Art Monthly 487
June 2025

Contents

Liliane Lijn, Get Rid of Government Time, 1962

Interview

Seeing the Light

Liliane Lijn interviewed by Chris Clarke

I began to understand that the object of what I had been making were these shadows. It was ephemeral but it was also material, so it was both.

Corbin Shaw, Soften Up, Hard Lad, 2019

Feature

Class Distinction

Morgan Quaintance asks what continues to suppress the working class in the visual arts sector, and what are their prospects for the future

In much the same way as the colonial subject existed as the irrational other against which the rational, civilised and civilising western subject was measured, the working-class subject must inhabit a position of socio-cultural lack to fulfil the role of uncultured other.

Jasper Marsalis, Stadium, 2020

Profile

Jasper Marsalis

Michael Kurtz

In November 2020, Jasper Marsalis left a crater in the rubble of a vacant site in Minneapolis. The simple earthwork was surrounded by seven powerful floodlights and titled Stadium, but there were no performers and no crowds.

Editorial

Class Actions

Mainstream representations of the working classes, which are rarely produced by people who would consider themselves working class, deliver a level of misrepresentation that ultimately leads to either scapegoating or erasure.

Joel Budd, in his new book Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class, refers to this as ‘ventriloquising’, an example being how the middle classes project their own prejudices, for instance about migration or Europe, onto the working classes.

Artnotes

Political Case for Art

In the lead up to the government’s Spending Review, numerous art organisations make the case for the visual arts; authorities suffer a backlash from the arts against a misleading interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Equality Act; the British Museum chief rules out restitution of looted artefacts; insipid proposals for the QEII Memorial are revealed; climbing on Winston Churchill’s statue is to become a criminal offence; artists and art organisations in the UK and the US stand against the rise of fascism; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Obituaries

Dara Birnbaum 1946–2025
Chris Townsend

Peter Sedgely 1930–2025
Anna Harding

Tris Vonna-Michell, Boxed Matter, 2024, Moon Grove, Manchester

Exhibitions

The World Through AI

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Chris Townsend

Tris Vonna-Michell: The Art of Clockmaking

Moon Grove, Manchester

Dylan Huw

Do Ho Suh: Walk the House

Tate Modern, London

Deborah Schultz

Sarah Roberts: SICK (a note from Sandilands Road and other stories)

The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds

Paul Carey-Kent

Nolan Oswald Dennis: throwers

Gasworks, London

Amrita Dhallu

Fake Barn Country

Raven Row, London

Peter Suchin

Ann Hamilton: We Will Sing

Salts Mill, Bradford

Lauren Velvick

Berlin Round-up

ChertLüdde • Dittrich & Schlechtriem • PSM • Michael Werner

Ari Nielsson

Colin Sackett, Manifold

Artists’ Books

Colin Sackett: Manifold – Publishing 1984–2024

Greg Thomas

Connections are drawn, for example, between the spacing of words and the passage of rivulets through rock, or of dead crustacean fragments through a desert sea; between the forward motion of the eyes across the page and a bike gently accelerating downhill.

Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast cover image

Books

Daniel Jewesbury: Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast

Michaele Cutaya

Daniel Jewesbury has been thinking and speculating about FE McWilliam’s 1974 sculpture, Woman in a Bomb Blast, for over 20 years, fuelled by a persistent unease about how audiences ought to respond to it.

The Activism of Art

Books

Dipti Desai and Stephen Duncombe: The Activism of Art – A Decentred Anthology

Daniel Neofetou

The editors’ introduction opens with two epigraphs which appear to stake out the coordinates of the book: one from Plato, who affirms the risk to society of art, and thus its activism, and another from Audre Lorde, for whom art’s activism in this sense renders it a ‘vital necessity’.

Eimear Walshe, Free State Pangs, 2025

Film

Eimear Walshe: Free State Pangs

Maria Walsh

The film is partly an allegory of Eimear Walshe’s own non-violent resistance and subsequent arrest at Shannon Airport for protesting, with two others, the use of the facility as a stopover by US military aircraft.

Film Workers for Palestine protest attended by BFMAF programmers

Film

Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival

Najrin Islam

St Aidan’s Peace Church hosted the anthology project titled Some Strings, which comprised over 100 shorts made by filmmakers around the world in response to poet and teacher Refaat Alareer’s recent death caused by Israeli military action in Gaza.

Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, Go With Your Heart, 2025

Performance

Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat: Go With Your Heart

Aoife Rosenmeyer

The performance avoids all sense of conflict – at most, figures position themselves on the periphery of others’ actions. Tim Etchells and Vltaka Horvat’s exemplary group presents a benign portrait of society.

Avant-Garde Institute, photo by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga, 2004

Reports

Letter from Warsaw

Nick Thurston

Poland has such a rich tradition of self-organised and alternative practice, and Warsaw seems to feed on the extraordinary strength of the country’s art academies and DIY scenes in Poznan, Gdansk, Wroclaw and, especially, Krakow.

Nico Vascellari, ‘Pastorale’, 2025

Reports

Letter from Milan

Leonardo Caffo

From the thousands of intelligent people who come to the city from all over the world to be here, it is those, some sleeping ten to a room in the suburbs just to be present, which perhaps gives the true meaning to the art fair’s ‘among friends’ theme.

Andy Warhol, Cagney, 1964, estimated at $2.5m–$3.5m, sold for $2.3m

Salerooms

New York Sales

Colin Gleadell

One pre-sale fear that did materialise, however, was that Donal Trump’s trade war with China dented Asian spending at the sales, particularly on work by American artists who make up the bulk of the US auctions – an own goal by the president.

Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts

Artlaw

Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts

Henry Lydiate

No regulatory frameworks were developed by or for the international art industry, which is why the art market is often described as being like the Old Wild West: a self-built society without law enforcement, just the survival of the fittest – the ‘elephant in the room’ being lack of transparency and regulatory oversight compared with other global industries.