• Why I’m looking back to art history rather than to the churn of the contemporary art world.

• A load of links, videos, thoughts and images for your contemplation.

• My three must-see exhibitions this month.

• A reminder that my social media posting place of choice is Substack Notes. I share videos, images, exhibitions, and my thoughts on art on there most days. To follow me you’ll need to download the Substack app if you don’t already have it.

I came for the art, not the lecture

Lately I’ve noticed myself spending more and more time looking backwards rather than forwards, towards art history rather than the churn of the contemporary. Partly it’s because time has already done some of the hard work for us. Art history is a kind of long, slow editorial process: ideas have been tested, absorbed, rejected, argued over, sometimes revived. The art of the past I’ve been revisiting has inspired me because it does something compelling formally, emotionally and intellectually; it’s art that has already proved it can hold complexity, contradiction and depth.

By contrast, a lot of what currently circulates as ‘important’ contemporary art can feel strangely thin, over-explained and morally pre-labelled. The role of the curator in explaining art is something I’ve written about before. It’s not that I want none at all — some factual context is often useful for helping to understand what I’m looking at.

But what increasingly puts me off is the dominance of an overbearing curatorial voice — not only in determining which artists are seen, but in prescribing how their work should be understood. Too often, art is framed through a narrow interpretive lens, with politics sitting louder than practice. Artists are selected or interpreted in ways that reinforce a predetermined narrative, rather than opening up space for ambiguity, contradiction, or independent thought. Even exhibitions of historical art are not immune to this treatment.

Looking back at art history is a reminder that some of the most powerful work emerged from uncertainty, disagreement, and unresolved tension — not from perfect alignment with the dominant language or moral framework of the day. This doesn’t mean turning away from the present altogether. It means wanting the freedom to think, feel, and wrestle with what I’m seeing, rather than being told what to believe before I’ve even had time to look.

Nor is this a retreat into formalism. I’m as interested in ideas as I am in surfaces: in why certain ways of seeing emerge when they do, and what social, political, economic, or psychological pressures make particular forms feel necessary at a given moment. At its best, art offers evidence not just of individual expression, but of how people understood the world they were living in — and what they needed art to do for them. The passage of time allows these layers to be traced without collapsing them into a single, ‘correct’ moral reading.

In today’s art world — by which I mean its institutions, media, galleries, museums, curators, funding bodies, and leading personalities — ‘non-conforming’ perspectives are barely tolerated, let alone meaningfully supported. Complexity is flattened into easily legible positions, while certain aesthetics, ideas, and artists are repeatedly prioritised in alignment with prevailing ideologies. In a climate of cancellation, this inevitably leads to self-censorship; dissenting thoughts go unspoken.

I’ve often quietly baulked at the language now used to discuss art, particularly in major museums and the art press, where viewers are increasingly instructed what to pay attention to and which responses are acceptable. The latest trigger warnings accompanying the early 20th-century portraits of Lawrence of Arabia at the National Portrait Gallery in London, in which he is depicted wearing local tribal headdress, are a classic example of this. Historical context is stripped away as contemporary arguments about cultural appropriation become the key takeaway.

This approach feels fundamentally at odds with what art is for. Art is, by its nature, about freedom — of expression, interpretation, and thought. The moment that freedom is curtailed, policed, or pre-approved, something vital is lost.

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Other bits and bobs I’ve been watching and reading about

1. New discoveries from the Turner Bequest Research Project, plus his secret stash of erotic images

After the 19th-century English artist J.M.W. Turner died in 1851, he left the nation an extraordinary bequest: around 37,000 works — including paintings, watercolours, sketchbooks, loose drawings, and studies — many unfinished, private, or never intended for public view. For decades, much of this material was poorly understood, inconsistently catalogued, and difficult for scholars to access.

In 2002, Tate launched the Turner Bequest Research Project, a major, long-term initiative to systematically catalogue, research, and digitise the entire bequest. The results are now available through Tate’s online catalogue, where thousands of high-resolution images can be explored for free.

Meanwhile, the Beeb has produced a documentary exploring some of his rarely seen drawings. The sketches are suggestive of Turner’s early trauma, working-class origins, possible neurodivergence, and his shifting responses to nature, industry and money. Plus it turns out he made loads of erotic drawings for his private enjoyment that reveal an intimate world entirely absent from the public grandeur of his finished paintings. Worth a watch.

2. Ai Weiwei on censorship in China and the West

Interesting interview in The Times this week with Ai Weiwei, one of China’s leading contemporary artists, about his short treatise on censorship due to be published on 29 Jan. He frames his experience of censorship as no longer unique to China, but as something he now sees operating across political systems.

While China’s censorship of his work was overt and state-imposed, Ai argues that in the West it is enforced more quietly through cultural institutions, media, and corporate pressure, something he says he has felt directly after exhibitions were cancelled following his comments on Gaza. This belief underpins his controversial claim that democratic societies are not as distinct from authoritarian ones as they like to imagine. Exactly that, Ai.

3. More sketches, this time a suitcase-full by the 20th-century artist Marlow Moss

The KunstMuseum in The Hague has an intriguing-sounding exhibition about the exchange of ideas between two artists in the 1930s and 40s. Marlow Moss was a brilliant but largely sidelined English abstract artist who cut a striking figure in interwar Paris: a lesbian, dressing in men’s clothes, embedded in the avant-garde scene, and deeply engaged in the same neoplastic ideas that would later make Piet Mondrian famous.

A significant portion of her finished work was destroyed during the Second World War when her house was bombed in 1944, wiping out paintings and sculptures that might otherwise have anchored her place in the canon much earlier. What survives instead are drawings, plans and studies often carried with her, folded away, or in this case, preserved in a long-forgotten suitcase which the museum purchased in 2025.

Long framed as a minor follower, she is now increasingly recognised as an equal interlocutor, particularly in the development of the double line, where the sketches show influence flowed both ways through conversation, shared exhibitions, and close artistic exchange.

Her revival doesn’t just correct a historical oversight; it reminds us that modernism was forged through dialogue and experimentation. It’s also a corrective example for the current trend of writing the history of women’s art without men: the complexity and richness of the picture emerges only when they are considered together. Read more about Moss here.

4. And another reason to visit The Netherlands

If you needed another reason to visit The Netherlands, here it is. A new, free sculpture garden is opening later this year at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam with three pavilions of sculptures by modern and contemporary artists including Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Roni Horn and Henry Moore. Lovely. Can’t wait to visit.

5. Making the Invisible Visible

If you are anywhere near York (UK) on the 1 Feb, don’t miss this. Shame Ends Here is an ambitious art-and-film project by Yorkshire-based art collective Make Your Mark that brings cold police statistics into uncomfortable proximity with lived experience, using personal testimony to show the real scale and impact of sexual violence.

Led by the artist Lucy Churchill, a long-time reader and supporter of this newsletter, the project is as much about listening as it is about visibility, honouring survivors, supporting services like SURVIVE, and opening up space for genuine community dialogue. It knowingly builds on the legacy of Suzanne Lacy’s seminal work Three Weeks in May (1977), reminding us that art, when it’s properly engaged with the world, can still be a force for real change.

Three exhibitions I’d like to see

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, The Met Museum, New York, until 5 April 2026. Beloved across the Nordic world but oddly under-sung elsewhere, 19th-century Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck was a quietly radical modernist who, working largely in isolation and against the odds, forged a stripped-back, emotionally charged painting language all her own. Unmissable.

Takesada Matsutani: Shifting Boundaries, Hauser & Wirth, London, 5 Feb to 18 April 2026. A key figure of Japan’s Gutai art movement, Matsutani moved to Paris in 1966 and, now 89, remains one of its last surviving members, still working daily in the studio with a relentless energy that carries from his historic experiments through to his new canvases. He asks some big questions on originality, authenticity and who decides what is good and bad art. I wrote about him back in early 2023:

William Nicholson, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (UK), until 10 May 2026. An individualist through and through, Nicholson hated the idea of being pigeonholed. In declining the invitation to be considered for election to the Royal Academy in the 1920s, he wrote ‘The idea of a label of any sort scares away from me all desire to paint.’ Here’s a good review of the exhibition discussing some absolutely lush images. The prospect of seeing this show makes my mouth water.

That’s all for today, GC readers.

Let me know your thoughts! And please help me spread the word about this newsletter by clicking like or restack. Or better still, share it with someone you think will enjoy it.

Thanks for reading!

I’m really excited for 2026, and I’ll be announcing some new projects I’m developing in the new year. Meanwhile, this last missive from me this year is a pick-n-mix of all sorts, including:

• A recent discovery of an English sculptor that I would love your opinion on.

• An exciting, multi-sensory exhibition that invites visitors to look, listen and touch, challenging the idea that art is only meant to be seen

• A feast of links, videos, quotes, thoughts and images for your contemplation.

• And my list of must-see exhibitions this week.

One more thing, if you want to hear more from me, my social media posting place of choice is Substack Notes. I find it to be a much quieter, slower, more engaging, rewarding space to be in than most others. A space for conversation rather than endless, rapid scrolling. I share videos and images, my thoughts on art and other things, and interesting Substacks on there most days. If that sounds up your street you’ll need to download the Substack app if you don’t already have it. I wish more artists would tbh.

If you celebrate Christmas, have a very happy one! I’ll be back in the New Year.

