notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Cosmos, who is no doubt a victim of nominative determinism, wants to redefine STEM as the alliance of science, theosophy, engineering, and myth. Digital tapestries with the look of 1980s popular science magazines illustrate the aesthetic connections between the research of life and life itself. Whimsically but also mechanistically, the works line up the atom, the DNA helix, and the microscope against the shapes of the planets, plant seeds, and the winding serpent of Asclepius.
These images could become moderately successful memes. The earth is a viral molecule on one tapestry, and biotech brings a new dawn on another. Both science and myth take turns as the butt of Cosmos’ clipart jokes.
Unfortunately, this study remains largely decorative because the works make too much of coincidence and not enough of the image. Their epistemic basis, that everything looks like everything else, is intuitive but insufficient. These diagrams, therefore, could be at home on an “in this house we believe” yard sign and an anti-vaxxer’s rally with equal ease. The artist would likely endorse neither.
Mr Mole is working from home. His mole children are home too, off sick from school in this wintry weather. Mrs Mole holds everything together. The fire is burning, cups of tea all round. Mole is tucked up in bed himself, a pile of paper on his lap. He has some stuff to catch up on, so he enlisted the help of his wife with copying out the Book of Numbers. That would have been fun but these numbers are 21, 19, 3, 9, and 18, and a whole lot more. In the thirty minutes of Marcon’s endlessly looped film, the Moles spend an infinity batting these figures from one page to another, interrupted only by the odd cough. Not even the mammals know why.
This is half cutesy, half absurd until one realises that little separates the animatronic moles from half of the world’s human population for whom rearranging numbers in a table is synonymous with survival. Idle work became indistinguishable from leisure, vegetative time-passing from family life. No wonder, then, that even the Moles seek meaning in the figures. The key, according to Marcon, is 566. But that number works only for him.
“In the early 1970s, women were second-class citizens” is as good an excuse for a survey of British 2nd-wave feminism as any. But just like the two decades of social politics and activism it narrates, this encyclopaedic exhibition requires an encyclopaedia to navigate. Not because the story is opaque – many of the works in the show are already familiar – but because the institution’s impulse to streamline its plot – to make history, in other words – demands scrutiny.
The intentions seem honourable and in the exhibition guide, the threads are distinct. There’s a room for labour, a corner for childbirth, one for black women, and a section for lesbians. This is as close to nuance as Tate gets today. But in the gallery, the material is so abundant that a visitor not already acquainted with the arguments might struggle to understand the conflicts that directed and often broke the march of progress which the museum would have us lock step with.
Counterintuitively, it might have been more productive to exclude the hundreds of pamphlets, zines, and other ephemera and show only those artefacts of the period that somehow already earned their place in the museum store. This would aestheticise, rather than ideologise this history.
Harpies drape themselves in pearls and wind their bodies around Art Deco ornaments on Fitzpatrick’s bronzer-gold canvases. Multiple copies of Brian Johnson, the 45-year-old billionaire face of anti-ageing therapy, haunt the room. His empty eyes betray a craving for the elixir of youth so consuming that it can only be satisfied by sacrifice.
In a bout of dark humour, Fitzpatrick nourishes this extractive dependency and prototypes a human growth hormone home brewing kit. The apparatus is assembled from salvaged Christian devotionalia and comes with an order of kindly nuns who watch over the proceedings. Beads for counting – or prayer – meter out the ritual. The reward for taking part in this experiment of life is ascension to the holy orders.
This would be a cynical caricature if it weren’t all true. Fitzpatrick’s sculpture and painting follow a rigorous research protocol deep into our molecular-spiritual system. Work by work, they build an ornate map intelligible only after decades of devoted study and even then, only to the divine. There’s no fast promise in this practice, but it’s the only way to reverse art’s schism with the image.
Having spent years tending to her garden in Australia, Henderson built a utopian version of it in Camden. There are imaginary plants and imaginary creatures everywhere. Some, like a sound installation of earthworms, may be real and alive. An army of scarecrow gardeners watches over this plot.
