Art Monthly 441: November 2020

Contents

Hannah Black, Bonaventure and Ebba Fransen Waldor, Anxietina (The Situation), 2017, Chisenhale Gallery, London

Feature

Burning Issues

Hannah Black interviewed by Larne Abse Gogarty

I think you need to burn things down then talk about it. It would be good to move away from the idea that political education is about information – political education is building collectivity.

Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Treatment 24, 2015

Feature

The Limits of Subjectivity

Tom Denman looks at the growing number of artists who counteract existing paradigms of race and representation by exploring the legacies of Modernism

The endeavour is to show blackness as going without saying. The work is as laudable as it is necessary and, when it succeeds, it does so not by subsuming blackness, but by unfixing it from the taxonomising strictures of race.

Barbara Hammer, The Art of Dying, 2018
lecture publicity shot by Alex Tomlinson

Feature

The Ties that Bind

Sophie J Williamson considers the shared intimacy of being with someone dying as a place from which to explore unspoken taboos in art

As with the deathbed or the bound body, there is a porosity that reaches beyond consciousness, blurring the binary of mind/body, and the boundary of one’s self and that of another.

Moyra Davey, Subway Writers, 2011/14

Profile

Moyra Davey

Elisa Adami explores how the artist uses informality to unpick categories of history, memory and experience

Watching Moyra Davey’s films and reading the scripts in close succession, it is difficult to tell which comes first: image or text. They are closely entangled and mutually generating.

Editorial

Picture This

The notorious ‘Fatima’ ad, calling for artists to retrain as bureaucrats, inadvertently revealed the mechanistic thinking of government agencies and the contractors they employ.

The ad could not have been more grotesquely insulting, demeaning and exploitative had it tried, which would be amusing if it weren’t so worrying.

Artnotes

Here for Culture

The first round of funding from the government’s Culture Recovery Fund has arrived, with strings; the culture secretary lays out the government’s position on contested monuments and tells funded arm’s-length organisations to toe the line; European arts institutions including ACE publish a manifesto against political interference in the arts; France continues its restitution of colonial-era museum artefacts; a review of the Parliamentary Art Collection begins, exploring its depictions of those connected with the slave trade; Fiona Banner teams up with Greenpeace for a North Sea anti-trawling art action; San Francisco experiments with Unconditional Basic Income for artists; plus the latest on galleries, people, prizes and more.

Jimmy Robert, Untitled (Ompdrailles), 2013
Nottingham Contemporary

Exhibitions

Nancy Holt: Points of View

Parafin, London

Karen Di Franco

The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

Fiona Anderson

Park McArthur: Kunsthalle_guests Gaeste.Netz.5456

Kunsthalle, Bern

Mitchell Anderson

Jimmy Robert: Akimbo

Nottingham Contemporary

Chloe Carroll

Arts ⇆ Crafts: Between Tradition, Discourse and Technologies

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

Mark Prince

Mariana Castillo Deball: Between making and knowing something

Modern Art Oxford

Paul Carey-Kent

Manifesta 13 Marseille

various venues

Tim Steer

Making It

The Box, Plymouth

Martin Holman

Ellen van Schuylenburch and Michael Clark during the filming of Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan, 1986

Performance

Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer

Chris McCormack

Promoted as a ‘constellation of portraits’, this first exhibition of Clark’s work and his numerous collaborations overturns what might have been sycophantic adoration into a compellingly prescient and ambitious survey.

Books

Feminist Findings

Maria Walsh

The limited-edition zine by the L.i.P (Liberation in Print) Collective features 23 members’ individual research into an array of transnational feminist magazines and periodicals spanning the 20th century using available, but underrepresented, digital archives.

David Levi Strauss: Co-Illusion – Dispatches from the End of Communication

Michael Wilson

In this emergent ‘iconopolitics’, David Levi Strauss proposes, conventional appeals to morality and reason have surrendered their force to a theatrics of power and greed in which (as he writes, assuming both Donald Trump’s style and his experience in the casino business), ‘you win by running the game’.

Brian Dillon: Suppose a Sentence

John Douglas Millar

The longest and most convincing essay here is on a sentence by Joan Didion written to caption a photograph in Vogue magazine.

Luis Lopez Carrasco, The Year of the Discovery, 2020

Film

Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival

Matt Turner

Berwick’s programme is always politically orientated, but the most engaging projects in this year’s selection were those that connected contemporary and historical political struggles.

Jerzy Kalina, Poisoned Well, 2020

Letter from Warsaw

Reality Check

Phoebe Blatton

If there’s a ‘trend’ in Polish art that keeps surfacing, I would hazard that it is one that speaks to the times we are living through, drawing on alternative forms of survival, esotericism, sensuality and theatricality.

Artlaw

Online Images

Henry Lydiate

Both art businesses are currently being sued by Pat Lipsky for violating her statutory moral rights by publicly exhibiting distorted digital images of Bright Music II, 1969. The mistreatment Lipsky alleges is the digital lightening of colours beyond those of the physical original painting, which, she says, damages her standing and reputation in the eyes of those who would recognise a significant lowering of the customary colour qualities of her paintings.

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