Thread & Everbody Comes To Holyrood
Two decent group shows, these. Thread is concerned with ideas around a work's place in its immediate environment, and the effect a work has on the space around it. All art has an effect on the space around it, obviously, but most of the artists gathered here do so explicitly.
Smith/Stewart's 'cardboard projection' is great - you can barely squeeze past it to get into the back room at Ingleby, and it has a lovely probing, beaky way about it.
The Carl Andre pieces here work the other way around (you could be forgiven for missing them entirely). Something very interesting happens to Andre's work in this domestic space, too: you'd expect their impact to be lessened outside the usual austere white cube, but its actually heightened, because of a sort of tug of war between the arch minimalism of the pieces and their surroundings, so that the delineation of space and consideration of materials in the work ends up being emphasised. In other words, minimal work is more at home (pun intended) here.
Everybody Comes To Holyrood is... not so good, but still worth a look. There's a nice mix of established and emerging artists (or, at least, artists who aren't well known in the UK), but the supposed focus on our relationship with mass media, ideas of fame and glamour &c., is too loose. Dutch artist Risk Hazekamp does a sort of feminised take on the iconography of Richard Prince - ie. photos of slightly dykey women in denims in the desert - and Martin C. de Waal's hyperglam shot of grave models in eighteez make-up against a city skyline is funny (as in, 'Derek Zoolander would find it a bit much' funnny). But he signals a descent into unthinking meta-camp, or post-camp - reproducing tropes rather than examining them (eek, does that make it double-camp). Jonny Woo & Peter Podworski's Wizard of Oz documents a performance in which a drag Dorothy with a broken arm and bandaged face miming Somewhere Over The Rainbow in front of projected stills of bombed-out cityscapes, while a femme fatale Wicked Witch rides a bomb in the background. Fabulous, yeah? But are they just aping 80s queer performance or saying something about it? The former.
Jemima Brown's stuff is better - the louche kitty-man is wonderfully mucky, and you can just imagine Kenneth Anger's perv-suicide write-up in some alternate reality Hollywood Babylon.
But when you look at the wallpaper above, again you have to wonder if this is naive teenage outrage, or art about naive teenage outrage. (I'll give her the benefit of the doubt).
I dunno, I guess it all just reeks of some warehouse in Mitte or whichever corner of the East End is currently en vogue, which puts me off.
