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The legibility of measurement is the baseline of modern capitalism: it’s how the nation-state, ruled from a centralised location often far away, was able to extract resources from its citizens. Pratchaya Phinthong thinks a lot about how we measure the value of something, not least when the artist picked 549kg of fruit during a residency only to exhibit 549kg of junk. It was a typically absurdist gesture, Adeline Chia notes in her cover feature of the March issue of ArtReview, highlighting how the price attributed to an object does not always follow the nature of its form, or even the consequences of its function. Measurement is also the thing that allowed Agnes Denes to plant .9 hectares of wheat next to New York’s World Trade Center in 1982, on land ‘worth’ $4.5 billion. That number was not based on the 450kg of grain Dene extracted from it (or however many sacks of grain that amounts to, assuming everyone knew the size of the sack and could trust the feudal lord had not enlarged the size of the sack with which the grain tithe must be paid – a common practice of the early European Middle Ages) but the amorphous real estate value. Amber Husain asks why we sentimentalise Denes’s most famous artwork, and where has this led us?
But what about that which actively resists measurement? Like the atmospheric choreographies of Alutiiq/Sugpiaq artist Tanya Lukin Linklater. Their collaborative exercises draw on Indigenous experiences in order to navigate beyond the undercurrents of colonial violence that structure many of our societies today? Lakȟóta artist Kite, also featured in this issue, responds a little differently to ideas of measurement: working in the realms of artificial intelligence, Kite’s been creating her own dataset – one that’s built around Lakȟóta dreamwork and body movements – in order to carve digital space for Indigenous knowledges. Some things are best when made to measure.
Elsewhere in the magazine Tyler Coburn meets Zamanbap, a collective of performers attempting to define ‘contemporary art’ in Kyrgyzstan; Michelle Santiago Cortés explores the tech-bro longevity complex; as Hong Kong builds its Northern Metropolis, a 30,000-hectare housing and technology hub, Ilaria Maria Sala considers the human and ecological costs; and Rosanna McLaughlin asks what do we want from tarot cards, once a simple parlour game, now signifiers of the occult. In the ongoing Eternal Returns series, ArtReview’s editors wonder what Gabriel García Márquez’s 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech can tell us about today’s political situation; and Bhanu Pratap provides his own slice of magical realism in a new comic strip.
Plus exhibition reviews of On Kawara’s early works in Paris, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in London, Leonora Carrington in San Francisco, Renata Lucas in São Paulo, and the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane; and much more.
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