Breuning has made a career of challenging the belief that critique and comedy do not go together. His paintings, sculptures and elaborately staged photographs satirise the more corrosive aspects of modern life, from man’s encounter with nature to the effects of technology on it, all while getting people to dress in silly costumes or show their bums. One example of his arse art is Text-Butt (2015), a cardboard cut-out of a behind with SMS text bubbles coming out of the crack. On the surface it’s a crude joke about talking out of one’s ass, or farting out messages. Deeper down, it’s about the unacknowledged effects of hyper-connectivity on the gut: the nervous effects of being always on-call. Text-Butt might even be included with a number of Breuning’s works which address the philosophical split between abstract consciousness and physical sensuousness—Descartes via the derriere. The invitation to such philosophising might also be a joke at the arrogance and pretentiousness of the art critic, who inflates the cultural significance of what is just a funny picture of a bottom.

Much of Breuning’s work explores the word-image relationship and like text-art—think Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha—draws upon signs from advertising (billboard style slogans), and popular culture (Bigfoot, animation) to, at least on one level, communicate clearly and immediately with a wide audience about existing political structures. But Breuning eschews cool conceptualism for absurdism and often vulgar joking; his word-image relationships belong more to the world of the cartoon, another mainstay of his practice.

In preferring to combine his ecological mission with entertainment and accessibility, Breuning’s work seems to align with the post-critical tendencies of the last two decades. Thinkers such as Rita Felski and Bruno Latour, have argued that critiques of ideology and language have become too elitist, self-referential and pessimistic in their problematising of ideas, forgetting pleasure and attachment, which are particularly necessary when addressing urgent problems. Latour argues that critique has had an adverse effect on environmental campaigns, by undermining the idea of universal truths or essences which have opened the way for climate change deniers to claim that the facts of global warming are social constructs, open to debate. But I don’t think anti-environmentalists are busy reading Derrida and Foucault, and in any case, wouldn’t such thinkers lead us to question the powerful interests behind their denials? Breuning’s art shows us that critique doesn’t mean sacrificing pleasure. His work is irreverent—a playful poking fun at issues, even as he rallies around them. He approaches environmental concerns with seriousness, in the sense of being important and worthy of attention, but he does not take ecological representations seriously, approaching them without the solemn reverence and unquestioning regard that seriousness implies. In short, if someone were to ask of Breuning’s funny work “is he sincere or not?” we would have to answer both “yes and no”.

The naivety of Breuning’s cartoon exaggerations ensure us of his sincerity—he truly cares and isn’t capable of duplicity. Even so, this grotesque overstatement inserts a touch of irony that pulls apart image and text, picture and message. Leave Me Alone (2024), a photograph in which Bigfoot and family stare anxiously at the camera, mid-migration, stands in for the plight of indigenous people forced out of their homes by capital extraction. Yet even as Breuning uses the pop culture figure to appeal to the viewer, the image offers a critique of a mass media more interested in a fictional avatar of early man, than in the real struggles of first nations peoples. Gasoline (2024) with its demonic red figure surrounded by flames, suggests both the damaging effects of fossil fuels and the reductive moralism which turns environmental problems into issues of good and bad consumption, encouraging a fatalistic stance that man must inevitably pay for his sins against nature.

Biblical signs recur in Wave Land (2024), a painting in which teardrop shaped rain produces huge waves threatening to engulf the land. Here Breuning nods to Arte Povera in using nature to depict nature, with his rudimentary woodblock printing circumventing industrial production. The childish images with floods of tears poke fun at the sentimentalism and infantilism of environmental imagery—think of the Keep America Beautiful adverts featuring Native Americans crying at the sight of littering—even as the work appeals to those same simple values. Then there is Sunny (2019), a video showing a young blonde boy staring into the camera, the earth in his eyes, until both planet and child start to burn up. It’s a moving scene, despite looking like an outtake from Michael Jackson’s much mocked 1995 music video Earth Song. The looped image, devoid of other narrative context, leaves unresolved whether the child is the victim or cause of planetary future destruction—does the son fly too close to the sun?—while the choice of a blonde blue eyed kid suggests the normative, heterosexist and frankly Aryan imagery of campaigns to save the planet “for future generations.” We may even ask if the formulaic, repeating image doesn’t suggest the failure of this familial cliché. So much is at stake here: not only the future of the planet, but the kind of planet we want to survive. In short, Breuning seems to tell us that the issues are too serious to be taken so seriously.

