fabrizio Moretti bought a rather undervalued work by the Florentine Renaissance artist Pacino di Bonaguida, The Miracle of the Tomb of Saint Proculus (1315-20), for 350,000 (425,000 with fees; est 50,000-70,000).
 
The cover lot, Jean-tienne Liotards Dutch Girl at Breakfast (1755-56), sold on a single bid for 3.8m (4.4m with fees; est 4m-6m)perhaps not the most exciting bidding war, but still more than three times the previous record. The London-based dealer Lowell Libson bought it on behalf of an undisclosed Northern European institution.



Christies fetched a more encouraging 57.5m (65.4m with fees; est 36.4m-54.9m) on the following night (7 July), with 77% of lots sold, or 33 out of 43. Overall the atmosphere was more lively, and several lots saw extensive bidding from the US, Europe and Asia. 

One buyer, on the phone with Francis Outred, the head of post-war and contemporary art for Europe (whose clients tend to be from that category), went on an Old Masters spending spree, securing not only Rubenss Lot and his Daughters (1613-14) for 40m (44.9m with fees; est 20m-30m), a record for any Old Master painting sold at Christies, but also Pieter Brueghel the Youngers Four Seasons series (dated 1624the last full set in private hands) for 5.7m (6.5m with fees; est 3m-5m) and The Payment of the Tithes (around 1615-17) for 420,000 (506,500 with fees; est 300,000-400,000). The Rubens was subject to a 15-minute bidding war that culminated in Outred, on the phone, winning the lot against the houses Rebecca Wei, also on the phone, and the New York-based dealer Bob Haboldt, in the room. 

The house also set records for David Teniers the Elder, Bernardino Luini and Donato Creti. The last four weeks in London have been very important for the market as a whole: its found its feet and we know where to set the prices, said auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen after the sale.


The Sotheby's sale had some beautiful things, but a great Liotard just doesn't have the global appeal of big brand names like Rubens and Brueghel. It appears that Christie's were able to attract stronger international bidding, and their sale clearly appealed to bidders from the contemporary field, says the adviser Hugo Nathan, a director at Beaumont Nathan Art Advisory.


Meanwhile, self-portraits seem to be in vogue this year: Bonhams sold the earliest known self-portrait by William Dobson (1635-40) for 920,000 (1.1m with fees; est 200,000-300,000), to a private English collector at the start of the week. At the Sotheby's works on paper sale, a self-portrait by Sir Peter Lely (around 1655-60), which had remained with the artists descendants for almost 360 years, sold for a record 720,000 (869,000 with fees; est 600,000-800,000), eclipsing the previous record of 12,650, set in 1997.  



 

Ten new galleries open at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh today (8 July), with Dolly the Sheep and an Apple Mark 1 computer from 1976 among the star exhibits. Over 3,000 objects, most of which have not been seen in decades, and 400 new acquisitions go on show in the new suite designed by Hoskins Architects and the exhibitions masterplanner Metaphor. 

Six of the galleries focus on science and technology; objects on display include the Wylam Dilly locomotive, parts of the Large Electron-Positron Collider from CERN, a field-testing kit for Ebola and one of John Logie Bairds earliest televisors. 

Four galleries are dedicated to decorative art, design and fashion. Key design movements such as Art Deco and Art Nouveau are explored in the Design for Living section with objects on view by Christopher Dresser and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. 

More than 250 hours of conservation work were spent on a 100-piece silver gilt travelling set supplied by the official goldsmith of Napoleon for his sister Pauline on her marriage to Prince Camillo Borghese in 1803. A tongue-scraper and brushes are among the items bequeathed by Pauline to Alexander, the tenth Duke of Hamilton, who was responsible for building the Scottish Hamilton Palace in Lanarkshire, which was demolished in 1927. 

The Art of Living gallery includes a late 17th-century wood-panelled and carved wall from the Scottish Hamilton Palace. Before the palace was razed, the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst acquired the room, but the elaborate carvings have since been in storage. 

The 14.1m project, part of an 80m masterplan, was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Wellcome Trust and the Scottish Government, with 7 million contributed by trusts, foundations and individual donors.