In Praise of the Quiet Sculptor

I recently discovered the work of Harold Gosney (born 1937), a sculptor who comes from the North of England, near Grimsby. He’s got a show on at York Gallery at the moment, which is how he came across my radar. Gosney is one of the many unsung artists of our generation — part of the vast majority who never reach the mega-gallery stratosphere, but instead keep quietly working, teaching, experimenting, and steadily building a practice over a lifetime. He’s my kind of artist.

Gosney’s work is rooted in figurative tradition and craftsmanship, and he’s perhaps best known for his sculptures of horses.

This video of Gosney discussing his long career and influences captures how an artist gradually accumulates layers of knowledge over time. I love watching him get his tools out to show us his process of making, working bits of wood, stone and metal by hand. It’s a delight to see the materials come alive in his process. Gosney also shares how drawing influences his practice, revealing his determination to understand each object completely before sculpting — which is, for him, the thrill of sculpture.

Plus there’s music in his art. He’s a self-taught classical/jazz musician, and is really engaging on how the crossovers between the artistic forms inform his understanding of three-dimensionality. This cross-disciplinary process is a subject I’ve written about before.

I’d love to know your thoughts on Gosney’s work and the ideas he talks about. There’s something so wonderful in listening to the joy he gets from making art:

Touching taboos

Not touching art in museums is important for the preservation of the work, but I often find myself wishing I could get my fingers onto Van Gogh’s painterly surfaces, or feel the cold and contours of Degas’s little bronze dancers. Just to really understand the piece, you know?

So this is very exciting: an exhibition where you can look AND feel. For people who are all about the haptic — knowing through touch — this will be an interesting experience. A new show at Henry Moore Institute in the UK, Beyond the Visual, challenges the dominance of sight in how we make and relate to art, inviting visitors to experience it using all the senses.

Designed with blind and partially sighted visitors in mind, the exhibition brings together historical art (some lovely pieces by Henry Moore included) with contemporary artists.

Serendipitously, MoMA just put out this thought-provoking video on the challenges they face in keeping roving visitor hands separate from precious artworks. Some art you can interact with physically, which makes that task all the harder: conceptual artists since the 60s have actively encouraged audience participation in artworks. Yoko Ono was a pioneer in breaking the ‘don’t touch’ taboo of museum artworks:

Have you ever felt the urge to touch a work of art to understand it better? If touch were allowed, which artwork would you most want to experience with your hands? Let me know in the comments!

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Other bits and bobs I’ve been watching, reading and enjoying

1. It’s all about colour for Frank Bowling, the British-Guyanese abstract painter. And oh my gosh, what colour! He’s 91, can hardly stand, but is excited to get into his studio every day to make work. I really enjoyed the interaction between him and his studio hands in this recent video:

2. In case you ever wonder what’s relevant about early 19th century paintings today, here’s some great chat from contemporary artists on the landscapes of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable in the age of climate change, in this video from Tate Gallery.

3. Sad news of the death of Martin Parr, Bristol-based photographer who spent his career sharply observing consumerism, social class, taste and national identity, particularly in Britain. I’ve had to rewatch this half-hour documentary on his oeuvre just to get my fill again. So good. There’s another more recent documentary but you can only watch it for free if you have access to BBC player. And amidst all the glowing obits, here’s a deeper analysis of Parr’s work from Ocula Magazine on how his work forced viewers to confront the ways we judge and categorize others based on appearances. His photographs are never neutral: they record both what people do and how they are seen, exposing the social and economic structures embedded in ordinary life. Worth a read.

4. What a way to start an essay:

I first met Giacometti when I was married to Marc Riboud, a photographer who was a protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson. It was 1962, and I was a young bride—a baby, really. They were close friends, and once, before Marc left on a trip to Vietnam, he said to Henri, “Take care of Barbara. She doesn’t speak a word of French.” Cartier-Bresson said to me, “Let’s go to Giacometti’s studio. Have you ever met him?” And I said, “Of course not.”

This is a fascinating read from Ursula Magazine (from Hauser & Wirth) on the sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud’s memories of Alberto Giacometti. It’s a different age, a different world, a different Paris, recounted by someone who still remembers it.

5. Imagine finding an old Rembrandt original in a drawer. For goodness sake. Would you sell it?

6. Some excellent observations and advice for artists on the importance of having a clear work ethic to make it in the artworld from , an independent gallerist and art advisor, who also writes a great Substack. He says:

making good art is not the same as making it as an artist. Those are parallel, sometimes conflicting, vocations. The studio trains one set of muscles - discipline, invention, solitude. The art world demands a different set entirely: clarity, legibility, stamina, and the peculiar social agility required to be remembered. Not because the game is noble or even particularly rational, but because art only matters once it leaves your hands. If you want your art to be more than therapy then it must find advocates, interlocutors, collectors, critics, and the support structures that allow it a life in public view.

7. I’ve decided to start reading this big old tome again, with fresh eyes, in 2026. Haven’t read it with sustained attention since I was 19. That’s nearly 20 years ago. What an intro to art history! Somehow I thought it was a good idea to take it with me backpacking around Europe, despite it being quite weighty. My back was in better shape then. Even though there are more canons, branches and artists than this one story suggests, Gombrich’s strength was in training readers to see art as problem-solving: how artists dealt with space, light, the body, emotion, and meaning. Have you read it, what impact did it have on you, and who’s up for reading it with me in 2026?

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Three exhibitions I’d like to see

Monument to the Unimportant, Pace Gallery, London, until 14 Feb 2026. Bringing together artists including Oldenburg, Thiebaud, Whiteread, Hockney and Fischer to show how the most ordinary things — cakes, pipes, weeds, household objects — can be turned into the playful, poignant and powerful.

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh, The Jewish Museum, New York, until 31 May 2026. Exploring the body, intimacy, ageing and female autonomy across more than fifty years of her practice. Unmissable. I’ve written about her here. And here’s some excellent chat about her on the Week in Art podcast this week.

Limitless Drawings: Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou Collection, Grand Palais, Paris, until 15 March 2026. Another group show, and this one sounds like a corker. 300 artworks exploring the ways in which drawing is endlessly being reinvented. Its scope includes works on paper, murals, installations, photography, film, and digital technology by Balthus, Basquiat, de Kooning, Giacometti, Man Ray, Brice Marden, and Picasso amongst others. Eurostar here I come.

That’s a wrap for 2025, GC readers.

Let me know your thoughts on anything and everything here! And please help me spread the word about this newsletter by clicking like or restack. Or better still, share it with someone you think will enjoy it.

Thanks for reading!

There’s anger at the choice of artist for the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2026. But is it justified?

KAWS at SFMOMA. An example of red-chip art. Like blue-chip but hollow and really hot-commodity.

Plus a mysterious AI mural in London. Who, what and why? And more importantly, is it interesting or good?

And my list of must-see exhibitions this week.

Deeply dispiriting art?

This week the largely unknown artist Alma Allen (I’m afraid I can’t point you to his website as he doesn’t seem to have one) has been announced as the choice to represent the USA at the Venice Biennale in 2026. The Biennale is the Olympics of the art world — a sprawling, century-old exhibition where countries send artists to represent their national identity on a global stage. The national pavilions carry huge symbolic weight: they are part cultural diplomacy, part artistic bragging rights, and part weather vane for what each country wants the world to think it cares about.

Allen’s work is characterised by large-scale organic, biomorphic sculptures in wood, marble, volcanic rock, and bronze, shaped by a mix of hand-carving and modern digital techniques. I’ve never seen any of Allen’s work in person, but critics have described his art as having the rare quality of feeling both ancient and contemporary, grounded in material but full of quiet energy and life.

Describing the choice of Allen for the Biennale as ‘deeply dispiriting’, the Senior Editor at ARTnews took aim at the Trump administration:

This is disappointing, not because Allen’s work is bad (there are plenty of worse choices), but because the work has nothing to say about the state of our country at the moment. Perhaps this isn’t surprising. The US State Department runs the proposal process, so no one would expect a pavilion about crackdowns on migrant communities, rampant racism and transphobia, isolationist economics, censorship of the arts and the press, and a President who has been credibly accused of being a fascist. And the newly created nonprofit body responsible for funding the pavilion — the American Arts Conservancy — appears to be stocked with Trump allies.

In other words, Allen is being judged not on the quality of his work, but on its perceived political relevance, or lack thereof. And furthermore, the work’s failure to overtly critique the current US administration. The implication is that Allen’s art is conservative and safe, and the US pavilion is likely to present an apolitical, aesthetically neutral image of America, sidestepping the country’s pressing social and political crises.

But to court controversy for a moment, this angry backlash over Alma Allen’s selection made me roll my eyes. The criticism circles around these points: he’s a white male, he’s not waving an obvious political banner, he’s not the ‘right’ kind of symbol for the culture-war moment. It’s an argument that assumes a national pavilion must always be a referendum on identity politics. But once you step outside that narrow frame, Allen starts to look like an unexpectedly strong choice — maybe even a refreshing one.

Because if there’s one thing Allen isn’t, it’s an establishment insider. His whole biography pushes against the perceived notion that the art world only uplifts its own. He’s the definition of self-made: left home early, didn’t go to art school, taught himself everything he knows by working with whatever he had, sold work from the back of his truck, spent years making things in relative isolation, and quietly built a language of form without the gloss of big institutions or galleries supporting him.

