notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Jones’ tableaux which capture everyday objects like tableware, cut flowers, or arrangements of light and glass are tricks of the eye that pretend to come from a past register of sepia-toned sentiments and cyanotype archive records. As objects representing objects, these works are exquisite and their tricks are revealed neither by their delicate dimensions, nor their luxury polished frames. One therefore imagines the painter’s hand applying the watercolours and oils to suedes and silks with the care once reserved for the most elaborate and delicate of photographic processes now synonymous with a nostalgia for easier truths.
But this spell must be broken. However attractive the trinkets in front of Jones’ easel and however masterly her rendition of them, these images finally inspire frustration. The lightness and slightness of the painter’s gesture cry out for a sledgehammer that would relieve the viewer of doubt and responsibility for deciding which of the scenes will stand the test of time.
Gifford’s lazy assemblages of textiles and oil paint – applied so thickly that it’s a miracle the canvases don’t bring the gallery walls down with them – are interested in little but their own form. A handful, as if to expose the artist’s obsessive yet underdeveloped idea of a masterstroke, incorporate domestic objects like the detritus of the laundry room or scraps of the bedroom curtain. Whatever stories these compositions bore in the artist’s studio, in the collector’s home they’ll only gather dust.
What good it is to be best in show when the competition is lame, crooked, or outright fake? Fischli’s Kennel Club parade of papier mâché dogs and stuffed cats is so inclusive that a plissé pug, a cross-stitch beaver, and even a tartan bunny have snuck onto the catwalk. In the gallery’s pristine interior, this motley victory parade is watched over by a canary and a feline with a fetish for denim. These natural enemies have suspended their squabbles so they can lull their prey into a sense of security as fragile as the gypsum fur ornaments that are the source of their pride.
What this contest lacks in hierarchy, it compensates for in irreverence. Fischli’s manner is not dissimilar to that of her namesake and countryman Peter (of ‘and Weiss’ fame), and her humorous affectation can today come across as insincere or imprecise. But if taken at face value, this project’s satire gets it the rosette.
Boyla’s sky-sizes canvases rendered in bleached ink mauves, pinks, and rust are the product of meditation that turned into catatonia. These images are reminiscent of tie-dye t-shirts more than of the sun’s coronal explosions or even the blotchy floaters one occasionally sees in their field of vision. A slightly quirky hang which has the paintings hover oddly above the floor and the gallery’s lighting grid replaced by singular sources force-aestheticise this non-experience.
Rothko’s abstractions are said to have induced tears in viewers overwhelmed by abstraction. Staring at the sun here, however, barely causes blindness.
This exhibition cannot decide if it’s a tourist attraction or a serious examination of sculpture’s relationship with movement. A survey so loosely framed could only ever be partial. This show, however, tries hard to rewrite the canon even when it needn’t. Where a more classic version of this story would have done with a David Medalla, for example, the Hayward’s account introduces a lesser-known Michel Blazy. This is one-upmanship confused by misreading of art history’s time arrow. Perversely, this method makes some works, like Choi Jeong Hwa’s mass-market totems, look like poor cousins even when they aren’t.
The project also betrays an impulse to read any material, shape, or colour as fad politics. A layer of faux more-than-human environmentalism, for example, is crowbarred into Teresa Solar Abboud’s resin legs and tongues and serves the work no favour. The show’s at least partly Ideological selection criteria, likewise, failed to exclude Marguerite Humeau’s macabre plastic fungi. By contrast, the equally atrocious rollercoaster by EJ Hill and Eva Fàbregas’ giant vibrating dildo can at least be excused as mindless selfie fodder.
The ICA’s once inviting gallery space is now a maze and smells of industrial rubber. Inside this pen, Dean’s video follows an animal’s death parade in a disused slaughterhouse. After a moment of exuberant confusion, the image turns into a sinister whirlwind. To the soundtrack of a cheap horror film, the invisible carcass then whimsically journeys over a pool of CGI blood and along a row of butchers’ hooks.
