Writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent collects various writings here, including his weekly column for FAD art news, monthly interviews for Artlyst and texts from the shows he has curated. He currently writes freelance including for Art Monthly, Seisma, STATE, Border Crossings and World of Interiors. See Instagram for his daily choice from current shows. Some non-art content, such as photo-poems, is also included.
These are version of my interviews for the excellent ELEPHANT website...
Liv Fontaine 2019
Young Glasgow-based artist Liv Fontaine imposes her sharply feminist perspective on audiences through anger-driven performances: expect a manic vocal style, cutting sarcasm and confrontational bodily exposure. She often adopts alter egos as a means of exposing absurdity, inequality and the unrealistic depiction of women by the male-controlled media—for example Treacle Fuckface, of whom Liv says “She is a lusty busty exhibitionist. She is militant in her agenda. She feels no shame… She is my role model.” Liv Fontaine isn’t her real name, either, but her uncomfortably hilarious material is evidently personal as well as political—so much so that she created the character Viv Insane “to say the things I felt I couldn’t as Liv Fontaine”. Recently Liv has confronted a challenge rather different from the patriarchy: illness. Yet in a typically positive manner, being bedridden facilitated an expansion into drawings which carry through her character-led diatribes in new ways—and she’s now back performing, too.
'Still Stella'
How did you arrive at your name?
I chose Liv Fontaine as a teenager for pure glamour, expecting to become an actress or a topless model. Everyone knows that a performer’s body is public property and I have often promoted this, laying my body in the pig trough and dragging myself by my own hair through the audience and onto the stage. A fake name was one of my wiser decisions, allowing the vital separation between personal life and public work—after all, I’m not always an artist and the last thing I want is Pervey Pete in HR accessing the crotch shots online.
Treacle Fuckface towards the end, 2014
Are you an exhibitionist or just pretending?
Just pretending. I am quite shy actually. At this point I’m in the market to settle down, become impregnated by a man of maybe 6ft 2, medium build, with a job. I want to buy a Citroen Picasso, and would like to live in the country.
Your performances are often angry. What riles you most?
Political injustice, polarizations of wealth, gender inequalities, bad shoes, bad breath, bad health, bad hair, bad sex, tax avoidance, empathy deficits, wicked men not calling me back, strident stereotypes, impossible expectations, inappropriate appropriations—all the usual total nightmares.
Untitled, 2018
You published your “rules for a good love life”. What’s the most important one?
Do not discriminate! Except on age. If your lover is too young to remember Diana’s death, they know nothing of real pain, collective pain, pain of a nation—and let’s face it, if you haven’t felt that you’re probably bad in bed.
Do you have any other advice for our male readers?
Sit down and shut up.
You once diagnosed yourself as an attention seeker. Is there anything in that?
In a performance I scream: “You say I am an attention seeker! I thought I was just a public speaker! You say I am preoccupied and I live for drama! OH MY GOD! I was just trying to eat a banana!”
Performing as Treacle Fuckface, 2014
What’s that about?
A woman is given a hard time because she loves eating bananas in public. She stands up for herself, calling out and debunking the myths of “female hysteria”, “histrionic behaviour” and the empty expression “psycho bitch”. She won’t stop, and subsequently ends up in a mental institution abused and alone. It’s an awful yet familiar tale of shame equivalency, sexual expectation and exploitation.
What chance did she have?
Not much. She talks in the language of trauma because she is traumatized. She behaves in an antisocial way because she is being constantly de-socialized. On dating apps you see so many men saying “no psychos please” in their bios… It really brings out the online troll in me.
Self Portrait (in the Gym), 2015
How do your characters operate, as opposed to “yourself”?
I would like to think the characters live without consequence and responsibility. This obviously isn’t true, though, as my work is autobiographical and I am very complicit in constructing the orgy of depravity in which they live and take inspiration. My primary incentive is to subvert stereotypes, but I’m also aware of the contribution I make to them. The characters are the extremes of my behaviour, a reduction that leaves just the raw emotion—raw enough to comment critically, perform sexually, perhaps entertain comically and often fail spectacularly.
Self Portrait, 2018
You’re not like that, then?
The characters will never compromise, which is in great contrast to my own personality. I’m an absolute pushover. You can get me to do anything by either making me feel guilty or buying me gifts. And I’m not even talking about anything decent—two Kinder eggs, a white wine spritzer or a ride in an Uber Exec and I’m yours.
You have recently produced drawings and paintings. How come?