The established London-based dealer Timothy Taylor is expanding into the US with plans to open a space in New York this autumn. Taylors new gallery, which occupies the ground floor of a Chelsea townhouse, is called 16x34 after the dimensions of the space (measured in feet).
 
A statement says that the new gallery will incorporate curated group and solo exhibitions of historical and contemporary figures. The launch show, which is due to open week beginning 19 September, will be dedicated to the late Mexican modernist architect Luis Barrgan.
 
Taylor says: We wanted to do something different and unexpected in New York, rather than opening another large commercial white space. The programme will be distinct from the London gallery, but similarly range from late European Modern masters through to younger contemporary artists. 

Taylor launched his first London space in 1996 at Bruton Place in Mayfair. Since 2007, the gallery has been based in nearby Carlos Place, where Armenian-born Armen Eloyan launches a show of large-scale paintings and bronze sculptures today (Garden, until 3 September).

The gallery roster is underpinned by an interest in post-war abstraction, with Shezad Dawood, Alex Katz and Sean Scully among its artists. Taylor also represents a number of significant estates, including those of Serge Poliakoff and Antoni Tpies. 
 

The veteran dealer Jeffrey Deitch will reopen his Lower Manhattan gallery at 18 Wooster Street in SoHo, the space he ran from 1996 to 2010, with a series of performances this autumn by Eddie Peake (8-10 September). The new works are inspired by the UK artist's prior piece shown in the space during Performa 2013. After that, the venue will host a New York iteration of the 2014 Walter Robinson retrospective at Illinois State University, curated by Barry Blinderman (17 September-22 October).
 
In 2010, Deitch left New York for the West Coast, when he was appointed director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; his tenure was short, however, as he stepped down in 2013. Since 2011, the Wooster Street space has been home to the Swiss Institute, which will now relocate to another New York location.
 
This was always anticipated, Deitch told us. I rented the Wooster Street gallery to the Swiss Institute for five years, and figured that would cover my journey to Los Angeles. I always intended to come back.
 
Deitch emphasised that he was not re-opening Deitch Projects, his former gallery, and will not represent artists (he estimated that a third of the shows he did at Deitch Projects were non-commercial). In 2015, he also began hosting shows at nearby 76 Grand Street, another of his former gallery spaces.
 
The model is to present the same kind of exhibitions that I might do if it was an institute of contemporary art, or a smaller museum, but to support it through the commercial system, through sales, Deitch says. Robinson himself owns a number of works in the retrospective, for example, and those will be for sale. 

The first comprehensive museum survey of work by the late American avant-gardist Bruce Conner, titled It's all true, opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 3 July (until 2 October). The exhibition is the first major survey of the artists career in 16 years and includes more than 250 works including experimental films, videos, performances, drawings, prints, photographs, photograms and assemblage. The show travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on 29 October (until 22 January 2017).

At the Pace Gallery, Blackness in Abstraction (until 19 August) explores how Post-war and contemporary artists use the colour black in abstract sculptures, films and paintings (especially in monochrome). The works, by artists including Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt and Oscar Murillo, were made between the 1940s and today. The show, which is organised by Adrienne Edwards (a curator at Performa and curator-at-large at the Walker Art Center), is an extension of her doctoral dissertation.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum continues its first survey of work by Lszl Moholy-Nagy in nearly 50 years. Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (until 7 September) includes more than 300 collages, films, paintings, photographs, sculptures and an installation titled The Room of the Present, which was conceived around 1930 but never built in Moholy-Nagy's lifetime. The work reflects his interest in achieving a gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that combines art, technology and life.

It is easy to feel trolled by the Ninth Berlin Biennale. The show, which is organised by the New York-based DIS collective (Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro), is a belated conclave for several attitudes that are more affiliated socially than they are intellectually and that began proliferating on either side of the Atlantic at the turn of the decade.

After sorting through the artists that the New York collective has assembled into a deadlocked congress of corporate anthropologists, fashion hangers-on, low-rent philosophers, anxious leftists and media theorists, one might generously distil the biennials essence as a rejection of critique in favour of an extracurricular, exacerbated presentism. Extracurricular because, as the curators put it in a recent interview, the biennial is not about objects, or about luxury, or about the inside world of art, and exacerbated because they instead conceive of DIS as [a] space in which ideas and value systems are not overtly analysed or critiqued but re-presented in their most heightened configuration.

