notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Desire breeds introspection. Semi-abstract expanses of ink and detritus make up intricate patterns on Hartley’s compact canvases. Veins of pigment glow on odd-looking stoneware tablets which hang between the pictures. A display of Polaroids whose surfaces erupted in paint and volcanic ash turns the exhibition into a study of itself.
Desire breeds mistrust. Misprinted pages ripped out from old art history books are the show’s unlisted medium. Hartley pulped Cézannes, Monets, and Twomblys into his paint binder, affording his masters a second and a third chance. That a shameless Rothko miniature somehow survived intact in this mix throws the lot into a crisis of authority.
A pair of houseflies caught in the sticky mess of a trap live out their last moments in serenade and coitus. The end, or is it? This is the kind of story one would like to be ‘deceptively’ simple in the hope of uncovering its trick. Kar’s animated film loops and the desperate rite misses a finale. Dirt, death, and procreation, again and once more, forever.
The installation relies entirely on a display gimmick. If these few frames hold some profound truth, this exhibition overplays its importance. Whatever insight Kar offers into a fly’s life – or, to have it his way, the whole universe – is aesthetically intriguing but fleeting.
The challenge of curating a retrospective of a career as rich as Kelley’s is to build a narrative that both lay audiences and art historians can believe. Wood packs the show and pleases neither fully.
It’s remarkable that any artist’s art school experiments would find home in the museum. Kelley’s 1970s high conceptualism does set the scene but takes some serious nous to be useful. His later turn to popular culture and historical construction thus feels detached from itself. The 90s’ Half a Man cycle, by contrast, brims with foresight. Kelley’s candid critique of the kidult/manchild culture (he satirises himself as a proud “pants shitter”) is remarkable next to his assault of the institution and the odd bout of political sloganeering.
But this is only the half of it. The show continues with sculpture, photography, and video installed so densely (or immersively) that they turn into cacophony. Kelley’s latter works restage high-school rituals and turn the museum into the gym hall. It is difficult to know where one piece ends and the next begins in this architecture. The art historian would know if such overload was the artist’s intended method. The layman will leave with a headache.
A floating double helix assembled from readymade steel staircase modules is the crowning centrepiece of O’Brien’s Frieze prize exhibition. These weighty sculptures hang in the air adorned with chrome balls. The spirals hide behind comically giant, loose-knitted stockings stretched over the forms’ voids. Hundreds of acrylic panels frost the gallery’s windows nearby, as though to form a horizon.
This is intriguing by scale and slightly odd in composition, but the effect is hardly worth a prizegiving ceremony. There is no discernible rationale for O’Brien’s materials to have come together so and no narrative emerges from the tonnes of steel and plastic his work consumed. Next door, the artist hastily installed a bunch of steel traffic bollards in glass display cabinets salvaged from a 1970s department store. Why is anyone’s guess: the work entirely fails to account for itself. Its only redeeming feature is that despite their simplicity, these smaller structures are somehow more disappointing than the steel DNA hanging.
It would take a visitor unfamiliar with Raven Row’s fetish for the 1970s until the heat death of the universe to understand what this exhibition is for. It assembles dozens of supposedly anti-temporal works that barely share a time zone, let alone partisan concerns, folding them into the present as though that could do some magic. Falhström’s 50-year-old study of globalism thus sits next to a strand of ‘mental health’ works by Podolski and Daučíková. An unimpressive archive of transhumanism dug up by Knauf has little echo. Next, some solidarity banners stitched by Zapatera Negra and a climate change corner with bits of glass by Schmidt.
The exhibition guide calls all this “radical”: if time were a social construct, things might have well been different. Proving the subjunctive useless, however, the gallery’s time-capsule top-floor flat hosts an exhibition-in-exhibition called “How to Eat a Rolex”. It may have been a good joke but it’s just too exhausting to look at.
The curator seems unfatigued. The show’s time-blindness peaks in Agirregoikoa’s idiotic pencil animation which poses Swan Lake as a Nazi anthem. This is “how culture is turned into an ideology”. Good to know that’s settled.
