notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
The gallery is empty except for a couple of battered wooden benches styled from the design of a violin. A single speaker periodically pipes isolated musical passages performed by the same instrument. This sound is extracted from an Elgar recording on which Leon’s grandfather, a Jewish refugee, played second violin.
The music is lost without context in the open-plan gallery dominated by the invigilators’ chatter. A series of musical ephemera from the artist’s collection half-heartedly situates the project in post-war Birmingham of the 1940s, but also too vaguely in the sprawling lineage of Beethoven, Schubert, and Vivaldi.
The gallery text finally explains the aim of this confusion: Leon believes that the symphony is “cacophonous” and wants to rescue his ancestor from the oblivion of music. He disowns the tradition in which fulfilment came from playing part in a collective, rather than individual endeavour. This could have been a tender homage, or maybe a political charge found in a life’s work. Instead, this embarrassing display indicts today’s second-fiddlers with narcissism and egomania.
Pritchard’s practice, once happily confined to the surface of a ready-made canvas, has found a new scale in this exhibition. The gallery’s basement sinks under the weight of three concrete assemblies. Their twisted shapes, textures, and menacing dimensions would make a great backdrop for a reality TV programme on Brutalist architecture and earthquakes.
Death by debris falling from building façades is an artist’s occupational hazard. A couple of collages that accompany Pritchard’s future rubble suggest that collapse was not far from the painter’s mind.
It is a matter of course that one end puts another in perspective. By unavoidable contrast, Pritchard’s smaller maquette sculptures lack either the menace or the lightness commanded by her concrete extrusions. Their number, excessive given the showroom’s subterranean lack of a skyline, leaves the exhibition unbalanced and lacking a guiding principle.
Shu Lea CheangScifi New Queer Cinema, 1994-2023★★☆☆☆Project Native Informant, LondonOn until 20 April 2024Warning visitors that Cheang’s video works “contain explicit sexual material, nudity, and strobe effects” as they leave the premises makes this gallery the champion of understatement and misrepresentation. The Taiwanese activist Cheang may be a pioneer of ‘alternative’ and ‘queer’ cinema who warrants a PhD thesis on post-punk, post-AIDS, or an altogether post-sex future. But even a brief sample of this screening programme reveals that, above all, she is a pornographer. The gallery’s darkened screening room offers the passer-by relief through hardcore sex which he would otherwise need to search for online with keywords like ‘vintage’, ‘Asian’, and ‘fantasy’.
The gallery’s verbose text hits the queer theory tropes but does little to explain how the straight couples fucking on screen contribute to anyone’s liberation. It does even less to encourage in-depth scrutiny of the over four hours of material in the exhibition. With content this gratuitously explicit and a curator so absent, it’s a miracle that this project wasn’t shut down by the licencing, or indeed art-historical authorities.
Jones’ tableaux which capture everyday objects like tableware, cut flowers, or arrangements of light and glass are tricks of the eye that pretend to come from a past register of sepia-toned sentiments and cyanotype archive records. As objects representing objects, these works are exquisite and their tricks are revealed neither by their delicate dimensions, nor their luxury polished frames. One therefore imagines the painter’s hand applying the watercolours and oils to suedes and silks with the care once reserved for the most elaborate and delicate of photographic processes now synonymous with a nostalgia for easier truths.
But this spell must be broken. However attractive the trinkets in front of Jones’ easel and however masterly her rendition of them, these images finally inspire frustration. The lightness and slightness of the painter’s gesture cry out for a sledgehammer that would relieve the viewer of doubt and responsibility for deciding which of the scenes will stand the test of time.
Gifford’s lazy assemblages of textiles and oil paint – applied so thickly that it’s a miracle the canvases don’t bring the gallery walls down with them – are interested in little but their own form. A handful, as if to expose the artist’s obsessive yet underdeveloped idea of a masterstroke, incorporate domestic objects like the detritus of the laundry room or scraps of the bedroom curtain. Whatever stories these compositions bore in the artist’s studio, in the collector’s home they’ll only gather dust.
