Pope.L

Hospital

★★★☆☆

On until 11 February 2024

Pope.L’s fanciful etymology of ‘hospital’ as ‘stranger’ is only one of this show’s missed metaphors. The centrepiece is a crumbling scaffold on which the nearly naked artist ate the Wall Street Journal in 2000. Reading the Journal is said to increase a person’s wealth. It didn’t for Pope.L and there was no budget to test this thesis again today. 

This monumental detritus confuses correlation with causation and forces accord with the now naïve staging of Wall Street as the main enemy. To make matters plainer still, the artist invites visitors to sprinkle “white stuff” onto his crumbling edifice, only to laugh behind their backs later.

The replication crisis continues in a 2008 video performance in which chickens and goats graze on and then topple the US Capitol building. This confounds the sources and forms of power and lands in the joke section of Animal Farm and not as a prophecy of the Jan 6th insurrection as the show guide would have it.

All this is as though the artist didn’t trust the audience to make meaning in his absence. The less performative parts of the exhibition – installations of wine bottles and hospital paraphernalia stained by decay – are free from this anxiety.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Ed Webb-Ingall, A Bedroom for Everyone at PEER ★☆☆☆☆

Ed Webb-Ingall

A Bedroom for Everyone

★☆☆☆☆

How can art improve the lives of communities? Wrong answers only.

Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely at Gianni Manhattan and P21 at Project Native Informant ★★★☆☆

Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely

★★★☆☆

These works are as garish as they are fun to look at.

Lutz Bacher, AYE! at Raven Row ★★★★☆

Lutz Bacher

AYE!

★★★★☆

There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition.

Özgür Kar, Heavy Ground at Emalin ★★★☆☆

Özgür Kar

Heavy Ground

★★★☆☆

Kar’s insight a fly’s life – or, to have it his way, the whole universe – is fleeting.

Ksenia Pedan, Revision at Cell Project Space ★★★★☆

Ksenia Pedan

Revision

★★★★☆

Pedan’s paintings would rather be anything but.

Helen Johnson, Opening at Pilar Corrias ★☆☆☆☆

Helen Johnson

Opening

★☆☆☆☆

This is the work of a mind that, having needlessly spent years in therapy, became hooked on ennui or of an artist who wasted time misreading Lacan.

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