I wanted to document my existence as an artist and also to make everything less finished. It takes great control to look so out of control. There’s a lot of pressure when performing to get everything right, to make sense, to remember the words, to not be too nervous or too drunk, to be offensive but not too offensive. The pleasure I take from performing is euphoric and orgasmic but it often seems like there’s nothing to show for all this showmanship! With the drawings I felt freedom in all my fuck-ups. I liked being calm in the studio, focusing on just one thing.
Once I sat down, though, in a cruel twist of fate, I couldn’t get back up. I got sick like Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective. My relationships fell apart, my skin fell off, I couldn’t walk. I had to stay in bed for months, so I just got really into drawing and watching Dragons’ Den. I am performing again now but have continued drawing the beginnings of stories that I am writing as performances. It’s a great thought process. And people decorate their homes with colourful physical objects, so from a capitalist view it seems like a good idea too!
Left: Cold Whore Crisis (Narrcisis), 2018; Right: Still from Cold Whore Crisis, 2018
One of your drawings jokes that male ladybugs must be secure in their masculinity… Do you think men in general are insecure these days?
I do not joke about such serious matters. Masculine insecurities can become critically dangerous, not just to women but to men, and to the environment too. Pride seems to be the problem. Pride and shame and dignity is a toxic triangle protected by privilege. But what if you never had the privilege in the first place? And you were forced to live a life as a shameful, heinous, undignified monster? Masculine pride may be damaged or dented but with the help of mothers and whores it will be restored. But the monster however, will be damaged goods forever.
Finally, any advice on Brexit?
Campaign for a second referendum—freedom of movement is fundamental for a good fuck.
EMMA COUSIN 2018
(showing some of the images in her Edel Assanti show - for a fuller range of studio shots, see Elephant).
Hot Ribena, 2018
When I visit Emma Cousin’s small studio in Peckham ahead of her exhibition at Edel Assanti
in London (5 July–15 August), it’s crowded with big paintings of
precariously grouped figures. The show is titled Mardy—a Yorkshire term
for ‘moody’ that catches the assertive and rather irreverent nature of
the work. There’s also an echo of the Mardi Gras, which suits Cousin’s
carnival of colourful figures acting out what she calls “the comedy of
how the body works”. Cousin loves words: typically her works emerge from
a colloquial phrase or saying which she explores through multiple
drawings until she finds the form for a painting. The last step is to
seek out a title which might, she says, “change the temperature” in the
same way as a palette or gesture can.
How did you get into art?
I drew incessantly as a kid. Attending a law conference at Oxford
University whilst assessing my options, I accidentally found myself
in the Ruskin. The prospectus included so much drawing, theory and
anatomy lessons, I was hooked. When I got home I told my mum I’d decided
to be an artist not a lawyer!
So you went to Ruskin School of Art?
I was there from 2004 until 2007. Then I spent a year across a
painting residency in Rome, Hungary and a job in Venice before moving to
London to work for John Adams Fine Art, followed by the Robin
Katz Gallery.
That was eight years’ involvement in the secondary art market through to 2016. Did that help you?
Yes, it immersed me in things—like lots of Bridget Riley, or
Bomberg’s explosive flower paintings—that I might not have gravitated
towards or been able to research in such depth. All that knowledge
simmers somewhere in the back of my mind.
So you were painting through those years, but very much part-time?
I was always painting, but it could feel a struggle. Eventually,
I got shortlisted for some prizes and that helped. I went down to three
days a week at work, found a “proper” studio, and met fellow
“struggling” artists at different ages and stages with whom to
share critical dialogues.
And you filled your house with art?
We got the chance to buy a large but dilapidated house in Brockley.
We were shopping for a bed to put in the spare room when it struck me
that we could use the space more communally and usefully. That led to
Bread and Jam—seven exhibitions with the brilliant Emily Austin and
Rebecca Glover during 2015 and 2016, featuring one hundred artists, and
taking over everywhere except our bedroom. Even the loo and the airing
cupboard hosted installations. I found I loved collaborating, and that
gave me the energy and confidence to focus on what I needed to make.
How do you start a painting?
I draw all the time, and I also write poetry: my ideas often begin
from words triggering drawings. I’m really interested in line and how to
bring the life of the drawing into the painting, like combining two
languages.
What’s behind Hot Ribena, for example?
I thought about how a character might be turned on and off
emotionally, physically and psychologically… and might malfunction in
some way, like a washing machine which responds automatically for years
then suddenly doesn’t. How much can we control our functions? Where
would those buttons be? Between legs, but also the belly button, the
boobs, the eyes as goggles… suddenly you have a body full of
buttons. The title takes me back to sensations: warming up
after freezing in the snow, being sick as a kid—as well
as arguments over how strong to make the Ribena!