The Imaginary Institution of India
★★★★★Barbican, LondonCurated by Shanay JhaveriOn until 5 January 2025How does a curator tell an unfamiliar history yet evade the museum’ didacticism and the audience’s dulled expectations? Jhaveri’s ambitious review of India’s testing decades at the end of the 20th century could easily have been a torturous sermon: the period’s Wikipedia entry is full of social tension, abuses of power, even civil unrest. The absence of wordy labels in the gallery, then, is radically generous. The exhibition’s 50 paintings and the odd installation put forth their aesthetic narratives without competition.
Even unfamiliar with the events, one gets the sense of their near-Biblical magnitude. The political anxiety of Rameshwar Broota’s satirical Reconstruction gives way to the growth caught in Sudhir Patwardhan’s city-building vistas. Social transformations give rise to dream sequences in Nilima Sheikh oils and temperas. Pablo Bartholomew’s record of the Union Carbide disaster tickles the Western consciousness, as do Sunil Gupta’s gay liberation slogan-photographs.
Forms from the 1990s like Sheela Gowda’s clay assemblies feel more familiar still, but Jhaveri avoids the internationalised Indian art market’s greatest hits. Patwardhan now turns to rural desolation, while Jitish Kallat cryptically codes Mumbai’s political agitation. Nalini Malani’s nuclear anxiety video room finally breaks the end-of-history timeline, prompting a second look with the exhibition guidebook in hand.
This exhibition’s three shows in one. Surveillance, reconstruction, demolition: the canvases trace a dystopian life cycle. It’s not immediately clear where one ends and the next begins, however, because Hempton’s thick brushstrokes hit the surfaces with a studied, low-information impasto. Building sites, traffic webcams, and a surgeon’s POV live-stream (!) mix in a mess of severed arteries.
Confusion is Hempton’s favourite trick. The panels play scale, time, and location but even the odd landscape in this show of odd-ones-out brings no conclusion to this winding storyline. Sense finally returns only outside the gallery, as does longing for the unruly canvasses’ promise.
Gabaldón reinvents the pastoral for the Instagram generation. A dozen of his compact, square, and near-monochrome oil landscapes punctuate the gallery’s walls. Examining them in the round, one loses track of where the sequence began as though it were an infinite scroll. Two runs around, however, and the painter’s trick becomes clear: his colour palettes are presets, the paint’s texture optimised by algorithmic trial and error. Even the tree forms come from a 3D object catalogue.
These features are distillates of Impressionism’s rarest forms and Gabaldón has emerald and gold at his disposal. Yet his pictures insist that they owe art history little and the charade is for nothing. This trick just about works in its intended medium (@willgabaldon), less so in the gallery.
Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone. Ask a human, and he falters. This exhibition tracks five decades of artists’ jealous frustration with the machine.
Jack Whitten’s rice paper Xerox, Albert Oehlen’s silkscreen plotters, and Christopher Wool’s CAD engravings perverted ‘new’ technologies in ‘old-school’ craft workshops. Rosemarie Trockel’s knitting and Mattias Groebel’s PAL television acrylics gave into remediation. Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ AI art history paintings, Seth Price’s bust-shelter poster print, and Jacqueline Humphries nominalism, finally, brute-force their hand on the algorithm.
These are modest responses to one of humanity’s oldest problems: man made the machine and knows not how to unmake it. Art brings some taxonomical reassurance. But what help is it when Ai-Da robot’s “painting” has already outbid it at auction?
Chong’s abstractions fancy themselves part of the literary canon. Rows of pastel-coloured strokes line up in grids, one next to and atop the other. Context clues – a slideshow of books clipped from paintings in the MET collection and a Chinese wallpaper poem – suggest that these acrylic marks stand in for book spines in a self-referential roman à clef. Read them all but they’ll still only half cover another set of patterns belonging to the canvases made from repurposed curtains.
Chong was probably reading some epic while painting his Equator pictures. In the gallery, however, they make up a tame cacophony that belongs in the self-help corner of a chain bookstore basement. It’s no book burning: like Idris Khan’s multi-exposure photographs of script, Chong wheels out the same idea not one but many times too many. This spoils the plot.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