The fact that he’s only recently hit wider visibility isn’t proof of privilege — it’s evidence of how long and how hard most artists work before anyone pays attention. He represents the 99% of artists who slog away outside the spotlight, not the curated few groomed for biennales since graduate school.

And maybe that’s the real political message here, even if it’s not wrapped in the language people expect. Allen’s work — slow, intuitive, grounded in labour and in listening to materials rather than ideologies — offers a counter-story about American creativity. It’s not about branding identity; it’s about building a life through persistence, instinct, and a refusal to quit even when no one is watching. The hard graft of making art is a subject I’ve written about before. Choosing Allen signals that the US pavilion can champion unknown artists whose work demands quiet contemplation. He’s an unlikely choice from the margins, but that’s precisely what I like about this selection. In a climate obsessed with optics, that feels like a far more radical gesture than the outrage gives it credit for.

Art for the tech bro era

Moving swiftly on to other art which has been slammed as empty, this time with perhaps some justification. The American artist KAWS (aka Brian Donnelly) currently has a survey show KAWS: FAMILY at SFMOMA, which surprised me at first since he’s a bit more toy-store-pop-phenomenon than museum heavyweight.

KAWS is known for his cartoon-inspired characters, X-ed out eyes, and slick, pop-culture-infused sculptures. Starting out as a graffiti artist who subverted advertising posters, he moved into toys, fashion collaborations, and large public sculptures that blur the line between street culture and high art. His work is instantly recognisable, hyper-marketable, and hugely popular worldwide, though it’s often criticised for being more about branding and commercial appeal than deeper artistic or political engagement.

In truth it is all pretty vacant, derivative stuff (his forerunners were Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons). In this rather acerbic review of the exhibition in Hyperallergic, his work is summed up as ‘art for the tech bro era’. It’s an example of what has come to be termed ‘red-chip art’ — in other words art which explodes in value thanks to aggressive gallery backing, social-media buzz, celebrity collectors, or speculative flipping. Rather than having any sustained critical depth or museum-level significance, red-chip art is often glossy, accessible, pop-culture adjacent, and easy to sell. It’s art made for the market moment rather than the ages.

The vapidity, however, is precisely what’s interesting to me about KAWS’ work. There ain’t no quiet contemplation of deeper meanings here. And yet it’s so popular. Queues have extended around the block for tickets to this show. Why? For a start it reflects a broader desire among institutions, brands, and collectors for work that is culturally legible, easily marketable, and detached from any challenging social questions. In other words, it’s safe and accessible. No thought required.

But perhaps more significantly it reflects the state of the global art market, which has become increasingly financialised, favouring works that can function as stable, brand-like assets. In this climate, easily recognisable, influencer-friendly aesthetics are more attractive because they translate smoothly across international markets and social media ecosystems, reinforcing demand. Depoliticised, instantly legible art thrives precisely because it fits the structural logic of the market.

His fans will no doubt drop a shed load of cash in the gift shop, and this might go some way to explaining why SFMOMA have hosted the exhibition. Now that really is deeply dispiriting.

Brueghel-inspired nightmarish AI mural

I’m always on the look out for AI art that is actually interesting. A sort-of-Christmassy, mysterious public mural created using AI and recently put up in a London suburb, has been causing a stir with local residents. Click here to see and read more. I’m sort of intrigued by it. What do you think — interesting or not?

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Three exhibitions I’d like to see

David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, until 28 Feb 2026. Playing with colour, perspective, space. It’s homage and reinvention from Hockney. 88 and still knocking out brilliant paintings.

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows, National Gallery, London, until 10 May 2026. 18th-century master of dramatic candlelit scientific experiments, with a dose of some darker stuff underneath — death, doubt, melancholy, and the sublime. A bijou one-room exhibit, but worth the 12 quid.

Paula Rego: Drawing from Life, Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, until 17 Jan 2026. Featuring over forty drawings from 2005–7, some shown for the first time, and a partial recreation of her studio filled with the dolls and creatures that inspired them. Includes a commissioned set of drawings for wine bottle labels that were too shocking to use.

That’s all for today, GC readers.

Let me know your thoughts! And please help me spread the word about this newsletter by clicking like or restack. Or better still, share it with someone you think will enjoy it.

Thanks for reading!

A photographic exhibition in Denmark on the fascinating and unexpected scenes of people / animals / things thrown up by Google Street View.

A proposal for a huge statue in San Francisco Bay. Is it brilliant or dreadful? You decide.

And my list of must-see exhibitions.

The art of Google Street View

The artist Jon Rafman caught my eye this week. I hadn’t heard of him before, but he has been a bigwig in the ‘Net Art’ scene for many years. Since 2007, when Google started sending out a vast army of cars, each equipped with nine cameras, to photograph every highway, road and dirt track in the world, Rafman has been keeping an archive of strange and uncanny images captured along the way. In his work, Nine Eyes, Rafman has nearly two decades’ worth of material, sifted from more than 200 billion photos taken across 100 countries.

This ongoing project, currently showing at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, is endlessly rewarding for viewers. If you can’t get to Denmark, you can see a whole load of them on Rafman’s (really old-skool) website here. It’s weird and wonderful imagery. What’s interesting to me about this project is the deeper unease it reveals about our relationship with technology and the vast corporations that rule the internet. Rafman says:

In the corner there is a button ‘report a concern’ and if you think about what that means, what does it say about our society? Maybe you see someone getting hit by a car, or maybe you see someone dead by the side of the road, you don’t know when exactly the photo was taken, what the context is, how the photo was captured through some huge corporation that is more Kafka-esque that even Kafka imagined. What does it mean ‘report a problem’? Who are you reporting it to? What is the concern?

Indeed. Where the Google cameras are indifferent, capturing everything without moral position, our human eye brings meaning and interpretation to these uncontextualised moments in time without any power to respond. With these photos he exposes how detached and bureaucratic our digital world has become: we witness human suffering through an algorithmic lens, mediated by a corporation that feels vast, faceless, and unaccountable. It raises questions about how technology shapes our sense of responsibility and empathy when the systems we use to ‘see’ the world also distance us from it.

Describing himself as a ‘cyber-flâneur’, Rafman emerged from the early days of Net Art, when there was a sense of an openness, dialogue, and creative experimentation on the internet. The excitement of discovery, of not knowing what or who you’re going to find, has been shut down, Rafman argues, by the ‘Haussmannisation of the internet’ — the flattening of digital space into wide, tidy boulevards owned by a few corporations. His work often reflects nostalgia for that earlier, decentralised web culture, contrasting it with today’s algorithm-driven digital landscape dominated by corporate platforms — Google, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and all the rest:

I wondered what you thought about any of these ideas? Are the big platforms like Instagram a good or a bad thing? They promise connection, but they also funnel us in specific visual and social directions. And have the corporate platforms reshaped what counts as visibility or success for artists? Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Symbol of hope or hubris?

A Denver-based crypto entrepreneur, Ross Calvin, wants to build a 450ft statue of the Greek titan Prometheus on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, a project he calls The Great Colossus of Prometheus. Taller than the Statue of Liberty and costing an estimated $450 million, the monument would include a technology museum and, according to Calvin, serve as a ‘beacon of optimism’ celebrating human ingenuity and individual heroism. He views Prometheus, who gave technology to mankind, as a symbol of the American spirit and the creative drive of the West.

I can’t decide whether I think this suggestion is grotesquely dreadful or completely brilliant. Because it occupies shared space, public art inevitably raises questions about who gets represented and whose values are being signalled. As a piece of public art, it could provoke valuable debate about the role of innovation, technology and capitalism in 21st century America. But it also looks monumentally hubristic: a crypto-tycoon building a godlike statue to creative selfhood on a former prison island is almost parody-level Silicon Valley self-mythologising.

Either way, Calvin is getting his proposal ready for Donald Trump’s consideration early in the new year. I just have a feeling it will hit the mark with him.

Three exhibitions I’d like to see

Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas: OOO LA LA, Frankie Rossi Art Projects & Sadie Coles HQ, London, 20 Nov-1 Jan 2026. Essentially two old mates exhibiting together. Here’s the official blurb though: ‘The exhibition will reveal the affinities between the artists’ distinct approaches – above all, their sense of life’s proximity to death, and their defiant – defining – exuberance’. Might be quite good.

Piero Manzoni: ‘L’invincibile Jean’ and Early Works 1956-1957, Hauser & Wirth, Basel, 27 Nov 2025–14 Feb 2026. Famous for his shit in a can, Manzoni was a key figure of the 1950s Italian avant-garde, and profoundly influenced twentieth-century art. A rare opportunity to see the formative phase of his practice.

Shepard Fairey: Out of Print, Beyond the Streets, Los Angeles, 15 Nov 2025-11 Jan 2026. Retrospective of over 400 of his works, highlighting his activism and protest, and demonstrating the enduring power of print to convey subversive, socially engaged messages.

That’s all for today, GC readers.

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by clicking like or restack. Or better still, share it with someone you think will like it.

Thanks for reading!

I’ve been thinking about the mountain of criticism that the new exhibition opening today at Canterbury Cathedral has already received. What’s it all about and is the anger justified?

An exhibition in New York is showing art that has been censored in the US in recent years. Which got me thinking (again) about art we’re not allowed to look at, specifically work that represents the more intimate parts of the female body.

Plus my list of must-see exhibitions, and a new section introducing you to artists from The Gallery Companion’s readership.