People and their bodies seem to be your subject?
I use the body, or groups of bodies, to build a structure, to present
“status changes”: like mobility, clothes and aging. The groups might
fail—are they going to topple over or fall apart? There’s an implicit
danger, a relationship between the figures which could go either way—to
provide a support system, or to pull each other to pieces. I’m curious
about our expectations of our bodies and judgements of other
bodies. I’m testing their limits and interested in putting the bodies at
risk. They exist in a liminal space which is a place of discomfort, an
edge or a boundary. A space between us and not us.
Are they self-portraits of a sort?
No, they may be the same person recurring, or different elements of a
self, and they’re from my perspective—but they’re not me. I see these
bodies as universal, starting from the idea of identity as unstable.
That’s why the spaces have no props or information—the figures have no
coordinates in the space, their only anchor is the structure of
themselves or possibly an overstretched forefinger groping for the edge
of the canvas.
Why do your figures tend to be naked?
Skin is great to paint. It enables them to wear the “same uniform”.
And I’m alert to the information it can hold—age, health,
gender, genetics. It is also the source of much of the tension in the
work, pulled, stretched or squashed to produce a feeling. These bodies
are awkward, uncomfortable, stacked, stretched.
Bracken and Brown Adders, 2018, oil on canvas, 190 x 190 cm
But there are skirts in Bracken and Brown Adders—why?
Clothes aren’t off limits! The original thought for this painting was
the difficulty of wearing a skirt—sitting down, cycling, etc. Then
whilst I was making it “upskirting” was in the news. I thought how young
girls in a more innocent context will lift their skirt up to gain
attention, or just show you their tummy. The irony is the skirts here
are not concealing anything. The title refers to bristling undergrowth
and the danger of adders (I walked a lot as a kid on the Moors and this
was a clear and present danger to the naked arse!). But you don’t need
to know that—I’m more interested in how the words make the viewer feel.
Why the small hands of one figure?
That felt right as a way to emphasize the pincer action. I’m not
after realism, no one poses for the paintings. Though I sometimes make
drawings from life to get it to read right. It’s more about how things
feel from the inside than how they look from the outside.
Black Marigolds, 2018
What’s going on in Black Marigolds?
That came from the phrase “the blind leading the blind”, the idea of
trying to help someone I care deeply about when neither of us were sure
how to or what to do. These figures are trying to assist each other
but going nowhere—pulling against one another as they are stuck. But
supporting each other too. The dark background suggests they can’t see. I
was thinking of three blind mice, so it’s particularly
pinkish flesh and their nipples become beady eyes.
What’s next for you?
I’m spending nine weeks at an intensive residency programme in
Skowhegan, Maine. It was established in 1946 and alumni include Alex
Katz, Ellsworth Kelly and Peter Saul—a great opportunity even if I’ll
miss my own opening at Edel Assanti! While away, I plan to work
towards the Jerwood Survey Exhibition, which runs from 3 October until 16 December.
Liminality Unlimited - an aside from Art Basel 2018
Basel is booked solid during its annual art fair in June. To get a
good deal, you need to arrange it a year in advance. I did, but the accommodation agent
cancelled three weeks before Art Basel, due to ‘emergency building works’.The only option I could find was five nights
at an airport hotel which turned out to be not just a tram and bus away from the
Fair, but then a 20 minute walk from the airport… Oddly, there was no transfer bus arrangement to the F1 hotel. My diurnal route
criss-crossed the non-places of the commercial edgelands.The 1.5 km route took in: one
border crossing (Switzerland to France); one French administrative crossing
(Mulhouse to St Louis); two escalators; three flights of steps; six car parks
crossed or walked alongside; one passenger tunnel; two bridges; three minor
road crossings and one motorway crossing. Along the way on those ten occasions
I saw seven planes taking off or landing (actually, I would have expected more); twelve workers, mostly undertaking construction-related activities;
and no fellow pedestrians following my route.
Yet all this liminality came close to
being a novel sort of interesting. Indeed,
many interests could have been satisfied by regular contact with area - day and night. And photographers have a subject – rare in this age –
which may not have been substantially pre-photographed.
Architectural appeal is evident from the get-go.
Various construction practices can be investigated in depth.
Horticulturalists will note some well-judged incursions of cultivated colour.
The ceremony in which cars kiss the kerb is one of several folk traditions still enacted regularly.
Students of semiotics will wish to spend time in the many car parks.
There are banks of wild flora, and of fauna, such as lizards, too fast to photograph.
Aviation enthusiasts will encounter the occasional movement, but this cannot be reckoned a primary attraction.
Car park design can never be prescriptive. Location, usage and growth must all be taken into account.
