notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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.
Doherty’s rich black-and-white images are half melancholia, half haunting. Large photographs and nearly still videos transpose a decrepit, eerie Northern Irish landscape to the barely-built Nine Lems. Deserted streets, the woods, even a shore’s silent cove turn into locations for a crime reconstruction drama.
An actor’s sombre voiceover completes this sorry mood board. “Where battles raged. […] Names changed. Language lost.” This land can age a man prematurely. Even the trees are in mourning here. Their memory will fade only with death.
Doherty’s tragipoetic timing and mise-en-scène can be masterly. This exhibition’s staging skips a beat, however. The installation is too neat, too classically formal. The gallery’s overlit, airless white cube denatures Doherty’s places and asks too much of the viewer far too quickly.
The only good way to encounter a Yang piece is on the last day of an art fair, where the dealer won’t mind your kid jangling the bells on her giant mobile sculptures. In the gallery, only the staff may touch the same laundry racks and light bulbs lest they find life of their own. These objects lack verve here, like in the Ikea catalogue where they belong.
The institution mindlessly reads life, culture, and even high politics into Yang’s window blind hangings, ignoring her testimony of this project’s sterility. It sadly makes far less of her early varnish and waste paintings which are the show’s only lively components. Next to them, Yang’s ‘Korean craft’ section comes off as a con and not a life’s question. The funfair is shuttered, long live the fair.
Rizaldi’s instructional films are aids to miscomprehension. One takes the form of a Hanna-Barbera space alien cartoon. Its saturated colours and muffled dialogue could be a highlight in a ‘70s science classroom. A pantheism subplot throws the lesson, however. The artist hopes we students won’t notice.
The spin continues on the next screen where a shipwrecked astronaut breathes physics jargon and 15th-century Sufism. Science and world religions dance in a polytheist multiverse. Nothing, sadly, saves our lonely hero.
Rizaldi’s grand unifying theory is as charming as it is confused. The conflict of belief and reason is a 19th-century problem. Throwing vague old maxims at it advances little. When an artist thinks he’s understood quantum mechanics, to twist Richard Feynman’s words, he doesn’t. How will he know if he knows god?
Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, Delaine Le BasTurner Prize 2024
★★☆☆☆Tate Britain, LondonOn until 16 February 2025The Turner Prize’s goal is to take the pulse of British contemporary art. One shouldn’t judge it harshly if the patient is dying. This year’s edition, sadly, is dull beyond redemption. Questions of identitarian “struggle” are the show’s sole organising principle. They’re so old hat that even the artists approach them with ennui.
Abad’s once vibrant critiques of his native Philippines’ Marcos regime turned into footnotes in a grey decolonisation textbook. In his latest edition, colonial Britain is to blame for Imelda’s handbag fetish. A sustainable claim, perhaps, but Abad offers no visual proof.
Kaur’s Scottish Indian mixed heritage pound shop is not stupid but it is depressing. Her airy display, like life, has space for prayer bells, family snaps, Irn Bru, and even a giant doily. Assimilation is a dirty word, however, and the gallery’s embrace of mass-produced cultures is entirely partial.
Le Bas’ presentation has a touch of novelty to it. Dressed entirely in fabric, her rooms turn into big tents in an unsubtle nod to some essential Roma sensibility. Content, however, is fleeting in this labyrinth. A video projection barely registers, the figures are like dolls, and the paint markings barely tell a story. Too heavy to be aethereal, too slight to be immersive, this work only manifests in the curator’s text.
Johnson is the safe hand here, but her desire for safety is the paintings’ downfall. Defining “black woman” would be a life-long task for any artist. Today, Johnson’s practice pleases the art world a little too eagerly. Like with a film’s exit music, therefore, the punters have left the gallery before the paintings challenge the Prize’s hackneyed ideology.
C. Rose SmithTalking Back to Power
★★☆☆☆Autograph, LondonCurated by Bindi VoraOn until 12 October 2024A crisply starched dress shirt is Smith’s only weapon in her battle against the windmills of power. In each of a dozen self-portraits in this cramped show made in the grand estates of 19th-century cotton farms in the Southern United States, she poses her body as though it were forever out of place. The rich shadows in her monochrome photographs nearly consume her. Only the shirt stands out against the colonial opulence.
Formally, the prints would make a photography student’s folio proud. Conceptually, they win acclaim from the institution unable to repair anything otherwise. Politically, Smith abdicates her power to the architecture of her imagination built from her ancestors’ agony. There’s no conversation, no challenge, no win.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
