Art Monthly Magazine
Contents
February 2020 Issue 433
Prem Sahib, Cul-de-Sac, 2019
Feature
Inscribing Desire
Prem Sahib interviewed by Paul Carey-Kent
It is not my agenda to make work about Minimalism. However, I do like the idea of destabilising some of what we have come to associate it with. Because I often use my own experience of sexuality as a material, I am inevitably queering the associations of that tradition.
Jo Spence, The Final Project ‘End Picture’ Floating, 1991–92
Feature
Sickness and Solidarity
Sarah E James on transforming privatised despair into political action
For Mark Fisher, the UK’s ‘fatalistic submission’ to austerity needed to be understood in terms of a ‘deliberately cultivated depression’ of the working classes. With Boris Johnson’s recent victory this drive towards a kind of collective depression seems less fatalistic than sadistic, and the task of transforming privatised disaffection into political anger and action both a more alien and pressing possibility.
Alan Warburton, Sprites I, 2016
Feature
Sleep
Marcus Verhagen fears the commercial exploitation of the unconscious
The significance of sleep in art has in recent times largely been determined by the interplay of these two conceptions, the surrealist and neo-surrealist view of it as creative motor and the tendency, in the work of Georges Perec and others, to see in it a form of tacit refusal.
Sung Tieu, Remote Viewing, 2017
Profile
Sung Tieu
Adam Hines-Green on the German–Vietnamese artist
Sung Tieu emphasises the threat the displaced body poses, and the necessity for immigrants to assuage those fears by conforming to a certain narrative of productivity, utility and safety.
sponsored
Editorial
Little Britain
Democracy’s slide into fascism is usually accompanied by costly patriotic festivals to distract the public, so what does this say about the government’s so-called Brexit Festival?
Scheduled for 2022 (presumably Brexit won’t be ‘done’ in time for the centenary of the Festival of Britain), it is hard to see what is being celebrated this time round.
sponsored
Letter
Hopeful Futures
Jes Fernie responds to Steve McQueen’s epic Year 3 installation at Tate Britain
The number of homeless children in London has risen by a third since 2014 and is now equivalent to one in every 24 children. This means that many of the photos in Year 3 include a child who is homeless.
Artnotes
Creative Appointing
The unelected baroness Nicky Morgan retains her culture secretary brief; the Australian government axes its art department while the country’s galleries contend with the wildfires; Taipei takes up Japan’s exhibition of censored art; Kyrgyzstan’s ‘Feminnale’ of pro-women’s rights art has been censored; Brazil’s culture minister announces the National Art Awards with a speech that plagiarises Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels; the US National Archives blurs out anti-Trump protest placards in an exhibition celebrating women’s suffrage; plus the latest news on galleries, appointments, prizes and more.
Obituaries
John Baldessari 1931–2020
Peter Wollen 1938–2019
Sohrab Hura, ‘Snow’, 2014–
on show in ‘Homelands’ at Kettle’s Yard
Exhibitions
Theatre of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011
MoMA PS1, New York
Gemma Sharpe
Homelands: Art from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
Virginia Whiles
Hans Haacke: All Connected
New Museum, New York
Alexander Massouras
Derek Jarman: PROTEST!
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
The Last of England
Void, Derry
Joanne Laws
Hilary Lloyd: Car Park
Sadie Coles HQ, London
Mark Prince
Hot Moment
Auto Italia, London
Maria Walsh
Nobuko Tsuchiya: 30 Ways to Go to the Moon
Mostyn, Llandudno
Mike Pinnington
Emilio Prini
Fondazione Merz, Turin
Martin Holman
Daphne Wright: A quiet mutiny
Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
Maeve Connolly
5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art: Immortality
Ekaterinburg
Agnieszka Gratza
A.O.–B.C. An Audiovisual Diary
State of Concept, Athens
Hana Noorali
sponsored
Performance
Alex Margo Arden and Caspar Heinemann: The farmyard is not a violent place and I look exactly like Judy Garland
Larne Abse Gogarty
I went to see the exhibition and two-act play shortly before the general election. Upon leaving, feeling uplifted, I thought about the play as an antidote to a cruel and crass political landscape.
Artists’ Books
David Blandy: The World After
Lauren Velvick
The World After as a whole comprises a gallery-based installation and film, along with the book that weaves an original narrative of mutation, megafauna and elemental magic, while also serving as the rules and instructions for a tabletop role-playing game.
Books
Huw Lemmey: Red Tory – My Corbyn Chemsex Hell
William E Jones: I’m Open to Anything
Andrew Hibbard
The focus on centrism rather than the moralism around chemsex is part of what makes this novel a valuable addition to the canons of both Brexit and pornographic literature.
Mogila Kukeri Group performing a Bulgarian fertility ritual
Sound
London Contemporary Music Festival: Witchy Methodologies
Irene Revell
This year’s thematic, ‘Witchy Methodologies’, almost too hip on the page, makes more sense in practice as a loose ordering principle over the six nights, which comprise a heterogeneous collection of new commissions alongside a ‘survey’ of more recent and historical works.
Jun-Jieh Wang, Passion, 2017
Letter from Bangkok and Taipei
Crossing Boundaries
Chris McCormack
It is this uneven narrative, however, which this exhibition compellingly straddles, where the widening gulf of an optimistic, modernist promise of an identity politics forging equality for some has left others viewing an ever-receding horizon, or a vector that alienates in its prescriptiveness.
opening of Lakiloko Keakea’s exhibition ‘Fafetu’ at Objectspace
Letter from Aotearoa / New Zealand
Undoing Research
Louise Shelley
I was witness to an art school working through ways to address a history predicated on a European art school model and, in many ways, a mainstream art scene with a similar history and world view.
Artlaw
Money Laundering
Henry Lydiate
On 10 January 2020 new anti-money laundering laws came into force in the UK that have wide-ranging, game-changing and undoubtedly controversial implications for the art market.
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