There are two fundamental problems with this position. The first is that it rehearses an illusory, if historically familiar, exit of art from art, in favor of a non-existent outside. This approach forgets that we cant get outside of ourselves, to borrow Andrea Frasers formulation in From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique (2005). The second problem is that DISs task of reflecting the present by exacerbation, or re-presenting, is itself an expository procedure beholden to forms of specialised knowledgeprecisely the kind of knowledge DIS disavows. As Hortensia Vlckers and Alexander Farnholtz of the German Federal Cultural Foundation aptly describe them in the catalogues preface, the members of DIS are experts in not wishing to claim expertise.

And so their plan to embody and exacerbate the present (DIS calls our period post-contemporary) is a funeral with neither corpse nor mourners: the curators deliver, under the sign of a provocative re-presentation without expertise, an ultimately inaccurate, homogenised and universalist account of what our epoch entails, such that their embodied present is virtually meaningless. It offers none of the stimulation they wish for. More troubling still, the biennials assumption of address perpetuates the neoliberal fiction of a reactive public primed to respond to the excesses of the present.

The result of this amalgam is that the handful of important works in the Berlin Biennale are lost in a conceptually unmoored exhibition veneered by easy-outrage, media-oriented provocations. Visitors to the exhibitions spiritual home at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art are greeted in the courtyard by Juan Sebastin Pelezs Ewaipanoma (Rihanna) (2016), a giant, headless cutout of the singer Rihanna wearing a bikini, her cheery visage superimposed on her glistening sternum. Upon entering the building, a stripper-pole accentuated installation (Privilege, 2016) features inane Snapchat footage shot by selfie feminist Amalia Ulman. At the Akademie der Knste, the shows other major venue, one of Anna Uddenbergs sculptures depicts a woman taking a picture of her posterior with a selfie stickone of two such gauche prosthetics to appear in works at the biennial (the other features in a sculpture of found objects by Guan Xiao at the Feuerle Collection).

This low-stakes antagonism finds its apotheosis in Nicols Fernndezs Everything needs its own absence, (2014-15), which, DIS is eager to point out, is the biennials only traditional oil painting. That this piece of trivia seems significant to them suggests a stunted understanding of where art is relative to its history, and what the terms of engagement with that history might be in the face of the globalised, late-capitalist present that they invoke at every opportunity. As curators, DIS correctly identify arts urgent need to adapt itself to the vertiginous effects of our time, but they seem unable or unwilling to put forth any kind of coherent framework for such an engagement. Instead, they consider universal the highly specific conditions of their present and offer generic, quasi-avant-gardist reactions to millennial bourgeois affectations (organic juice, physical exercise, social media, start-up culture).

Nowhere is this more evident than in the biennial's scatterbrained catalogue. After riffing on some pop signifiersSoulCycle, TED talks, Donald Trump, Shakira and Michael Jackson, to name a fewin their characteristically vapid style, DIS delivers in the catalogues introduction the closest thing to a prcis for their projects intended purpose. Our proposition is simple: Instead of holding talks on anxiety, lets make people anxious," they write. "Rather than organizing symposia on privacy, lets jeopardize it.


Since DIS positions their project as a form of address to the public, the absence of the actual parameters of this public is a devastating omission. They instead offer an indeterminately universal people. The presumption of address to an expanded, non-art public is central to DISs claimed pivot away from the inside of art, yet this audience is left entirely undeveloped in their actual project.

The apotropaic invocation of a spectral public is a hallmark of post-democratic neoliberal governance democracy without a demos. Though DIS professes to react to the conditions of the neoliberal instrumentalisation of art and its alleged public, their escape itself enacts arts ideological function as a space for the accumulation and assimilation of false alternatives in the name of an obviated public sphere.

Contemporary international exhibitions, biennials, and events such as Documenta and Manifesta primarily address the general public, not the collectors of art, Boris Groys dubiously asserts in one of two essays in the catalogue that deal exclusively with artistic production and exhibition-making. He continues: And these exhibitions are conceived by their curators as vehicles for sending universal messages in the name of international art The world of art should therefore not be ashamed of the bureaucratic structures and institutions that channel this public appeal.

