notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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.
The devil’s greatest trick, said Baudelaire, was to convince us he did not exist. His fellow poet Lakhrissi is no trickster. A giant daemon mask stands in the centre of his show of pencil drawings and luminous glass ornaments. Biblical horns, wings, and wagging tongues sparsely mark the walls as though they fell from Apollinaire’s rain cloud.
But writing poetry is hard enough. Lakhrissi’s pencil works brim with childlike, pre-verbal charm that tickles a literary tradition. His wall trinkets, however, are garish. They betray the artist’s indifference to symbols and, worse, his sculptural medium.
Something troubles the men in Prinos’ street photographs. They stand lined up, tensely, their heads bowed as though at a state funeral. Another one, opposite, holds a silver-plated ornament. Is this the ceremonial object of their veneration? What tragedy or triumph does this scene mark?
It takes a moment to understand that these portraits were snatched separately and assembled only in the gallery. Prinos’ frames are precise, tight, and formal, as though the street were his studio. A found image curio from the tabloid’s ‘funnies’ section attached to the gallery’s window breaks the spell, only to make the others more daunting.
It becomes harder to understand what Mimosa House is for with each of its exhibitions. The mission statement lauds “intergenerational women” and “queer artists”. The programme spells “Global South” and “intersectional”, too, making this outfit indistinguishable from myriad other non-profits.
This instalment of a confusing multipart project suggests that women’s innate caring sensitivities can liberate them from sex-based oppression that exploits their very same nature. The thesis is impossible to evaluate, however, because the videos fade in bright lights, their sound bleeds, and the sculpture hides from sight lines. A Boyce installation looks damaged. Even Himid’s framed paintings look out of place, as though the whole thing were a school project staged in a disused office block. The show has half a dozen curators.
Lack of care for the artefact is a strange USP for a gallery. Mimosa House’s shows brim with works that are both poorly fabricated and shoddily installed. Even the website is ugly. Is this how public funding (£100k a year from ACE) makes itself look “subaltern”?
Justin ChanceMotherhood
★★☆☆☆Ginny on Frederick , LondonOn until 26 October 2024Quilt me a story. Chance’s wool fibre hangings stuffed between silk sheets set off accidental abstractions. One hides the outlines of a Leonardo cartoon. Another’s single blemish becomes a Caribbean island. Coming to the third which is densely marked as if it were a budget Basquiat, the mind is primed to play along with the artist’s unwitting trick.
An intricate woven butterfly atlas completes the set. If only Chance stopped there. He also wrote two versions of his show’s press release but still somehow made no sense of his story. His barely comprehensible copy stitches a juvenile historical grievance into the chaos of a butterfly’s flutter. These ideas rob the works of authenticity. Their grammar, worse than is customary of the genre, turns the show into a joke.
Igwe’s film installation imagines a group of African and Caribbean intellectuals like C.L.R. James and Kwame Krumah conspiring in late 1940s London. One screen enacts these “Mavericks’” fictional meeting. They talk politics, tactics, and… agitprop art. A second, modern-day scene completes the artifice. Igwe has actors workshop a stage play that would have seriously advanced the cause of anti-imperialism had the Mavericks actually written and staged it.
Art could have freed them, and it can free us now! Such sentimental world-making is political art’s favourite pastime today. Not without good precedent, of course. Igwe’s project, however, builds not a world but a wordy counter-historical thesis. By showing her working while neglecting the artefact, she mixes up art’s and its subjects’ autonomy. The Mavericks wanted a weapon, Igwe leaves them a toy.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
