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.
From the Back Catalogue Against Immersion
Adam Heardman looks beyond the spectacle of immersive art experiences. First published in 2023, now free online.
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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 …
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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.
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Question Time Flipped with David Dimbleby and Naiza Khan Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, Sun 9 Mar 2.30pm
Manchester Urban Film Series Screening: ‘ESEA and South Asian Women Speak Out!’ ESEA Contemporary, Manchester, Thu 13 Mar 6.00pm
LIVE at Modern Art Oxford Inspired by Barbara Steveni Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, Thu 13 Mar 6.30pm
Launch of Untamed Assemblies Public Programme: Panel Discussion with Bruno Birmanis, Phyllis Cohen and Guus Beumer Cell Project Space, London, Thu 13 Mar 6.30pm
‘Ancestral Avant-Gardes’ Conference Organised by Claire Bishop artresearch.mmu.ac.uk A one-day event addressing the resurgence of interest in ‘ancestralism’ among performance and visual artists, who hark back to traditional or indigenous forms of collective knowledge. How might we develop a critical vocabulary for approaching work that requires not just participation, but also an openness to the spiritual?
Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University 21 Mar
Find local shows with the Art Monthly gallery maps!
Podcasts
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On iTunes
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Feb: Erika Balsom on John Smith’s latest film ‘Being John Smith’, Ben Burbridge on rave culture as an unfulfilled promise for a new politics of the left and Dan Kidner reviews the Deep Time festival at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh.
Dec: Mark Prince discusses postwar US modernist abstraction as a form of cultural protectionism.
Oct: Bob Dickinson discusses artists who connect the sleep crisis to the climate crisis, while Tom Denman reviews the ‘Towards New Worlds’ exhibition at MIMA in Middlesbrough.
The most significant award for emerging artists working in the field of sculpture in the UK: offering £10,000 in financial support towards the making of new work, plus a funded solo show at Standpoint Gallery. Standpoint Gallery, London | 12 Mar 2025 standpointlondon.co.uk
Art Appreciation Course – The Meaning of Myths: Classical Stories in Western Art
Weekly online art course exploring classical myths in Western art, from Daedalus to Medusa. Led by art historian Dr Sarah Wilson, hosted by the National Gallery of Ireland. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin | 25 Mar 2025 nationalgallery.ticketsolve.com
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