Video artist Matt Stokes has made it his business to champion the kinds of musical subcultures that tend to ignite moral panics. He has investigated northern soul (pictured), acid house in the caves of the Lake District, and hardcore punk in Austin, Texas. His Cantata Profana is a choral work featuring the vocal vomiting of six grindcore “singers”. Discarded memorabilia of posters, flyers and demo tapes are collected and documented by Stokes with all the care and veneration of a cultural archaeologist.
Grundy Art Gallery, Sat 1 Feb to 29 Mar
RC Photograph: Peter Dibdin
Cast-off couches and other household finds are a staple of the American, Berlin-based artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s funny, charming sculpture. In place of people, her dented seats support amorphous families of ceramics, which sport lovely mottled glazes. Meanwhile, lived-in clothes, like her husband’s shirt or a pair of faded old jeans, provide further allusions to the passage of people through the world. There’s a delightful confusion of support structures at play, as sculptures become plinths or canvases sprout sculptures. It all conjures the necessary if unruly co-dependencies of hectic family life and other ties that bind.
Timothy Taylor Gallery, W1, to 8 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Erik van Lieshout’s shenanigans are often compared to the satire of Sacha Baron Cohen or Louis Theroux’s button-pushing documentaries. In his films he’s bounced through a variety of testy social situations, from a clash with neo-Nazis to Dutch government-sponsored spaces for shooting heroin. He can be annoying or charming, idealistic and provocative. As much as his encounters amuse, they demand questioning of our own values as much as those of the people he meets. While Van Lieshout always takes centre-stage now he’s turning the cameras on his own family, who all happen to be social workers, and who provide rich material for the artist’s study of world views and selfhood. The result is a surprisingly moving study of idealism.
Maureen Paley, E2, Sat 1 Feb to 9 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Despite differences in age and geography, the work of American abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner’s romantic landscapes turn out to have much in common. In the 1950s, Frankenthaler quietly revolutionised painting, creating bouquets of washy, pastel forms and dark lines (work pictured). Here, in works spanning four decades, her take on landscape and abstraction veers from fields of curving brown and melting orange, to fizzing freeform clouds of hot pink or apple green. Such dissolving forms and delight in paint itself are matched in Turner’s works, which progress from early bucolic scenes to skies of riotous swirling pigment.
Turner Contemporary, to 11 May
SS Photograph: PR
The Hartlepool-born artist Maurice Cockrill, who died in December, was an admired figure among British painters. Indeed, Cockrill has often been called a “painter’s painter” for his feel and fluidity. Over the years, Cockrill painted memories of north Wales landscapes, allusions to the classical myths of Venus and Mars, and semi-abstract series with titles such as Spectral Rivers. Yet throughout he retained a lyrical spirit. His pictures seem more choreographed than composed, with layers of dancing shapes that interlock in an elaborate counterpoint. As his later works became more and more abstract, they never lost their evocative and almost poetic sense of a celebration of a life that was really lived.
The DLI Museum and Art Gallery, to 30 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
In Alex Dordoy’s exhibition an old photocopier has been dismantled and its parts covered with tinted silicone, which is peeled off and hung so as to resemble skin-like trophies. In an adjoining room there are images painted from photographs distorted by abused Photoshop software. Things get even more perverse with an assemblage of Karl Marx plaster casts, each taken from a wooden bust hand-carved by the artist’s father. Dordoy makes creative misuse of technology, awakening the ghost in the machine, commemorating the afterlife of redundant gadgetry, wielding traditional craft to construct previously unseen curiosities.
Inverleith House, to 30 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
Although history has often aligned the painter Patrick Caulfield with the swinging 60s and the razzmatazz of pop art, this show demonstrates his more intimate side. Caulfield may have reduced his palette to colours squeezed straight from the tube and outlined everything in the bold black contours of advertising graphics, but his imagery tends not to be the stuff of traditional interiors and still-lifes. These works lie an Atlantic’s distance away from Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can. Witness, for instance, his Hemingway Never Ate Here (pictured, 1999), a teacup on a table beneath a wall-mounted bull’s head, and Pottery (1969), a pile-up of jugs and jars that fill the picture surface with a dinner party’s worth of moderately drunken scarlets, viridians and ultramarines.
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, to 29 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
To many, Martin Creed will always be the bloke who won the Turner prize for switching a light on and off. Indeed, while his work includes more physically substantial offerings like a balloon-stuffed room (pictured)and even such traditional fare as painting, at its best it is pointedly slight: a bald intervention into the stuff of everyday life. In this first UK survey of his work that includes piano lids opening and shutting; a car that starts up and switches off; and metronomes ticking out of synch. Music’s another big interest and extra-curricular exhibition highlights include his band’s album launch, a composition for the Royal Festival Hall organ and a ballet.
Hayward Gallery, SE1, to 27 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