A feature bridge marks the midpoint of the walk.
Abandoned monoliths evidence civilisations past.
There is space for meditation.
Sculptural-kinetic interplay is powered by natural forces.
A tunnel has been set up, the better to conjure the drama of emergence.
The geometry of the area replays analysis: the relationship of fundamental shapes with organic forms is notably nuanced.
Some attractions are too alluring to be left unprotected.
Do You Wanna Funk With Me? II (Sylvester), 2018 - Tempera on linen, 150 x 150 cm
Sinta
Tantra's work has often featured hot Balinese colours, but that's only
true of half her new show, not that she hold back with the vibrant
patterns spilling onto the floor. But she has
also introduced more linear works in which she restricts herself to
brushed
brass, raw linen and the white of tempera in adopting an aspect of the
blueprint in musing on Buckminster Fuller's 'Your Private Sky' - the
1948 manuscript in which Fuller outlined his visionary design for a
glass geodesic structure. Add several sculptural elements, and this a
notably varied presentation of inspirational geometries.
Your Sky May Be Surfaced Inside (Buckminster Fuller) , 2018 - Tempera on Linen,
120 x 100 cm
______________
Bomberg @ Ben Uri Gallery, 108a Boundary Rd - St John's Wood
To 16 Sept
Racehorses, 1913
The Ben Uri Gallery is somewhat under-appreciated. Certainly the
current survey of David Bomberg is excellent: a national touring show featuring
plenty from the gallery’s own collection. That includes ‘Racehorses’, 1913, a
black chalk masterpiece of Bomberg’s vorticist style in which I find it takes a
while to ‘see’ how the race operates from left to right and make out the
spectators talking to bookies in the foreground – but then it all clicks
dynamically into place.The later Bomberg is appreciated most
for self-portraits and foreign landscapes in which precisely simplified architecture meets light
to reveal what he termed ‘the spirit in the mass’. ‘Cathedral, Toledo’ 1929 is
typical. ‘You must remember’, teased
Bomberg,‘I was a poor boy from the East End and I’d never seen the sun before’.
Detail from Concrete Jungle, 2011 Luiz
Zerbini is essentially a painter who feeds off day-today observations
of Rio de Janeiro, but his practice expands to cover membership of the
performative collective Chelpa Ferro, and this ten year survey show
includes a ‘3D painting’ / sculptural installation, monoprints made
directly from plants, and films of Brazilian landscapes. A glitch in one
of the films added coloured squares which Zerbini then adopted as a
motif in his paintings, serendipitously linking that to tiling and
architecture in his dense combination of natural and manmade. The whole
makes for a rich account balanced between psycho-geography and
aesthetics, as well as between intuitive and rational.
Still from Sertão, 2009 - colourful reflections in a river with added glitch colours.
______________
Yuko Mori: Voluta and Peter Fraser: Mathematics @ Camden Arts Centre
To 16 Sept
Seasonal light on two Untitled images from Mathematics - chairs and a thinker.
Camden’s latest pairing is of Peter Fraser’s saturated
photographs with Yoko Mohri’s cutely contingent orchestration of objects. Is
there a connection? Maybe, if you see
the Japanese artist’s way with fish, spoons, bells and percussive Venetian
blinds as a model of our thoughts pinging round our brains. For Fraser’s
untitled photographs form the project ‘Mathematics’, which show (i) scenes which
remind him of how maths underlies reality and (ii) portraits of people asked to
imagine that something they had long held to be true had just been proved
false. So both can be related, but abstractly, to thought: for we can’t see
what Fraser’s subjects are thinking, and pretty much any items might have
illustrated the metaphysics of maths, given it’s attributed to everything.Both shows prove to be metaphysically knowing
in a wryly amusing way.
