Harry Burke Reviews Hannah Black's Ruin/Rien

Art critic and curator Harry Burke has reviewed Hannah Black's recent London show at Arcadia Missa, Ruin/Rien, for e-flux's art-agenda. The show explores "art's genesis in the conditions of racial capitalism," as Burke contends, and draws in figures like Marquis de Sade, C. L. R. James, and Ed Ruscha, whose 1962 painting OOF is given another version of itself in Black's oil-painted RIEN. An excerpt:

In his 1993 book On the Museum’s Ruins, Douglas Crimp contended that artistic strategies of reproduction and appropriation—such as those found in Ruscha’s artist books—undermined the “originality, authenticity and presence” that had previously been “essential to the ordered discourse of the museum.”1 Black’s detournément of “oof” to “rien” reframes these conversations by demonstrating that social reproduction, a line of inquiry often valorized in postmodern critiques of the museum, is itself neither neutral nor universally inclusive. As indicated on a printed text skewered on a fake deer antler in the wall-mounted sculpture The Hunt I, “rien,” or “nothing,” was King Louis XVI’s aloof diary entry on July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille was stormed. His surreal, paradoxical jotting—which may have been referring to an unsuccessful hunt earlier that day—anticipates the semantic nihilism that many artists would later diagnose as a product of industrial alienation.

While Ruscha’s work can be read in a lineage of artists who identify such alienation as characteristic of urban life, it was Charles Baudelaire, observing Georges-Eugène Haussmann redevelop the cobblestoned streets of medieval Paris in his 1857 collection Les Fleurs du mal, who defined this spirit. Lorraine O’Grady explored this genealogy in her 1998 photographic installation Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, a series of cibachrome diptychs that superimpose Baudelaire’s poetry and images of him and Jeanne Duval, the Haitian actress and dancer who was his mistress and muse, upon details from Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). “Ruin/Rien” evokes this self-reflexive critique of the entanglement of modernist appropriation and colonial expropriation.

Find the full review at art-agenda.