Art Monthly 461: November 2022

Contents

Ami Clarke, Lag Lag Lag, 2019

Feature

Reputation Regimes

Emily Rosamond argues that the internet’s power to financialise information might be its undoing

Today’s so-called ‘post-truth’ moment might better be called a moment of mass online reputation warfare: a moment in which online reputation becomes an infinitely, ubiquitously tactical field.

Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 (yellow), 2010

Feature

Art/Other

Mark Prince questions the limits and gains made in operating outside an artistic discipline or medium

There are advantages and freedoms to operating outside a discipline or medium, as there are to approaching it from the unfamiliar tangent offered by an alternative domain. For one thing, it may offer a release from the endemic self-referentiality of contemporary art.

Leila Hekmat, ‘Female Remedy’, 2022

Profile

Leila Hekmat

Mimi Howard

The exhibition is populated with intricately outfitted mannequins – so-called Krankensisters – who sit or stand clumped nonchalantly together in assorted states of sprezzatura.

Editorial

Boxed In

The government’s financial incompetence is costing people dear, so it is time to think outside the box: stop cutting and start investing in the arts and elsewhere in order to deliver the growth ministers are so desperately seeking.

No more jumping through bureaucratic hoops to justify our existence. The arts consistently deliver, now it is time for the government and the DCMS – and ACE – to do their part.

Letter

Social Practice

Pierre d’Alancaisez argues that socially engaged artists are in direct competition with social workers but are not subject to the same scrutiny.

Artnotes

Fiscal Facts

Late-October budget decisions from the chancellor and ACE define the state of the culture sector (and beyond) for years to come; the collapse of the Centre for the Moving Image is a warning sign for UK arts charities; progressive debates over the restitution of looted artefacts are closed down by the government; anti-oil protesters continue to target artworks; Sonsbeek’s artistic team resigns en masse in protest against sexism, institutional racism and ‘unbearable’ working conditions; Christie’s apologises for a crass ‘Art Handler’ merchandising project after it was accused of class tourism; plus the latest on galleries, people, prizes and more.

Obituaries

Conrad Atkinson 1940–2022
Andrew Wilson
Brian Catling 1948–2022
Robin Klassnik

Petrit Halilaj, When the sun goes away, we paint the sky, 2022

Exhibitions

Manifesta 14

various venues, Prishtina

Juliet Jacques

Simeon Barclay: In the Name of the Father

South London Gallery

Amie Corry

The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Richard A Kaye

From the Volcano to the Sea: Part II – The Feminist Group Le Nemesiache in 1970s and 1980s Naples

Chelsea Space, London

Lucia Farinati

Adeela Suleman: Allegory of War

MAC, Birmingham

Virginia Whiles

Huw Lemmey with Onyeka Igwe: Ungentle

Studio Voltaire, London

Francis Whorrall-Campbell

Dani and Sheilah ReStack: Cuts in the Day

Camden Art Centre, London

Cherry Smyth

Bianca Hlywa: Residual Yeast

Gossamer Fog, London

Chris Fite-Wassilak

SERAFINE1369: We can no longer deny ourselves

Somerset House, London

Rosalie Doubal

Scorched Earth

Books

Jonathan Crary: Scorched Earth – Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capital World

Marcus Verhagen

For Jonathan Crary, the internet complex is plainly a kind of accelerator that assists capital in the reconfiguration of processes of production and consumption, destroying earlier patterns of activity while colonising new areas of experience.

Art after Liberalism

Books

Nicholas Gamso: Art after Liberalism

Thomas J Watson

If examining present day ‘creative practice’, why does Nicholas Gamso’s analysis limit itself to events solely within and adjacent to the gallery tradition?

John Akomfrah, The Unfinished Conversation, 2012, cover image from Black Film British Cinema II

Books

Black Film British Cinema II

Harvey Dimond

The essays contained in the anthology straddle the period of the global Black Lives Matter protests during 2020, but it remains to be seen whether supposed institutional commitment to these concerns will translate into long-term change.

‘Coercion is Not Government’, Greenham Common protest banner

Books

Women for Peace: Banners from Greenham Common

George Vasey

Published to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the original march, Women for Peace: Banners from Greenham Common tells the story of the peace camps through their visual culture, including banners, posters, drawings, badges and flyers.

Marcus Coates, The Directors: Mark, 2022

Film

Marcus Coates: The Directors

Maria Walsh

Coates’s approximations palpably convey the incapacitating exhaustion of living with psychotic illnesses. This cannot but generate compassion, but the films are also genuinely upsetting because they question the fine line between control and loss of control in relation to what is commonly agreed upon as shared reality.

Shy Radicals, dir Tom Dream, 2020

Film

Tom Dream: Shy Radicals

Natalie Bradbury

Hamja Ahsan’s Shy Radicals has resonated among certain sections of the art world and now it has been turned into this short film by director Tom Dream. Taking a quasi-documentary approach, the film foregrounds Ahsan’s real-life campaign against the imprisonment of his brother, Syed Talha, who received an Asperger’s diagnosis in jail.

Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Cultural Field, 2022

Film

Rosa-Johan Uddoh: Cultural Field

Onyeka Igwe: The Miracle on George Green

Tom Hastings

Both of these new films pose the question: to whom does the land belong? Yet they operate with almost polarised strategies of address.

ACE’s Let’s Create investment principles

Report

Fair Enough?

Susan Jones argues that responsibility for the pandemic’s harsh impact on artists’ livelihoods can be traced to UK art policy makers’ preference for neoliberalist business models.

While there has been a steady growth of institutional hierarchies comprising teams of leadership, operational, marketing and mediating roles – the number of people in such visual arts occupations having increased by 40% over the past 20 years to 173,595 – artist numbers have remained static at 42,000.

Robel Temesgen, Mourning Performance, 2022

Reports

Letter from Bor

Toby Üpson

Echoing Sinkneh Eshetu’s sentiments about how losing a landscape leads us to lose part of ourselves, this railway station-as-tomb stands witness to the failures produced through private enterprise.

activists from Just Stop Oil after throwing tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, 1888, at the National Gallery, London

Artlaw

On Freedom to Protest

Henry Lydiate

This authoritative ruling and rationale by the criminal appeal court sets a legal precedent, which all prosecution and defence lawyers and judges must follow and apply in all future criminal damage via violent protest cases – not only cases of damage to a ‘memorial’. The UK government has therefore succeeded in effectively closing off a legal line of defence for future protesters committing criminal damage.