Art Monthly 484
March 2025

Contents

Linder, ‘Danger Came Smiling’, installation view

Interview

Sacred Monster

Linder interviewed by Ellen Mara De Wachter

I think that’s how I experience life. I’m very aware of how, in the West, the eye dominates. For me, the main sense organs are the ear and the nose.

David Blandy and Daniel Locke, ECO MOFOS!!, 2024

Feature

Playing Games

Jamie Sutcliffe suggests that artists’ tabletop role-playing games offer alternative ways of imagining and potentially building better worlds

In place of the expansionism of built worlds, we might focus on artists’ uses of the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) as a medium for exploring social contingency, bodily instability, personal failure and narrative unresolvedness.

Es Devlin, Forest of Us, 2021

Feature

Total Immersion

Marcus Verhagen discusses a form of experiential ‘art-as-event’ that has developed its own profitable economic model

In techno-vitalism as in immersive entertainment, the data sublime produces oceanic effects, inhibiting the articulation of parts. These cultural productions tend towards the stunning and amorphous, the erasure of tension and contradiction.

Editorial

Playing Manopoly

The sudden shift in power to US-based ‘billionaire tech bros’ may have given rise to a slew of neologisms, such as ‘oligopoly’ and ‘broligarchy’, but one could add ‘manopoly’, and since they have all pledged allegiance to the lawless Donald Trump, they should perhaps be described as serving the ‘manarchy’.

All this would be amusing, even pathetic, if it were not for the power that Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow btbs wield. As for the two richest, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, fighting over who has the biggest rocket …

Artnotes

Artist Austerity

Recent figures show that artists’ income has gone backwards since 2010 and that on average artists bring home half the minimum wage; Scottish arts organisations receive a funding boost; a new report shows that Welsh arts funding is the second lowest per person in Europe; France introduces austerity measures for the arts; President Donald Trump signs a swathe of executive orders that have far-reaching consequences, including for the arts; Australia abandons its selected artist for the Venice Biennale after an attack from right-wing press; the British Council explores the possibility of selling its art collection to pay off a Covid loan; artists launch a campaign for arts education, protest AI and agitate against fossil fuels; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Obituaries

Malcolm Le Grice 1940–2024
Sophia Phoca

Peter Davies 1944–2024
Susan Jones

Elliott Roy, A Content Replaces Another, 2024
‘New Contemporaries’, ICA, London

Exhibitions

Soil: The World at Our Feet

Somerset House, London

Colin Perry

Conversations

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Sarah E James

New Contemporaries

ICA, London

Alexander Harding

Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark

Raven Row, London

Francis Whorrall-Campbell

Allan Weber: My Order

Nottingham Contemporary

Tom Denman

Breaking Lines: Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry – Dom Sylvester Houédard and Concrete Poetry in Post-war Britain

Estorick Collection, London

Peter Suchin

Dan Guthrie: Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure

Spike Island, Bristol

Daniel Culpan

Katrina Palmer: The Touch Report

National Gallery, London

Luisa Lorenza Corna

New York Round-up

Hauser & Wirth • Ulrik • Reena Spaulings

Mimi Howard

Adam Chodzko, Ah, look …

Artists’ Books

Adam Chodzko: Ah, look, you can still just about see his little legs sticking out from it all!

Cherry Smyth

The jokey title of Adam Chodzko’s roving, associative book sets up the expectation of a humorous, less deferential essay, but this is a serious consideration of what we turn away from and how art finds ways to encourage us to look back and see anew.

Stephen Cornford, Petrified Media

Artists’ Books

Stephen Cornford: Petrified Media

Michael Hampton

Petrified Media imbricates human beings both within and beyond the Anthropocene, revealing a disturbing milieu of entropic processes and damage everywhere that nature and man-made technology collide.

dove / Chris Kirubi, WILDPLASSEN

Artists’ Books

dove / Chris Kirubi: WILDPLASSEN

Taylor Le Melle

Some of the fragmented writing in WILDPLASSEN feels as if Chris Kirubi is coughing up language in a semi-hysterical spasmodic manner: ‘sorry bramble’, for example, demonstrates a specifically English type of repeated apology, this time in London’s Burgess Park.

Ali Al-Jamri, The Legend of the Looms, 2024

Film

Ali Al-Jamri: The Legend of the Looms

Farah Dailami

On show at Blackburn Museum, the film tells the tale of two ghost weavers (one Bahraini, one British), and in doing so it offers a refreshing exploration of traditional craft, collective cultural memory and revolt.

Candela Capitán, Celda Sonora, 2025

Events

Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy

Michael Kurtz

The audience connected their phones to a livestream and were instructed to ‘turn up the volume to the maximum’. Candela Capitán held the livestreaming phone and, when she sprang to life, the action was transmitted to devices at different speeds and every sound she made was multiplied across the crowd, creating an unnerving digital echo.

Cara Despain, slow burn (Factory Butte), 2022

Reports

Letter from Texas

Chris Townsend

This letter has become a meditation on the foundational American fallacy that nature can be wholly tamed and turned for profit.

Cléophée RF Moser, Dreams and Ruins, 2024

Reports

Letter from Dakar

Gabriella Nugent

Through these exhibitions from the 1960s onwards, Dakar became a trailblazer on the continent, and several other biennales, some short-lived, followed in its wake.

Lin Yan-Xiang, Forced Landing, 2024

Reports

Letter from Taipei

Laura Harris

This strand of visual art presentations on the world stage helps to provide an avenue for Taiwan to bring its precarity to global consciousness.

ClownVamp, Junk #8, 2024
Christie’s ‘Augmented Intelligence’ auction

Artlaw

Copyrightability

Henry Lydiate

The US Copyright Office has concluded that copyright does not extend to material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements – and that prompts entered into AI tools do not alone provide sufficient control.