notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
The institution can be the best and the worst for an artist. Davis’ canvases, for example, are remarkable. The figures he captures mid-air, half-asleep, or between planes give an account of time more sensitively than the Victorian portrait photograph. These works make a justifiable claim on the market and have earned a spot in the public gallery’s canon.
Yet Davis was also the animator of some middling social art projects and a conceptual artist whose concepts hardly graduated art school. The museum venerates these, as though to make him a Basquiat for a new generation. This does the painter no favours. To celebrate, as this show does, that Davis was “creative” from a young age is trivial. To indulge a hollow reading of race in his Jerry Springer paintings is irresponsible. To fetishise his illness and death younger than Jesus gleefully opportunistic. These missteps, in turn, cast doubt on the paint’s surface.
“You just had to be there” isn’t quite the recipe for cultural reproduction. When crypto cults are the currency, October trades in old money. Its programme treats boomer avant-gardes to low-budget reenactments of their prime. The crowd, like the gallery walls, look worse for wear.
Burroughs should be sexy, right? Penguin didn’t make him a Classic for nothing and neither did, cringe, Guadagnino’s latest film. The scribbles – for that is what many of the drawings on show amount to – may be the products of the same fevered mind that birthed Naked Lunch but here, this mind misses its exalted status. The gallery’s economy frames, old-fashioned museum mounts, and lukewarm wine make the writer’s crazed daring even less obvious.
The legend muddles through, however. A few photo-collages in this collection come a step closer to the writer’s literary record. A singular cardboard portrait of a Crazy Man – a sight Burroughs caught it in a mirror? – holds the artist like a straightjacket.
Arnold’s landscapes want you to pay more attention to their interruptions than the subject itself. If you imagine the painter mounting a ladder in some field so he can reach the treetops on his large, thickly covered canvases, you would also need to notice the meteorite brutally cutting the sky in half. How the artist survived its impact, before witnessing it again the next day, is the very question of art and nature.
This trick is disarmingly simple, of course, as is the exhibition’s pairing of Arnold’s paintings with Baer’s off-hand architectural follies. One dare not ask for more.
What does an artist do when she has “nothing to say?” Admitting outright, as Southgate-Smith does in her exhibition text, that the intellectual ethos that drove her production (to say nothing of her gallery’s programme) is now sterile might have marked a turning point.
There is no trace of this in the work, alas. Austere abstractions like in the hotel lobby, found photographs pinned up with fridge magnets, an inconsequential, feint soundtrack, and an intriguing, but ultimately unyielding index-card sculpture all fall back on the very same verbiage that today unambiguously denounces them.
The old tricks don’t work, and it is stupefying to see this production and think that they ever did. Still, one might have expected the old regime to put up some fight. It is clearly too late to save it, yet too early to mourn.
LinderDanger Came Smiling
Danger Came Smiling
Danger Came Smiling
★★★★☆Hayward Gallery, LondonOn until 5 May 2025It’s been a long time since Linder was sexy. That’s not because her incisive bust-ups of bodies and ideas are any less compelling than the still circulating visions of, say, Barbara Kruger, but because Linder’s second-wave feminist propositions were ruthlessly superseded by another set of objects.
Take the iconic 1976 photomontage of a nude woman with an iron for a head which Linder made for a Buzzcocks album cover. This modest yet outrageous image, now in the Tate collection, serves as the exhibition’s key marketing asset. That the artist remade it in 2015 as a larger-than-life lightbox says as much about her fight as the fact that this new work remains available for purchase.
Linder just about survived the demise of the print pictorial magazine. Her costume and sculptural works from the last decade are intriguing but understandably limited in number at the very end of the stuffily hung show that gets only a small part of the Hayward’s otherwise cavernous spaces. They make the diminishing returns of Linder’s and her peer’s demands poignantly evident.
Hany ArmaniousCircle Square
Circle Square
Circle Square
★★☆☆☆Phillipa Reid, LondonOn until 12 April 2025The lightness of being can turn unbearable. Armanious’ whimsical assemblies of everyday objects – a pair of wire hangers, a broken chair, or an umbrella stand – are so arbitrary that not even Daniel Day-Lewis would welcome them into his loft. It is a pity, therefore, that their gravitas stays firmly on the page of the gallery handout: that the artefacts are all copies of life cast in precious metals and synthetic rubber is barely the plot of a novel.
