Art Monthly 417: June 2018

Contents

Ed Atkins Good Wine 2017

Interview

Crash-test Dummy

Ed Atkins interviewed By Martin Herbert

The Oxfordshire-born, Berlin-based artist discusses avatars, dummies, metafiction and 'bad' writing, as well as technology and its limitations.

The surrogate became more like a crash-test dummy, hurled into situations with an abandon inappropriate for anything remotely like a character … I'm basically finding ways of insisting on its inhumanity in order to be this brutal with it.

Sean Baker The Florida Project 2017

Feature

Outside the Box

Mark Prince explores alternative, non-linear, non-hierarchical ways of occupying space

Through the lens of filmmakers James Benning and Alfred Hitchcock, and work by, amongst others, Ed Ruscha, Joel Meyerowitz, Ryan Trecartin and Sean Snyder, how might we conceive of space in a way that transcends the spurious binary of globalism and isolationism?

James Benning called this a process of creating 'spherical space' – a phrase which now seems politically resonant in its implication of a reach beyond the single time and place of the image, associating a 360° viewpoint with a globalist perspective.

Heather & Ivan Morison Look! Look! Look! 2017

Feature

Follies

From pyramids to pagodas and pavilions to palaces, the folly is back and Lara Eggleton asks why

Artists as different as Kunlé Adeyemi, Phyllida Barlow, Fiona Curran and Ai Weiwei have addressed the concept of the folly for the 21st century, perhaps no surprise in our age of austerity.

Possessing their own kind of double ontology, follies symbolise both the escape from reality and the impossibility of such an escape. As Theodor Adorno asserts: art pleases but does not gratify, it breaks its promises.

Comment

Editorial

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

The traditional burst of applause in auction rooms when a record is broken is being heard a lot these days. With the public sector having been so underfunded for so long, is the market taking advantage of our museums and national institutions in their weakened state to promote blue-chip artists?

It was surely not just for reasons of space that, immediately below the report of yet another art auction record, one newspaper ran a story about a Harley Street doctor revealing that there has been a 100% rise in the number of londoners, 90% of whom are male, seeking help for porn addiction.

Artnotes

Not Our People

Brooklyn Museum is again at the centre of protests, this time over its appointment of a white curator of African art; Tate Modern is targeted by protesters over workers' rights at one of its sponsors, Ernst & Young; LGBTQ activists are hospitalised by security guards at Beijing's 798 Art District; art institutions in Helsinki come together to publish strategies to support equality; shortlisted artists withdraw from the Belgian Art Prize after the all-white, all-male shortlist was criticised as being exclusionary; plus the latest news on galleries, appointments, prizes and more.

They Are Here The People Behind the Financial System 2017

Profile

They Are Here

The London-based art practice, led by Harun Morrison & Helen Walker, examines collaboration, authorship and group dynamics.

They Are Here harness the flexibility and amorphousness of the contemporary artist as a tool, shifting consciously between ways of working that are conversely participatory, inviting people to take part in predetermined structures, and collaborative, by working with people intensively to figure out what those structures might be.

Adam Chodzko Ghost 2018
part of 'Groundwork'

Exhibitions

Groundwork

various venues, Cornwall

Maria Walsh

Zoe Leonard: Survey

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Michael Wilson

Ian White: Any frame is a thrown voice

Camden Arts Centre, London

Chris McCormack

Lee Lozano: Slip,Slide,Splice

The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Matthew Bowman

Shen Xin: Sliced Units

Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester

Laura Harris

Vincent Fecteau

Greengrassi, London

Mark Wilsher

Emma Smith: Euphonia

Bluecoat, Liverpool

Beth Bramich

Glasgow International

various venues

Tom Emery

EVA International 2018

various venues, Limerick

Chris Clarke

ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE

Chelsea Space, London

Amy Budd

Reviews

Taryn Simon An Occupation of Loss 2018

Performance

Taryn Simon: An Occupation of Loss

Ashiya Eastwood

A stark reminder: this was a performance. What does it mean to perform grief for an audience, and what happens when a platform is provided for such a performance to take place?

Reviews

Books

Lucretius 1: An Ontology of Motion

David Ryan

Perhaps the astonishing thing is that such an ancient text remains controversial, speaking afresh to each generation – each interpreter, even – which is one of the more consistent themes that underpins recent commentaries.

Polemic

Monumental Failure

The Face of Bigotry

Stephanie Schwartz

The debate about monumentality, as I see it with and through this photograph, is a debate about who has the right to take up space in public.

Reports

skater alongside Clare Sams and Broa Sams's Fatberg 2017 installation of a 9-metre-long artificial sewer

Yarco and Proud

Creative Workplace Summit

Jonathan P Watts

Elizabeth Wright's advocacy of Mazi was probably the most radical gesture of the day – an advocacy for parallel infrastructure. No creative bureaucratic negotiations.

Reports

'Dawn of a Nation' installation view

Letter from Florence

You Need a Point of View

Patricia Bickers

A small text work by Alighiero Boetti, 21 October 1968, lingered in my mind – a sign of the possibility of future political change, or a memorial for a lost opportunity?

Viewpoint

Art Investigation

Forensic Architecture

Daniel Neofetou

The success of Forensic Architecture in the art world is symptomatic of a broader demotion of art's own capacity for political opposition in favour of art as a conduit for often paraphraseable political content.

Artlaw

Ways of Working

Reputation: Art & Artists

Henry Lydiate

Ever since the development of authorship and attribution in art practice, there has been a vexing question of the relationship between the reputation of artists as authors and the separate but interlinked reputation of their works.

Listings

Events

Calendar

The updated events and exhibitions calendar can be viewed online.

Exhibitions

Exhibition Listings

Art Monthly's exhibition listings can be viewed online.