A spoon prepares to play a bell in Voluta
______________
Dialogues with a Collection @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place –
Tottenham Court Rd
To 16 Sept
Lucy
Heyward: Face Up Face Down, 1998
The
premise for Laure Genillard’s new show sounds a tricky one
to pull off: ask 11 artists to show their own work as complement to one
of the
works she has in her own collection. It turns out, though, that the
original works,
the new works, the pairings, and the precise explantory texts supplied
come
together beautifully. Highlights include Gerhard Lang’s ‘visus signatus’
(unsighted) drawing of clouds alongside their meteorological data in
response to Frank Heath’s
penetratingly funny project of inscribing computer back up in laser cut
form;
Sarah Staton’s updating of the language in Stephen Willats’ 1960’s
rearrangable
clothing with text (‘poor / rich / sick…’) with categories from 2018
(‘pangender
/ neurodivergent / aromantic…’) and Lucy
Heyward's 'Face Up Face Down', which seems to derive some sort of merger
of sex and forensic anthropology from the attractively tweaked logic of
displaying a photogram of a plate-stand on that very plate-stand as if
it were itself a plate.. Laure also has as a good a Tomma Abts as you’ll
find at the Serpentine…
Tomma Abts: Zerka, 2015
______________
Caroline Jane Harris: A Bright Haunting @ ASC Gallery, Taplow House, Thurlow Street - Elephant & Castle (to 10 Aug) and Superimposition @ Partners & Mucciaccia, 45 Dover St - Mayfair (to 31 Aug)
Caroline Jane Harris: Shroud, 2018 - hand-cut archival pigment print, 130 x 100cm
I’d
better start with a double bias-alert. I chose Caroline
Jane Harris as winner of a solo show at ASC Gallery; and I helped
write the text for the rather substantial catalogue of Catherine Loewe
and Michael Stubbs' curation. All the same, here are two excellent shows
which investigate the nature of image-making today.
Caroline Jane Harris:Monolith II (detail)2017–18 - white pencil rubbing on archival Kozo pigment print, 112 x 66cm
Harris
uses all manner of technical
processes to expose and work through the digital aspects of such
quotidian
views as clouds seen through a window, which becomes the
screen of post-production. The intricately beautiful results emerge not
as a critique of any truth attributed to analogue indexicality, but (to
quote Jon K. Shaw's catalogue essay) as ‘an affirmation of the visual
mysteries of the everyday’.
Paul Morrison: Pyxide, 2010 - gold leaf and acrylic on linen, 72 x 54 cm
The superimposition in 'Superimposition' can be seen various ways: Barry
Reigate mixes modes over each other – carton,
graffiti, abstraction. Mark Titchner imposes language on pattern to
baroque effect. Michael Stubbs
obscures graphic signs with abstract overlays. Paul Morrison ruptures
space by
combining different scales and sources within the same pictorial space –
an
implied planar superimposition. All of which suggests the digital
overlaps of the screen without using its technologies directly, and
makes for a highly stimulating conversation of contrasting yet related
voices.
Mark Titchner: Up, 2012 - carved wood and imitation gold leaf, 141 x 141 x 10cm ______________
Pablo Picasso: Woman on the Beach, 1932
Carol Bove @
David Zwirner, 24 Grafton St – Mayfair
To 3 Aug
May, 2018
Some of Carol Bove’s best known work uses peacock feathers,
quite an apparent contrast with the big all-metal collages here, which she
makes ‘in the air’ using a robust system of hoists, jacks and harnesses. Yet –
perhaps due to that – there’s a lightness to Bove’s combinations which she says
she ‘imagines fast’, as if working in clay. The results are compelling. Partly due
to the interplay of rusty found steel, manipulated and then powder coated steel
tubing, and highly polished steel discs. Partly due to the superbly orchestrated
‘abstract narrative’ (if I can be allowed the term) which unfolds over the two
floors.
View with Nike I and Nike II, 2018
______________
Aki Sasamoto: Clothes Line @ White Rainbow 47 Mortimer St - Fitzrovia To 4 Aug (Tues-Fri 11-7)
Sasamoto making a performative drawing at the opening
I wasn’t surprised when New York based Japanese artist Aki
Sasamoto told me she has experience as a stand-up comic. Her practice centres
on wry dialogues delivered in a Japanese accent as delightful as Laure Prouvost’s
French, all the while making drawings to illustrate her points. At White
Rainbow You can see the drawn result of her London performance alongside films of her actions
and resulting drawings from three further performance projects in America. To
give you a flavour, one starting point is to contrast the detailed view of the
dung beetle with the broad sweep of a bird. What kind of life do you want? One which
includes this show would be a sensible start…
Sasamoto in dung beetle mode in the film Yield Point
______________
Rafal Zajko:Jaka praca dziÅ› - takie nasze jutro * and Jutro @ Castor Projects, Resolution Way, Deptford To 4 Aug
Anna Perach: The Red House Lord, 2018 - hand and gun tufting, artificial hair and yarn, 140 x 115 cm
Now
is the time to visit Deptford, as Andy Wicks is expanding from one of
the enclaves at Resolution Way to take Castor into two - but for a while
he has all three. The old space contains Rafal Zajko's solo show, which
sees him move from a performance-based practice to an emphasis on
sculptural forms derived from public art in his native Poland, but
retaining a performative element: inserted ice melts, cracks and falls;
visitors have the chance to add chewing gum. The new double unit holds a
group show which elegantly plays wall-based sculptures off against each
other, curated by Zajko together with Wicks and introducing some fresh
Eastern European voices.
