Commercial galleries across the capital open their doors to showcase work by their most important artists, from American football and fountains to porn theatres and Palestine
This weekend (and beyond), commercial galleries all over the city will be showcasing work by their most important artists – and admission is free. Here are 10 great shows to drop in on if you’re in the capital, from a film by Nan Goldin to images of Palestinian youth.
Serpentine North Gallery, London Best known for her 70s Dinner Table homage to heroic women, the American artist moves centre stage at last in a show of variously blazing, bold, crude, generous work inspired by female subjugation and power
Fierce but gentle, blatant yet often graceful: Judy Chicago’s six-decade survey at the Serpentine North Gallery is not at all as expected. This is partly because of everything that this show omits. There are no death masks, bloody menstrual pads or caustic needlework. There are no gathered-lace vulvas standing in for the mind and art of Emily Dickinson.
Chicago’s most celebrated work – exhibit A in feminist art of the 70s, and once described by Roberta Smith in the New York Times as “almost as much a part of American culture as Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, WPA murals and the Aids quilt” – cannot be here. The Dinner Party (1979), that vast triangular table, with place settings for 39 great women, above floor tiles citing 999 more, is now too fragile to move from the Brooklyn Museum.
The superstar of the avant garde has revisited a notorious football tackle that left one player paralysed. He talks about violence, ageing and how the US empire is in decline
There aren’t many people in the world who could produce a literal river of excrement and be hailed as a genius. But Matthew Barney, the 57-year-old US artist whose maximalist work often features sex, violence, testicles and shit, is one of them. The New York Times, back in 1999, called the sculptor, film-maker and performer “the most important artist of his generation”. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones has described The Cremaster Cycle, Barney’s most famous work, as one of the most “brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema”. Kanye West, more recently, called Barney his “Jesus”.
When I arrive at Barney’s New York studio on a grey spring day, the first thing I see isn’t the son of God but a snake. Or rather, a snakeskin – the creature itself is hiding in its tank. Its name is Hardeen, Barney tells me, after Harry Houdini’s brother. It is not a pet. The snake made an appearance in Barney’s 2014 film River of Fundament, a six-hour opera loosely based on Norman Mailer’s rewrite of the Egyptian book of the dead. It features Mailer’s spirits, in various incarnations, crossing a river of sewage. “Hardeen,” Barney jokes, “is a retired actor.”
Meet Patricia Piccinini. She's the mother of Skywhale and a much-loved artist. The artist shares why her work is driven by a fascination for the frontiers of science and its potential — and her fears of what we're doing to the world.
When people were offered a window between New York and Dublin, puerile behaviour beat bridging worlds
How will technology change us as a species? In Silicon Valley, all prophesies seem to have converged into one: that it will usher in some sort of planetary Buddhist revolution. To read its mission statements and watch its Ted Talks is to hear phrases such as “connectedness”, “common understanding” and “overcoming barriers”. You could probably pitch a social media platform and a spiritual handbook simultaneously these days: “This will lead humanity to smiling, peaceful enlightenment.”
The soothsayers in Hollywood, meanwhile, see it differently. Introduce new tech within a blockbuster film and things tend to go one of two ways. Awe and then terror, as the product wreaks havoc on the planet; or alternatively, the rise of an emotionless new society, where, surrounded by intelligent machines, people start behaving a bit like robots themselves. The stereotypical sci-fi citizen is cold, sombre, aloof and efficient. In the minds of scriptwriters, at least, tech will at some point leach the very humanity out of us.
The beauty of concrete. "Why are buildings today drab and simple, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor." A long article by Samuel Hughes describing the history of how ornamentation is produced.
The first life-size representation of a ritual ballplayer found to date in the Huasteca, a tropical region spanning parts of several states along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, on view at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.
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