For Groys, as for DIS, such a will to universality is made ideologically palatable by portraying it as a necessary reaction to the exigencies of the present. In this convenient thinking, any engagement with the conditions governing arts putative right to universal address amounts to petty cynicism. "We feel consumed by individualism staged in the face of the utter powerlessness of the individual in the age of the Anthropocene and big data," DIS's Lauren Boyle explained at a press conference in February. But it is well understood that the effects of climate change and big data are experienced asynchronously and heterogeneously throughout Western societies, to say nothing of the world at large.

Older styles of reckoning with arts institutional nature may justifiably seem parochial and insufficient in the face of contemporary challenges. But doing away with critique altogether risks misdiagnosing both the conditions of the present and arts capacity to respond to it, paving the way for blinkered exacerbationart as pure flavour. For biennial artist Sean Raspetwho works for Soylent, Silicon Valleys SlimFast, and who contributed an edition of the product to be bundled with the catalogueart is indeed a little extra je ne sais quoi to eventually be reabsorbed into our metabolic processes.

(Such a position imbues the biennials most directly political worka music video about the European migrant crisis by Halil Altndere, starring a Syrian-born rapper who came to Berlin as a refugeewith an unsavory flavour because its expression of marginal subjectivity is recast as empty aesthetic calories.)

Fortunately, several artists in the biennial escape DISs limitations to offer a productive engagement with the presents unique conditions of power and image. In their installation at the Feuerle Collection, for example, the artist duo Korpys/Lffler present a work made of crisp footage shot in the European Central Bank building in Frankfurt designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au, a once radical, avant-garde architectural firm, along with grainy, Super 8 documentation of the chaotic and ineffectual Blockupy anti-capitalist protests of 2015.

Hito Steyerl, in a two-part video installation screened in the basement of the Akademie der Knste, links geopolitics and aesthetic technologies, from drones to architectural rendering. Upstairs, Christopher Kulendran Thomas astutely connects the Sri Lankan contemporary art boom that followed the countrys brutal suppression of the Tamil Tigers with Silicon Valley globalisms promise of stateless culture in New Eelam (2016), an installation that houses a speculative startup proposal in a corporate environment containing contemporary artworks purchased from Sri Lankan galleries.

Surpassing the biennials limitations, these three artists do not shirk away from the imbrication of art into the apparatus of spectacle and control, nor do they propose a kind of facile critique. They meet the treachery of the present unflinchingly, without ignoring their works irreducible institutionality as art. For that is perhaps the one negotiation art, even as it subverts its own historical character, is incapable of performing. The terms of the present require a reevaluation of arts purchase on politics, but attempts at extracting art from itselfof extruding it as universal or as infinitely mutableare more liable to emerge from the neoliberal playbook than expose it.


Ninth Berlin Biennale, various venues, until 18 September

Body paint, Super 8 films, furious smoking and substantial amounts of Becks beer took us all back to the 80s at last nights (7 July) unveiling of Studio Voltaires The Neo Naturist exhibition (until 21 August). It is the first show in a public institution to celebrate the extraordinary contribution of the performance art group, established in 1981 by Christine Binnie, Jennifer Binnie and Wilma Johnson and involving pretty much everyone in the 80s scene: from Boy George to Leigh Bowery, John Maybury, Derek Jarman and Michael Clark. The founding trio were very much in evidence, having adorned themselves elaborately for the occasion in Sellotape cocktail dresses, vividly emblazoned with body paint which, as the evening went on and many embraces were exchanged, migrated onto the clothes of pretty much everyone present.

Many former Neo Naturist participants and supporters were also amongst the throng, including the collector and Studio Voltaire patron Valeria Napoleone; the artist and all-round icon Andrew Logan; the designer and former partner of Damien Hirst, Maia Norman; and the art dealer James Birch, who gave both Jennifer Binnie and Wilma Johnsonas well as former Neo Naturist Grayson Perrytheir first shows.

As well as this landmark show, there will be more opportunity for bodyand memorybaring at the ICAs Night with the Neo Naturists on 24 August, which your correspondent notices is sponsored by Yana and Stephen Peel. Whether the newly appointed Serpentine Gallery CEO will be getting her kit off remains to be seen.