Dean has contributed plenty to art’s politics as a writer and editor. Her thoughts on necropolitics would have thus been of some interest. But this work is as subtle as the “U.S.A.” denominator included in the video’s title. Even at the outset, the project’s chances are scarpered by a knee-jerk association of black American life with systemic and terminal oppression.
Capital is racism, architecture is death. Dean isn’t wrong and all this could have been a decent e-flux essay. But visuals of her own making overpower Dean the artist. There are, for example, no butchers and no cattle in the film’s frame. The question of death-value turns into idle musing, leaving the work of the ‘system’ as opaque as ever.
Barriball is known for repetitive marks which caress surfaces before defeating them with pigment. Now, new drawings of windows – blue, orange, and yellow rectangles of faintly broken-up colour – try to capture shadows cast by the sun on the floor in her studio. They’re visible only against a layer of dust which temporarily settled between gusts of wind.
But they only feign such fragility. On unsolicited inspection, these blocks turn into dull sheets of waxed paper and not the light-loving cyanotypes or Polaroids to which they make claims. The blinds are drawn tightly over the frames, leaving no highlights, no shadows, and no sunlight either.
Vague references in the gallery’s text to the artist’s comfortable pandemic isolation fail to illuminate this confusion. The eyes may be the windows of the soul. To make an aphorism of the reverse needs more than shadow-play.
Sasnal’s sun-soaked Californian road trip turned sinister. The highway’s coastal expanse, recorded here in the painter’s usual Adobe Illustrator style, is unmarked by the signs of life. The streets play host to murder, and the luxury apartment to solitude. The wholesome teenager who in one canvas offers the painter some lemons is sure to be hiding a switchblade behind his back. The reservoir barely hides the night. “LA”, as a canvas precariously propped up by a ladder proclaims, “is not safe”.
Perhaps. Parts of the exhibition support this narrative, as does the LA Times. But Sasnal’s untitled, unmediated project switches tracks from one canvas to the next. The scenes’ intense sunshine and the odd technological instructible paintings thrown into the mix saw seeds of doubt if not discord.
This universe is half picture postcard and half dystopian meme. Reality, in a word. But Sasnal’s paint stays flatly on the canvas. Only in flights of anger – somehow too studied but too indecisive – does this vision come close to becoming believable.
Fritsch, Genzken, Oldenburg, Shani, Sherman, Smithson, ThekMaterial Rites
★★★☆☆Gathering, LondonOn until 9 March 2024Material’s disastrous influence on meaning, questioned in this show deftly by Oldenburg, Sherman, and Genzken, should be art’s most pressing concern. The role of faith in the making of truth, likewise, is routinely overlooked. Here, Thek and Fritsch take a good stab at it.
The instincts are right, but too much makes sense to make sense together in this cramped Soho showroom. A scan of the gallery’s roster reveals that the project’s aim is to upvote a couple of amorphous, although figurative works by Tai Shani. Curatorial and commercial ambitions mix thus, and suffer the same fate we all do.
How can art improve the lives of communities affected by the cost-of-living crisis, years of underinvestment in public services, and the brutality of open markets? Wrong answers only because Webb-Ingall has already turned this group of migrants, minimum-wage workers, and local activists into low-grade animated content.
Aesthetically, his 15-minute film which the gallery hopes will inspire or agitate viewers, is akin to the verbose, AI-generated web blogs one has to wade through on cooking recipe and instructional websites before finding the content of interest. Politically, it’s a technocrat’s call masquerading as a grassroots protest banner, cloaking impotence with pseudo-radical verbiage that has done no one any good, ever.
Peer sits a block away from the Job Centre, where many of this exhibition’s target audience supplicate themselves in return for meagre state handouts. A minute’s walk in the other direction is a branch of the citizens’ advice service, where the same appellants learn to cope with this system. Webb-Ignall can’t decide which of these two he’d rather show his work at. In the gallery, he replicates the failings of both.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
