notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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.
Despite 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.
It 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.
The phrase “conceptual art” is sometimes deployed as a term of defensive derision. Visiting exhibitions that consisted entirely of empty gallery rooms, such as Yves Klein’s 1958 antic, audiences in the second half of the 20th century were legitimately bewildered and annoyed. It took plenty of time and theory, if not Centre Pompidou’s 2009 Voids retrospective of nine such projects, before this particular concept became so old hat that it no longer upsets anyone.
Zhu didn’t have the foresight to leave Chisenhale empty. Instead, he divided the hangar-like gallery into four garishly decorated rooms, thus inducing visitors to slam doors irately as they sigh in the realisation that each space is more “conceptual” than the last. Trying to jump the art-theoretical queue, Zhu produced a whole book of instructions and explanations. “Histories of violence” and “colonial inheritances” dominate its index.
Without such already hackneyed theory, it is unclear what might induce a visitor or a future art historian to buy into these shallow associations of form and narrative. Zhu’s silly playing-card sculpture box and a cutesy bow – the exhibition’s sole objects – are capable of inspiring neither curiosity nor desire. Faced with so little, one longs for an even emptier room.
The risk of working with hot metal is that, like water, it spills away from the mould. Burke’s materials – silver, bronze, and aluminium – which she has worked into arcane ritual objects that one would more readily expect to find in the dimly-lit rooms of ethnographic museums than East London galleries have minds of their own. Some betray their decorative intent without revealing the occasion. Others are miniature charts that would lead the bearer to undisclosed treasure. A couple, resembling musical instruments, invite the staging of a performance whose score was never written.
These forms are exquisite and the little they lack in antique opulence they make up for in austerity. A nod to 17th-century hydromancy in the gallery text already charges the pieces with too much utility, however. Burke’s next demand that they affirm “posthuman feminist phenomenology” fails entirely. This, perversely, only confirms Quicksilver’s independence from artistic thought.
Muenzer’s study of moody teenagers staged in a messy bedroom is so self-referential that one wonders if the artist might ever escape their world himself. His subjects are locked-in kidults hiding from view in bubbles transparent only enough to show off their indignant vexation with the world. The artist poses his heroes ironically on play swings, at the mall, or at the Thanksgiving family dinner that they’re about to ruin for everyone. They relax only when they illicitly sneak into that filthy bed.
All this would be annoying to this middle-aged critic, except this gallery actually is someone’s messy bedroom most nights of the week. Final Hot Desert is a transplant from Utah now seeking its fortunes in Hackney. Muenzer, it turns out, is the West Coast art establishment’s hapless darling. But in this DIY setting, the whole endeavour is so quaint that it’s almost charming. Pity only that an atrocious exhibition essay betrays these kids’ desperate ambition to graduate into adulthood.
Desire breeds introspection. Semi-abstract expanses of ink and detritus make up intricate patterns on Hartley’s compact canvases. Veins of pigment glow on odd-looking stoneware tablets which hang between the pictures. A display of Polaroids whose surfaces erupted in paint and volcanic ash turns the exhibition into a study of itself.
Desire breeds mistrust. Misprinted pages ripped out from old art history books are the show’s unlisted medium. Hartley pulped Cézannes, Monets, and Twomblys into his paint binder, affording his masters a second and a third chance. That a shameless Rothko miniature somehow survived intact in this mix throws the lot into a crisis of authority.
A pair of houseflies caught in the sticky mess of a trap live out their last moments in serenade and coitus. The end, or is it? This is the kind of story one would like to be ‘deceptively’ simple in the hope of uncovering its trick. Kar’s animated film loops and the desperate rite misses a finale. Dirt, death, and procreation, again and once more, forever.
The installation relies entirely on a display gimmick. If these few frames hold some profound truth, this exhibition overplays its importance. Whatever insight Kar offers into a fly’s life – or, to have it his way, the whole universe – is aesthetically intriguing but fleeting.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
