notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Seeing the proliferation in galleries of long, sparse, indulgent, and hookless video installations that obliquely refer to the ancestral practices of unspecified, distant peoples, one might suspect that this trend in ‘radical’ filmmaking is the work of a conspiracy. Ra’s thirty-minute montage of washed-out wide shots lacks as much in action as it does in structure. Landscapes from a Philippine village wash over the screen and occasionally play host to livestock and human figures performing yogic-like dance movements. A colour-field sequence with designer subtitles relays fragments of a conversation between a grandmother and grandchild, the sense of which is ungraspable in the cut. The sign-reader’s desire is only obliquely rewarded by a prolonged scene, shot through a lens smeared thickly with Vaseline, in which a group of people allegorically adore a trans beauty queen.
Generously, one could compare such work to meditation. It might, at a push, be a piece of instructional diplomacy. But the gallery’s deployment of “a pedagogy of decolonial choreography” and branding the artist’s hometown of Sidney “Gadigal land, Eora Nation” break the spell. Such work was once a mere grift. But when it is this boring and has so deeply captured even the most cynical of art institutions, it is an outright stitch-up.
“Like people, rabbits come in a variety of different shapes, sizes, and colours”, the exhibition handout warns visitors. Beware, ye faint of heart because Gatewood has bred at least a dozen. She has a story for each and each is more thrilling than the last. The show’s a dive down the warren and it will leave you breathless.
But not thanks to the qualities of her rainbow pastels. No. These rabbits are, to swap Gatewood’s idiotic euphemism for another, stand-ins for ‘historically oppressed people’. “Children of the projects” appear in one. Others, she explains, are the alter egos of Toni Morrison, David Hammons, and Kara Walker.
As though this couldn’t get any more patronising, the bunnies preach morals. “Rearrange yourself as an act of humility,” one challenges the bamboozled viewer. Such thin metaphors could only have come from LA. Did Gatewood look at her “In This House We Believe” yard sign and think that it needed some furries?
Is there a limit to the number of fads a single practice can channel? In this bijou, four-piece show, Camerno packs building site machismo, camp Technicolor nostalgia, generational warfare, and a dollop of old queer.
Such indecision could be dismissed as youthful enthusiasm, but these inconsistencies are premeditated. Ornamental steel shapes hung from a monumental totem revel in laser-cut precision. They’re so far oblivious to the speckles of rust that will one day consume them. A ‘70s pin-up who appears on one canvas is till today unmoved by the decades which separate her from glory.
But the procession of time marked out in another painting is unstoppable. What’s left of the show are stage props that feed adolescent imaginations with false memories of the long-finished party. But even if Camerno’s complaints against the past were legitimate, his bet on the lasting value of his stock illustration tropes makes for poor politics.
Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett>anticorpo<
★★★★☆Galerie Neu and Emalin, Condo LondonOn until 17 February 2024The brand of formal inquiry exercised by Pernice and Plunkett rarely makes the news today. In the age of the skeuomorph, the lost meaning of signs and the human detachment from them should alarm philosophers. For artists, it is a rare opportunity.
Pernice’s accidental sculptures, assembled from plinths, crates, and podiums, forego any trace of joy or celebration. The flag poles, once bearers of pride and excess, stand naked as if to mark a period of mourning. Their Eastern European colours and forms, like the detritus on an abandoned building site, speak of an opportunity missed and self-induced amnesia.
Plunkett’s semiotic photographs continue along time’s arrow. The image archaeologist’s wheel stopped on Coke cans and sun gods just now, but many more objects deserve a place on Wikipedia’s ‘top things’ list. They’ll miss out on the click-through traffic, however, because Plunkett’s signs, like Pernice’s, revel in detachment.
There’s nothing new under the sun here, quite literally. Such ‘80s nostalgia for meaning before history’s end is a comfort blanket. It would take a demagogue to remember that even the Bechers’ water tower pictures were a call to action.
Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely★★★☆☆Gianni Manhattan and P21 at Project Native Informant, Condo LondonOn until 17 February 2024Forcing a Seoul gallery to share space with a Viennese one seems a little ungenerous of this London venue when the two artists’ projects are so idiosyncratic. Meïté Sikely’s acrylic canvases mix fantasy daemons with everyday slogans in the manner of DC Comics and sub-Saharan advertising murals. It’s half William Blake, bit strip-mall, part superhero film set. Ahn’s menacing cat pictures in which the artist’s pet plots his revenge against the human race are peak YouTube cuteness restaged for the CSI morgue. But when the same mutt jumps from the canvas and assumes distorted sculptural forms, the threat of his claw is but a lame joke.
