For an exhibition that ostensibly concerns itself with the marvel of conceptual evolution, Birds is depressingly arid. Posing as an archaeology of signs, women, and their entanglement, it amounts to mere research notes.
Huws’s penchant for the Duchampian readymade turns her into an opportunist and a peddler of empty slogans. “We don’t need artists we need more thinkers” is as banal as it is untrue. Her challenge to Freud, wrapped in a muddle of pictorial references and sticky notes, aesthetically lands next to an undergraduate’s sketchbook effort.
Büttner’s taxonomies are subtler, her images more sumptuous. The photographic moss is, well, pretty, and free of stifling overinterpretation. Her Art History of Bending—who doesn’t like a comedy slideshow—suggests some interest in the substance of things. But Büttner blows her cover with a pair of gigantic breasts in unfired clay, a childish response to the urinal. This oozes more than necessary, illuminating little.
