Art Monthly 479: September 2024

Contents

Jesse Darling, Reliquary (for and after Félix González-Torres, in loving memory), 2022

Interview

Future Past

Jesse Darling interviewed by Chris McCormack

I sometimes try to imagine not just a different future but a different past, one that has been there all along, maybe, in a different timeline, a story that we didn’t learn in school. So, with these works I’m trying to imagine backwards as well as forwards, into the past that might have become, or might yet become, some kind of alternative present.

Florence Peake, FACTUAL ACTUAL, 2023

Feature

The Exhibition as Performance

Sarah E James finds collaborative exhibition formats that offer more complex models than those put forward in Claire Bishop’s new book Disordered Attention

Claire Bishop fails to articulate the ways in which capitalism, spectacle, commercialisation and a general depoliticisation of culture have worked in tandem with the cultivation of distraction, the erosion of memory, solidarity and social action.

Joe Devlin, Marginalia Drawings, 2022

Feature

Book Marks

Greg Thomas considers our relation to books as an embodied encounter that leaves traces on both the object and the individual

Against Decorum reminds us that, like the human body, the codex can travel through time and space, and carries the marks of its journey with it. Like us, it is unique yet related to a mass of similar individuals. The book as body as chronograph.

Delcy Morelos, The Embrace, 2023

Profile

Delcy Morelos

Michael Kurtz

In Delcy Morelos’s installations, with their rich humus smells, embracing structures, surfaces inhabited by insects and green shoots, the beholder is no longer subject to the artwork’s object but immersed in a dynamic ecosystem.

Editorial

Set in Stone

Newly published research reveals that Stonehenge, one of the greatest land artworks, was the product of collaboration over centuries by migrant populations working together across great distances that are now divided by national borders.

More recent archaeology of the site has revealed a society much more complex and sophisticated than was previously thought, whose people were closely related to migrants, from the Balkans and other south-eastern regions, who migrated westwards along the Mediterranean coast before settling in the far north of the continent. There is evidence that they were not insular but connected by a wide trading network to Europe and beyond.

Artnotes

In a State

New research shows how 14 years of successive Tory-led governments has pushed the arts ecosystem to the brink; the Royal Academy finds itself under pressure over its decision to present, and then remove, images relating to the war in Gaza; an Iranian artist is jailed for work that mocks the regime; a statue is beheaded after protests by anti-abortion campaigners; the Science Museum ditches one oily sponsor but fudges its reasoning to keep another; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Obituaries

Bill Viola 1951–2024
Chris Townsend

Robert Ellis 1951–2024
Andrew Cross

‘Sound Solid Liquid Light’, Two Queens, Leicester

Exhibitions

Francis Alÿs: Ricochets

Barbican, London

Deborah Schultz

Lonnie Holley: All Rendered Truth

Camden Art Centre, London

Lizzie Homersham

Anna Boghiguian: Period of Change

Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin

Chris Clarke

Barbara Kasten: Site Lines

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea

Chris Townsend

Hannah Perry: Manual Labour

Baltic, Gateshead

Matthew Bowman

Hetain Patel: Come As You Really Are

The Hobby Cave at Grants, Croydon

Amna Malik

Sound Solid Liquid Light

Two Queens, Leicester

Janice Cheddie

After Mallarmé: Parts Two and Three

Large Glass, London

Andrew Chesher

Indigenous Histories

Kode, Bergen

Elizabeth Fullerton

The Wastes cover

Artists’ Books

Roy Claire Potter: The Wastes

Lauren Velvick

‘I get caught up in the world,’ says the protagonist. This mode of experience also describes how I approached the reading of the book as a whole: cover, sleeve, dedication, story, epilogue and further research. Given the explicitly experimental scope of this artist’s book, the spaces around it and what you find in them are as relevant as the central text itself.

Pictures and the Past cover

Books

Alexander Bigman: Pictures and the Past – Media, Memory and the Spectre of Fascism in Postmodern Art

Morgan Falconer

Paradoxically, given how immersed they were in mass media, the Pictures group evinced a deep distrust of it, one whose basis is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s warning against the aestheticisation of politics under fascism.

a selection of printed matter from Personal Libraries Library and Press

Reports

Speculative Libraries

Nick Thurston

The tier on my sliding scale in between such symbolic gestures and all-out speculative libraries is an amorphous in-between zone, neither one nor the other. The library-artworks in my grey area tend to hover between being a library item and being representations of a library or libraries. They propose ‘nearly libraries’, hidden libraries and the like.

Rosie’s (Adrien Howard and Lisette May Monroe), In Scotland ..., Disobedient Press, 2024

Reports

Edinburgh Art Festival 20th Anniversary

Hatty Nestor

This year, the Festival is concerned with solidarity, intersectionality and grassroots activism. Across the city, the events and commissions are diverse and wide-reaching.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (Formian Dreams + Actuality), 1983, estimate £1.2–1.8m, sold for £2.5m

Salerooms

Summertime Blues

Colin Gleadell

The summer sales had been looking soft for a while. Gathering valuable works of art for sale so soon after New York’s big May sales was always a challenge and, with the added hurdle of Brexit red tape for overseas sellers, the summer totals had been slipping.

AI-generated art storage image used in promotion by Zero Art Fair

Artlaw

Store-to-Own

Henry Lydiate

The first Zero Art Fair in Upstate New York was scheduled to last four days in July 2024, but lasted only two, because nearly all the exhibited artworks were taken away by collectors – who paid no money to the selling artists. Instead, collectors signed a novel online agreement as a ‘Friend’ of the selling ‘Artist’.