Richard Hughes creates monuments to obsolescence. A bicycle stripped to its frame by vandals is transformed by gold plating. Dirty mattresses, discarded trainers and torn sofa cushions are, on closer inspection, painstakingly sculpted from silicone, fibreglass and cast resin. A centrepiece is a full-scale sculptural replica of a thoroughly run-down late-70s community centre, its stifling atmosphere of social redundancy unaffected by a still whirring extractor fan. Outside its four walls a lineup of Victorian lamp-posts sprout legs and appear to be fleeing, and one can well imagine a small cast of Samuel Beckett loners tramping down Hughes’s Glasgow’s own Desolation Row.
Tramway 2, to 16 Dec
RC
Grimewave (2011), by Richard Hughes Photograph: PR
The type of memory here tends to be of a collective social and cultural kind as photo, video and installation artists Tim Davies, Paul Graham and Michael Sanders counter the historical conventions of memorials. Wars, conflicts and moments of crisis are hinted at and decidedly unglorified. While the standard city-centre memorial is necessarily built from carved stone or cast bronze to embody an enduring civic confidence in an official sanctioned worldview, these three artists tend to deal in ephemeral glimpses and half obscured intimations of loss. Images are fleeting, subjects anti-heroic, recollections unresolved, amd perspectives are highly personal and unashamedly subjective. The camera may lie, but it offers alternatives to mass media cliches and stereotypes.
Usher Gallery, to 13 Jan
RC
Paul Graham: Roundabout Photograph: PR
Cathy Wilkes brings together disparate objects to create a heightened sense of surreal suspense. I am reminded of the great proto-surrealist Isidore Ducasse’s likening of a new breed of beauty to “the chance meeting on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Wilkes’s entranced dummy-nudes pose seemingly petrified in unnerving scenarios of misplaced props. It’s as if these collections of domestic and medical fragments provide external clues to the carefully-staged enigmas of the sleepwalking protagonists’ dreams. Then there’s the melancholic backdrop of Wilkes’s mysteriously subtle abstract work.
The Modern Institute, to 24 Nov
RC
Untitled (2012), by Cathy Wilkes Photograph: PR
The son of a famous illustrator and poet, the Mexican Dr Lakra studied with one of his country’s contemporary art stars, Gabriel Orozco, and his imagination draws freely on surrealism and anthropology, alongside a patchwork of influences from body art to Mad Magazine comic strips to Day Of The Dead festivities. His intricate blue-line drawings have inked everything from dolls to 1950s magazine spreads of pin-up girls and vintage medical illustrations. In his world, businessmen become Maori warriors and imposing sumo wrestlers sport tats of women in sombreros.
Kate MacGarry, E2, Fri 9 Nov to 15 Dec
SS Photograph: PR
Harland Miller has revealingly claimed that “painting is the worst medium to express narrative, but perhaps the best to hit a nerve.” Thus he sets out his painterly agenda, combining bookish crazes with what he calls a “sleeves-rolled-up kind of painting”. These are deceptively simple images, enlarging the classic 1950s and 60s Penguin book covers into paintings of quite tactile presence. His deadpan humour consists of doctoring the book titles so they read with one-or-two-liner titles such as Bridlington: Ninety Three Million Miles From The Sun. This would be no more worthy than the gallery postcard stand were it not for the fact that Miller’s painterly touch somehow deepens the cringeworthy jokes.
Ingleby Gallery, Sat 3 Nov to 26 Jan
RC
Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore (2012), by Harland Miller Photograph: PR
The output of the Friedrichshof artists’ commune will always be overshadowed by its demise. When it fell apart in 1991 after nearly two decades, it seemed the evil twin of its former self, while its founder Otto Muehl was imprisoned for the sexual abuse of underage girls. Terese Schulmeister’s tongue-in-cheek videos tell an alternative story: of artistic collaboration and inventiveness. Co-created with Muehl during the 1980s, and featuring guest appearances from now famous artworld faces, like Lawrence Weiner and former Royal Academy curator Norman Rosenthal, they take the form of delirious art satires. Andy’s Cake explores Warhol’s Factory days, including video artist Nam June Paik as a priest, while Vincent portrays Van Gogh as a hippy.
SPACE, E8, to 15 Dec
SS
Still from Vincent (1984), Terese Shculmeister Photograph: PR
There apparently isn’t much that Jochem Hendricks can’t get away with. Glittering diamonds on velvet cushions have been made from the carbonised bones of birds with the aid of a former Soviet lab. A sportscar is displayed as an artwork as an elaborate tax dodge. Most disturbing is the single fine thread, stretching to 25 miles in total, made of human hairs, glued together at the tips by women working in Cameroon. When it comes to the ethics of labour, exchange and value, Hendricks keep us on our toes, thinking beyond the finished product and questioning what we’re told.
John Hansard Gallery, Tue 6 Nov to 20 Dec
SS
Crime - Terror - Riots (1973 - 2012), Bank Robbery. With Magdalena Kopp, by Jochem Hendricks Photograph: PR
Frank Auerbach had his lightbulb moment as an artist painting London’s postwar building sites in the 1950s. Their muddy quality – the earth beneath the paving stones laid bare, first by bombs and then churned up by developers – has stuck. Famously, he likes his pigments sludgy and dirty, whether painting his Camden neighbourhood or the regular sitters in his Mornington Crescent studio over the last 50 years. Culled from private collections, this showing of his portraits runs from his early days to 1978.
Offer Waterman & Co, SW10, From Fri 2 Nov to 1 Dec
SS
Studio With Figure On Bed (1966), by Frank Auerbach Photograph: Prudence Cuming