The Duchess of Cambridge's frock and hair do were not the only talking point at the Art Fund's Museum of the Year bash on Wednesday night (6 July). The Turner-prize winning artist Grayson Perry's alter ego, Claire, met her doppelganger, Caroline Worthington. The chief executive of Bexley Heritage Trust in south London, shared curatorial small-talk while attracting admiring glances at the pre-awards drinks. Grayson later tweeted a pic of the pair of power dressers. For the record, Claire wore an art-deco inspired bespoke frock, Caroline was in Scandi-minimalist by Cos. Meanwhile, the former Kate Middleton was in a full-length, off-the-shoulder dress. The sartorial effect somewhat overshadowed the Serpentine summer party down the street, another swanky event that night. 

Westminster has been the source of much anger recently following the Brexit referendum but Jorge Otero-Pailoss installation The Ethics of Dust (until 1 September) invites long term contemplation of the momentous decisions that have taken place here. Organised by Artangel and on show in Westminster Hall, the artists translucent 50-metre-long latex cast has captured the dirt and dust that has accumulated here over the centuries.

None of Georgia OKeeffes works are held by a public institution in the UK, so Georgia OKeeffe (until 30 October) at Tate Modern is a rare opportunity to see many of the influential US artists pieces. Among these are her most famous flower paintings as well as lesser-known abstracts such as My Last Door (1952-4).

Sickert and Photography (until 17 April 2017) at Tate Britain is a small display, which opened this week and looks at Walter Sickerts use of the burgeoning medium of photography as a direct source for his paintings. The artist produced his own photographs to copy from, including a series in which he posed as Lazarus. He also used images taken from newspapers that on one occasion led to a plagiarism spat between him and a photojournalist, which is played out in the Daily Express newspaper clippings accompanying the exhibition.  

David Solkins Art in Britain 1660-1815 is a very welcome successor in the Pelican History of Art series to Ellis Waterhouses Painting in Britain 1530-1790. The latter first appeared in 1953, and a fifth edition was published in 1994, with an introduction by the late Michael Kitson.
Waterhouses title unambiguously restricted the scope of his volume to painting. Solkins title Art in Britain suggests a range beyond painting and it does have some room for printmaking, but sculpture is not considered at all; it could have had the same title as Waterhouses volume, except for the dates.

Solkins book begins with a historically significant date, 1660, the year of the restoration of the monarchy after Cromwell, but ends much later than Waterhouses, in 1815, also a significant historical date, which allows him to include discussions of Blake, Fuseli, Turner, Constable and English watercolours. Waterhouses terminal date, 1790, gave him an excuse not to write about Romantic artists, with whom he was not in sympathy. He once admitted to me that he hated Blake, and no doubt felt the same about Fuseli and other history painters.

Far more significant are the differences of approach. For Waterhouse, artists are influenced mainly by other artists and have individual temperaments and occasional patrons; the world of events and social change has little effect on them. Aesthetic judgements and claims of artistic influence are given freely and confidently.

Behind Waterhouses often cavalier opinions is an impatience with any British art that is not portraiture or landscape. Indeed, it is the treatment of history that is the biggest difference between the approaches of the two authors. For Solkin, history is not just something that happens in the background to the practice of art, but is an inextricable part of it; and it is the history of social change, rather than of events and personalities. Solkin is much influenced by the writings of recent historians of 18th-century Britain such as Richard Sennett, John Brewer, John Barrell and John Pocock, who have tended to see the art and literature of the period in terms of the cultural struggle between the landed interest and newly wealthy City merchants and professionals.

This struggle was around such issues as politeness and refinement (and their oppositevulgarity), luxury, civic virtue, sensibility and disinterestedness (the last claimed on behalf of aristocrats rich enough to be supposed to be beyond corruption). Art, and especially portraiture and landscape painting, is seen by Solkin not only as the product of individual negotiations between artist and patron, but also of the latters ideological interests and the artists need to make a living in the rapidly changing society of 18th-century England. It is hardly controversial any more to look at 18th-century British art this way, but we should remember the hysterical and shameful attacks, led by the late Denys Sutton and the Daily Telegraph, on Solkins excellent Richard Wilson exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1982.

