notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Carole Ebtinger, Esther Gatónphosphorescence of my local lore
★★☆☆☆South Parade, LondonOn until 13 January 2024Autumn, eh? Ettinger’s pastel drawings look like Monet’s water lilies but caught late in the year after the garden died down and the artist’s vision faded. Gatón’s hanging of sticks and frayed plastics, once a proud scarecrow, has seen better days. Rot overpowered this subject and came for the object next.
This could have been a scene from an ‘eco’ remake of The Blair Witch Project or an homage to Metzger. Instead, this slight show barely justifies its five-word title. A star docked for splitting the gallery in half to concurrently host an atrocious solo exhibition instead of working this local lore into a serious proposition.
Less is more, as the saying goes. Nagle’s porcelain and resin maquettes, none larger than a shoe box, are the bare minimum. The sculptures gesture at fantasy worlds in the making. One has an erupting volcano, another the beach. Some are cross-sections of domains filled with gold ore and cumulus clouds. Each is a land promised.
But it’s the eighth day in this multiverse and these worlds are unfinished, as though assembled by a video game designer in a hurry. The volumes and shapes are only roughly to scale. The copy-and-paste textures are the materials’ default and merely trick the eye. Their setting, as though in an austere but high-end jewellery store, completes the illusion. It’s all good enough and as good as it gets. The only snag is that this bliss gives way to rage every Monday.
I saw this show mid-install and the gallerist’s talk of identity politics hardly served the work’s best interests. But even under ideal conditions, the photo tableaux documenting this Goldsmiths-trained artist’s journey to his Native American roots would have likely annoyed me. The aura of these works doesn’t bridge continents. If they serve the artist’s project of “reindigenization”, it’s only as a grift.
But Eash’s sculptures – assemblages of bull horn, shotgun cartridges, and wicker – jarred somewhat less. His painterly abstraction on cowhide – halfway between a tie-dye and a Rorschach ink blot – finally broke from his ideological bounds, as only an animal might. But for this world to be worth rebuilding, the artist must choose which ground is best ceded.
Stephen WillatsTime Tumbler
★★★★☆Victoria Miro, LondonCurated by Jelena KristicOn until 13 January 2024In half of this exhibition, the now octogenarian Stephen Willats does the internet. A series of watercolour, text, and photographic collages map abstractions like search engines and social networks with the artist’s familiar arsenal of arrows and diagrams. He orders fragments of time, matter, and space into data packets on one side of the flow chart and puts them to use on the other. The most alluring of these images have no trace of the human. The currents are orderly and the possibilities are endless. None of this theory is true, of course, but it’s hard not to look.
The illusion is troubled by the rest of the show which reprises Willats’ hits from the 1970s. There, social practice meets semiotic analysis. The artist’s time-and-motion studies of homemaking, street life, and the corporate boardroom are celebrated as potent critiques of social relationships that play contrary to the exuberance of late capitalism. Unnervingly, the method of this inquiry is the same as in Willat’s network suite. This forces a reconsideration of the seminal work’s value as ‘data’ and foregrounds its form.
Marisa Krangwiwat Holmes, Shamiran Istifan, Tasneem SarkezSaccharine Symbols
★★★☆☆Rose Easton, LondonOn until 20 December 2023Meaning parts with the image in this exhibition, never to return. Two paintings by Sarkez overlay banal messages (“11:11” and “good morning” in Arabic) on unremarkable street scenes from the Gulf states. Istifan mixes all manner of iconographies – Playboy bunnies, Baroque cherubs, and Wingdings the font – in all manner of media. Kringwiwat Holmes collages vintage mail-order catalogues with photographs and doodles. Post-structuralism triumphs.
All this is intriguing but ultimately impossible to parse because these artists, working in separation, each stage their own assaults on the same symbols and the display does not reveal the rules. What should have been a sinister game of chess – Sarkez provides a board – is instead a frustrating circular reference.
This exhibition combines the most vulgar of all art school tropes: juvenile narcissism, NFT kitsch, and mindless referentialism. In five video still portraits, Sin takes the place of art history’s celebrated subjects including Caravaggio’s Narcissus and Man Ray’s Kiki. The characters, distinguished more by their plastic wigs and colourful make-up than their presence, project sombre pensiveness.
