notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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.
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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