What good it is to be best in show when the competition is lame, crooked, or outright fake? Fischli’s Kennel Club parade of papier mâché dogs and stuffed cats is so inclusive that a plissé pug, a cross-stitch beaver, and even a tartan bunny have snuck onto the catwalk. In the gallery’s pristine interior, this motley victory parade is watched over by a canary and a feline with a fetish for denim. These natural enemies have suspended their squabbles so they can lull their prey into a sense of security as fragile as the gypsum fur ornaments that are the source of their pride.
What this contest lacks in hierarchy, it compensates for in irreverence. Fischli’s manner is not dissimilar to that of her namesake and countryman Peter (of ‘and Weiss’ fame), and her humorous affectation can today come across as insincere or imprecise. But if taken at face value, this project’s satire gets it the rosette.
Boyla’s sky-sizes canvases rendered in bleached ink mauves, pinks, and rust are the product of meditation that turned into catatonia. These images are reminiscent of tie-dye t-shirts more than of the sun’s coronal explosions or even the blotchy floaters one occasionally sees in their field of vision. A slightly quirky hang which has the paintings hover oddly above the floor and the gallery’s lighting grid replaced by singular sources force-aestheticise this non-experience.
Rothko’s abstractions are said to have induced tears in viewers overwhelmed by abstraction. Staring at the sun here, however, barely causes blindness.
This exhibition cannot decide if it’s a tourist attraction or a serious examination of sculpture’s relationship with movement. A survey so loosely framed could only ever be partial. This show, however, tries hard to rewrite the canon even when it needn’t. Where a more classic version of this story would have done with a David Medalla, for example, the Hayward’s account introduces a lesser-known Michel Blazy. This is one-upmanship confused by misreading of art history’s time arrow. Perversely, this method makes some works, like Choi Jeong Hwa’s mass-market totems, look like poor cousins even when they aren’t.
The project also betrays an impulse to read any material, shape, or colour as fad politics. A layer of faux more-than-human environmentalism, for example, is crowbarred into Teresa Solar Abboud’s resin legs and tongues and serves the work no favour. The show’s at least partly Ideological selection criteria, likewise, failed to exclude Marguerite Humeau’s macabre plastic fungi. By contrast, the equally atrocious rollercoaster by EJ Hill and Eva Fàbregas’ giant vibrating dildo can at least be excused as mindless selfie fodder.
The ICA’s once inviting gallery space is now a maze and smells of industrial rubber. Inside this pen, Dean’s video follows an animal’s death parade in a disused slaughterhouse. After a moment of exuberant confusion, the image turns into a sinister whirlwind. To the soundtrack of a cheap horror film, the invisible carcass then whimsically journeys over a pool of CGI blood and along a row of butchers’ hooks.
Dean has contributed plenty to art’s politics as a writer and editor. Her thoughts on necropolitics would have thus been of some interest. But this work is as subtle as the “U.S.A.” denominator included in the video’s title. Even at the outset, the project’s chances are scarpered by a knee-jerk association of black American life with systemic and terminal oppression.
Capital is racism, architecture is death. Dean isn’t wrong and all this could have been a decent e-flux essay. But visuals of her own making overpower Dean the artist. There are, for example, no butchers and no cattle in the film’s frame. The question of death-value turns into idle musing, leaving the work of the ‘system’ as opaque as ever.
Barriball is known for repetitive marks which caress surfaces before defeating them with pigment. Now, new drawings of windows – blue, orange, and yellow rectangles of faintly broken-up colour – try to capture shadows cast by the sun on the floor in her studio. They’re visible only against a layer of dust which temporarily settled between gusts of wind.
But they only feign such fragility. On unsolicited inspection, these blocks turn into dull sheets of waxed paper and not the light-loving cyanotypes or Polaroids to which they make claims. The blinds are drawn tightly over the frames, leaving no highlights, no shadows, and no sunlight either.
Vague references in the gallery’s text to the artist’s comfortable pandemic isolation fail to illuminate this confusion. The eyes may be the windows of the soul. To make an aphorism of the reverse needs more than shadow-play.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