Paul Clinton

Moffat Takadiwa’s studio is situated in Mbare, a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Harare, whose informal economy is partially based on the recycling of electronic goods and the sale of second-hand products imported from Europe. Over the past ten years, he has been collecting computer keyboards, used toothbrushes, empty toothpaste tubes and pen casings, as well as bottle caps, plastic bucket handles, spoons and many other objects. More recently, belt buckles and zippers have appeared in the giant tapestries exhibited as part of Zimbabwe’s national pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

These disparate elements are given new life through the art of Moffat Takadiwa, who transforms them into sculptures and tapestries. His practice follows in the footsteps of the African artists, who from the 1980s onwards, chose to create works from almost exclusively recycled materials, in a radical break from the Western academic art which was introduced into Africa at the end of the 19th century.

For Moffat Takadiwa, the turning point came in 2015 with the protest movement “Rhodes Must Fall,”(2) which challenged the predominant Western worldview in the curricula of South African universities. This was the moment when he realized that it was time to find his own path, employing an artistic language that drew on his local socio-cultural surroundings. Using keys from computer keyboards, present in many of his works, Moffat Takadiwa began developing a “de-colonialized” vocabulary.(3) Through his multicolored mosaics, whose constituent elements are strung together with fishing line, the artist relentlessly builds connections between past and present, between the ancestral wisdom of yesterday and the urban societies of today. Each new work is a narrative that invites the viewer to contemplate the interdependence of communities across centuries and beyond geographical borders.

The circle, omnipresent in Moffat Takadiwa’s oeuvre, not only refers to a shape found in numerous everyday objects but also evokes the outlines of Great Zimbabwe, a legendary medieval city, today in ruins, but which once sat at the center of an empire that encompassed present-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The aesthetic appeal of his works—which borrow motifs and colors from a variety of cultures in his country—underpins a scathing critique of the legacy of a troubled colonial past, while at the same time praising the resistance groups that fought against it.

Moffat Takadiwa’s works are akin to algorithms relentlessly producing variants of the same narrative. They methodically chart the journeys of goods that have been returned to Africa. Raw materials extracted from the continent are shipped to Europe or China, where they are used in the manufacturing process. When they finally “return to their homeland,” Moffat Takadiwa transforms them into precious objects, some of which once again make their way back to the West, destined for museums and collectors.

N’Goné Fall

Laetitia Chauvin: Do you do preparatory sketches for your sculptures? As you sculpt, are you guided by your own inspiration or by the way the wood is formed and its different aspects?

Laurent Le Deunff: Recently, I’ve been doing more and more sketches for my sculptures and installations, but this act has more to do with the simple pleasure of drawing and the freedom to explore different possibilities than the need to plan out a particular sculpture.
I often compare wood sculpture with pencil drawing: the log is like a blank page, a support that is constrained by its format, but where anything remains possible. A log or a section of tree trunk is not sterile in nature, it has already been part of a living thing, and within, it carries an awareness of life.
During the sculpting process, the grain of the wood, the knots and the beginnings of branches, as well as the size of the block obviously have a bearing on the shape the sculpture will take.

LC: Should we be able to perceive a kind of rebus in these sculptures? Obviously, the viewer is drawn in by a process of montage involving the imagination: are you trying to produce the same kinds of unconscious association sought by the Surrealists with their exquisite corpses?

LLD: I have no intention of telling a specific story with this series of sculptures; I’m just trying to create exquisite corpses with logs and by invoking other works or styles through the use of imagination. I’m inspired by artists who regularly work with wood such as Stephan Balkenhol, Constantin Brancusi, Claudia Comte or Martin Puryear… to name but a few, as well as, and above all, by forms seen on chainsaw sculpture competition websites and various curios and objects from the world of handicraft or the so-called vernacular practices.
In a similar way to the Surrealists with their folded sheets of paper, I use chalk to divide the block of wood into three equal parts. I begin by working on one end, the resulting shape leads to a second and so on until the sculpture is finished. What motivates me with this technique is knowing how it starts, but never how it will end up.

LC: These sculptures obviously bear a certain resemblance to the Native American totem poles of the North-West (Alaska, British Columbia, etc.) and moreover you also spent some time in Vancouver and on Victoria island. Did memories of this period inspire you while sculpting these “totems”?

LLD: Of course, it would be difficult not to think of Native American totem poles when you see my own vertical sculptures, made up of superimposed figures. This however wasn’t done intentionally. And yet, there is perhaps something spiritual in these forms: I never feel alone when I’m working in my studio; it’s as if I were surrounded by ghosts. This series is a means of summoning them and lending them material and visual form.

LC: Production methods and supply chains have always been an important factor in the creation of your sculptures. As far as possible, you favor locally sourced materials, encounters with artisans, YouTube tutorials, studio work and D.I.Y. This translates into research into the simplest, most natural, direct and meaningful of forms. Where did you find the materials used in this series of sculptures?