Graffiti and grace

This week there have been more raised eyebrows about the ‘progressive’ tendencies of the Anglican Church. After recently appointing a woman who’s fine with same-sex marriage as the Archbishop of Canterbury (the spiritual leader of the Church of England), a new exhibition opening today at Canterbury Cathedral is drawing yet more heated / angry comments. HEAR US features graffiti-style works created in community workshops in response to the question, ‘What would you ask God?’

The installation, which incorporates messages from marginalized groups, including the Black and Brown diaspora, neurodivergent, and LGBTQIA+ communities, aims to foster inclusivity and amplify diverse voices within the cathedral space. The dean of the cathedral emphasised that the exhibition builds ‘bridges between cultures, styles, and genres’ and highlights contributions from younger participants.

Critics have denounced the graffiti-like aesthetics and questioned the appropriateness of altering a historic religious site. Worshippers have called it ‘sacrilegious’, ‘awful’ and ‘more suited to an underground car park’. Online, Elon Musk called it ‘shameful’, and the US Vice President JD Vance wrote on X:

It is weird to me that these people don’t see the irony of honoring ‘marginalized communities’ by making a beautiful historical building really ugly.

These criticisms of the project are way too harsh. It’s not that I’m wild about the graffiti style — in fact I think it’s very basic and school-project level in its sophistication.

But what I do like about it is that it challenges traditional notions of beauty in a space which is loaded with ideas about authority, taste and history. There’s no attempt to fit in to the look of the building — the soaring Gothic features, the intricate decoration, the stained glass, the gold of the chalices, candlesticks, altarpieces. The exhibition disrupts the cathedral’s polished harmony, transforming its architecture from a grand historical monument to a down-to-earth space for dialogue. Against the sand-coloured stone walls and pillars, the colourful artworks positively demand to be engaged with — you just can’t miss them.

The exhibition also raises questions about site-specificity, context, and audience expectations: how does the meaning of art change when installed in a sacred, historical space rather than a white-walled gallery? What might seem reflective or critical in a gallery can take on greater emotional intensity — or provoke discomfort — in a consecrated space.

These artworks resist the critical distance that art history usually gives us. It’s hard to look at them without becoming entangled in the living language of Christian belief, in contrast to the cool, historical gaze through which we now encounter, say, an early Renaissance painted altarpiece.

I can’t quite work out how I feel about this exhibition. It interests me because it (possibly unintentionally) sticks two fingers up at authority and taste: I love how it riles people. But the Christian context and messaging also makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, like I’m intruding on other people’s faith.

I wondered what you thought about it? Let me know in the poll below and in the comments.

No pubes in art, please.

Over in New York, an exhibition titled Don’t Look Now, is featuring artists and artworks that have been censored in the US in recent years. On first reading about it, I naturally thought: ‘Yes please! Tell me more! Show me the images!’ Because of course when art is censored it attracts more curiosity than it might otherwise.

What struck me as I perused the list of artists and looked up some of the artworks is how visually gentle so much of it is. There’s nothing that’s actually intolerable to look at (for me at least) — the artworks are more poetic and beautiful than outrageous.

Don’t Look Now demonstrates that censorship happens more frequently today than you might think. I was aware of several attempts in the past fifty years to censor art made by women in particular. Margaret Harrison’s 1971 exhibition of drawings critiquing the objectification of women in popular culture, which was shut down by the police after just one day, is one famous example. Still, it did surprise me how much imagery representing the female body by relatively unknown artists has been censored even in the past ten years.

The perceived threat from female sexuality and the idea that women might want to control their own bodies has driven this censorship. Take Marilyn Minter’s Plush series from 2014, for example, which depicts female pubic hair, and which has been regularly censored from exhibitions and social media.

Minter is an American artist known for her work exploring women’s bodies. If you’re not familiar with her art, here she is talking about some of her recent work. On the Plush series Minter said,

Pubic hair has been erased in all of art history because it was deemed too vulgar. In 2014 I saw young girls were lasering off all of their pubic hair. So I decided to make pictures of beautiful pubic hair, representing all races and colours.

Art gets censored when it exposes the fault lines of power — works that confront dangerous subjects, taboos, things that we don’t want to talk about or acknowledge as problematic. By depicting parts of the female body rarely shown in art, Minter challenges powerful cultural ideals about beauty that women are so often expected to meet. And she pays the price for it.

One more brief example. This work by the textile artist Yvonne Iten-Scott, titled Origin, was banned from the American Quilters’ Society exhibition in Florida in 2024 because it was ‘representational of a part of a woman’s anatomy’. Was this censorship something to do with the politics of reproductive rights in a conservative State perhaps?

So it seems it’s a ‘no’ to pubes and wombs (or clitorises if that’s what you also saw) in art in the 21st century. Remove them from our view lest they force us to confront uncomfortable truths!

I can’t see anything graphic or violent about these artworks. In fact I would describe them as quite mild. What’s shocking isn’t the imagery per se, but how easily even the most restrained depictions of women’s bodies still manage to feel threatening to some people.

If you’re interested in seeing more examples of recently censored art (and you can’t get to the exhibition in New York) look through the Don’t Look Now website — it’s fascinating stuff. Honestly, I can’t quite believe what gets banned. As always I’d love to know your thoughts.

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Three exhibitions I’d like to see

Monet and Venice, Brooklyn Museum, New York until 1 Feb 2026. Surely there’s nothing new to say about Monet? But like research on WWII, fresh perspectives keep coming. So, if you’re into Monet and/or Venice, get yourself a ticket to this mega-show.

Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, England until 2 Nov. Last two weeks of this exhibit of portraits of artists by artists, from the early 20th century through pre-war modernism, pop art, the London School, and the YBAs. Rammed with big-name British artists. Plus a jolly nice day trip from London.

Lee Miller, Tate Britain, London until 15 Feb 2026. Comprehensive exhibition of Miller’s remarkable career from Vogue model to surrealist pioneer to WWII photographer, including her iconic self-portrait in Hitler’s bathtub. Unmissable IMHO.

Show Us What You’re Making

Share what you’re working on, thinking about, and creating! If you would like to introduce your art to The Gallery Companion’s readership, reply to this email with a short summary of what your work is about, where you’re based, and your links.

Caroline Banks is an Anglo-French artist based in London whose work explores the circularity of energy, time, and interconnectedness through expressive, calligraphic mark-making. Using the circle as a recurring motif, she reflects on life, death, regeneration, and collective unity in an era of division. Her dynamic yet contemplative works, often painted in gesso, ink, and acrylic, capture gesture, memory, and transformation. It’s beautiful stuff. On the work pictured above, Storm and Gloss, which she finished last week, Caroline said:

I draw one thing then see another: in this case a drawing of a dancer’s gesture becomes a painting reminding me of a watercourse. Painting with hand-made brushes reduces the level of precision: I’m operating from experience and skill yet also from the moment. Time is very important to me: its elasticity and depth which I express in the gesture.

Jen Selmore is an Australian artist who uses recycled and vintage materials reminiscent of fabrics, textures and colour palettes from her childhood. Jen’s practice has evolved into what she calls paper entomology — using delicate, hand-drawn butterflies to explore serious social themes through small, beautiful, and seemingly fragile forms.

She recently completed this wonderful work, Living on Mute, which marks a shift for her away from social critique and nostalgia, toward something more hopeful. The work, a dense cluster of hand-drawn butterflies spilling from their frame, captures the moment of transformation that comes with self-acceptance and risk. Jen painstakingly made it over the course of a year, and it’s both a celebration of growth and the beginning of a new direction towards larger, more ambitious installations. Love it.

That’s all for today, GC readers.

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by clicking like or restack. Or better still, share it with someone you think will enjoy what’s going on here.

Thanks for reading!

First up, I’m introducing a new feature — a spotlight on the work of artists from The Gallery Companion’s readership. My emails go out to thousands of readers around the world, both artists and art lovers. So if you would like to introduce your work to this readership, reply to this email with a short summary of what it’s all about, where you’re based, and your links.

What else? I’ve been thinking about the value of sketchbooks to artists, inspired by GC reader Ann Pham’s sketches.

And in response to Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s recent controversial Rising Dragon firework piece I’ve got some questions about the ethics of making art today.

Plus my list of must-see international exhibitions and news from Gallery Companion readers from around the world.

Some thoughts on artists’s sketchbooks

Hearing an artist talk about their ideas and the process of making, and seeing those ideas gradually emerge in visual form in sketchbooks, is where the magic of art lies for me.

A couple of weeks ago in this newsletter I included a sketch made by David Bowie, which prompted one of my readers, Ann Pham, to share some of her sketches with me. Ann always carries a travel watercolour set and a sketchbook with her, and uses any gaps in time to draw and write — when she’s travelling, in a cafe, between meetings. Her current body of work is about animal welfare, and she makes written notes on the research she does alongside her sketches.

Ann’s pages here epitomise the idea that the sketchbook is where you see the artist thinking it all out. It’s not the polished canvas or the finished sculpture, but the place where ideas tumble onto the page as visual notes, half-formed thoughts, and experiments in line and colour. It’s an intimate visual diary, a way of working through the world with a pencil or brush in hand — observing or imagining a figure, a landscape, an animal, copying a favourite artwork.

Sketchbooks are visual journeys and memory banks: they store details, impressions, and fleeting ideas, often laced with scribbled text or pasted-in images or photos. Sometimes they drift into something else — when does a sketchbook become an album? That in-between quality is part of their fascination.

