The German sculptor Katharina Fritsch appears to have a good nose for the testy relationship between art and the British public. Her contribution to Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth might have been designed to draw out our cultural peccadillos. Indeed, her 15ft electric blue French cockerel has managed to work its magic long before the unveiling this week – a conservation group dubbed it “totally inappropriate” – and it is set to be a mischievous wake-up call amid the square’s tradition.
Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, WC2, Thu 25 July
SS Photograph: James O Jenkins
The gallery Nottingham Contemporary continues to initiate shows that are as thematically and aesthetically engaging as any around. Aquatopia, staged here before moving on, appropriately, to the seaside at Tate St Ives, takes on the worldwide history of oceanic imagery in art. This is less to do with gazing on seascapes as picturesque scenery than diving below the surface as a metaphoric scenario of the collective unconscious. The depths are recognised as home to all things that are an otherworldly reversal of our terrestrial routines. Hokusai’s 1814 woodcut print shows an octopus performing a no-doubt particularly intense form of cunnilingus on a naked pearl diver and LA-based film artist Jennifer West overlays images to create seaside snaps gone awry.
Nottingham Contemporary, Sat 20 Jul to 22 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
The celebrated Japanese artist Shimabuku has turned acting daft into a fine art. His videos focus our attention on delightful incongruities, simple acts of everyday wonderment, jokes that are told with such disarming earnestness that they start to seem somehow profound. One piece, titled Then, I Decided To Give A Tour Of Tokyo To The Octopus From Akashi, follows the artist as he takes the said cephalopod in a portable fish tank on a sightseeing tour of the city’s famous Tsukiji fish market before being returned to its natural habitat. Other works show Shimabuku riding the London Underground with his left eyebrow shaved off, and distributing free ice-cream seasoned with salt and pepper. Shimabuku has distinguished himself by seriously fulfilling ideas that most artists would dismiss as simply flippant.
Ikon Gallery, Wed 24to 15 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
Jockum Nordström’s collages, drawings and feathery watercolours depict a rootless dream world of human and animal activity. In this survey of the Swedish artist’s 20-year output, you might find floating cavemen hunting stags against a backdrop of sunrise pink, giant figures in top hats and bowties astride office blocks, or a threesome taking place in a darkened living room. His characters span aeons, and while they get up to some grown-up shenanigans, his style recalls kids’ drawings and pictures in storybooks from bygone eras. (In Sweden he’s equally well-known as an illustrator, and creating album artwork for the band Caesars.) His surreal work collides the innocence and freeform imagination of childhood and fairytales with adult life, with all its rules and repressed passions.
Camden Arts Centre, NW3, Fri 26 Jul to 29 Sep
SS Photograph: PR
How designers are adapting high-tech production methods to our needs can sound like the stuff of sci-fi. This show, providing a snapshot of where industry is heading, has plenty of astounding innovations to show off, from trainers you can turn into compost to looms that weave any image from a digital file. It’s not just the way we make things that’s been changed by new technology, it’s also the way we consume. The emphasis here is very much on how designers and manufacturers want to make the buyer feel as if they’re part of the picture. Exhibits include customised dolls and a “crowd-sourced” sofa, and there are workshops where the locals get to reimagine public space.
Design Museum, SE1, Wed 24 Jul to 3 Nov
SS Photograph: Andrew Thomas Ryan
This is a selection of art that adopts the subversive heckling role and takes no partisan position, yet cheekily pokes fun at authoritative positions. It is unashamedly irresponsible, deeply irreverent and is, in a sense, similar to most art around. Yet there are many moments of perverse delight. The collaborative duo Shaun Doyle and Mally Mallison create a room full of slogans and grotesque sculptural mutations, lit by chandeliers that are fashioned from rawhide dog chews, while Clunie Reid stands out with her seductive offensive of cut-up and collaged photographic nerve, and London photographer Max Reeves explores the capital’s psychological terrain.
New Art Gallery, to 22 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
This show is like a dark mirror version of this week’s Design Museum survey of new technology (see right). Its exhibits tread a path through apparently sentient machines, from fridges that switch the oven on to websites whose cookies-led advertising suggests the internet knows our deepest desires. For its curator, the Turner prize-winning artist Mark Leckey, the “hyper-rationalism of modern technology” has produced “an ‘irrational’ magical realm”. Upending notions of scientific progress, Leckey pairs his modern marvels, such as a Cyberman helmet, with objects from earlier eras, including a saint’s bones in a silver hand and a gargoyle.
De La Warr Pavilion, to 20 Oct
SS Photograph: Chris Balcombe
Franz West, who died a year ago, was one of the most daring, intriguing, bewildering and truly inspiring artists of our time. West put everything into the mix and came up with works that are something else. Mostly West is a delightful exhibition of West’s collaborations with fellow artists, including such luminaries as Sarah Lucas, Douglas Gordon and Michelangelo Pistoletto. The whole show comes across like a playground for a bunch of mischievous rebels, with paintings, collages and sculpture-furniture set variously against a garish fluorescent pink and yellow checkerboard wall. Despite the collaborative nature of the work, everything is imbued with West’s contagious generosity of creative spirit.
Inverleith House, to 22 Sep
RC Photograph: Franz West and Heimo Zobernig
