The men in Amir Chasson’s paintings have familiar faces. It’s not the nagging “where do I know them from?” you get from a brush with a minor TV personality. Rather, it’s that usually his cast of middle-aged guys with thinning hair, tasteless ties or tired polo shirts are the epitome of Mr Normal – so middle-of-the-road they’re impossible to pin down socially. Rendered with wonky, puffy features, the noses swollen, the eyes, a little lop-sided, these everymen are offset with paintings suggesting data, depicting pie charts or topographic diagrams. Here it’s round green measuring weights stacked like ambitiously pruned hedges. Originally trained as a designer, Chasson’s fascinated by the way abstract graphics are used to represent society. The individuals his portraits conjure dodge any easy classification.
Outpost, to 21 Aug
SS Photograph: PR
In the early-70s Daniel Meadows travelled around Britain capturing ordinary people and places: young couples taking dance classes or kids keeping pigeons. Brought together for the first time in this fascinating survey, Meadow’s intimate documentary photos reveal a lost world where economic decline was starting to bite. The mood is never grim however, least of all in his Butlin’s series, created while he worked a season at a holiday camp alongside his friend, future photography legend Martin Parr. Here the DIY fashions and summer hijinks unfolding against gaudily tarted-up huts and one menacing former industrial building speak of young people making the best of it.
Ffotogallery At Turner House, to 8 Sep
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Butlin's Filey, Yorkshire, (1972) by Daniel Meadows Photograph: Daniel Meadows
It has become something of an architectural tradition to wrap buildings in the process of renovation or conversion in full-scale vinyl printed sheets that illustrate the building’s future appearance in photo-realist digitised detail. Here, with typical deadpan wit, James Pyman reverses the process, covering the Grade II-listed watermill in the Hepworth’s gardens with lifesize blown-up sketches that record the building in its virtual ruin. The result, with Pyman’s meticulous graphic style, is something like an architectural ghost.
The Hepworth, to 1 Jul 2013
RC
Upper Mill (2011), by James Pyman Photograph: PR
This exhibition, subtitled Difference On Display and intending to ask the question “What is normal and who decides?” is a central focus of Liverpool’s Dada Fest 2012, a festival of disability and deaf arts. It’s safe to say that with regard to all the contemporary creativity here, normality doesn’t exactly play much of a part, and for that matter isn’t seen as much of a desirable goal. Birgit Deiker’s sculptural figure here seems to refer as much to a fetishist’s brothel as it does to hospital surgery. And the renowned performance artists Aaron Williamson and Bruce Nauman present work of extraordinarily illuminating peculiarity, no matter that one is profoundly deaf and the other far from it.
The Bluecoat, to 2 Sep
RC
Bad Mummy by Birgit Deiker Photograph: PR
In 1967 Philip Guston left behind the buzzing New York art scene and settled in rural upstate New York where he also jettisoned the pastel-toned soft-edged abstractions that had brought him so much acclaim. Instead, during the last 14 years of his life he made a series of apparently crude figurative compositions that people of the time had no idea what to make of. Their awkward combination of tragic seriousness and self-mocking absurdity, of painterly improvisation and cartoon graphics, seemed unprecedented. Was Guston having the art world on? Now we can see for sure that the late Guston paintings on show here are some of the strangest, funniest, most innovative and moving images of the late 20th century.
Inverleith House, to 7 Oct
RC
Photograph: PR
The elements might seem like an old-fashioned thing to make art about, but for Benedict Drew they’ve been the perfect foil for delving into supercharged modern life. He explores the gaps and crossovers between nature and technology, and as the skipper of a canal boat and creative project space, Drew’s navigating watery worlds this month with the help of Sam Belinfante and Chisenhale gallery’s young people’s group Propeller. In their new film, thoughts about urban life flit through animations and footage of a journey from Birmingham to London on the Grand Union canal, while a live recording will transmit sounds from the water’s depths to the boat and gallery.
Chisenhale Gallery, E3, to 26 Aug
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Bulldozer by Benedict Drew Photograph: PR
While this photography show is aimed at this month’s visiting hordes, it’s got plenty to offer Londoners too. Works span life in the capital from 1930 to 1950, and balance the familiar tourist fare – Trafalgar Square, pearly kings and plenty of royal pageantry – with lesser-known haunts. All of the photographers here were from outside Britain, including giants such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, and their images brought a freshness to the city. What unfolds is an absorbing social history of the city: from the smart set taking tea at Lyons tea rooms in the 1930s to a father and child boarding a train in a desolate second world war-era King’s Cross, sandal-wearing flower children in the 1960s and punks in bondage gear in the late-70s.
Tate Britain, SW1, to 16 Sep
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Mike Eghan at Piccadilly Circus, London (1967), by James Barnor Photograph: PR
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s life’s work was so potently enigmatic that his art influence has increased significantly since his death six years ago. This highlight of the Edinburgh Festival precedes major retrospectives of his work at Tate Britain and at the São Paulo Biennial later in the year. The enduring intrigue of his sculptural blend of literature and gardening is fuelled by the fact that it is far from obvious what it was about. For some, his 40-year project of creating the Little Sparta sculpture garden in the Pentland Hills, might have led us up the garden path. Others see Finlay engaging thoughtfully with political conflict and ecological crisis. This representative exhibition includes three boulders engraved with the names of Japanese warplanes.
Ingleby Gallery, to 27 Oct
RC
Carrier Strike (1977), by Ian Hamilton Finlay Photograph: PR