We know that sketchbooks in their bound form have been around since the 15th century as demonstrated by Leonardo Da Vinci, but they became widespread in the 18th century, when mass-produced paper, pencils, and portable watercolour boxes made them affordable companions. Suddenly, everyone from the amateur traveller to the professional painter could carry one.

Today the tradition has expanded: digital sketching apps have turned tablets into portable studios, with artists like David Hockney enthusiastically embracing the iPad as a 21st-century sketchbook.

Artists, do you carry a sketchbook with you all the time or is it a studio thing? Are your sketchbooks private, or are you happy to show them to others? When you’re sketching are you mostly observing the world or developing new ideas? Do you write notes alongside your sketches? Have you tried digital sketching — and if so has it changed things for you? What do you think your sketchbooks reveal about your process that a finished piece can’t? I’d love to know your thoughts.

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Pretty unethical art?

I’ve been following an intriguing recent news story about the New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang involving gunpowder, corporate branding, environmental damage, the Chinese Communist Party, and the power of Chinese social media. For me the story raises a few ethical questions about making art today.

For those of you unfamiliar with Cai’s work, here’s a brief summary: he was born in 1957 in China, and left for Japan in 1986 where he developed his signature gunpowder drawings; in 1995 he moved to New York where he has produced some of his most famous works including Transient Rainbow (2002), a firework piece that created the illusion of a rainbow over Roosevelt Island; Inopportune: Stage One (2004), in which he froze cars in mid air as though they were mid-explosion; and Sky Ladder (2015), a 500-metre-long firework piece resembling a ladder rising into the sky; in 1999 Cai won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale; he also directed the fireworks for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

For more background on Cai, this is a great video about his career, major works and his thoughts on his practice:

But back to the story. A few days ago Cai staged the work Rising Dragon in the foothills of the Himalayas in Tibet, in collaboration with the clothing brand Arc’teryx. The artwork, which represented a dragon snaking up the mountainside, immediately ignited controversy and condemnation on Chinese social media about the environmental harm it might have caused. The local branch of the Chinese Communist Party launched an official investigation and both Arc’teryx and Cai issued public apologies.

The incident highlights tensions between the use of art in corporate branding and ecological accountability, as critics argued that such a display was reckless in a fragile ecosystem. The Chinese middle classes on social media are popular consumers of the Arc’teryx brand, and it reveals a heightened sensitivity within China to environmental stewardship and corporate responsibility. Interesting.

Also interesting was the response of the Chinese Communist Party, which rushed to promise an investigation. I wonder whether this was partly an attempt to shore up Cai’s reputation, which the Party champions both in China and abroad. Cai’s work is an example of the ‘soft power’ of art: in China he is celebrated as a cultural ambassador whose grand spectacles project national pride.

I was also interested in the location for this artwork: why did Cai choose to stage the work on the Tibetan Plateau, a politically contested area ruled over by China? In my mind I can’t help comparing Cai with Ai WeiWei, the outspoken, dissident Chinese artist whose criticism of the tyranny, corruption and cruelty of the communist regime has been a clear theme throughout his career. Cai, on the other hand, has never talked about his personal views on the Chinese government, and the themes in his work are more universal than directly political. Some critics have therefore raised questions about the meaning of his work, given Cai’s known collaborations with the Communist Party in state projects like the Beijing Olympics: is he complicit with or subtly critiquing the political system in China? Or is it all just simply a pretty spectacle?

Cai’s Rising Dragon piece — and his work in general — raises some questions for me about the ethics of making art and I wondered whether you had any thoughts in response:

1. His pyrotechnic work is very loud and dirty, and clearly disrupts any local natural environment in which he creates it, so should he not produce this work at all? Given that it’s impossible for most artists to be completely sustainable in their practice, where do you draw the line? This is a subject I’ve written about before, and I’m still not sure what I think.

2. His firework pieces are expensive to produce and without corporate sponsorship he wouldn’t be able to make them. But does creating art for branding purposes compromise its cultural value — or is it just a realistic means to an end in today’s cultural climate? Would you turn down cash from a corporate sponsor to help you make your art?

3. And finally, do we expect too much when we want artists from authoritarian states to openly oppose their governments, or is that demand central to how we value their work in the West?

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Three exhibitions I’d like to see

Ghosts: Visualising the Supernatural, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland until 8 March 2026. Do you believe in ghosts? This major exhibition brings together more than 160 works spanning 250 years. From 19th-century spiritualism and theatrical trickery to contemporary art, it explores how ghosts linger in our collective imagination, blurring the line between science, superstition, and the unseen.

Giorgio Armani: Milano, per amore, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, until 11 January 2026. This one’s for the fashionistas amongst you: a poignant final project from the late designer that places over 120 of his garments in dialogue with Renaissance masterpieces by Caravaggio, Bellini and Raphael. More than a fashion show, it’s a meditation on colour, atmosphere and light, revealing unexpected echoes between Armani’s tailoring and the drama of historical artworks.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Gunpowder and Abstraction 2015–2025, White Cube, London, until 9 Nov 2025. Why not go and see some of Cai’s work and let me know what you think? This particular show focuses on the reintroduction of colour into his gunpowder pieces since 2015.

News from Gallery Companion readers

Romanian artist Laura Partin has been accepted to an artist residency in Lloret de Mar in Spain in October. She will be developing a series called Mar Adentro about the decline of marine biodiversity in the Anthropocene and mythological figures from different cultures related to the sea.

Kirsty Harris is showing in a group exhibition & Still Different Worlds at Thames-side Studios Gallery in London from 18 Oct to 2 Nov. Harris’s practice centres around the violent, man-made events that scar the landscape: the detonation of the atomic bomb — and the awe, the absurdity and the abhorrent nature of human ambition.

That’s all for today, GC readers.

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by clicking like or restack. Or better still, share it with someone you think will enjoy what I write. Thanks for reading!

What does ‘emerging’ mean anyway? A GC reader shared a recent article with me this week on age barriers in the art world, and I wondered what you thought.

American feminist artist Judy Chicago holds firm in the face of public criticism of her exhibition What If Women Ruled The World? at the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel. And I wondered what you thought about that too.

And I dream about a little trip to Finland to see British artist Keith Tyson’s current exhibition. Once dubbed the ‘mad professor’, Tyson’s into maths, science, physics, astronomy, philosophy, computer technology, and machine systems, and brings all that good stuff into his art.

Plus my list of must-see international exhibitions.

How old is an ‘emerging’ artist?

Last week an article appeared in the online art magazine Hyperallergic about what it really means to be an ‘emerging’ artist. The author shared a story about applying for a fellowship, which supports early-career artists from underrepresented communities in New York. He applied and… Bam! Rejected. Not because his work wasn’t good, not because he wasn’t dedicated, but because he was literally seven days too old. Just a week over the arbitrary age limit, and that was it.

It’s not only the networking and financial opportunities that come with residences and fellowships that older artists are often excluded from. A lot of commercial galleries gravitate towards younger artists to find the next exciting talent.

All of this is a stark reminder of how the art world often equates ‘emerging’ with youth, even though artistic careers are rarely linear. Some artists do follow a straight path from undergraduate to postgraduate to landing gallery representation or residencies and fellowships, sure. But many others start later, take detours, or juggle caregiving — and yet the system still treats them like they’ve missed their chance. As the author argues, there’s an age-constricted conveyor belt that brings legitimacy to an artist:

emerging by 30, mid-career by 40, late-career by 60. If you fall behind, step off, or return later, the system doesn’t know what to do with you.

I can’t tell you how many artists I know who have started their art practice seriously in their 50s and 60s, or later. Some went to art college at the ‘right’ age, before the pragmatics of earning money redirected them to other paying jobs, or the demands of motherhood and family life limited them from being able to pursue their art. Only with retirement, financial stability, or children reaching adulthood have many artists been able to seriously engage in developing their practice and career.

I’m not talking here about those artists who have consistently made art for years, who throughout that time faced exclusion and rejection from the art world, and then found success in later life. There are many examples of these artists, such as Phyllida Barlow, Howardena Pindell and Faith Ringgold.

I’m talking here about artists who have started or returned to art practice in later life and who have managed to successfully navigate the art world for those highly sought-after things: exhibitions, fellowships, project funding, gallery representation, income from sales, reputation. The later-life thriving artists seem to me to be much rarer.

One example is British artist Rose Hilton (1931-2019), who trained at the Royal College of Art in her youth, and whose art career was largely put on hold during her marriage to the painter Roger Hilton. She returned to painting seriously aged 43, after her husband died, and eventually had a retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2008. In this video she talks about her experience as an artist:

But I’m struggling to think of many others. Can you? Hilton seems to me to be one of the exceptions that proves the rule.

I would love to know what you think about this subject. Are you an artist who has begun or returned to art practice later in life? Have you experienced age-related barriers in accessing residencies, fellowships, or gallery representation? Or has your experience been different? Have you ever identified yourself with the term ‘emerging’ artist? Please let me know in the comments!

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Judy Chicago at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art: yes or no?

A group of 50 artists and cultural figures has urged American artist Judy Chicago and Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova to cancel the exhibition which opened yesterday at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, accusing them of “artwashing.” In a public letter, they argued that staging a feminist project in Israel is hypocritical given the country’s role in the Gaza conflict, where UN Women reports over 28,000 women and girls have been killed since October 2023. They argue that,

To speak about feminism within an institution of a state that perpetrates such atrocities while ignoring them is hypocrisy.

