Art Monthly Magazine
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Contents
November 2020 Issue 441
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.
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From the Back Catalogue
Black Art UK/US
Richard Hylton discusses the rise in thematic shows of black artists.
First published 2017 – now free online
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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.
sponsored
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.
sponsored
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.
sponsored
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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