Silver hangers dangling from golden screws are about as endearing as Tereza’s cough. Even less that the art market, bereft of lasting value, looks to material trickery for meaning. Art loves a good plot twist, but this one’s long spoilt.
I'm so gay for you
I'm so gay for you
I'm so gay for you
★★☆☆☆Miłość, LondonCurated by Sophie WilliamsonOn until 15 March 2025Valentine’s Day is good to launch a love-in, but this thirteen-artist “celebration of queerness” is no orgy. Judging by the works selected – seemingly at random – from a related glossy magazine, to be gay is to remain only half-aware of having a body lest it prompts the realisation that so does everyone else.
The fear of sex haunts this project, if not the culture it stems from. Murky images, like Rosie Thomas’ silvery snapshots of street carnivals gesture at sensuousness but they are too hard to read, and so without good reason. Gosia Kołdraszewska thinks she’s a sex rebel, but outright censors her erotic scene with a a cutesy metaphor that saves her subjects the proverbial bother. Paul Arthur’s raunchy 70’s pin-up once came close to a climax. It now seeks the ending on PornHub.
Does anyone fuck anymore? Or make art? At least Lucy Deveral has the nerve to make an old-school lesbian nude, and that alone breaks the show’s mantra of “joy”. All that’s left is to giggle post-coitally, then dive into Olivia Sterling’s body part patisserie.
The tragedy of a one-hit-wonder visual artist is that good painting or sculpture is harder to hum than a once-catchy tune. Lidén could be typecast by her 2010 billboard poster assemblies. Indeed, her practice has stayed close conceptually to their concerns since. This new show tries to repeat those works’ success quite literally, barely bothering to swap one backing track for another. Doing so, it misses that the world and Lidén have evolved in over a decade.
The billboard meditations on the city and the image are back, and this time they’re electric. But that’s not because they take from Rothko or Albers as they’d have you believe: each literally needs a plug socket. Museum benches propped up on stacks of card waste suggest that one should look at them with intent, without explaining why. A pair of mostly black videos cryptically set on a beach are the one source of true intrigue.
But this isn’t Times Square in a blackout. Lidén made so, so very many copies of these works that they overwhelmed her better judgment. Even the gallery deemed some redundant and it dismantled part of the exhibition halfway through to accommodate another artist’s show.
Phung-Tien Phamdoesn't work
doesn't work
doesn't work
★★☆☆☆Project Native Informant, LondonOn until 15 February 2025Despite comprising only a handful of elements – nearly monochrome acrylic canvases that pretend they’re not art, a Tintin tribute video, some flat-pack furniture adorned by its previous owner, and the props of a failed stage magic trick – Pham’s installation induces a sense of encapsulation and excess. Without turning its gaze away from the mirror, it mumbles “Look at me, I’m a little crazy”, as though anyone but the artist could guess what brought this condition on.
This staging is reminiscent of Covid lockdowns that turned half the world into infantile narcissists. The pandemic, alas, is now down the memory hole and Pham’s irreverent performance – a white stuffed toy dog, so cute – middles in the TikTok algorithm without a rationale. An air fryer abandoned in the street outside the gallery, however, spells the sorry end for fad aesthetics of fad ideas.
Liam GillickThe Sleepwalkers
The Sleepwalkers
The Sleepwalkers
★★★☆☆Maureen Paley, LondonOn until 1 March 2025It it weren’t for a line of text likely picked at random from a pulp fiction novel and printed across the gallery’s walls, one might struggle to understand how a box full of ribbons, the paraphernalia of airport security, and a vase half-full of vodka modulate one another’s significance. Having read it, one is fooled briefly into believing that language holds the key. In the next room, however, a video screen forces together interior shots of a traditional Korean house and Italian opera. These elements meet in neither’s geography. A shelter made from coloured acrylic partly overhangs the installation, as though to egg on the film’s undramatic edit.
Gillick’s practice lacks obviously consistent character, save for it is sparseness of means and the ungraspability of its referents. Decades spent by the artist lightly underlining their arbitrary connections, however, have etched the outlines of a functional map. Gillick wants his audience to commit fragments of it to their memory. On this page of the atlas, his plea is unpersuasive.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