* The work of today – determines our tomorrow
Rafal Zajko: Technological Reliquary I (Current), 2018: Jesmonite, embroidery, steel, push button, ice 80 x 50 x 4.5 cm
______________
Richard Woods: The Ideal Home Exhibition @ Alan Cristea Gallery, 43
Pall Mall - central
To 31 July
House with Solar Panels, 2018
At last year’s Folkestone triennial Richard Woods came
across the illogical combination of houses being sold as second homes because the
locals couldn’t afford to buy them as their only residence. That – in the form of implausibly colourful model
‘holiday homes’ - is the starting point for a rich mix of ideas bringing
the housing market to Woods’ characteristic modes. Fashionable cellar
extensions and solar panels are mocked. Eight prints of ‘Dream Homes’ refer to
the somewhat double-edged compliments of estate agents: does ‘mature garden’
mean it's overgrown, does ‘potential to convert’ indicate it's currently
uninhabitable? Another set converts Woods’ famous wood effect prints – by rotation,
cropping and minimal intervention – into ‘handheld landscapes’, ie views of
plots of ground to be sold.
Handheld Landscape (51 acres), 2018 - Acrylic on birch plywood, 27 x 20 cm
______________
Summer is traditionally the time for group shows, typically
combining gallery artists with a sprinkling of guests and tied to a theme which
suits a fairly light curatorial touch. That can become formulaic, but it’s not
necessarily a bad formula. Timothy Taylor, Simon Lee have good examples and White Cube a grand version.
Mask @ Kamel Mennour, 51 Brook Street – Mayfair
To 28 July
Installation view including François (left), Rondinone (centre) and Halilaj (right)
An obvious enough theme avoids the obvious: Nobuyoshi Araki shows
half-face, half-flower collages of what were previously two separate
streams of work to propose 'a still life which masks the psychosexual
desire of the Japanese people'; Petrit Halilaj’s ‘Do you realise there
is a rainbow even if it’s night’ is a moth; Michel François half-masks
his then-wife Ann Veronica Janssens with a white liquid dip; Alberto
GarcÃa‑Alix photographs himself as partially self-masked - and so on,
with 13 artists in all… True, Ugo Rondinone appropriates the look of an
African tribal mask, but that winks at us, conspiratorially.
Araki collage
______________
Mute @ Amanda Wilkinson, 18 Brewer St -
Soho and Elizabeth Price: txtʃərzat Morley
College, 61 Westminster Bridge Rd - South Bank
(to 14 July including Art Night)
Derek Jarman: Household God III (Wagner), 1989
‘Mute’ is, quite simply but originally, a series of works which
keep themselves quiet in various ways. Angela Bulloch’s ‘On/Off Line Drawing
Machine’, 1991, allows itself hardly any expressive capacity as it proceeds to
build up a horizontal. Derek Jarman decapitated the busts of several composers,
replacing their implied music with rocks or objects found near Dungeoness.
France Alys provides a delicately hesistant drawn gesture. Jimmy Desana’s
figures are gagged. Isa Genzken’s radio is concrete.
An offsite extension to Elizabeth Price’s new film at the Morley
Gallery is very much on track: in her trademark ‘archive with disco’ style, she
presents the 6 minute story of a strike-of-sorts through which the governing
committees of universities and museums opt for wordlessness in – it would seem –
the face of increasing corporatisation of those institutions. The only visuals
are collaged video clips of magazine clippings showing long dresses as worn by
models c. 1960-80: on the one hand summoning better days for academic freedom
from commerce, on the other referencing hoe the dresses’ models had to pose for
the purpose of display, rather like a lecturer ticking inspectorial boxes.
Elizabeth Price: still from txtʃərz
______________
Family Values: Polish
Photography Now @ Calvert 22 Foundation, 22 Calvert Avenue – Shoreditch
To 22 July
From Zofia Rydet's Sociological Record
At the core of this show, despite its subtitle, are two
stunning long-term series from the last century. Zofia Rydet made an amazing 20,000 images of
Poles in their homes for her Sociological Record (1978-90) – detailed
orchestrations at a rate of five per day from age 67 to her death! Film maker
Józef Robakowski, banned from exhibiting his work, turned to the apolitically
personal, albeit with the texture of surveillance, as a way of protesting
obliquely at collectivist ideology. From My Window (1978-2000) is just that:
the neighbourhood’s coming and goings to a commentary which stresses their
personalities just as it transmits Rabakowski’s. There are also four recent
projects in the show. Remarkably, they assert themselves successfully in the context
of the older work, especially Aneta Grzeszykowska’s Negative Book and Aneta
Bartos’ startling dual portraits of herself with her bodybuilder father.
Vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 305 x 228 cm
Cipriano Martinez: Brilliante, 2011
______________
Beatriz
Milhazes:
Rio Azul @ White Cube Bermondsey
To 2 July
Installation image Ollie Hammick
There’s
everything in this exuberant show: big paintings, and even bigger tapestry,
collage, hanging sculptural combinations of found objects, and stage set and
opening performances by her sister's dance troupe (a little is here).
One way of looking at the show would be as a rebooting of the Manifesto Antropófago published in 1928
by Oswald de Andrade, for that proposed that European influences should
be 'cannibalised' - chewed up and digested to emerge in a South American form -
and Milhazes definitely integrates a tropical and carnival aspect into European
modernist tropes. This show is particularly heavy on circles, and there’s a
contrast between the dazzling intricacy of their intersections in most of the
work and the comparative simplification which emerges from the weaving process.
As
irmãs em azul celeste, 2015-2018 - Collage on paper 86.5 x 76 cm, Photo: Manuel guas
Shows
about identity politics can get heavy handed, so Lea
Cetera’s light touch is welcome here. The central work is a 15 minute
‘artist
interview’ in which we see an artist - identified by number, hooded like
an assassin,
voice disguised – answer questions about her practice and background.
She complains
when asked how race informs her work on the basis that a white artist
wouldn’t
have been asked that, yet the show is largely about that, as well as
what the
interviewee says her work is about: on the one hand, mockingly, ‘it’s
about
everything, it’s about nothing’, on the other hand it’s about ‘the
psychological spaces we construct and operate within’. The rest
of the show features hyper-real sculptures of quotidian items (coffee
cups and
suchi are favourites) with emails integrated to indicate how the
artist’s
everyday experience is informed by the nature of art and identity. This
is all within the pretended
parameters of a progression chart which the Filipino New Yorker found
online, showing how to
accept then go beyond the role of ‘artist of colour’ to make work about
'whatever the fuck you want'.
Cup Construction, 2018 - plywood, formica, resin, porcelain, acrylic
_____________
Brian Bress:
Another Fine Mess @ Josh Lilley, 44-46 Riding House Street – Fitzrovia
To 27 June
Sunset Peacock (cutout), 2018 - 140 x 76cm
American artist Brian Bress puts the fine into what’s far from a
mess with the most formally innovative show in London. On entering, you wonder
‘what is this?’ Several canvases curl down in curiously attractive tatters from
being cut away with a knife. Down in the
main space you find that those paintings were the main part of stage sets to
make films in which canvas and screen converge. Each start with an image which
gets cut away from behind so that the reverse side hangs down. Bress does the
cutting while wearing a suit with a third painting on it. Behind him is a
fourth painting. The balance between the four levels shifts mesmerisingly over
15-30 minute loops. And that is just one strand of Bress’s video panel
paintings shown here, relatable to Helena Almeida and Alex Hubbard, I suppose, but
effectively a new cross-medium.
Still from Sunset Peacock, 2018 (29 minute video loop)
______________ New Relics @
Thames-Side Studios, Harrington Way, Woolwich
To 24 June
Michael Samuels: Logjam, 2016
Artist-curators Kate Terry and Tim Ellis fill the large
spaces of Thames-Side Studios’ gallery with no fewer than 56 sculptures,
providing an excellent cross-section of current practice well worth the trip to
Woolwich. The conceit of ‘New Relics’ is broad enough to allow considerable
variety, but many artists use their materials with a certain wit: take Vasilis
Asakopoulos’s resinous puddle in a chair (Shell
II, 2018); Simon Brinkman’s fetishistic Untitled
Anonymous, 2018, a black rubber, silicone and steel ramp to nowhere;
Michael Samuels’ oddly resonant boxing off of a ladder in Logjam, 2016; and Alan Magee’s Was,
is, shall be, 2015, a mere sprinkle of silicon which has been cast in the
holes of a colander – one of several small floor-dwelling works offsetting the general
up-thrust of forms. Oh, and Hamish Pearch’s kinetic Bambi, 2018 massages itself…
Molly Soda: Me
and My Gurls @ Annka
Kultys Gallery, 472 Hackney Road – Cambridge Heath
To 16 June
Molly Soda’s teeming and multifarious practice is most
naturally online. Here, then, she effectively transports her studio to the
gallery by covering the walls with images and footage from her laptop, complete
with a 15 foot printout of comments on one of her YouTube posts which takes
over the space sculturally. That is a make-up tutorial which pokes an artist’s fun
at the genre, yet evokes deadpan or mocking responses from people who take her
to be playing it straight. Indeed, Soda entertainingly subverts various roles
and genres. Instead of showing off her new clothes she adapts the format to
present her favourite Gifs: she likes ‘the delayed Gif experience’, as when a
flower keeps the viewer waiting before opening.