But the other side to this argument is that cancelling the show risks silencing precisely the kind of voices that insist on questioning power structures.

Freedom of expression means allowing art to exist even in moments of political tension, especially when it is uncomfortable. Judy Chicago’s practice has always been about confronting inequality — gendered, social, and political — and to withdraw her work from view would deny audiences in Israel the chance to engage with feminist ideas at a time when dialogue is urgently needed.

Museums are not governments; they are cultural spaces where contested ideas can be debated. To demand the closure of an exhibition because of the political context blurs the line between criticism and censorship. Rather, it can be seen as an opportunity to bring feminist discourse into a fraught environment, to make visible any contradictions, and to provoke conversations that might otherwise be suppressed. Protecting artistic freedom — even in, or especially in, difficult contexts — is fundamental if we believe in art’s power to question, disrupt, and imagine alternatives.

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, who has become an international symbol of resistance, free expression, and feminist protest, collaborated with Chicago in the making of the artwork What If Women Ruled the World, a physical and digital quilt. She responded to the letter by saying that she ‘is not currently involved in any decisions connected to the work or where it is shown.’ Given that Tolokonnikova has been imprisoned by Putin’s regime for her art performances (I wrote about it here in 2023), I’m not sure what to make of this response.

No matter what you think about the Gaza conflict, should we not reject the idea of restricting art from viewers? Censorship of art shuts down ideas and reduces opportunities for reflection. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Dreaming of Finland

If ever there was a reason to take a little trip to Finland, seeing British artist Keith Tyson’s latest exhibition at the Serlachius Museum is one of them. Tyson is in the category of ‘late career’ artists, and his work just keeps getting better in my opinion.

If you’re not familiar with his art, here’s a quick what-you-need-to-know: he has been into computers, coding, and maths since childhood; early in his career he was dubbed the ‘mad professor’ and the ‘wacky boffin of art’ for his artworks exploring scientific and mathematical concepts and systems; he won the Turner Prize in 2002; his work is about life, nature and the forces that make things come into being; his practice is diverse, including painting, sculpture, drawing and installation; although he doesn’t really have a recognisable style, there’s a spiritual theme that runs through all the works.

Tyson talks about his ‘strategy’ for making art which uses computers, machines and chance to produce art that pushes and pulls between order and chaos. He once said,

I’m fascinated by science’s dogmatic determinism, the belief that any action, however complex — a Mozart concerto, a terrorist attack — arises from hydrogen atoms bashing together after the Big Bang.

But rather than accept that everything is already mapped out, Tyson uses his art to test those boundaries, building unpredictability into his process.

One of the things I love about his work is that you can see the passage of time passing over the years as he incorporates new technologies and scientific ideas. His 1990s Artmachine, drew together knowledge from books, algorithms and software he coded himself to create a ‘database of the world’ (this was before the wide-spread use of the internet and search engines). It churned out random prompts for him to create artworks from, such as a painting composed of 366 painted breadboards. The Artmachine was pretty basic by today’s standards, but reflected the excitement around knowledge and the potential of computers at that time.

Some of his more recent works use AI in their creation. I think Tyson’s incorporation of this new technology into his art succeeds in being interesting in a way that eludes other artists. 16m³ of Ocean (Atlantic), for example, is a bronze sculpture that captures a frozen moment of the ocean, translating its ever-moving energy into a static cube. Tyson used a photograph from an Atlantic crossing along with AI and modelling software to recreate the surface of the sea and the hidden motion beneath the waves. In this artwork he was confronting the age-old artistic challenge of depicting life’s constant dynamism in a single, still form.

It’s a lovely object, and the explanation of it is much more engaging when he talks about it himself in the 12-minute video below. He also discusses some of the threads that run right the way through his oeuvre from his earliest pieces to his most recent AI artworks. And he almost bubbles over when he explains the scientific and systems thinking behind some of the works in the exhibition. I have to admit I’m not a science boff but I love listening to his explanations of the process of making each artwork:

Let me know what think about Tyson’s art. If you’re an artist and you have themes or processes in your work that relate to his, reply to this email — I’ll share it on Substack Chat for all Gallery Companion subscribers to see.

Three exhibitions I’d like to see

1. Fra Angelico, Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco, Florence, 26 Sept-25 Jan 2026. OK, this is exciting. Fra Angelico, who was one of the first artists to play with linear perspective and bring light to life in fresco and panel painting, is getting a huge double-venue show of over 140 works. It’s the most complete look at his career yet, and a chance to see just how modern and dynamic this early Renaissance master really was. Definitely a reason for a little trip to Firenze…

2. Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, Royal Academy of Arts, London until 18 Jan 2026. Marshall makes large-scale paintings of black Americans, drawing on art history, civil rights, comics, science fiction, and personal memory. It has been described as ‘the show of the season’, so get yourself a ticket.

3. Ai Weiwei: Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White, Pavilion 13, Expo Center of Ukraine, Kyiv, until 30 Nov. I think this is one just for my Ukrainian readers. In this single work exhibition, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, has responded to the war with a monumental artwork of three spheres wrapped in camouflage fabric patterned with animals, creating a symbolic structure that reflects on war, nature, and human connection.

That’s all for today, GC readers.

I’d love to know what you think in the comments about any of the things I’ve talked about this week. Or give me a like, if you like it. Or restack my post on Substack. Or help me spread the word about The Gallery Companion: if you know someone who would be into this newsletter please share it with them. Thanks for reading!

Exciting news if you’re a David Bowie fan. The new, free-to-access V&A East Storehouse in London (which is ace) has just opened up Bowie’s extensive archive to the public.

Also exciting news if you’re a Walter Sickert fan. A new exhibition opening in London on 26 Sept shows rarely seen works by the early 20th-century British artist, including one from the Ennui series on the boredom of married life.

And in another exciting news story about the recent developments in telepathic technology, I give you an extremely short and very potted history of artists who have been inspired by telepathic communication since the late 19th century.

Plus my list of must-see international exhibitions, and art show news from Gallery Companion readers from around the world.

Artists, if you’d like me to give your exhibition a shout-out DM me in the chat function on the Substack app or hit reply to this email. Send me info about it, dates, venue, country, a link to find out more, and a striking image.

Also artists, if your work speaks to any of the ideas in my newsletters, DM me and I’ll include your work in the GC Chat on Substack. That’s exactly what multimedia artist Nastya Kuzmina did when I wrote about art involving drones last week. She created a performance in a circus, training a drone to work with a tiger. I found it funny and thought-provoking.

David Bowie archive at the V&A East Storehouse in London

V&A East Storehouse is a new purpose-built public space for over 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books and 1,000 archives from the V&A’s collections. It opened in May this year, and I think it’s a really exciting project. It’s a new kind of museum experience because it gives visitors a chance to see behind the scenes of a working museum, and to watch curators doing the job of caring for and preserving historical objects.

But the really wonderful thing about this museum is that it gives unprecedented personal access to their collection. Visitors can order an object from the archives which you can get your actual hands on and study up close — just tell them what you want. How fantastic is that? There’s a lot to choose from including fashion, textiles, theatre costumes, jewellery, furniture and much more.

What’s particularly interesting for artists is that there is a huge collection of paintings, and a significant amount of material relating to the history and development of the graphic arts in the UK, spanning from the 19th century to the present day. The material held includes personal papers and correspondence, diaries, sketchbooks and designs, photographs, press cuttings, administrative records and artefacts. Check out the Archive of Art and Design here for more info. For this art history geek it sounds heavenly.

Hardcore fans of David Bowie will be thrilled by the prospect of this research space, given that his archive is now part of the V&A’s collection. I’ve been searching on the V&A’s Order an Object page to find out what’s in his archives. It’s a treasure trove of goodies, with 90,000 objects including costumes, photos, posters, ephemera, merchandise, bootleg albums, scribbled notes and stuff sent to him by fans. Bowie was a collector of stuff, dating back right through his career to his early days.

Less well known about Bowie is that he was a talented visual artist, sketching concepts as part of his creative process, as well as creating artwork for posters and albums.

He was also a painter. This self-portrait below dates back to 1988. It’s definitely got some Egon Schiele vibes going on. Bowie was also an art collector, and had a Schiele in his collection (this is a great video from Sothebys on Bowie’s art collection, what he was interested in collecting and why, and how it inspired his creative output).

Bowie’s paintings date back to his time living in Berlin with Iggy Pop in the late 70s. He loved German Expressionist art and set up a studio there. He didn’t have any personal ambition as a visual artist but he used paint as a way to find resolutions to obstacles he had whilst making music. Whenever he encountered a creative problem he would draw or paint it out. He said this:

If I found myself in some kind of culture-de-sac in the music I’d break it down, the problem, by actually painting it. I try and visualise what the problem was, that the sense of these textures were grating against each other in a way that wasn’t admirable. I try and visualise those textures and paint them and then find out what was wrong. And then when I’d solved that problem I’d take it back into the studio.