But their demand for attention is tiresome because these drag figures are all artifice. Sin, dressed up as Frida Kahlo or Mona Lisa is only formally distinct from the TikTok girls who digitally adorn their faces for likes. In this pictorial metaverse where substance is exchanged for crypto, there is no time for the human and no space for art.
Max Hooper SchneiderTwilight at the Earth’s Crust
★★☆☆☆Maureen Paley, LondonOn until 17 December 2023Mad Max meets Waterworld in a crossover sequel conceived by a film studio’s marketing department. Hooper Schneider’s dioramas are scenes of bleak undersea struggle. What is left of human civilisation – an old master painting and a bad ‘80s sitcom – persists only at the mercy of nature that’s out of control. Sea creatures have evolved into hybrids which the artist bestows with intelligence and purpose. The ocean floor looks like the Garden of Eden, but this environment is hostile, and all humans are banished. The capsules that once saved life have turned into museums.
The end is nigh, it always is. But Hooper Schneider makes it difficult to take this story seriously, despite his scientific and research credentials. The spectre of SpongeBob SquarePants hangs over this apocalypse. If this is intentional, it isn’t funny. If not, as with much eco-art today, tiresome.
In this latest series of costume dramas, Bronstein comes to the dinner table. As is typical of his elaborate acrylics, the sights are as ornate as they are comical. In lavish, gilded frames, he falls into the late evening stupor of the cheese trolley, the oyster tray, and… the Mars bar.
Some of these scenes are out of the Fawlty Towers buffet, others belong to Last Year in Marienbad. A couple more that complete this cycle of conspicuous production and consumption show cooks stuck on the set of Metropolis. It’s all as hilarious, as camp, and as inoffensive as ever. Except that we have seen it before, albeit not quite in this order.
How does one assess the mid-career production of an artist who found success in a simple, well-executed idea in his twenties and has hardly allowed it to evolve since? Bronstein, and Herald St’s programme generally, are symptomatic of the natural midlife crisis of mid-range art born out of pre-2008 opulence. Their refusal to change with the wind is likely a virtue. But as the market for Bronstein’s antics ages, so will his tricks. To live out one’s forties in a Regency K-hole would be unbecoming.
Ksenia PedanRevision
★★★★☆Cell Project Space, LondonCurated by Adomas NarkevičiusOn until 19 November 2023Pedan’s paintings would rather be anything but. Their surfaces, rendered on board that looks as if attacked with an angle grinder, betray little. They hang above eye level, as though to discourage close inspection. The gallery, likewise, isn’t like a gallery. Lengths of electrical cabling cross the walls without reason. Crude boxing conceals the radiators and budget light fittings shine directly into the visitors’ eyes.
But a false wall that oddly covers an altar on which a bird abandoned its nest reveals that all this is a shoddy cover-up, a botched renovation in which the builders cut corners before rushing off to their next job. Everything’s a little sub-standard in that way one begrudgingly gets used to but can never truly overlook.
Even the paintings use the pseudo-neutral palette and form of a mid-range interior design catalogue that rejects lasting meaning. But their marks slowly become discernible: a dense forest, a pile of bones, an hourglass turning dust to dust. In this eerie environment, they demand reverence and reward it with stories of death and disaster that resist any rushed renewal.
Does self-obsession make a diva or is it the product of her fame? It would be unfair to appraise this line-up of arias from Verdi, Bizet, and Puccini sung by seven sopranos as an operatic production because their perfectly competent renderings are mere footnotes to Abramović’s narcissism who is the work’s only protagonist. Thankfully, this prima donna doesn’t sing but her body constantly dominates the stage in giant projections that humiliate Tosca and Carmen as if their deaths were nothing compared to Marina’s.
When the heroine speaks, she spouts nonsensical last words which confirm that cynical grand delusion has been the Abramović method for decades. This has none of the charm of Norma Desmond, none of the heartbreak of Norma Jane Baker, and none of the dramatic charge of Bellini’s Norma, either.
Not content with her stardom – and this production is a testament to the unchanging nature of showbusiness – Abramović wants to destroy all performance and all women until she holds the monopoly over stage death. But this abuse is only for vanity because Marina trades any pretence for the crowd’s mindless cheer. And it’s on us that we prefer a train crash over a fall from grace.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