Despite the strong historical framework that Solkin imposes on British art, it does not come at the expense of looking closely at paintings. He examines paintings meticulously and integrates them elegantly into his wider discussion. His account of van Loos success in portraiture, for example, depends on an analysis of the effect of the painters technique in comparison with that of contemporary London artists, which Solkin notes is impossible to discern from reproductions.

The central theme of the second half of the book is the importance of exhibitionsthe Royal Academys and otherswhich often have a subtle but decisive effect on the practice of painting and its relation to the public. The prospect of exhibiting paintings brought artists into a highly competitive market, where their ability to make a public statement and, with luck, sell their paintings, had a transforming effect on subject matter and on all genres from landscape and portrait to history painting.

Causing a sensation with a striking work on the walls of the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy could be the way to a successful career as a painter. Painters could literally become the talk of the town, and public exposure provided an opportunity for Fuseli, for example, to make a dramatic impact by the calculated use of horrific subjects. This relatively new public role for art remained decisive into the early 19th century and beyond, and it enabled what Solkin calls a national visual culture to emerge from the period of the French Revolution.

Solkin has created a coherent and persuasive account of the growth and development of British art, based on a fine-grained understanding of the larger historical movements of the periods he considers and an intense engagement with the works themselves. But there are some omissions that are likely to govern any future attempts to cover such a wide field in one volume. It is intrinsic to Solkins approach that the emphasis of the coverage is firmly on the side of public art rather than the more private. To give one example, George Romney is discussed as a portrait painter but no consideration is given to his frenetic and inconclusive drawings for history paintings.

There is an unexpected whiff of Anglocentrism that may be implicit in the original remit of the book. Although Allan Ramsay and Alexander Runciman are considered, there is no sense of their Scottish context at all. Lely, Kneller and other foreigners are discussed thoroughly but not in terms of their continental origins.

There are discussions of paintings that relate to the emerging British empire, but it is not as strong a presence as one might expect. Zoffanys Colonel Mordaunts Cock Fight is discussed, but Tilly Kettle gets only a passing mention. Nor is there any discussion of the empires contribution to the British economy and how that fed into the art market.

Though there is a page on the imagery of slavery, there is almost no mention of the presence of black slaves in a number of formal portraits. Nor is there any consideration of the relationship between American and British painting, which absurdly is almost always treated separately, though almost all 18th-century American painting was the work of artists who had come directly from Britain.

Despite a title that suggests that it might be an earlier volume of the Pelican histories, Painting in Britain 1500-1630 is a totally different kind of book. If the normally single-author format of the Pelican histories connects them to a long tradition of scholarly work, this one bears the stamp of the British Academys relatively recent emphasis on cross- disciplinary work in the humanities, carried out by teams on the model of science research. It has input from the National Portrait Gallery and two university departments, the Courtauld and Sussex, and is written by a team of academics, curators and conservators.

This might suggest an impenetrable technical conversation, but the authors make a commendable attempt to make it comprehensible to non-specialists. An essay by Aviva Burnstock explains the enormous advance in the analysis of paintings over the past few years that enables greater accuracy in dating and identifying materials.

All of this new knowledge of the dating of wooden supports and the paint used to identify workshops and artists is brought to bear in an illuminating way on the principal artists of the 16th and early 17th centuries. It is now possible to reconstruct the oeuvre of artists like Hans Eworth with a new certainty. The volume also considers the movement of artists and their markets. It does not claim to have all the answerstoo much has been lost over the centuries for thatbut it does begin to clarify what has always been a somewhat neglected and underrated field of study.

David Bindman is the emeritus professor of the history of art at University College London and a fellow of Harvard University

Art in Britain 1660-1815

David Solkin

Yale University Press in association with the Pelican History of Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 384pp, 55 (hb)


Painting in Britain 1500-1630: Production, Influences and Patronage

Tarnya Cooper, Aviva Burnstock, Maurice Howard and Edward Town, eds

Oxford University Press in association with the British Academy, 436pp, 150 (hb)

The ninth Liverpool Biennial opens tomorrow (8 July) and transforms the northern city into a site for what the curators call six art episodes, with one at Tate Liverpool tied to the citys collection of Greek antiquities. We imagined ourselves as writers, writing episodes that play out across the city and casting artists into different worlds, says Sally Tallant, the director of the event.

Forty-two artists have been commissioned to produce new works around themes including ancient Greece, Chinatown and Monuments from the Future. The biennial includes 21 exhibitions as well as performances and events.

