notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Anna Bunting-Branch, Choy Ka Fai, Damara Inglês, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Lawrence Lek, Kira XonorikaWhat Is It Like?
★★☆☆☆Arebyte, LondonCurated by Helen StarrOn until 4 May 2025For an exhibition that claims to concern itself with “embodiment”, this slick but gimmicky display of audio, video, and VR works could not be any less intelligible through the human senses. Starr turned the dimly lit gallery into an archive vault from which visitors must themselves assemble exhibits of bewildering artefacts: game world vistas, augmented reality performances, and soundscapes inflected by programmatic AI-fi.
This physical challenge might be surmountable (audiences love interactivity, right?) but it clouds the show’s crucial concerns. Can the machine know like a human? What does it feel like for an intelligence to be artificial? What do any of the artists in this show have to say about it? And what, if anything, does that have to do with a bat?
That this is moot is Starr’s very point. Yet if art is a knowledge-generating discipline, its knowledge itself needs an art that translates it into forms. In the optimism of the Enlightenment, this process was the core of aesthetics. Today, technology and art serve to mystify each other, leaving the human out of the picture.
Richard Aldrich, Prunella Clough, Masanori Tomita, Anh Trần, Terry WintersPlace Revisited
★★★★☆Modern Art, LondonOn until 5 April 2025Modern Art churns out so many good painting shows that one suspects it of insider trading. Indeed, there is a trick to this programme: each line-up drags a historical anchor that quells any hesitation of the medium’s future value. In this portfolio, the late Clough’s abstractions – straight out of the fruit bowl and the back garden as John Berger had them – underwrite the risk. One canvas, barely obscured by its subject matter, bears a pair of comedy teeth marks that leave the forensic accountant puzzled.
It’s not like the rest of the deal is sub-prime, though. One may quibble with Aldrich’s emoji-like palette but even it drinks up this context. Winter’s cloud paintings are exuberance alone, and markets love that. Trần’s abstractions of fairytales and Tomita’s rich textures are the wildcards, their paint too fresh to make a claim on the matter’s past performance.
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.
It’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.
The 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.
Valentine’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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