In this 8-minute video Bowie talks about his creative process. I love how he articulates the blurring of boundaries between sounds and visuals, his response to criticism of his work, and his advice to steer away from fulfilling other people’s expectations in creative output:

Rarely seen Walter Sickert drawings, paintings and prints

This one’s for all you Walter Sickert fans out there. From 26 September to 19 December the London gallery Piano Nobile will be showing very rarely seen paintings, drawings and prints by the artist. What a treat! The works are from the personal collection of Herbert and Ann Lucas. The exhibition, titled SICKERT Love, Death and Ennui will feature over 80 works, including life drawings and the prints they relate to, and many of the works are accompanied by Sickert’s dedications, colour notes and annotations.

Walter Sickert (1860–1942) is definitely one of my favourite early 20th-century British artists. He was key to the development of modern British art, and was an inspiration to later British artists such as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach. He was influenced by the French impressionist artist Edgar Degas, which you can see in Sickert’s loose brushwork, subtle colour harmonies and interest in urban life. There’s something unsettling and psychologically charged about his street scenes, music hall audiences, domestic interiors, and nudes.

Sickert is perhaps best known for his Camden Town period in the decade before WWI when he painted gritty, working-class subject matter, which was strikingly different from the idealised landscapes and society portraits of the Edwardian art scene. In his Camden Town Murder series (1908-9), sparse bedrooms with a nude female and a clothed man ambiguously hint at prostitution, violence and sexual tension.

One of the stand-out works in this show is from Sickert’s series entitled Ennui from 1913-4, which reflects his interest in the psychological nuances of ordinary lives. In a working-class domestic interior a man sits smoking at the table whilst his wife stands behind with her back to him. This particular scene is a close-up of the husband staring into space. The paintings in this series have been interpreted as being about the boredom of marriage, when the drudgery of daily life has taken hold and all joy has died out.

If you’re a fan, and you can, make sure you get to this exhibition at Piano Nobile in London as I think it will be pretty good.

Scientific breakthrough in telepathy

Scientists have made a major breakthrough in telepathic technology, developing the world’s first device that lets people communicate without speaking. Experts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a wearable gadget, worn around the ears, which uses bone conduction to interpret unspoken words into signals. MIT said the new tech could help people with speech disorders to articulate their thoughts, and also enable wordless communication between two users. Wow! This is exciting and almost incredible!

Artists have been fascinated by telepathy since the late nineteenth century when ideas about the unconscious mind, psychology, hysteria and unexplained paranormal experiences started to be scientifically studied and named. The development of new technologies like X-Rays, which enabled people to see through the body, also contributed to the interest in seeing thoughts in the mind. Edvard Munch, Odilon Redon and Auguste Rodin all explored the topic.

The French artist and animator Emile Cohl (1857-1938) made a film in 1910 exploring the inner thoughts of an hysterical man, Le Retapeur de Cervelles (The Creator’s Brain). It’s also interesting to watch as an example of really early artistic film-making:

Throughout the 20th century artists have continued to give material and visual form to the silent communication of thoughts. Abstract, surrealist and conceptual artists have explored the subject of telepathy. Joan Miró, for example, explored the unconscious thoughts of the mind through ‘automatic’ imagery, suppressing conscious control over the making process:

In later years, the development of new Cold War technologies undoubtedly re-energised the interest in the potential of telepathic communications. Conceptual artists since the 1960s explored dematerialising artworks, creating new relationships between artists and audiences, and ideas about telepathy fitted right in to performance-based projects. The Austrian collective Haus-Rucker-Co, for example, encouraged audiences to influence their own environments with their thoughts. Their Mind Expander series (1967-1969) consisted of various helmets that could alter the perception of those wearing them.

More recently artists like Marina Abramovic have also been inspired by the transmission of intangible thoughts between two people. In the series Point of Contact with her collaborator Ulay, they silently explored the presence and energy that resonated between them.

Recent developments in communication technology have inspired other contemporary artists such as Susan Hiller, Nam June Paik, Fabrice Hyber, and Sigmar Polke to explore this subject too. These are just a few examples of artists who have been interested in the subject of telepathy, but there are so many more I haven’t mentioned. It’s a big topic.

I wonder how the realisation of actual telepathic technology will inspire artists interested in this subject today. Please share your thoughts and let me know if your work relates to this subject.

Three exhibitions I’d like to see

1. Man Ray: When Objects Dream, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York until 1 Feb 2026. Major exhibition devoted to the artist’s experimentation with rayographs, a new technique he pioneered in 1921 to make photographs without a camera. The show includes many of Man Ray’s most famous images. If you’re a fan of Surrealism and Dada this is one not to miss.

2. Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists, National Gallery, London until 8 February 2026. It’s all about small dots of colour in Paris in the 1880s. Paintings by artists including Seurat, Van Gogh, Signac and Pissarro from the Kröller-Müller Museum’s collection. What’s not to like? Unless of course you’re not interested in the neo-impressionists, which some people find a bit vacuous.

3. 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia until 22 November 2025. This exhibition interweaves the resilience of Indigenous art with the history of Australia, from early contact to the present day. One I definitely won’t get to, sadly. Australian readers if you’ve seen it let me know what you thought in the comments!

News from Gallery Companion readers

Get this date in your diary British readers: Melanie Cormack-Hicks’ Elemental exhibition (8-29 Nov) at the Paragon gallery in Cheltenham delves into the connections between light, colour and landscapes. Her work is inspired by the Cotswolds and the rolling hills and stunning coastline of Sussex.

Over in South Australia, Greta Laundy has a big solo show coming up at Art Images Gallery in Norwood. Drawing inspiration from landscapes like the Botanic Gardens, Coorong, and Kangaroo Island, Laundy’s fleeting impressions are transformed into layered abstract paintings, inviting viewers to see the familiar in new and unexpected ways.

In the USA Ann Pham will be participating in Women Artists of the DMV, the first ever survey of established and emerging female visual artists working in Maryland, Virginia, and the Greater Washington DC metro area. Pham, whose art explores our interconnectedness with each other and our planet, will show work at the Strathmore Mansion in North Bethesda from 4 Oct to 8 Nov.

Also in the US Andrea Morganstern currently has a solo show with Museum Mile Contemporary. In her painting and sculpture Morganstern creates abstract biomorphic forms by fusing elements of the human body, animals and plants, using dots as building blocks. It’s wonderful stuff.

That's all for today, GC readers. I’d love to know what you think in the comments about any of the bits n bobs above.

And please help me spread the word about The Gallery Companion. If you know someone who would love this newsletter please share it with them, and restack my post!

Some correspondence with the ever-thoughtful artist Martin Cody, which led me to think about where inspiration comes from.

Reflections on news this week that the British public are becoming ever-more sceptical of Net Zero climate targets. Landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy, who currently has a retrospective at National Galleries Scotland, is a tonic to this. His art connects us to the beauty of the natural world. But what impact can art realistically have on our actions?

And with the step-up in bombings on Ukraine by Russia this week, I’ve been thinking about artists who have explored connections between art and military technology over the years.

Plus my list of must-see international exhibitions, and news from Gallery Companion artist subscribers from around the world.

Where does inspiration come from?

Earlier this week I received an email update from one of my favourite artists, Martin Cody. Martin is a sculptor based in Bristol in south west England. He is an improvisor at heart, interested in exploring the possibilities of material. And he buzzes with ideas and plans. His work ethic is inspiring. I visited him earlier this year in a pop-up studio where he was trialling things out in a new space.

Since July Martin has been back in his studio, and this was some of what he wrote to me:

I seem to have been sifting and filtering old and new ideas, by throwing together materials of one sort or another. I have shelved, or rejected these going along and now I have one or two lines of development as my focus for the next year. One of the things I did resolve was those annoying little card boxes you saw at the open studios; the ones with the line drawings on them. I glued a stack of them together to make larger boxes, and treated the surfaces with paint and more line. The results connected to some other stuff I made last year and therefore clarified for me what was going on. I am no longer annoyed by little boxes.

What I love about this description of his process is the connections Martin makes backwards and forwards, the experimentation, the reworking of old materials into new objects, and the resolution of sticky problems. I’m sure this will sound familiar to many artists reading this. And it reminds me of something the American artist Tara Donovan once said about the hard graft of making art:

Inspiration is a joke. Real artists sit down and work.

Donovan uses familiar, mass-produced, mundane objects like straws, cups, buttons, pins and rubber bands to create sculptures that she builds through repetition and layering to create objects that have an almost uncanny feel to them.

Her work featured in the brilliant sculpture exhibition When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery in London last year, which I reviewed.

Donovan describes herself as being like a scientist in the studio, performing experiments, seeing what she can make materials do. I really like her work:

Have we stopped caring about climate change?

Exclusive research for The Times newspaper has revealed a big increase in the number of people who believe the dangers of climate change have been exaggerated, despite all the scientific evidence. Amongst the public there’s a growing reluctance to do anything about it.

The findings stand in stark contrast to polling undertaken in 2021, when a sizeable group was broadly in favour of Britain’s Net Zero target (a legally binding goal set in 2019 that commits the UK to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050).

What’s changed? Partly it’s the continual voicing of climate change scepticism by political leaders like Trump: doubt creeps in when other countries aren’t on board with reducing emissions. It gives us permission to question the point of even trying.

But that’s not the main reason. This recent polling indicates that an increasing number of people are less willing to sacrifice their own money to meet national carbon targets. British consumers are struggling to keep afloat with rising energy bills, food inflation, the price of holidays and the cost of living generally. Climate change is way down the list of worries right now, a problem for another day.

