Art Monthly 464: March 2023

Contents

Andrea Fraser, Not just a few of us, 2014

Interview

Group Dynamics

Andrea Fraser interviewed by Morgan Falconer

Artists tend to use actors as puppets or proxies, or as tickets into celebrity culture. And most artists are terrible directors. Also, it’s important for me as an artist, since the work is under my name, to be putting myself at stake – my body, not someone else.

Vlad Brateanu, An Artist Who Cannot Get Funding Is No Artist, 2021

Feature

Care v Competition

Morgan Quaintance identifies a contradiction deep at the heart of art-world rhetoric surrounding issues of care

Put simply, if the temporary alteration of awards, bursaries and the like were partly due to an empathic response to the socio-economic and psychological difficulties caused by the pandemic, then how can an allegedly ‘caring’ sector be deaf to the extraordinarily difficult conditions artists and cultural workers are presently struggling with en masse?

Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, 1964–67

Feature

Mania and the Museum

Francis Frascina argues that the failure of museums and galleries to properly address their historical legacies has led to a form of censorship

Anxieties and phobias about collecting and curatorial practices of the past can lead to mania and redaction about curatorial practices of the present.

Editorial

The P-Word

Questions around unreasonable windfall profits and rapacious business practices throw into sharp relief the plight of precarious workers in all fields, not least the arts.

In war time, ‘unreasonable profit’ deriving directly from the circumstances of war, including shortages, would be called profiteering, which is an offence. Thankfully, the UK is not at war; however, Ukraine, which unlike the UK is not a member of NATO, could be said to be fighting Russian aggression on NATO’s and, therefore, on our behalf, yet with few exceptions commentors have fought shy of using the ‘p-word’.

Artnotes

Strike at the Museum

British Museum staff provide a high-profile picket line as 100,000 civil servants walk out on strike; Lucy Frazer is this year’s culture secretary, after Michelle Donelan was moved on only a few months into the role; Tate Britain finds itself targeted in the Tory culture wars; Vladimir Putin makes his nationalistic views on culture official policy in Russia, forcing out a high-profile museum director; Michael Rakowitz proposes donating his Fourth Plinth artwork to a UK national institution in exchange for the repatriation of an Iraqi artefact; the Royal Opera House finally dumps BP as a sponsor; Southend councillors try to meddle with the agreed planning consent for an artwork while Stoke’s councillors regret the accidental demolition of a public sculpture; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Jenkin van Zyl, Surrender, 2023, Edel Assanti

Exhibitions

Rosemarie Trockel

MMK, Frankfurt

Mark Prince

A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s

Touchstones, Rochdale

Eddie Chambers

People Make Television

Raven Row, London

Morgan Quaintance

Decolonial Ecologies

Riga Art Space

Juliet Jacques

Jimmy DeSana: Submission

Brooklyn Museum, New York

Anthony Huffman

Jenkin van Zyl: Surrender

Edel Assanti, London

Daniel Culpan

Horror in the Modernist Block

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Thomas Ellmer

Zadie Xa: House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness

Whitechapel Gallery, London

Kathryn Lloyd

Caragh Thuring

Hastings Contemporary

Beth Williamson

Editorial Tables: Reciprocal Hospitalities

The Showroom, London

Orit Gat

Larne Abse Gogarty, Usable Pasts

Books

Larne Abse Gogarty: Usable Pasts – Social Practice and State Formation in American Art

Tom Hastings

The artworks in this book turn on the participation of oppressed subjects who participate in projects exploring the effects of their oppression, sometimes (though not always) in real time.

Brian Dillon, Affinities

Books

Brian Dillon: Affinities – On Art and Fascination

Chris Hayes

The tendency towards the fragment, to meandering research and quotation, grasps the form of affinity but reflects back on the working realities of the contemporary writer whose thinking occurs in-between snapshots of commissions and deadlines.

Mattin, Social Dissonance

Books

Mattin: Social Dissonance

Alex Hull

Mattin accepts alienation as being integral to our subjectivity, and argues that this alienation emerges as social dissonance: there is a contradiction between what we do and what we believe.

Beatrice Gibson, ‘Dream Gossip’, Ordet, Milan

Film

Beatrice Gibson: Dream Gossip

Maria Walsh

Beatrice Gibson’s vision of the domestic as a site that incorporates care and art as modes of interplay between parents, children, friends, lovers and precursors, living and dead, is inspiring.

Robbie Synge, All of Us, 2022, research material

Reports

The Uses of Huts

Greg Thomas

In a series of poetic expositions called ‘Hutopia’, the poet Alec Finlay cultivates an idea of the hut as a site of provisional belonging that is nonetheless alive to wider political realities: ‘the watch-tower and border post are kinds of hut’, the sequence reminds us.

Sumayya Vally, They Who Brings Rain Brings Life, 2022–23

Reports

Dhaka Art Summit

Will Jennings

Half of the works on show are new commissions, and where western artists are involved, they have generally worked collaboratively with local practitioners, leading to welcome surprises.

Rajkamal Kahlon, People of the Earth, 2017–21

Reports

Letter from Vienna

Chris Clarke

Rajkamal Kahlon’s work excavates modern history’s repressed horrors, yet there is a compelling delicacy to her interventions, a light touch that sits in uneasy correlation with the grisly details.

Demonstration image generated by text prompt through Stability AI’s DreamStudio. Image Prompt: "a hyperrealistic painting of crashing waves sprays of water particles splashing on rocks, intense, epic, exciting, wow, panoramic, cinematic, moody, hdri, lens flare, exciting, 3D, stop motion, highly detailed, octane render, soft lighting, celestial, professional, 35mm, Zeiss, Hasselblad, Fujifilm, Arriflex, IMAX, trending on artstation, artstationhd, artstationhq"

Artlaw

AI Art Tools

Henry Lydiate

A ‘fair use’ copyright violation defence by Stability AI may well feature in the US class-action artists’ lawsuit, but is unlikely to be available to defend Getty Images’ separate UK lawsuit.