Dan Guthrie

Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure

★★☆☆☆

On until 17 August 2025

The problem for a culture built on iconoclasm is that eventually, it will need to create images of its own. Guthrie is yet to consider this because his image war is still virtual. The subject of his static video installation, as well as of the animated statue-scrapping sequence, is the infamous Blackboy Clock in Stroud. The artist fantasises that the offensive figure has vanished but that he alone might still control its afterlife.

But artists have not been the sole purveyors of aesthetic meaning since the Reformation. In Strud, the statue’s mooted removal has stalled in bureaucracy. Lacking the conviction to climb a ladder and destroy the object himself, Guthrie’s posturing smacks of desperation. The project’s subsidiary poems, press cuttings, and morality tales told as quasi-art history are barren adjuncts to the vilified “retain and explain” strategy. Next to the object itself, they give rise to nothing.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Nanténé Traoré at Sultana and Amanda Wilkinson ★★☆☆☆

Nanténé Traoré

She says it's the high energy

★★☆☆☆

Bodies clash with lights in front of Traoré’s Narcissus camera.

Șerban Savu, The Romanian Pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Șerban Savu

What Work Is

★★★★☆

This Elysium is part panel house block, half Roman ruin

Bruno Zhu, License to Live at Chisenhale ★☆☆☆☆

Bruno Zhu

License to Live

★☆☆☆☆

Faced with so little, one longs for an even emptier room.

Max Hooper Schneider, Twilight at the Earth’s Crust at Maureen Paley ★★☆☆☆

Max Hooper Schneider

Twilight at the Earth’s Crust

★★☆☆☆

Mad Max meets Waterworld in a crossover sequel conceived by a film studio’s marketing department.

Jordan Derrien, Painted on a Wall of the Inn at Marlotte at Des Bains ★★☆☆☆

Jordan Derrien

Painted on a Wall of the Inn at Marlotte

★★☆☆☆

Derrien has his audience discussing the nature of paint drying out loud.

Klara Lidén, Square Moon at Sadie Coles ★★☆☆☆

Klara Lidén

Square Moon

★★☆☆☆

This isn’t Times Square in a blackout.

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