Art Monthly 469: September 2023

Contents

Luke Fowler, Ilam Actual, 2023, production still

Interview

A State of Disturbance

Luke Fowler interviewed by Adam Heardman

When you have a ‘subjective camera’, you’re seeing the world through the character’s eyes. That’s how Hollywood does subjectivity, interiority. What I did in All Divided Selves was try to pry that open and think about multiple subjectivities. Crucially, I didn’t necessarily place human subjectivity at the top of the pyramid.

Mirna Bamieh, Sour Things, 2023

Feature

Fermenting the Future

Sophie J Williamson discusses art-food practices and how they can be politicised to counter societal decay

Like decay, fermentation is similarly a process of survival inherent in all organic life, extracting energy from the molecules that it breaks down. Yet fermentation also introduces a resolutely different trajectory into the processes of decay: to ferment is to excite, to create effervescence and vivacity.

Vincent Dance Theatre, The Art of Attachment, 2018–20

Feature

Art and Attachment

Bob Dickinson argues that it is time to repair the damage done to art and society by rampant individualism

Art education in the UK and other countries has been taken over by neoliberal values that attempt to turn artists into human capital, subsequently emerging into a precarious universe where everyone is a separate unit competing with everyone else fighting to survive.

terra0, Flowertokens, 2018

Feature

The Work of Artists

Linda Rocco suggests new collaborative ways of working and alternative models of cultural and economic exchange

In pigeonholing artistic and curatorial work to predetermined outcomes or formats, priorities veer towards producing tangible outputs and limit the extent of research capabilities.

Gelare Khoshgozaran, Men of My Dreams, 2020

Profile

Gelare Khoshgozaran

Vaishna Surjid

Gelare Khoshgozaran uses the idea of archives to examine fragmentation in the present, elucidating the condition of exile and its unsettling and distancing effects.

Editorial

Floating Metaphors

The media’s fixation with the Titanic, matched briefly by its obsession over the Titan submersible which imploded this summer during a dive to the wreck, was in stark contrast to its coverage of the sinking of the Messenia, the Greek migrant ship. When it comes to the toxic state of our own nation, however, the media should look much closer to home.

As a metaphor for the current state of this country, it is hard to think of a better or more appropriate one than the Bibby Stockholm.

Artnotes

Barbican Out

Resolve collective closes its show at the Barbican in response to racist incidents; Michaelangelo Pistoletto’s monumental Venus of the Rags is razed by an arson attack; various museums have been looted, embezzled or have had to sue their directors for fraud; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Obituaries

Ilya Kabakov 1933–2023
James Lingwood

Jamie Reid 1947–2023
Andrew Wilson

Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, Thou Shall Not Assume, 2023, Helsinki Biennial

Exhibitions

Martha Rosler: In One Way Or Another

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

Mark Prince

Jesse Jones: The Tower

Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

Maria Walsh

Rebecca Moss: Unstable Condition

Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea

Matthew Bowman

Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief

Camden Art Centre, London

John Douglas Millar

Liverpool Biennial: uMoya – The Sacred Return of Lost Things

various venues

Sarah E James

Helsinki Biennial: New Directions May Emerge

various venues

Daniel Culpan

Rick Buckley, Under a grey blanket

Artists’ Books

Rick Buckley: Under a grey blanket – Berlin, 9.–19.11.1984 Old World Apes

Martin Herbert

In 1984, artist Rick Buckley was an English indie promoter in his early 20s whose duties involved taking 12-inch records by bands such as Anorexic Dread from London to Berlin and distributing them to DJs and record shops. He was also an amateur photographer, and recently he found a roll of Ilford FP4 film from a trip in November 1984.

Naomi Pearce, Innominate

Artists’ Books

Naomi Pearce: Innominate

Jonathan P Watts

Innominate is a hybrid novella – part auto-fiction, part historical mystery – that is the culmination of seven years of research by Naomi Pearce into the undervalued and forgotten work of female administrators in London’s artist-led organisations of the 1970s.

Penelope Curtis, The Pliable Plane

Books

Penelope Curtis: The Pliable Plane – The Wall as Surface in Sculpture and Architecture, 1945–75

Brian Hatton

Here, Penelope Curtis examines cases where sculpture and architecture were fused in renewed kinds of material commonhood. She finds them in four modalities – cave, cast, clad, closed – but they mostly converge around kinds of relief.

Art Night Dundee

Events

Art Night Dundee

Tom Jeffreys

Art Night’s first iteration outside London since its foundation in 2016 comes at a pivotal moment for Dundee, with progressive figures attempting to position the city as a place of renewed cultural possibilities.

Amartey Golding, ‘In the comfort of embers’, Power Plant

Reports

Letter from Toronto

Chris McCormack

Initiatives include efforts to confront the continued failures to address forms of transhistorical racist violence toward black, indigenous people and people of colour; subjects that now shape many public-facing institutions’ programming in the city.

Wael Shawky, Am Hymns of the New Temples, 2023

Reports

Letter from Pompeii

Agnieszka Gratza

With time to kill ahead of the premiere of Wael Shawky’s film in the Odeion, I drifted aimlessly among the ruins set aglow by the late afternoon sun, from time to time stumbling upon places of worship and burial, living quarters and public squares, gradually becoming aware of the invisible boundary lines that separated the discrete neighbour- hoods. I could have been discovering any other city – not a phantom one.

Sim Chi Yin, Garden of No Return, 2023

Reports

Letter from Berlin

Sarah E James

Savvy’s Berlin takeover follows a strange period in German cultural politics in relation to the issue of blackness and post-colonialism, which saw the late Okwui Enwezor step down as director at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2018 and the scandalous ‘Afrofuturism’ exhibition that took place at the Künstlerhaus Bethanian in 2019, that, incredibly, featured no black artists.

Andy Warhol, Orange Prince, 1984, based on an original photograph of Prince by Lynn Goldsmith

Artlaw

Fair Appropriation Practices

Henry Lydiate

Artists often ask their lawyers: ‘What am I allowed to use, and is there any reliable guidance?’ Reliable guidance is found only in copyright legislation and case-by-case court decisions.