Art Monthly 481: November 2024

Contents

Suzanne Lacy, Silver Action, 2013

Interview

Working Together

Suzanne Lacy interviewed by Larne Abse Gogarty

As somebody who has worked between activism and art and community organising for years, I know this particular participatory work, in art and research, is more than a symbolic one.

Laura Huertas Millán, The Labyrinth, 2018

Feature

Ruin Fever

Marcus Verhagen suggests that our romantic fascination with ruins wilfully ignores our part in creating them

In the elegiac tradition, the ruin exists in time but not in history – that is its chief attraction. Dora Apel is right to see this approach as, at root, consolatory. For the ruin to serve a more radical agenda, it has to retain echoes of willed destruction.

Morehshin Allahyari, Lamassu, 2015–16

Feature

Repatriation v Duplication

Tom Snow argues that artists must be given a vital role in addressing longstanding issues about the repatriation of artefacts found in western museums and current debates about digital replicas

How might a more creative use of digital technologies critically resituate or intervene in conservative museum aesthetics, and productively renew the role of cultural institutions in representing so-called world history?

Sammy Baloji, Aequare: The Future that Never Was, 2023

Profile

Sammy Baloji

Elizabeth Fullerton

Struggling with the vexed history of photography, a medium so bound up in the (mis)representation of Africa’s inhabitants, Sammy Baloji has increasingly moved into sculpture, installation and film as a way of forging a visual language capable of reframing histories and generating new perspectives.

Editorial

What on Earth?

Ruins continue to be romanticised, not least in TV shows such as ‘Abandoned Engineering’, yet the entertainment industry’s ahistorical approach is a diversion that distracts audiences from the present-day ecological disasters that such earth-shattering engineering and extraction continue to wreak on our failing biosphere.

During the Cold War era, the demand for uranium increased exponentially, with dire consequences for the miners at DRC’s Shinkolobwe mine – ‘Shinkolobwe’ is named after a kind of boiled apple that leaves a burn on the skin if squeezed.

Artnotes

Just Stop in Jail

Peaceful climate protesters are punitively jailed for faux art attacks; further attacks are carried out in defiance; museum directors call for an end to the targeting of cultural artefacts; the National Gallery implements visitor restrictions in response to activist stunts; artists protest against the West’s arms trade with Israel during the war on Gaza; a Rasheed Araeen river performance is cancelled because of sewage discharges; museum artworks are mistaken for rubbish and binned; Scottish arts organisations warn of dire consequences as funding decisions are delayed; art-authentication charity IFAR closes down; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Glenn Ligon, ‘All Over the Place’, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Exhibitions

Tina Girouard: Sign In | Conflicting Evidence | I Want You to Have a Good Time

CARA | Magenta Plains | Anat Ebgi, New York

Chris Murtha

Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Matthew Bowman

Manifesta 15

various venues, Barcelona Metropolitan Area

Chris Clarke

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998

Barbican Art Gallery, London

Chloe Chu

Dexter Dalwood: English Painting

Lisson Gallery, London

Cherry Smyth

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land

Spike Island, Bristol

Virginia Whiles

Emma McNally: The World is Knot Flat

Drawing Room, London

Andrew Chesher

Machine Painting

Modern Art, London

Chris Townsend

Imran Perretta: A Riot in Three Acts

Somerset House, London

Alex Bacon

Ventriloquism: The Lost Voice Spoken by Others

Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery, Rossendale

Bob Dickinson

Olana Light, The Birch Tree Family, 2024

Events

Middlesbrough Art Week

Tom Jeffreys

The event makes use of many alternative spaces. It means that shoppers hunting fast fashion can also discuss mass species loss via Amy Dover’s drawing, or those having their mobile phone repaired can relax on a deck chair and watch Kyriaki Goni’s video in which a personified algorithm explains the systemic biases and catastrophic climatic effects of artificial intelligence.

Co-operative Education, Politics, and Art cover

Books

Co-operative Education, Politics, and Art: Creative, Critical, and Community Resistance to Corporate Higher Education

Natalie Bradbury

What unites these alternative courses is a clear belief in the social purpose of art. Common across the contributors is an interest in the place of art in everyday life, the role of art education in teaching skills such as criticism (or ‘crap detection’) and a responsibility to respond to contemporary social challenges, from AI to climate change.

Diego Marcon, La Gola, 2024

Film

Diego Marcon: La Gola

Chris McCormack

Diego Marcon’s blending of the mechanical and the digital gives a queasy feeling of a life imprisoned inside the limits of flesh, as if the characters have awoken locked inside a body as coffin.

Jeane Dunning, The Toe Sucking Video, 1994

Reports

Letter from Vienna

Miriam Stoney

Vienna has always suffered from some form of malaise, at times bearing it with more dignity than at others. This malaise has often been ‘sublimated’, as Sigmund Freud termed it, through art forms that probe the visceral discomfort involved in ‘being’ – a body, a human, an Austrian or otherwise.

Marcel Broodthaers, Éloge du sujet, 1974 estimated at £80,000–120,000, sold for £381,000

Salerooms

Cutting the Mustard

Colin Gleadell

A rare assemblage of found objects arranged and labelled like a museum display by the Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers sold for a triple-estimate £381,000. Conceptual Art has a back seat in the market behind Minimalism, Pop Art etc and great examples are usually the terrain of museums.

Kirsha Kaechele, Ladies Lounge, 2020

Artlaw

Ladies Lounge

Henry Lydiate

A key aspect of the legal and artistic circumstances of the case, as submitted to the court by the artist’s lawyer, was the ‘participatory element of allowing women and denying men … who are experiencing Ladies Lounge: their experience of rejection is the artwork … they experience the artwork differently than women, but men are certainly experiencing the artwork as it’s intended’.