______________
Maeve Brennan: Listening in the Dark@ Jerwood Space *,171 Union Street - Southwark
To 3 June
London seems to be in something of a cave moment just now.
If you want paintings of them, see Mimei Thompson’s dark places in a show about
light at ArthouSE1; for a psychedelic encounter with the astro-cthonics of
alien abduction, spectacularly installed, head for Megan Broadmeadow at CGP.
But I like bats in my caves, and Maeve Brennan’s 43 minute film Listening in
the Dark makes the most of them, bringing the unintended fatal
consequences of
wind turbines on bats (their lungs explode in the pressure drop behind
the blades) together with ultrasound detection, scientific research
methods, geological
history and the operation of whale calls to explore bats as a symbol of
how convenient it can
seem to be to ignore what we are doing to the environment. It’s
effectively
paired in the Jerwood's 'Unintended Consequences' with Imran Perretta’s
film about refugees, something else
with which many would prefer to ignore.
* Jerwood's web coverage is unusually good
______________
Mequitta Ahuja: Notations @ Tiwani Contemporary, 16 Little Portland Street
To 2 June
Material Support, 2017 - 213 x 203cm
American
painter Mequitta Ahuja - mentored by Kerry Marshall - takes a
refreshingly unconventional view of the artist in the studio: both by
staging herself reading the paper and doing a crossword as well as
amongst various intersecting works; and by - in her words -
'positioning a woman-of-colour as primary picture-maker, in whose hands
the figurative tradition is refashioned'. The personal and political
aspects come together in Material Support, when we see her
covering a canvas which refers to the 1865 promise of Forty acres and a
mule for freed slaves - that it was never delivered is perhaps indicated
by the letters being written backwards.
Crossword, 2017 - 107 x 106 cm
______________
Hermann Nitsch: Das Orgien Mysterien Theater @ Massimo de Carlo, 55 South Audley St - Mayfair
To May 25
This three floor survey with extensive film documentation of
Nitsch's Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries, plenty of paintings and rooms full of
relics gives a powerful overview of what Hermann Nitsch has done these 60
years. Plenty of transgressive and blasphemous animal slaughter, ceremony,
nudity and crucifixion of course, but what’s it all about? Nitsch is an
existentialist who seeks to maximise intensity by embracing extremes as - in
his words - ‘the artist who is into meat and blood'. He believes that
natural human instincts have been repressed, and that the rituals will release
their energy, purify and redeem us. Even if you're not convinced, the spectacle
remains.
______________
In The Future @
Collyer Bristow, 4 Bedford Row – Holborn
To 14 June
Installation view with Karen David
Law firm Collyer Bristow have, remarkably, now been using
their offices to show art for 25 years*. And they’re big shows: 60-odd works by
20 artists appear in regulator curator Rosalind Davis’ latest, which uses a
Talking Heads lyric even older than the gallery to set off thoughts about what
the future might be like. Any danger of sci-fi similitude is countered by plenty
of wit (eg Kitty Sterling, David Worthington, Sasha Bowles) and a good sprinkling
of retro-futurism (Tim Ellis, John Greenwood and young German Arno Beck, who
has the surprising idea in one of his age of using a typewriter to convert digital images into deliciously delicate
analogue equivalents). Four artists contribute especially large and coherent
bodies of work: Dan Hays, Alison Turnbull, Ian Monroe and Karen David. You do
need to know, I think, that the candies** are in David’s pictured installation
because just that was used to lure E.T. from the woods.
*
By appointment during office hours: and subject to meetings sometimes
occupying rooms, so Friday afternoon is a good time to visit. Comes with
a nice booklet.
** Odd what you can learn looking at art:
Reese's Pieces are American packs of peanut butter candy spheres,
manufactured by The Hershey Company in yellow, orange and brown. Sales
tripled when, in one of the earliest such film product placements, they
featured at a cost of $1m in ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’, 1982.
Arno Beck: Textmode (Mountain), 2017 - typewriter drawing on Japanese paper
I was in my leisure time Editor at Large of Art World magazine (which ran 2007-09) and now write freelance for such as Art Monthly, Frieze, Photomonitor, Elephant and Border Crossings. I have curated 20 shows during 2013-17 with more on the way. Going back a bit my main writing background is poetry. My day job is public sector financial management.