Ancient Greece gets Modern

The first floor galleries of Tate Liverpool will be transformed to resemble ancient Greece, with classical sculpture collected by the 18th-century antiquarian Henry Blundell on show with work by contemporary artists. Blundell restored his sculptures, which are now in the National Museums Liverpool, so fragments from different eras with different characteristics merge into single figures.

One of thema hermaphrodite whose penis was removed so it would resemble a sleeping Venusalso plays the role of narrator in the exhibitions catalogue. It has become an important character in the biennial, Tallant says. It shows the construction of history.


China on the Mersey

Liverpools Chinatownone of the oldest in Europespeaks to the citys connection to the East. But unlike the neighbourhood, this episode will be dispersed throughout the city in such locations as the disused Cains Brewery, among other public locations. People will have to hunt in the community for these works, Tallant says. Ian Chengs film Something Thinking of You [2015] is being screened at a Chinese supermarket and theres a work hidden in the freezer, too.


Monuments from the future

Artists become futurists in this section that imagines Liverpools cityscape in 20 to 40 years time. Predicting a police state, Lawrence Abu Hamdan has created Hummingbird Clock, a tree of binoculars that look like CCTV cameras. The monument will be placed opposite the Law Courts and will record variations in the citys electrical grid. (Tallant is working to make it a permanent installation.)

The biennial is sponsored by the clothing company Ted Baker.

Liverpool Biennial, various venues, 9 July-16 October

What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehrys Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question might have been almost exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheims phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque government to recoup the construction costs within three years, moved the debate on to issues of branding and statement architecture.

Now the discussion has moved on again. In the public imagination, museums have been transformed from cultural destinations into leisure ones, and there has been a global rise in visitor numbers. Tate Moderns new extension, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, was partly predicated on annual visitor numbers topping five million instead of the two million originally envisaged when the institution opened in 2000. The new wing is notable for the spaciousness and drama of its circulation spaces as much as for the galleries themselves. The other challenge for museum architects today is to design spaces for forms of media, such as video and performance, that are an increasingly prominent part of institutional programming.

As museums get bigger, the tension between intimacy and expansiveness becomes more difficult to resolve. As the artist Thomas Demand notes, some architects, such as Norman Foster, are skilled at moving large numbers of people around airports, while others, such as David Chipperfield and Caruso St John, are experts at intimacy. The two together is the taskscale and intimacy, Demand says.

We asked architects, artists and curators to name their favourite museum buildings

Thomas Demand
Artist
Architects often build museums for their taste, rather than for the collection that will be housed therethats the first problem. Philip Johnson hated certain artists and when he designed museums, he prevented them from being shown. You will never see a Carl Andre in one of his museums; hed put down a tropical wood floor or something. But whatever you do, the artist will challenge the context to make their show unforgettable. The best museums are the ones you can take a walk through. You mustnt see everything at once; every space should not be the same and, because artists create their own worlds, you need windows to connect you to the outside world. At Hans Holleins Abteiberg Museum in Mnchengladbach, Germany, every space is accessible through a corner, allowing installations that are not dominated by the architecture. David Chipperfields Neues Museum in Berlin is great, with every detail, down to the door handles, considered. Caruso St John Architects give spaces atmosphere, intimacy and uniquenesstheir most daring being Tate Britain, where they got the strength of the decoration right. Its a question of proportion and sensibility. 

Cornelia Parker
Artist
All artists want is a neutral, beautifully lit space in which to exhibita space that is uplifting and atmospheric before you even begin to absorb the art. I love the Guggenheim in New York, which is so great for retrospectives and chronological hangs. I admire Renzo Pianos Menil Collection in Houston for its light, intimate spaces; the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, both by Louis Kahn; the Met Breuer in New York, by Marcel Breuer; and Norman Fosters Great Court at the British Museum. Artists dont need flamboyant vanity architecture to fight with. Sadly, at Zaha Hadids MaXXI in Rome, the interior spaces are totally dominated by her ego; the artists work always looks compromised as a result. The Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart by James Stirling is tatty postmodernism at its worst. 