LLD: One of the things I like most about working with wood is the relative economy of means. It’s important to me to be able to work with short chains of supply, with local tree species that I can find within a limited perimeter. Since my workshop is in the South-West of France and my parents live in the country, it’s fairly easy for me to get hold of various types of wood. For the larger works, I call upon an artist friend, Christophe Doucet, who used to be a forester, and I purchase the rarer wood types from a retired fellow who lives in Brittany and who I met through an online mail order site. The type of wood I use is very important in terms of color, hardness and shape, which vary from one species to another. Moreover, the title of each work is given according to the type of wood used. My eventual aim is to produce a sculpture in each existing type of wood, even if that involves a lot of travelling to find the raw materials.

LC: On the walls of the gallery space, we find large-format drawings of cartoon explosions. What is it about these comic explosions that fascinates you so much? Is it the stylization of catastrophic events a means of distancing oneself, of reducing the disaster to a size the mind finds easier to cope with?

LLD: It’s not really the explosions that fascinate me—in my mind, these drawings are more like clouds—but rather the way they are represented in cartoons. I find them by freeze-framing. I carefully go through a sequence, second by second, until I find the image I’m looking for. The instants I draw are not necessarily visible when watching the sequence normally, as the time they appear on the screen is very, very short. What interests me is literally the smokescreen effect, the way everything is erased, the interlude, the pause and the way it transforms the narrative.

LC: Finally, could you tell us what the title Easter Eggs refers to?

LLD: I chose this title for my installation in the project room because of its analogy with an Easter egg, its position in the gallery and the incongruity of the objects I’ve chosen to present.
I often play video games with my son, in particular Red Dead Redemption 2, a kind of melancholic western that plays on the codes of generic western movies, in an open world, whose every nook and cranny I love exploring. The game involves many “Easter eggs” in the form of secret levels, referenced phrases, concealed objects etc., all hidden away by the game’s authors.

The cult that revolves around William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), his reputation as an author who was both a junkie and genius, his invention of the cut-up technique in Paris at the end of the 1950s, alongside Brion Gysin, his influence that endures through the work of generations of artists, musicians and even film directors such as Gus Van Sant, who invited him to take part in his movie Drugstore Cowboy (1989), all evidently lend each of his artistic works the status of a fetish object. Yet in order to better observe and understand what the author of The Naked Lunch (1959) has left before our eyes, we must go so much further than this state of idolatry.

Both close up and from a distance, the paintings “executed” by the American writer William S. Burroughs in Kansas, during the 1980s and after, seem to me to be the epitome of punk painting. Indeed, a friend of mine recently whispered in my ear that one of these “shotgun paintings” was blasted out by the singer Debby Harry of the group Blondie. There’s something wild about this abstract bad painting, these messy compositions and his somewhat tasteless palette—I can’t help but see and hear traces of Californian punk or the Beastie Boys Sabotage (1993), rather than the New York mythology that habitually clings to Burroughs’ needle-pocked skin. If I had to associate it with the work of another artist, I could see it exhibited alongside the perverse and noisy paintings of the German artist Jutta Koether with her Bruised Grid canvases that emerged from a difficult and introspective period of her life.

However, if we are really looking to establish a dialog between these paintings and the writer’s texts, we should undoubtedly turn towards his essay collection Electronic Revolution (1970). In this concise handbook for media sabotage, the writer evokes a rock festival, where hordes of young people mix together thousands of random recordings: political statements, music and news broadcasts as well as sexual grunts and the farts and belching of politicians, recorded secretly in their toilets. A festival of tape recordings, a sonic magma, a giant celebration of media-jamming, to short-circuit the repetitive and mendacious flow of cultural communication.

The Shotgun Paintings and Burroughs’ other artworks clearly belong to this sabotage operation: he prevents any direct and convenient communication between the paintings and their viewer, refusing any messaging, gluing (sometimes repeatedly) images from magazines to the canvases, saturating the spaces with marks; jamming is obviously the true modus operandi of these paintings. As for the holes made by the gunshots, they are there to interrupt the flow once again, yet at the same time open “doors” to a liberating beyond.

Not entirely by happy coincidence in the times we are experiencing, it was in a recent and masterful essay by the queer philosopher Paul B. Preciado Dysphoria Mundi (2022), that I found some enlightening and extremely contemporary pages concerning the American writer: “For Burroughs, these acts of sabotage had a therapeutic, almost organic purpose. They were intended to heal the social body: mass communication had generated a form of contamination, against which it was only possible to fight by intentionally hijacking the inscription machines. Electronic guerilla warfare was the only thing capable of ‘releasing the virus contained in the word and thus bringing about social chaos’.”1

“Language is a virus”: this declaration, found at the heart of Burroughs’ thought and work, is examined and reused by Preciado in a context of dysphoria, that is to say in reality, one of general disorder exacerbated by the Corona Virus pandemic. In fact, “today, we are probably better able to understand” this strange and viral theory about language that we must also extend to the visual language used in mass media and communication: writing (and by extension language, speech and communication) is always an infection. Yet Burroughs’ proactive proposals to deal with this contamination are even more crucial: “For Burroughs,” Preciado states, “the writer and activist’s task, was to attempt to use language as an inoculation, as a vaccine. Language has infected us and we can only be cured by the intentional hijacking of the semiotic machines that inhabit us,” and that includes turning them against themselves and against the poisonous power they exert on us and within us.