These works are as garish as they are fun to look at. But experienced without the mediation of a phone screen, their exuberance is jarring. Such overstimulation is the host gallery’s brand as post-internet art’s dealer of choice. It would have been more rewarding to pursue only one of these plots.
Talar AghbashianSolace of the Afterimage
★★☆☆☆Marfa' at The Approach, Condo LondonOn until 17 February 2024There was a time, that of Greenberg or Berger, when art would transport a viewer to a land far away. In front of a picture, a mind could shed its mundane concerns and experience realities alien to the gallery. Post the art world’s political turn, however, such thoughts are pure nostalgia.
Aghbashian’s project, crowding four canvases into a room the size of an art fair booth, may have been an attempt to return to this space of pure imagination. Indeed, her allegorical abstractions contrasting horizons and figures hark to a glorious tradition.
They stand no chance, however. Aghbashian’s gallerist, claiming the exhibition space entirely for herself, directs all minds straight to a market stall with her uninterruptable recitation of the artist’s life story and the work’s pedigree. These tedious details lock the wandering mind on the hollow nodes of identity production and market value.
The carpet dealer’s zeal overpowers all paint. In so doing, however, it does the viewer the ultimate favour of highlighting the artist’s full complicity with the sales patter and thus the work’s lamentable inadequacy.
Christopher Aque, Alexandre Khondji★★★★★Sweetwater at Studio M, Condo LondonOn until 18 February 2024Despite consisting of only three works, this exhibition is the gallery equivalent of a cryptic crossword. Aque’s photographic diptychs marry views of sea waves at the shore with candid street photographs of men. The colours have faded, as though in cheap holiday snapshots from the 1970s. But that clue is a decoy: the men wear this decade’s casual summer attire. The knee-to-breast close-ups which centre on the men’s groins invite closer inspection and thus lay a false trail of desire in the puzzler’s mind. More hints appear in a sideways glance because while one of the men comfortably sports a wedding ring, the other precariously fidgets with his.
Khondji’s flood barrier installation, the type of steel and rubber construction familiar from Venice, cuts the room in half. The scale and material of this object contrast so starkly with the street scenes and scents of Aque’s portraits that it cues an escape to the beach, paradoxically the origin of the peril, earlier overlooked by the clue-hunter. Finally, the eye finds the solution in the weight of the water and the destructive forces of sex. Aesthetic cognition or crossword puzzles only rarely bring such perverse pleasure.
By pursuing ideologically unassuming programming, Modern Art has had quite a run of excellent shows this past year. It would be unfair, however, to question the method on Simpson’s canvasses because his habit of rendering life’s dimensional interstices – doors, ladders, and chimneys – as perspectival projections developed decades before he joined Stuart Shave’s stable.
The images, some nearly as expansive as the gallery’s walls, set out simple scenes. Fragments of architecture – like a quaint library console that could have come from Arne Jacobsen’s Brutalist design for Oxford’s St Catherine’s College – appear in technical detail in some. In others, they resonate with the graphic character of advertising or agit-prop and become scenes of sin, confession, and reparation. In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, however, neither is a truer likeness of the events which Simpson deftly omits from his canvases.
Since the 2020 US racial reckoning, curators and critics in the UK have unthinkingly imported American tensions only to confound England’s already fragile interplay of class and ethnicity. The political value of such activism is still to be seen. Its aesthetic effects, however, have been devastating on both sides of the Atlantic.
The London exhibition of the New Orleans painter Auudi Dorsey’s portraits of his black, working-class neighbours could signal the turning in this morose trend. His works show a female parking attendant who chews gum as she writes a ticket, two restaurant chefs on break from the kitchen, an off-duty construction worker, and a middle-aged angler with his implausibly large catch.
Dorsey’s acrylics brim with dignity. The subjects’ faces betray signs of daily fatigue, but their stance is secure. That the canvases are rendered in sombre blue and green hues, as in a dark cop drama, is the one clue that other narratives could fit in these lives. Even the curator’s essay barely points to the reductive race-first reading of what is already evident by the artist’s hand. This leaves Dorsey to record the human experience with the true universalism of paint.
Anyone intrigued by Philip Guston’s oeuvre but deterred by Tate’s £20 tickets could do worse than Co Westerik as a consolation prize. Many of this Dutch Realist painter’s canvases made between the 1970s and his death in 2018 share the American’s fondness for wrinkled lines, heavenly interventions, and a pallet of social unease.
Westerik catches his figures in deep contemplation in front of the mirror, in the gynaecologist’s chair, or even mid-orgy. They look innocent but each has much to answer for. The show thus builds an industry of judgment and guilt and, unlike Guston’s whose redemption narrative was crowbarred in by circumstance, damns the viewer along with the painter.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
