Art Monthly 478: Jul-Aug 2024

Contents

Otobong Nkanga, Wetin You Go Do?, 2015

Interview

Spaces of Memory

Otobong Nkanga interviewed by Ellen Mara De Wachter

My interest in the dynamics of extraction comes from just living in it. It’s our reality, and there is no way to get out of it.

Tomás Dzadon, Is it an attraction or is it tumbling down?, 2010

Feature

Against Nostalgia

Bob Dickinson looks at the ways in which artists have sought to address the threat to our future posed by the right’s nostalgic appeals to the past

It has long been apparent that the rise of right-wing political narratives, not just in the EU and the UK but worldwide, increasingly trade on a yearning for lost security, transforming the future into a zone of fear.

garden party at Buckingham Palace to support the creative industries in the UK, May 2024

Feature

A New Deal?

Susan Jones argues that there is too much focus by all political parties on the funding of arts institutions and too little on freelance artists who are fundamental to the whole art ecology

As always, fair treatment for artists is almost inevitably an ‘add on’ to the main agenda, dependent first and foremost on arts organisations being financially resilient.

Tiffany Sia, The Sojourn, 2023

Profile

Tiffany Sia

Mimi Howard

For a Hong Kong-born artist like Tiffany Sia, the production of printed words comes at particularly high cost. Sia’s mother tells her, bluntly: ‘You’ve written a book. They’re particularly sensitive about printed materials.’

Editorial

Betting Ends

The decision to call a snap general election has delivered not only party manifestos weak on support for the arts but also a series of spectacular campaign own goals far beyond satire.

A government spokesperson dismissed this latest example of, at best, unparliamentary behaviour and, at worst, criminal conduct, as ‘a personal matter for the individual in question’.

Artnotes

Museum Alarm

A survey of museum directors reveals the parlous state of the cash-starved sector; the government review of ACE is shelved for the election; a comprehensive review of the arts in schools presents a damning verdict on policies of the past 14 years; Tate boss Maria Balshaw decries the British Museum’s links with BP; activists continue to target high-profile artworks; pro-Palestinian campaigners target art galleries and their directors; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Obituary

Marc Camille Chaimowicz 1947–2024
Michael Archer

Soumya Sankar Bose, A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, 2020–, Delfina Foundation, London

Exhibitions

Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker

Spike Island, Bristol

Tim Steer

Roger Ackling: Sunlight

Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery

Peter Suchin

Glasgow International

various venues

Cole Collins

Soumya Sankar Bose: Braiding Dusk and Dawn

Delfina Foundation, London

Vaishna Surjid

brecht: fragments

Raven Row, London

Alex Fletcher

Permindar Kaur: Nothing is Fixed

John Hansard Gallery, Southampton

Amna Malik

Claudia Martínez Garay: Wakchakuna / We Who Share Everything and Nothing

Nottingham Contemporary

Elizabeth Fullerton

Sam McKinniss, Star Spangled Banner (Whitney), 2017

Books

Philippa Snow: Trophy Lives – On the Celebrity as an Art Object

Chris Hayes

The book flows with an idiosyncratic zeal for its subject; moments of serendipity are genuinely illuminating, but what is gained by evoking parallels between Kim Kardashian’s brand-building and artworks? The argument is fun but stretched around a shaky thesis.

Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism cover

Books

Anna Kornbluh: Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism

Daniel Neofetou

Anna Kornbluh takes pains to situate herself in a lineage of dialectical thinkers for whom mediation is key – GWF Hegel, Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno – but her account is ultimately marred by a lack of dialectical thought. For Kornbluh, to put it crudely, it is simply the case that immediacy is bad and mediation is good.

Nina Davies, Editers, 2024

Performance

Nina Davies: Editers

Antonia Blocker

By extracting ‘the Edit’ from the multiple fictional layers of the film and presenting it through live bodies in the space, Nina Davies creates a compelling and confounding blend of the actual and the virtual.

Aura Satz, Preemptive Listening, 2024

Film

Aura Satz: Preemptive Listening

Maria Walsh

Seven years in the making, this essay-film is a collaboration with over 20 experimental musicians who were asked by the artist to compose a new siren sound that might call attention to planetary emergencies.

Matthew Barney, Secondary, 2023

Film

Matthew Barney: Secondary

Michael Kurtz

During a preseason NFL game in August 1978, Oakland Raider Jack Tatum brutally tackled Darryl Stingley of the New England Patriots, breaking two of his vertebrae and leaving him paralysed from the neck down. Matthew Barney, then 11 years old and with a college football career ahead of him, was captivated.

Steve McQueen, Bass, 2024

Sound

Steve McQueen: Bass

Chris McCormack

Steve McQueen effectively immerses the viewer into a cinema with no images, where one is instead witnessed within it, as both momentary onlooker and revealed as image in these painful histories.

William Scott, Praise Frisco Peace and Love in the City, 2024

Reports

50 Years of Creative Growth

Sarah Jury

There was a general call for an ‘ad hoc’ or ‘sliding-scale’ payment method to be recognised by the social security administration, which continues to cause challenges for artists with disabilities who are trying to receive payment for their work.

Vinit Gupta, If A Tree Falls in the Forest, 2024

Reports

Letter from Delhi

Ranjana Thapalyal

Delhi is swathed in images of the prime minister and the orange lotus, while memes, cartoons and phone messages offer conflicting representations of what is happening and who is a ‘patriot’.

G, ‘There Are (Many) Parts to This’, 2024

Reports

Letter from Amsterdam

Toby Üpson

Marwan gallery is hosting the second in a series of four exhibitions by the artist G – who also describes themselves as a natural death researcher, babysitter and raver – and which is fittingly titled ‘There are (Many) Parts to This’.

Artist’s Resale Right protest outside the Courts of Justice, London, 2005

Artlaw

40 Years of Collecting

Henry Lydiate

DACS currently has over 180,000 members worldwide, to whom £240m has been distributed since 1984: a remarkable milestone, and a tribute to DACS’s enduring belief in the power and value of collectivist self-help, especially given its idealistic origins, which were starkly at odds with the then government’s prevailing ideology of individualism.