Art Monthly 486
May 2025

Contents

Giuseppe Penone, Vegetal Gaze, 1995

Interview

Touching the Universe

Giuseppe Penone interviewed by Martin Holman

When you breathe you introduce into the air that is in the room a form that has a different temperature than the air around it. It is like the intrusion of a form in a material, so in that sense it is a sculpture, a sculpture that starts at the beginning of our life and ends when we finish.

Walead Beshty, FedEx Golf-Bag Box …, 2012–

Feature

Negative Freedom

Michael Kurtz asks how might contemporary art respond to the rise of what Hito Steyerl has called ‘negative freedoms’

In our increasingly networked reality of digital dependency and atomised freelancers, with museums crumbling alongside so much of the public sphere, the battleground for critical art has changed beyond recognition.

Greenwich Mural Workshop, Floyd Road Mural, 1976

Feature

Artificial Local Colour

Henry Broome wonders whether art could help achieve positive urban transformation for dispossessed citizens

The multicoloured art that developers commission represents socially excluded groups on a purely symbolic level, while on a very real material level the same developers bulldoze their homes.

Caspar Heinemann, Festival of Light, 2022

Profile

Caspar Heinemann

Larne Abse Gogarty

Caspar Heinemann’s work makes me unembarrassed in believing in the necessity of subculture, the handmade and the DIY because of his commitment to ‘convey the infinite with the least possible means’.

Editorial

The Long Good Buy

The UK’s increasing inequality is clearly visible in the exploitative higher-education system, where students are treated as cash cows by universities and real-estate developers alike.

In the post-industrial age it is more appropriate, perhaps, to describe the ever-expanding university sector as the ‘corporate-educational complex’ or ‘corporate-academic complex’.

Artnotes

Let’s Create Dissent

ACE is forced to defend its controversial Let’s Create strategy just its future is uncertain; the UK’s flagship galleries struggle to draw audiences compared with international counterparts; Just Stop Oil end their stunts attacking artworks; more Palestinian and Ukrainian artists have been killed in airstrikes; demolition plans are revealed for the iconic School of Art in Wolverhampton; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Lina Lapelyte, You Turn to Me, 2025, The Cosmic House, London

Exhibitions

Can the Sea Survive Us? A World of Water

Sainsbury Centre, Norwich

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Barbara Steveni: I Find Myself

Modern Art Oxford

Peter Suchin

Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product

Gropius Bau, Berlin

Rachel Pronger

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press

Frith Street Gallery, London

Matthew Bowman

Ull Hohn: Revisions

Haus am Waldsee, Berlin

Mark Prince

Mario Cresci: Geometries/Epiphanies

Large Glass, London

Andrew Chesher

Lina Lapelytė: In the Dark, We Play

The Cosmic House, London

Vaishna Surjid

Ho Tzu Nyen, T for Time, 2023–

Film

Ho Tzu Nyen: T for Time

Maria Walsh

As an act of postcolonial resistance, Ho Tzu Nyen wants to get away from the singular timeline of imperial history, which he achieves by submitting his database of imagery to algorithmic editing.

Harry Lawson, Stepney Western, 2025

Film

Harry Lawson: Stepney Western

Adam Heardman

The director and the people he works with ask sociopolitical questions about the struggle to figure out how to lead one’s life, what it means to be part of a community, and how to simultaneously embrace and look beyond your inherited circumstances to see the horizon, the sky.

Edward Thomasson, The Whole Routine, 2025

Performance

Edward Thomasson: The Whole Routine

Alexander Harding

The Whole Routine continues Edward Thomasson’s interest in how subtle forms of control are navigated, responded to or exerted within social situations; slowing these behaviours down to reveal them not only as performative parts of our everyday interactions, but also where such notions or hopes of control might slip.

Florian Hecker, Synopsis Seriation, 2021

Sound

Florian Hecker

Nathan Geyer

To an extent, the experience of this kind of high-intensity sound is violent, but it can also produce a hypnotic passivity. After a short while, I had begun to imagine each fizzing high-frequency tone was a needle piercing my body.

Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal, Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes: The British East-India Company on Trial, 2025

Events

Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC): The British East India Company on Trial

Tom Snow

Part of the premise of the CICC is that all courts, whether recognised as legitimate under law or not, are ‘performative’; their participants operate according to preestablished scripts or ‘fictions’.

Ara H Merjian, Fragments of Totality

Books

Ara H Merjian: Fragments of Totality – Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde

Morgan Falconer

Futurism was forged in nationalism, fired by technophiles, violent in its rhetoric, xenophobic and proto-fascist. Does that mean that Futurism’s time has come once again? Probably not. Donald Trump has, rather, the tastes of Il Duce: he wants a classical revival. In fact, our felt distance from Futurism is surprising.

Asian American Arts Alliance ‘What Can We Do?’ programme announcement

Reports

US Art Under Fire: How Donald Trump is Reshaping the Cultural Landscape

Simon Feisthauer Fournet

Some organisations, particularly those with diversity embedded in their missions, are refusing to make concessions. ‘We are not going to change what we do,’ said Lisa Gold, director of the Asian American Arts Alliance, ‘and we’re not going to change how we talk about it.’

Artjom Astrov, Juice, 2025

Reports

Letter from Tallinn

Elizabeth Fullerton

Tallinn is a beautiful city whose architectural mishmash of gothic, baroque, art nouveau and Soviet modernist styles testifies to upheaval, displacement and occupation over many years.

Abdul Halik Azeez, Tilly’s Beach Hotel, 2019

Reports

Letter from Colombo

Edwin Coomasaru

The many social divisions in the country have long manifested in territorial conflict. The civil war, which was waged between the government of Sri Lanka and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam over an independent state in the north of the country, had its origins in the instrumentalisation of ethnic groups during British rule between 1796 and 1948.

Keir Starmer visits the White House

Artlaw

US Art Import Tariffs

Henry Lydiate

Clarification by US officials of this currently uncertain legal tariff situation is needed, ideally before 8 July 2025 when higher tariffs are due to come into effect. Another art tariff lawsuit against the US government, nearly a century after Constantin Brancusi’s, would doubtless be legally entertaining, but is wholly avoidable.