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Contents

Issue 461, November 2022

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.

From the Back Catalogue Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones makes new sense from non-sense. First published in 2015, now free online. Read now →

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.

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LAST CHANCE → Offer ends midnight 5 November

Michael O’Pray Prize

An award for new writing on moving image and artists’ film

The shortlist for this year’s prize is:

• Laura Bivolaru
• Dan Guthrie
• Siavash Minoukadeh
• Evelyn Wh-ell

The winner will be announced in the new year when all four shortlisted texts will be available to read on the Art Monthly website.

The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative, in partnership with Art Monthly. Supported by University of East London and Arts Council England.

Rene Matic, we give a lead to britain, 2020

Online article

Rene Matic

Leanne Petersen responds to Rene Matic’s practice in dialogue with Black Cultural Archives’ collection

Commissioned by Almanac Projects in collaboration with Art Monthly and the Black Cultural Archives as part of their open call Writer in Residence 2022 initiative.

Born in Peterborough to an English mother and Irish-St Lucian father in 1997, Rene Matic investigates their identity and experiences as a queer mixed-race womxn of the black British diaspora to expose structures and ideologies surrounding Britishness, nationalism and blackness. Through a multidisciplinary practice, comprising photography, textile, film and prose, the artist looks at Britain’s complex and often paradoxical history concerning race from the postwar era to the present day.

Art Monthly Events

And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives

BIRMAC and Art Monthly, in association with Electra, present a series of four online panel conversations investigating different questions central to collective work. Building on two months of asynchronous collective writing, involving seventeen participants, the panelists below consider how we might write, think, read and practice together through other means.

Convened and moderated by Lina Dzuverovic, Birkbeck, University of London

1: Labour, Value and Social Reproduction

Monday 31 October 7pm

Fabiola Fiocco, Katja Praznik, Karolina Majewska-Güde, Kirsten Lloyd, Jelena Vesić

This panel focuses on labour and value in collective work, acknowledging that even in most progressive artists’ groups, collectives, or communities, collectivity rests on some form of socially reproductive, affective and often unremunerated labour—most often performed by female-identifying collective members, friends, partners, mothers, administrators or curators.

2: Why collaborate? Network Formation, Reproduction, Access

Thursday 10 November 5pm

Carla Cruz, Lily Hall, Abhijan Toto, Felicity Allen, Manual Labours

Focusing on the possible divergences between external articulations of collectivity and their internal working realities, this panel explores the formation and reproduction of networks, asking how cultural organisations engage with collective work, exploring the blurry lines and unstable positions between organisational (curatorial, communication, production, administrative) and artistic work, and the gaps between naming and acting.

3: Is Ephemerality Freedom?

Friday 18 November 6pm

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz, Kuda.org/Zoran Pantelic, Irene Revell, Marina Rosenfeld

This panel questions the relationship between medium and process, taking in improvised and experimental sound practices to ask questions about different attitudes to and experiences of collective work, and whether a certain openness and enthusiasm towards collaboration, and an excitement about the process itself predominates within music and sound practice, as compared to the visual arts.

4: ‘The Third Hand’ – Claire, Bernadette and Friends

Thursday 1 December 7pm

Helena Reckitt, Chris McCormack, Gerrie van Noord

Considering the deliberate erasure of individual identities, this panel combines two interwoven lines of enquiry. Firstly, it considers a particular approach to working collectively, one in which the identities of each individual artist involved are deliberately obfuscated, forming a singular, newly created artist with their own name and a distinct, manufactured identity – what Charles Green terms the ‘third hand’.

Price: Free
Venue: Online
Book tickets: artcollectives.org

Art Monthly Calendar

Emily Furneaux, ‘Ciggie Stories’, 2022
CCA

Selected Events

• Cryptic Nights: Piano Sketches
  CCA, Glasgow, Wed 2 Nov 8.00pm
• Love is the Message, The Message is Death panel discussion
  Douglas Hyde, Dublin, Thu 3 Nov 6.00pm
• Ciggie Stories: Twenty Tales of Love & Sorrow
  CCA, Glasgow, Thu 3 Nov 7.30pm
• Vanessa Daws & Rosie Herman Talk
  Fabrica, Brighton, Fri 4 Nov 6.30pm
• Cantonese-led Tour for ‘Hong Kong Future Diaspora’ with Clara Cheung
  Bloc Projects, Sheffield, Sat 5 Nov 4.15pm
• Twelve Tones – Final Recordings
  Eastside Projects, Birmingham, Mon 7 Nov 12.00pm
• Exhibition Tour — Larry Achiampong: Wayfinder
  MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, Sat 12 Nov 11.00am
• Queer Possibility in the Museum
  Ulster Museum, Belfast, Sun 13 Nov 7.00pm
• Approaches to Making Video: Workshop with Natasha Thembiso Ruwona
  DCA, Dundee, Mon 14 Nov 2.00pm
• Re:View
  CCA Brighton, Brighton, Wed 16 Nov 5.30pm
• Lynne Green on Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
  The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Thu 17 Nov 1.00pm
• Just This: Zen Approaches to Drawing, Poetry & Music
  The Newbridge Project, Newcastle, Sat 19 Nov 10.00am
• New Poetry Collections from Blue Diode Press
  The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 19 Nov 2.56pm
• Gelitin performance: I Like My Job Five
  Kunstraum, London, Sun 20 Nov 7.30pm
• Tender Torture: film, performance and kink as sites of radical permission
  CCA, Glasgow, Tue 22 Nov 8.00pm
• Joshua Lockwood-Moran tour of Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs
  Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, Wed 23 Nov 1.00pm
• The One Fifteen: Is All Quiet on the Genre Front?
  MIMA, Middlesbrough, Wed 23 Nov 1.15pm
• Here, a Nut Falls Twice
  Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Sun 27 Nov 4.00pm

