notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Geumhyung JeongUnder Construction
★☆☆☆☆ICA, LondonCurated by Andrea Nitsche-KruppOn until 15 December 2024A senseless transhumanism has become so ingrained in contemporary art that it no longer bothers to articulate it. At the centre of Jeong’s installation is an exploded human-and-machine skeleton. Were this assembly less pristine, one could have looked for traces of a pager that led to this apparent disaster. Nearby, neatly arranged tools point to some geeky joy in DIY body modification. Rows of widgets share table space with 3D-printed vertebrae. A CCTV room next door beams in images from the artist’s studio, where these skeletons are said to have found “life” in their exo-existence.
This tech-optimism might have entertained gallery-goers twenty years ago when technologists didn’t dare call themselves artists. After Björk’s robot love and Boston Dynamics, however, there is nothing novel, graceful, or left to discover in Jeong’s unstated proposal. To wonder if we are machines, or if machines could be human is as fruitless as considering this work as accomplished sculpture.
It takes some courage to name things. Turning “retrospective” into a proper noun, Cullinan and Richards open this fragmentary account to a third-party translator. A singular narrative doesn’t emerge lightly, however. Lights, mirrors, and cryptic geometries are part of the vocabulary. The works’ elaborate titles imply that they once made up a complex grammar. Sixteen-year-old text paintings hang close to current witchy triangular abstractions. Traces of the artists’ day jobs prop up archival productions. Material arrangements break formal conventions, then break other artists’ even earlier breaches.
Read in one way, this show is the kompromat in an art generation’s archive. With less context, it takes an irreverent gallop through the establishment’s self-regarding fringes. For that reason, this review is partial. The oeuvre’s charming humour, however, is incontestable.
Vanity proceeds in circles. In the 1920s, the Irish designer Gray built herself a villa on the French Riviera. She and the structure would have become icons, but a more famous architect initially took the spotlight. It thus took a hundred years for a trust to turn the building into a tourist attraction.
Why we might care is not obvious. Heritage projects often commission artists to “research” and twist complex narratives into marketing collateral. The history revisionist Wilcox made a two-projector film for Gray’s tiny home cinema. A docu-fiction track meets Baudelaire in his frame, laying the ground for some greater legend.
This trivia is too tiresome to fact-check and should have stayed on the French coast. Only vanity can explain the film’s London outing. The garishly blue, metallic still prints don’t even make for good postcards.
Mary L. Bennett, Richard Dial, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Mose TolliverThe Stars Fell on Alabama: Southern Black Renaissance
★★★☆☆Edel Assanti, LondonOn until 26 October 2024Commercial galleries rarely lean this deeply into art history for validation. This fast stroll through the Southern Renaissance scene of Alabama of the 1980s follows the gallery artist Holley’s Camden Art Centre show and takes part of its outlook from the Royal Academy’s suitably fuller exhibition of 2023.
Unlike the other propositions, this one is not forthcoming with context. The handout waxes about the titular 1833 meteor shower and MLK’s 1986 assassination. How these events gave rise to the unlabelled works is unclear, and one is left looking for traces of Jim Crow on Thornton Dial’s canvases and in the rust of Minter’s yard sculptures alone.
Some patterns emerge, but they are not as advertised. Bizarrely, Bennet’s duotone quilt and Tolliver’s childlike diagrams of vehicles are easier to parse than Lockett’s more emotive paintings of hurt forest animals. The commercial imperative is understandable. The art historical intent, less clear.
For nearly thirty years, Etheridge has shot fashion, editorial, and what Gagosian calls “studio” photography, as though to avoid the association with “art”. Etheridge was a latecomer to the game of image semiotics. He nonetheless carved out a practice by mashing up symbols and registers. Meticulously styled product shots appear in his viewfinder as readily as candid pin-up girls. Coke bottles share colour spaces with touching family portraits. His folio is so eclectic that when a duck finds its way onto the studio’s infinity curve, nobody flaps a feather.
The success of these images relies on the active disavowal of context beyond their frames. But in this tiny pass-by display, Etheridge’s method finds an extreme. There isn’t enough information in the assembly for the mind to notice what it is not being given. The prints’ glossy richness reigns.
If only they were smaller, Piñera Ballo’s paintings would be a great hit in the shopping centre gallery your ex-army uncle just opened in Surrey. He’s gambling with the family’s savings, you condescend, but so is Pace with their show. The market for “young” artists is crashing. Who in London, precisely, would buy 6-meter-wide Cuban beach souvenirs? Surrey, at least, knows its own taste.
A palpably stubborn nature unites Huddleston’s women. Looking at one of her subjects’ stern faces, one might believe that she is possessed of an “attitude” associated with ill manners in one of lesser breeding. The paintings’ formal framing doesn’t lift the mood. Under Huddleston’s brush, a monochrome background of one canvas has as much nerve as the marble and French topiary in another.
These women come from disparate stories. One is an aristo housewife, another a mountain explorer, while one strayed into the 21st century from a troupe of Tudor lute players. Their copycat features, however, suggest that they are each the painter’s alter ego. It is, therefore, poignant that as one loses her focus in laughter, an image of stern determination shows up in the frame nearby.
“Preferring to work quickly and intuitively”, as the gallery handout informs us, McGurn has created the visual equivalent of elevator music. Indeed, to paint these figures of young, often naked women cannot have demanded more than a weekend. The formula which McGurn follows, however, is exacting. Her template was perfected by scores of commercial illustrators and street caricaturists through years of market research.
The pastels are twee. The baby deer outline which shows up on two canvases isn’t bizarre enough to put the rest in some contrast. Against this gallery interior’s opulence, these paintings aren’t even a plausible study of kitsch.
Patricia FergusonEach Little Scar
★★★★☆FILET, LondonCurated by Brenna HorroxOn until 6 October 2024No medium is better suited to anxiety and dread than the menacing dark line of the copperplate print. The late Ferguson’s 1980s graphic and charcoal works trace life in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. Fear and loss left deep scratches in the faces of the women and children whom these works catch in moments of great trepidation. In one, a knock on the door wakes up a mother’s basest of instincts. In another, a liberatory political banner is a deadly trap.
“There is a gun in her home, and she is afraid”, marks a print titled Ireland. There is no defiance here, and no resolution in peace, either. Ferguson’s later works veered into media abstraction. Three sizeable plates of copper scoured seemingly at random and bearing signs of rust are hard to view through the gallery’s window. This isn’t on purpose, but it gives the show respite.
Elsewhere, the display reveals an anxiety over the status of prints as worthy art objects. A bizarre contraption of steel and distressed wood inspired by Ferguson’s subjects serves as a counter for her smaller coppers. It needlessly compensates for a deficiency not manifest in the work.
If this installation were a film pitch for Wong Kar Wai – and it’s hard to imagine that it’s anything but – it would end up in development hell. Pencils and oils barely cover the surface of the plywood panels on which Phatsimo Suntstrom set out her storyboard. The genre is ‘noir’, and the twist that the sinister protagonist is female.
No gasps so far. With the right lighting, this story could be a mid-century colonial classic. Phatsimo Suntstrom doesn’t deliver. Yet, even the paintings’ faux sentimentalism could be forgivable in a skilful edit. Less so is the painter’s timid decision to commission an elaborate stage set made from her trademark plywood. The Curve could be the villa from Robbe-Grillet, but it isn’t. In the final print, neither actor takes the spotlight, and neither deserves it.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
