Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining The Dots From The Situationist International To Malcolm McLaren, Southampton
Malcolm McLaren was one of punk’s original motors, and behind McLaren there were the Situationists. Before he steered one of music’s most transformative moments via Sex, the shop he ran with Vivienne Westwood (later rechristened Seditionaries), and managing the Sex Pistols, he was set on his path by European rebels such as Guy Debord, Asger Jorn and King Mob, whose work he encountered at art school. This show traces a route through their ideas challenging cultural authority and banal consumerism, to McLaren’s radical work across mass culture and politics (he ran for London mayor in 1999). Highlights include Jorn’s Defigurations, where copies of Old Master paintings are revamped as cartoonish goons, and Debord’s film The Society Of The Spectacle.
John Hansard Gallery, Sat to 14 Nov
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Matthew Darbyshire, Manchester
The Victorian pomp of Manchester Art Gallery is infiltrated by Matthew Darbyshire’s too-cool-to-be-kitsch dystopian modernism. Against an almost melodramatic stone staircase and repro-Parthenon frieze backdrop his Exhibition For Modern Living is an immaculately staged tableau of dubious taste. Chrome and glass shelves present fixtures of slick pink and gold plastic. Darbyshire sidesteps the indulgences of retro nostalgia by eliciting an uneasy ambivalence. Some visitors might allow themselves a giggle, others will feel an urge to smash the whole thing up. With the takeaway subculture of the gallery shop seeping into the gallery itself, Darbyshire’s gift lies in window dressing the deeply vacuous.
Manchester Art Gallery, to 10 Jan
RC
Hannah Collins, Gateshead
While the British photographer Hannah Collins takes on subjects so profound they would force most photo-artists to retreat into cop-outs of ironic detachment, she carries it all off with such deceptive simplicity, sensitive care and technical precision as to be convincing. A giant monochrome photograph titled Family shows a pileup of variously sized battered old speakers. It ought to be banal but it’s monumentally imposing. A recent series of smaller-scale colour images, accompanied by wall-based texts, recounts her experience of curative and hallucinogenic plants encountered on a recent stay with the Cofan and Inga tribes of the Amazon basin. Despite their matter-of-fact composition, her works are so honest they can suspend critical disbelief. They are simply yet powerfully affecting.
BALTIC, to 10 Jan
RC
Emily Jacir: Europa, London
Politics and poetry meet in Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s explorations of exile and displacement. Key works include her installation about Wael Zuaiter, the writer assassinated by Mossad for unproven involvement in the murder of athletes at the Munich Olympics. Jacir uses everything from the music he loved to references to 1001 Nights, the book he was translating when he died, to conjure a life cut short. Other works push into fiction, with a short film inspired by pilot Amelia Earhart, who vanished attempting to circumnavigate the globe. Shot in a former Palestinian airport, its plane disappearing into clouds is a haunting vision of an uncertain journey.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Wed to 13 Dec
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Mat Collishaw, Walsall
Hardly a British art big name like his contemporaries Hirst, Lucas or Emin, for my money Mat Collishaw is the best of them all. Collishaw’s photography, film and sculpture installations aren’t hard to get, yet are enduringly haunting. They tend to be aesthetically gorgeous, seducing the viewer through neo-Renaissance chiaroscuro, a resonant play of shadow for dramatic effect. Collishaw’s darks are tragic and his lights illuminating. He is more informed by a passion for art history than academic theory, with influences ranging from 17th-century memento-mori still-lifes through to the 19th-century poetic decadence of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal. Thematic references include the biblical massacre of the innocents and the 2004 Beslan siege. Also, although he rarely uses paint, Collishaw engages far more intelligently with painting’s profoundly affecting history than most painters.
The New Art Gallery, to 10 January
RC
Turner Prize 2015, Glasgow
Glasgow has proved itself to be a welcoming environment for artists to have a good time and still get things done, and now for the first time the annual art-world jamboree arrives in the city. The four shortlisted artists – Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel, Nicole Wermers and the collaborative group Assemble – variously present installations of art masquerading as something else, or something masquerading as art. There are hints of designer fashion (Wermers’s posh fur coats draped over classy chairs); radical cultural research (Camplin’s study centre on quantum theory and witchcraft); a libretto of cartoon violence (Kerbel’s Iggy Fatuse, The Human Firefly); and DIY architectural interventions (Assemble’s community do-gooding). It’s likely that the latter will have the most wide appeal and, as ever, the £25,000 first prize will be of less relevance than the accompanying critical fanfare.
Tramway, Thu to 17 Jan
RC
Jimmie Durham: Various Items And Complaints, London
The Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham spent the 1970s campaigning for Native American rights, before disillusionment with his home country’s empty promises led him to channel his politics into art making. Now Berlin-based, the past three decades have seen him expand his vision of a people hijacked by literal and cultural violence, be that colonialist oppression or the stereotypes of tourist industry novelty. As with his most recent work in this survey – fish-dragon hybrids of glasswork and Indian or Asian patterns, born from research with the new migrant communities firing Venice’s age-old crafts industry – Durham reminds us that there’s always more to things than meets the eye.
Serpentine Gallery, W2, Thu to 8 Nov
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