This text originally appeared in The Critic.
“Culture is Great Britain”, a government-sponsored billboard informs visitors landing at London airports. At a time of internationally rising cultural populism, they may wonder which culture the slogan refers to. The campaign’s Instagram page lauds Cambridge architecture and London Craft Week but also makes claims on Taylor Swift’s Ears tour. With an American counterculture playing an outsized part in November’s elections, and the British Government unsure whom to forge alliances with in the new geopolitics of chaos, what should even UK locals make of a British culture that wants to be global and local at the same time?
Condo Complex, a programme of some thirty exhibitions at London commercial galleries staged and curated by their mostly European and American peers opened a couple of days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The commercial visual art world doesn’t parade its political views openly, but Condo’s seventh edition is emblematic of a somewhat flagging, though engrained internationalist impulse that underpins elite British cultural production.
Judging by the somewhat chaotic constitution of many Condo exhibitions, that kleptocratic international tendency which until recently made London the capital of the global art trade is now mostly habit. Sylvia Kouvali gallery in Mayfair co-produced her display with Beirut’s Mafra’, but not even the trendy “x” marking their collaboration alleviates the headache of seeing seven artists and even a show-within-a-show in a single small room.
This is a pity because a couple of the projects in the show, like Rania Stephan’s 64 Dusks, make for potent illustrations of how cultural and territorial ideas propagate though the art world’s infrastructure. Stephan’s modest photographic diary is an homage to the Egyptian film star Soad Hosny. The actress, known as “Cinderella of the Screen”, died in London 2001 under suspicious circumstances. Her funeral in Cairo was attended by over 10,000 people. The Lebanese Stephan’s picture diary that brings together film stills and snaps of London made while the artist was on a residency at the Serpentine Gallery thus mounts a mournful solidarity campaign between the actress’ cult following in three different nations. It feels forced, given that little of Hosny’s screen appeal rests in Stephan’s images themselves.
A short walk away, the Marylebone gallery Arcadia Missa packed in not one but two guest shows, including a bazaar-like display of assorted wares from two guest dealerships. The other presentation made with gallery Veda is symptomatic of another sentiment in the London art world. This exhibition re-introduces the English-born sculptor Dominique White by way of her Florence gallery and in dialogue with another British painter Lewis Hammond represented by the host. But this is, by the art world’s logic, an international project. It is a cliché that artists claim to live in multiple countries (Essex and Marseille for White), and UK artists often appear on European gallery rosters to help foreign dealers access collectors here.
What is new about this arrangement, however, is revealed by White’s iron harpoons adorned with the nautical detritus of sisal and raffia. Her oversized sculptures are menacing because they point to the inevitably sorry ends of human hubris. White’s works have appeared in exhibitions that prophesise or even explicitly promote the end of the nation-state and the collapse of empires. This oeuvre which damns Britain’s history and future equally is both an import and export good.
One could quip about post-Brexit customs procedures begrudged by art dealers. But the significant point is that the intellectual basis by which Britain trades in contemporary art has shifted. When the market was booming a couple of decades ago, London’s galleries glibly fetishised the foreign as exotic. The Eastward expansion of the EU, for example, introduced hundreds of new artists happy to play the part. Collectors’ eyes first lit up and then glazed over as they repeatedly read about “the fall of communism” in gallery catalogues. Today, the other – who is also the self – is not so submissive. The international success of artists like Wood is a sign of both Britain’s waning confidence and its hapless ability to turn even that failure into a commodity worthy of an empire.
Should one consider this tendency in light of the recent downfall of American cultural institutions at the hand of a political-critical ideology of their creation? Contrast it with the laughably impotent displays of #resistance by British and European cultural animators emerging in the past weeks? Or, for that matter, note the nascent attempts to restage countercultural phenomena like Manhattan’s Dimes Square scene in London?
The truth is that despite recent talk of Britain’s soft power and the Government’s plan for replacing the cultural promoter British Council with another, likely as ineffective body, our culture has been missing a trick on the international stage for a long time. This is poignantly illustrated in Condo by Being John Smith, a self-referential show staged by Berlin’s Tanya Leighton Gallery with Kate MacGarry in Shoreditch. The septuagenarian Smith has amassed a cult following since his 1974 film The Girl Chewing Gum shot in Dalston. He is doubtlessly one of the most consequential British film artists of his generation. Smith’s new work, however, is a tongue-in-cheek filmic lament on his failure to find fame given his common name. Indeed, scanning the artist’s CV, one is struck that Smith has long been celebrated by art institutions abroad far more than the UK art world.
Would Smith rank higher in the international art world if Britain’s art market were more parochial or the artist more vocal politically? A cryptic answer comes from one of Condo’s highlights, a museum-worthy duo exhibition by sculptor Janet Olivia Henry and painter Cynthia Hawkins at Hollybush Gardens in Farringdon. Their New York gallery Gordon Robichaux prides itself on being a “utopia” for African American artists.
But this has little to do with the quality of the work next to the conviction that a London collector will immediately recognise in Hawkins’ overwhelming acrylic abstracts and Henry’s humanoid figures constructed from items obsessively collected over decades. These hanging sculptures are at once glossy demonstrations of a cultural prowess and admissions of a kind of modesty of means that allow artistic ideas to develop to their own enrichment first. Or perhaps utopias make for good marketing copy. In the import/export world of culture, getting that brief right seems to be half of the game.
Condo Complex exhibitions continue until 15 February 2025.
Main image: John Smith, Being John Smith (film still), 2024 at Kate MacGarry.
