notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Rizaldi’s instructional films are aids to miscomprehension. One takes the form of a Hanna-Barbera space alien cartoon. Its saturated colours and muffled dialogue could be a highlight in a ‘70s science classroom. A pantheism subplot throws the lesson, however. The artist hopes we students won’t notice.
The spin continues on the next screen where a shipwrecked astronaut breathes physics jargon and 15th-century Sufism. Science and world religions dance in a polytheist multiverse. Nothing, sadly, saves our lonely hero.
Rizaldi’s grand unifying theory is as charming as it is confused. The conflict of belief and reason is a 19th-century problem. Throwing vague old maxims at it advances little. When an artist thinks he’s understood quantum mechanics, to twist Richard Feynman’s words, he doesn’t. How will he know if he knows god?
Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, Delaine Le BasTurner Prize 2024
★★☆☆☆Tate Britain, LondonOn until 16 February 2025The Turner Prize’s goal is to take the pulse of British contemporary art. One shouldn’t judge it harshly if the patient is dying. This year’s edition, sadly, is dull beyond redemption. Questions of identitarian “struggle” are the show’s sole organising principle. They’re so old hat that even the artists approach them with ennui.
Abad’s once vibrant critiques of his native Philippines’ Marcos regime turned into footnotes in a grey decolonisation textbook. In his latest edition, colonial Britain is to blame for Imelda’s handbag fetish. A sustainable claim, perhaps, but Abad offers no visual proof.
Kaur’s Scottish Indian mixed heritage pound shop is not stupid but it is depressing. Her airy display, like life, has space for prayer bells, family snaps, Irn Bru, and even a giant doily. Assimilation is a dirty word, however, and the gallery’s embrace of mass-produced cultures is entirely partial.
Le Bas’ presentation has a touch of novelty to it. Dressed entirely in fabric, her rooms turn into big tents in an unsubtle nod to some essential Roma sensibility. Content, however, is fleeting in this labyrinth. A video projection barely registers, the figures are like dolls, and the paint markings barely tell a story. Too heavy to be aethereal, too slight to be immersive, this work only manifests in the curator’s text.
Johnson is the safe hand here, but her desire for safety is the paintings’ downfall. Defining “black woman” would be a life-long task for any artist. Today, Johnson’s practice pleases the art world a little too eagerly. Like with a film’s exit music, therefore, the punters have left the gallery before the paintings challenge the Prize’s hackneyed ideology.
C. Rose SmithTalking Back to Power
★★☆☆☆Autograph, LondonCurated by Bindi VoraOn until 12 October 2024A crisply starched dress shirt is Smith’s only weapon in her battle against the windmills of power. In each of a dozen self-portraits in this cramped show made in the grand estates of 19th-century cotton farms in the Southern United States, she poses her body as though it were forever out of place. The rich shadows in her monochrome photographs nearly consume her. Only the shirt stands out against the colonial opulence.
Formally, the prints would make a photography student’s folio proud. Conceptually, they win acclaim from the institution unable to repair anything otherwise. Politically, Smith abdicates her power to the architecture of her imagination built from her ancestors’ agony. There’s no conversation, no challenge, no win.
The game begins even outside the gallery, where a dirtied drawing casts a rabbit shadow. Mounting the stairs, the visitor encounters a TV screen showing a blurry eye. Next to it leans a sculpture made from a bowling ball and pool cue. These traces of play continue. A pair of trousers hangs abandoned as though a comic ran for it halfway through his stand-up routine. A mirror mosaic panel bear the signs of a party worthy of supermarket cake but no more.
This scene is austere, yet unashamedly playful. Marsalis plays tricks, but he gives them up willingly, too. One of his large oils starts embarrassed in the gamer’s POV only to become a luscious abstract landscape. Bowling balls turn into tripping hazards, and a too-easy-to-miss camera beams the art-lovers’ contorted faces to an advertising billboard.
Working with both all and with very little, Marsalis injects his props with life. His circus is in town, its acts are the infrastructure of contentment. A less practised surgeon would have killed the proverbial frog.
Do you like street art, but not the street or the people who make it? Do you enjoy the frisson of taboo ideas but are too anxious to share an ironic meme? Do you like KAWS but find him too expensive? Why, meet Slawn, the spray paint kid “taught” in a Lagos skate shop now hailed by Sotheby’s as Nigeria’s top “Instagram Art Sensation”.
The canvases are too large for Slawn’s naively painted figures. His references – the gallery laughably cites AbEx – don’t stretch beyond a phone’s emoji keyboard. It’s all big tits, big lips, big eyes, sometimes a background squiggle. Risqué if you’ve not seen a Haring. Out of the blue, however, a single canvas has three figures in KKK robes. Perhaps Slawn follows Philip Guston’s socials.
Street art fans love this stuff because they’re fans. Brands drink up the PR’s identitarian nonsense because it has little manifestation in the work. But with the 23-year-old’s auction record understandingly unimpressive, what’s in it for the dealers?
The nonagenarian Katz is an acquired taste. His bold colouring and reduced forms are perfect for sore American eyes trained on advertising and pop art. To them, such habitual simplicity might look like an unpretentious virtue.
Should flower arrangements need such an initiation? Katz’s pictures of willow and daffodils are pleasant but trivial. The man’s a legend, granted – think Hockney and his later landscapes – but this emperor’s clothes have moth holes.
If a painting could scream “excess”, Fischer would turn it into a series. A dozen large mixed-media panels collect the detritus of a post-Baudrillardian age: supermarket wares, car adverts, Amazon book listings, and newspaper headlines. These objects obscure pastures of abstract pastels laid in well-defined colours.
A vinyl photo print which covers the gallery’s not-inconsiderable footprint reproduces the painter’s Californian studio. He has an atelier on each coast, and this isn’t even his first show this year with his London gallery. There’s market demand, but this barrage of signs is of the artist’s own making.
Fischer does not admit responsibility. In the pictures, however, a lone male figure drowns in all this clutter. His body lies in absurd submission to the surplus that suffocates him. It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.
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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