Selected Exhibition Openings

• Rudolf Stingel
  Sadie Coles HQ Kingly St, London, opens Tue 1 Nov | PV 31 Oct
• Alexandra Bircken
  Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, opens Fri 4 Nov
• Cinzia Says...
  Goldsmiths CCA, London , opens Sat 5 Nov | PV 4 Nov
• Fiona Connor
  Maureen Paley, London, opens Sat 5 Nov
• Andrew Grassie
  Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, opens Sat 5 Nov
• Journey of the Mind
  Arnolfini, Bristol, opens Sat 5 Nov
• Yun Choi
  LUX, London, opens Sun 6 Nov
• Ayo Akingbade
  Chisenhale Gallery, London, opens Fri 11 Nov | PV 10 Nov
• Jim Dine
  Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, opens Fri 11 Nov
• ING Discerning Eye
  The Mall Galleries, London , opens Fri 11 Nov
• Elizabeth Price
  Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, opens Fri 11 Nov
• Paint Like the Swallow Sings Calypso
  Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, opens Sat 12 Nov
• Richard Long
  Lisson Gallery, London, opens Wed 16 Nov
• Van Hanos
  Lisson Gallery Lisson st, London, opens Wed 16 Nov
• Marcel Dzama
  David Zwirner, London, opens Thu 17 Nov
• Bruce Bernard
  Gagosian, London, opens Thu 17 Nov
• Honor Titus
  Gagosian, London, opens Thu 17 Nov
• Magdalena Abakanowicz
  Tate Modern, London, opens Thu 17 Nov
• Lawrence Lek
  Quad, Derby, opens Sat 19 Nov
• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
  Tate Britain, London, opens Thu 24 Nov
• Ebun Sodipo
  Goldsmiths CCA, London , opens Fri 25 Nov
• Hannah Fitz
  Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, opens Fri 25 Nov | PV 24 Nov

Selected Digital Resources

• Constant Violins, Arcadia Missa
• Online Exhibitions, Art at a Time Like This
• Shahin Entezami aka TEGH: Sink, Beaconsfield
• Online Roundtable: Diaspora & Hong Kongness 3 Nov 7pm, Bloc Projects
• Online Platform, Bloomberg New Contemporaries
• Human Conditions of Clay, Chapter
• Joy Labinjo, Chapter
• Collective Observations, Collective
• Alison Scott: open-weather, Collective
• Archive of Destruction, Flat Time House
• Michael Ho, FVU Watch
• IMMA Talks Online, IMMA
• Saoirse Amira Anis,'Holding Barzakh', LUX Scotland
• MattFlix: Nina Davies, Matt’s Gallery
• David Noonan: Mnemosyne, Modern Art
• Artists’ Moving Image Network, Pavilion
• Online Resources, The NewBridge Project
• Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Reba Maybury conversation, Rodeo
• Sonia Boué: The Artist is Not Present, Site Gallery
• Out of SPACE Podcast, SPACE

Gallery Maps

 

London and UK Gallery maps

Find the reopened shows with the Art Monthly gallery maps!

Podcasts

 

Art Monthly on the Radio

Art Monthly hosts a show to discuss the current issue at 8pm on the second Monday every month on Resonance 104.4 FM , with the show repeated at 10am the following Wednesday.

On iTunes

The Art Monthly Talk Show is available as a podcast on iTunes – subscribe for free automatic downloads

Online

Audio recordings are available in the Events section of the Art Monthly website: www.artmonthly.co.uk/events

• Oct: Ellen Mara De Wachter and Dave Beech discuss the ‘Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics’ exhibition at the Barbican and Maryam Jafri’s artist’s book Independence Days.
• Sep: Bob Dickinson on art and class; Francis Whorrall-Campbell on Lou Lou Sainsbury; Gwen Burlington on the Brent Biennale.
• Jun: Chris Hayes argues against artist’s basic income schemes and Maria Walsh profiles filmmaker Suki Chan.

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