All is tranquil and whimsical until even the gallery gives way to decay. Things fall apart, elegantly. In three ornately framed paintings, a quartet of frogs become consumed by abstraction. Bronze and clay creatures emerge from dirt heaps to be absorbed by them again. In a sure sign of the end times, the plants have eyes. But to bring solace, a blissfully plotless film tracks the growth and decline of Henderson’s backyard, revealing that these cycles are one.
Dust to dust, joy to joy. The whole thing feels like a remake of Wind in the Willows directed by a garden gnome. But this gnome is one of Henderson’s accomplices, too. The show only falters when it brings the ‘creative process’ wholesale into the gallery. Ironically, this is the exhibition’s stated aim. One room hosts a quirky greenhouse studio filled with doodles and trinkets. This structure unduly protects the artist from nature’s graceful cruelty.
If there is a logic to these seven paintings, Glantz makes it hard to believe. In one, half of a bright-eyed, middle-aged woman poses with a handbag and… half of a duck. One is a landscape within a landscape, and Glantz paints in a coffee cup to remind the eye that its job is to think. Another could have been a still life with fruit, but something obscures most of the scene, suggesting a more intense affair right behind. There’s also a closer portrait of another woman, this one with no gimmick. It matches the others only in its palette of lichen greens and beiges and the sparse application of paint.
Despite the purposeful distractions, each of these images commands attention. But their assembly is unsatisfying. The clues that Glantz leaves on her surfaces are also traps. There are either too many or not quite enough to follow or fall into.
There’s an unfortunate ‘emerging artist’ vibe to this handful of readymade sculptures and not only because the show is part of a commercial “emerging artist” prize. Xenofontos replaced the gallery’s door with one salvaged from a mid-range 1980s Greek apartment building. Its lock is broken. In the vestibule, a fragment of an industrial ventilation system periodically spins up. It stops soon after. A stack of mass-market plastic garden chairs finds a home in the corner. They failed quality control. Two chains made of silver walking sticks hang from the high ceiling. They’re too weak to support anything. The titles of these works allude to class, industry, and royalty. But all this is nostalgia, and nothing’s a challenge.
A series of unassuming pieces based on the evacuation plans of civic buildings, presented separately in a darkened room, bring a dose of hazard which was missing thus far. Each is a constellation, quite literally, of LEDs that occasionally flash to reveal images of eyes and ears. But this is a put-on, one imagines, to capture the visitors’ faces. This non-consensual game of blind hide-and-seek cuts through the public domain more than Xenofontos’ wistful recollections in the rest of the show.
Sixteen scruffy, hand-embroidered rugs show street scenes in garish reds and oranges. The images are wonky and lack perspective, as though they were recorded by a six-year-old. Writing stitched in Spanish, Arabic, and English explains these views: a restaurant, a pharmacy, a mosque. Slogans and lines of poetry find space between the edifices. “Del rio al mar libres vamos a andar” – a liberation call familiar from recent news – appears twice. The gallery text finally reveals that these works pay homage to the Palestinian diaspora of Puerto Rico.
An exhibition could hardly be more topical, although this is a coincidence. But it is, inevitably, also the show’s downfall. Is this East London gallery calling for Palestinian liberation from a Caribbean island with memorabilia made in Iraq because these artefacts demand it? Or is the exhibition a political reflex that has the art world celebrate Farad’s subject position?
This question is heartless but cannot be unasked. The intentions are explicit but there is no answer in the work. Presented this way, the artist’s cause and the object become enmeshed in a bland, yet exotic mess.
The installation consists of only a handful of elements: five yellow mesh hangings which divide the gallery, four oversized kitchen colanders with text engravings, a pair of traffic lights. The constellation turns the gallery into a stage set in search of a script.
The programme promises the world. We’re watching comedia dell’arte! These objects are “experiences of power” and “satires of social hierarchies”! They question “agency and authority” and engage us in “roleplay”!
All those would be great plot twists, but the play has been cancelled. The actors are missing and there is no story, neither forward nor back.
Why theatre, why these notions, why these props? Having forgotten what the ‘dramatic’ in art stands for, visual artists today too often mistake hacked theory and mistranslated philosophy for stage directions. A tragedia dell’arte for our times.
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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