In our hyper-mediatized society, we are all spreaders, that is to say we are infected and trapped in the webs of the social networks, while spreading the media virus ourselves. Swimming against the current as always, Burroughs reminds us of the counter-force embodied by painting and artistic practice, with canvases that he originally made for his own personal mental hygiene, not for the benefit of a spectator, in a mix of quasi-automatic practice, agitated thought, anti-media therapy, acute paranoia and anti-establishment painting.

Jean-Max Colard

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1. Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi, p. 72, Grasset, Paris, 2022.

Translation: Chris Atkinson

Broccoli is good for you… but what’s good for broccoli? Hein Koh’s latest suite of drawings and paintings anthropomorphize the leafy green vegetable, creating an avatar through which the artist can navigate contemporary anxieties. There’s a playful goofiness here, as Koh’s broccoli-woman struts through the snow or rain, but there’s also pathos. Like Philip Guston’s restless, insomniac smokers, these characters offer a way to address real loneliness, insecurity, and alienation.

Known for labor-intensive, whimsical soft sculptures, Koh has only recently detoured back into two-dimensional media. Mostly made during the pandemic’s year of stress, these works track a familiar oscillation between despair and optimism. We see Koh’s protagonist reclining in a field of flowers—but also puffing manically on a cigarette, or examining her single Cyclop’s eye, bloodshot and beat. It’s Ok finds her mounting a mysterious staircase, exhaling smoke, trying to reassure either herself or the viewer as darkness creeps in around the edges.

The domestic claustrophobia of quarantine is counterposed against moments of relative freedom: driving a car at night, painting a self-portrait while texting with friends…fantasies of escape and release in an age of lockdown and isolation. One of the strangest of many strange drawings here is Tree of Life: broccoli-woman reclining in a subterranean cave or grave beneath a tree, its roots apparently fed by her green body. Has she given up? Or merely come to find some peace and quiet, an acceptance of nature’s cycles, the fact that shit happens and the world keeps moving on?

An undercurrent of empowerment and eroticism courses through these works as well, even if it’s relayed with tongue slightly in cheek. Break on Through imagines broccoli-woman as a sledgehammer-wielding boss, smashing a brick wall to reveal a mysterious eye beneath it. Sporting thigh-high black leather boots and fire-engine red lipstick, she’s empowered and fierce, in no need of anyone’s attention or approval. The sex appeal is both serious and winkingly ironic—something of a call-back to an earlier Koh photo series in which the artist herself posed nude, pin-up-style, alongside her own sculptures.

Like Ellen Berkenblit or Carroll Dunham, Koh borrows the aesthetic logic of the cartoon to dig up deep, universal truths and emotions. These drawings and paintings are unexpectedly affecting: VeggieTales through the prism of contemporary psychology and self-care. “Eat your broccoli!” a parent nags, pressuring their grumpy child toward better habits. Koh takes that archetypal symbol of health and complicates it—makes it chainsmoke, makes it run itself ragged. This broccoli is no kind of role model.

There’s how we know we should live, and how we actually live, and the chasm between. One confounding and irritating narrative of the pandemic has been the opportunities it supposedly presents for self-improvement. Sure, we’re stuck at home, or out of work, or desperately trying to home-school kids—but isn’t it also a great time to start riding a Peloton, or getting into baking, or learning Japanese? Koh’s scenes of a broccoli, alone and struggling, are far more relatable. Like us, she’s just been getting by—through the boredom, anxiety, and doubt—and hoping to come out the other side, not too wilted.

Scott Indrisek

If she essentially turns to photography in her work, Sophie Ristelhueber utilizes her shooting to create full plastic works, playing with the material and the format of the image, its status, its framework and its installation in space.

Her work has been exhibited in numerous international institutions, among which MoMA (New York, US), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, US), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, US), The Power Plant (Toronto, CA), Tate Modern (London, GB), Imperial War Museum (London, GB), biennials of Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Triennial of Etchigo-Tsumari, Rencontres Photographiques d?Arles, and in Paris, MNAM  Centre Pompidou, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Musée Zadkine, Musée Rodin .

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