Connie Butler
Chief curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
I love architecture and dont think that art should be placed in a generic white cube. As a curator, it can sometimes be interesting to push against architecture. I was just at the Serralves Foundation [in Porto, Portugal; designed by lvaro Siza Vieira], where the galleries are glorious but not necessarily easy, with their strange angles. It works because the very choreographed space recedes to a backdrop for art when it needs to. A flexible architecture is ideal for a temporary space, and one of the best that started the trend for raw spaces is Frank Gehrys 1983 Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The spaces I love include the Beyeler Foundation in Basel and the Menil Collection in Houston [both designed by Renzo Piano]. The light is beautiful and ethereal. It is also something to do with [the intimacy of] scale. Some galleries are so big that exhaustion sets in on the part of the viewer because there is no break, no punctuation. There is a curatorial move towards bigger and bigger architecture, but this isnt always what we need. 

Jens Hoffmann
Deputy director, Jewish Museum, New York
I like very neutral spaces that are just straight white cubes, and also very eccentric, historical spaces with unusual floor plans and difficult layouts that have a lot of character. I like the Japanese architects Sanaa a lot; they are very subtle and careful but not precious with their architecture. I like Renzo Piano for his interiors. The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor is brilliant and unusual. I also like David Chipperfields redesigns of historical spaces, and Diller Scofidio & Renfro have done some amazing things recently. The worst museum I have ever seen is the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, designed by Fernando Romeronothing is right in that place. It was all about creating a spectacular exterior to recreate the effect of Gehrys Bilbao Guggenheim but without the class and a proper interior. Daniel Libeskinds Jewish Museum in Berlin is also pretty terrible as an exhibition space, given the particular shapes of its galleries. What I dislike most are patchwork museumsmuseums with many extensions and new wings that dont really fit together. 

Adam Caruso
Caruso St John Architects, London/Zurich
The most important thing about a museum building is how powerful the experience of the art inside it is. There has to be something about the architecture that allows for a productive installation of the art, and it is probably the case that former industrial spaces are better for late-1960s conceptual art than they would be for early Renaissance paintings. Starchitecture probably hinders ones experience of art; it is often an indication of a client who wants to build a spectacle to attract people, rather than build an institution or a programme. I prefer spaces that have a specific character, which should come out of what kind of art will be shown but also out of the social and physical situation of the projects. There are architects who are genuinely interested in looking at art and have made some museums that are very enjoyable to visit: the Neues Museum in Berlin [by David Chipperfield Architects], the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery in London [Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates], the Kunsthaus Bregenz [Peter Zumthor], the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, the Netherlands [Benthem Crouwel Architects], and hopefully a few of our projects, too.

The London-based philanthropist Valeria Napoleone is to show her all-female art collection in public for the first time in the UK regions. The Italian-born collector has exclusively acquired works by women artists for the past two decades in a bid to redress the art worlds persistent gender imbalance. An exhibition of highlights will open at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield in the north of England next week (Going Public: the Napoleone Collection, 15 July-1 October), before travelling to Touchstones Rochdale in Greater Manchester (10 December-11 March 2017). 

With works by established and emerging artists including Monica Bonvicini, Tomma Abts, Shirin Neshat and Mai-Thu Perret, the show forms part of Going Public, an initiative by Museums Sheffield to foster collaboration between major international collectors and regional museums. Co-organised with the art consultants Sebastien Montabonel and Mark Doyle, the exhibition programme brought loans from the collections of Dominique and Sylvain Levy, Nicolas Cattelain, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Egidio Marzona to four venues across Sheffield last autumn, drawing 135,000 visitors. 

The pioneering project shares my goals of supporting realities which are too often overlooked by the mainstream and creating a catalyst for change, Napoleone says in a statement.

Today (7 July) also marks the publication of the report from the Going Public summit at Sheffield Hallam University last October. The report by The Art Newspapers contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck represents the first step in a vital conversation to establish how public galleries can develop meaningful, reciprocal relationships with philanthropists, says the chief executive of Museums Sheffield, Kim Streets. 

Against a climate of spending cuts to UK arts institutions, particularly outside London, philanthropy cannot and should not be a substitute for government funding, Buck warns. The collectors themselves agreed that too much private influence could undermine the integrity of our public institutions. Philanthropy is not a silver bullet.

The Going Public Report is available to download in full here.