The realities of people’s pocket books is a powerful opinion-driver, and it has left me wondering to what extent art can change behaviours on climate issues.

Artists like Andy Goldsworthy still give me a bit of hope. Goldsworthy is a British artist best known for the ephemeral art he makes in the landscape. His works are short-lived, delicate sculptures using only the materials that he finds around him — stones, leaves, sticks, fallen branches, sheep wool, ice, mud, feathers, bushes, flotsam from beaches. He photographs these interventions before they disappear again.

Some rare pieces, like the Tilberthwaite Touchstone Sheepfold in Cumbria, are permanent and have become pilgrimages for walkers:

Goldsworthy has never been part of the Art Establishment, although he is widely loved by the British public: back in the 1990s his photography books were popular, and school kids often learn about his work because it’s so approachable and fun. The sort of art that Goldsworthy creates connects with people on a basic level: nature is beautiful and our relationship with it is precious. This early documentary Rivers and Tides (2001) about Andy Goldsworthy’s art practice is 45 mins of pure, quiet joy if you have time to watch it.

Meanwhile New York is gearing up for Climate Week later in September, with loads of events from arts organisations, museums and galleries lined up. The artist Maya Lin is taking the message on to the streets with a series of posters for bus shelters titled What If?, prompting the public to think about environmental issues.

Lin hopes the posters will spark curiosity, hope and a sense of individual and collective responsibility for the future.

But how much do these projects really effect change on the individual level? Art certainly sparks reflection; it moves people and can shift perspectives. But it can’t solve systemic political and economic issues that affect people’s daily lives. The new polling from The Times shows that people prioritise their actions to maintain standards of living, including minimising climate issues if it has an impact on household budgets.

I’d love to know what you think about this. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Photographing Drones

One of the things I’ve been watching with interest in the war between Russia and Ukraine is the development of drone technology. Ukraine’s production and deployment of drones using AI has been a story of innovation in this awful conflict.

My mind always goes to artistic responses, and it has been making me think about art and military technologies during the Cold War era. One notable artist collective was Experiments in Art and Technology, otherwise known as E.A.T. Set up in 1967 by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, and engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer from Bell Labs, E.A.T. aimed to explore new creative possibilities with emerging technologies — computers, electronics, robotics, satellites, communications systems — matching artists with technical help to develop their projects.

But back to drones. One of the most interesting contemporary artists for me on the subject of art and military technology is the American photographer Trevor Paglen. His work explores surveillance, technology, aesthetics and politics, and he has spent a lot of time on the Nevada border photographing drones at the nearby Nellis Range where most US military drone technology is tested.

If you’re not familiar with Paglen’s work I would recommend this video as an introduction — it’s fascinating viewing and I love the questions he asks about what we don’t know and don’t see. He’s interesting too on the early landscape photography of the USA, undertaken by the Department of War for mapping purposes, and how his own work relates to the history of art. As always I’d love to know your thoughts.

Three exhibitions I’d like to see

1. The Quantum Effect, San Marco Arts Centre, Venice until 23 Nov 2025. Immersive exhibition exploring exciting quantum things like parallel universes, time travel, supersymmetry (whatever that is) and dark matter. It’s got some big names, like Jeff Koons and Man Ray.

• Steve McQueen, Occupied City, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 12 Sept — 25 Jan 2026. 34-hour immersive film projected on to the museum facade, exploring the stories of more than 2,000 Amsterdam locations from the Nazi occupation in WWII and today. You can also watch it with sound in comfort inside the museum.

• Andy Goldsworthy, Fifty Years, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh until 2 Nov 2025. Huge retrospective of landscape artist Goldsworthy’s career. Outdoor art presented indoors. It’s had RAVE reviews. If you’ve seen it let me know your thoughts as I’m unlikely to get to Edinburgh by early Nov, sadly.

News from Gallery Companion readers

Over in Berlin, Lucy Powell is running the Hildegard project space for transformative cultural practices in a large wild garden on the edge of the city, with events planned over the next few weeks. In London Caroline Banks will be exhibiting work with film makers, painters, graphic designers, photographers and sculptors at Cumberland Road Studios as part of the Open House Festival on 20-21 Sept. In Switzerland painter Sibylle Laubscher is showing abstract works that shift between observation and imagination at the Reinach Business Park on 17 Sept. And in Brussels until 21 Sept Maja Kaurin is showing collage works as part of the group exhibition Collective Roots: Innerscapes of Healing, which brings together artists whose practices illuminate the healing power of art.

Artists, if you’d like me to give your exhibition a shout-out DM me in the chat function on the Substack app or hit reply to this email. Send me info about it, dates, venue, country, a link to find out more, and a striking image. Keep the info you send me short and sweet so I can quickly summarise.

That’s all for today, folks. If you know someone who would love this newsletter please share it with them!

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I’m Victoria Powell, the voice behind The Gallery Companion.

It has been a while since I last emailed you, so I want to update you on a few changes I’m making to the format of my emails from now on, and the stuff I’ll be writing about.

Every other Friday (or so) I’ll send you a newsletter choc-full of art-related things that I’m thinking about, links to inspiring videos about artists and their practice, news about interesting-looking international exhibitions, stories about art (contemporary and historical), and features on the artists who subscribe to The Gallery Companion.

Less long-form essay (like I used to write) and more smorgasbord of delicious art tit-bits. I’m based in the UK so some of my content will inevitably skew to exhibitions and news going on here, but you are an international readership so I’ll do my best to cover far and wide. Even better if you can send me news of exhibits from your neck of the woods that you think are worth sharing with other readers.

There will be lots in The Gallery Companion newsletter to inspire you, so it’s a read-it-over-several-goes type of email. I would love to know what you think — please comment and like. I use Substack to send out my emails, so the easiest way to share your thoughts with me and other readers is to click through to the app or website.

Flags, flags, flags.

It has been a red and white summer here in England. ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ has seen a spontaneous celebration of the English flag. The St George’s flag has been hoisted up on street lampposts, motorway gantries, and buildings; roundabouts, potholes and street crossings have been painted red and white; cars festooned; and people have hit the streets draped in flags.

Unlike in the USA, where it’s normal to celebrate and revere the American flag, and where you see the Stars and Stripes flying proudly everywhere, ‘Raise the Colours’ has sent Poor Old England into a bit of an existential crisis.

The media has been agonisingly hand-wringing about what it means to be English, patriotism, the politics of class, and the divisive symbolism of the St George’s flag. Celebrating all things English is not something we often do here (big sporting events excepted), so it has been an interesting debate to observe. Flying the English flag has been associated with racism, the far right, populism and the English working class, and has raised uncomfortable questions about the success of multiculturalism in our country.

My mind always goes to how artists respond to these events and questions. And there’s no better artist for this topic than the great British photographer of the working class, Martin Parr.

Parr, who is now in his 70s, has been quietly snapping expressions of Englishness for decades. His photographs capture the richness and quirkiness of our English culture with deadpan humour and honesty.

The image of the crowd above was taken at the annual St George’s Day parade in 2018 in West Bromwich, one of the most deprived areas of the UK, which overwhelmingly voted to leave the EU in the Brexit referendum in 2016.

What I love about this particular image is how Parr has hard-cropped so much into the shot. It’s a busy crowd, but there’s also a quiet focus on the girl in the left foreground. She has an almost defiant look despite her playful bug antennae, supported by the proud distant gaze of the blonde woman standing over her shoulder, who blends seamlessly into the sand-coloured house behind her. To the right, a face completely covered by the St George’s flag. This is patriotism rooted in place and family: an expression of identity that the West Brom residents keep on celebrating year after year.

Meanwhile over in the States Trump has created a brouhaha about burning the American flag (American readers, is this an out-of-control problem thing?). One year in jail for that crime he says, although one wonders how that will work with America’s firm freedom of expression rights. Trump’s latest directive aims to restore ‘respect, pride and sanctity’ to the US flag. But as many American artists over the years have explored through their work, you can’t control meaning. The flag as an object is complex and deeply symbolic.

This is a subject the artist Pope L. (1955-2023) addressed in his art practice. He was a multidisciplinary artist and although he isn’t a household name with audiences, his influence on other artists over the years has been profound.

Back in the late 70s he started to make a reputation with a performance called Crawl (1978). In this work he dressed himself in a suit bought from a charity shop and crawled the length of 42nd Street in New York on his hands and knees. Passers-by were forced to confront the incongruity of a man in business attire crawling along the busy sidewalk.

It was a genius performance piece, which drew attention to the homeless people that the average upright citizen walking along the street often tries to ignore. And it probed assumptions about race, poverty, and how we self-police our behaviour in public space. At the time several of Pope L.’s close family members were living on the streets. It was uncomfortable to watch, and it got right under people’s skin in the way that only the most powerful art can.

In 2015 Pope L. created a work about the American flag that raised questions about the rituals and interpretations of it in different contexts. He used the humble onion as a metaphor for the layers of symbolic meaning and performative, constantly-changing aspects of the flag as an object. He painted the onions in red, white, blue, black and green, arranging them in rows on tables, and as the exhibition continued the onions started to sprout, shrivel and rot. In the background, an oversized flag blowing wildly through the gallery, deteriorated as it became frayed and torn.

I have always loved the way Pope L. talked about his art practice. He was a poetic and soulful man. If you want to find out more about his work this interview is a great introduction to his career. Skip to the 16-21 mins mark for his chat about the American flag. I’d love to know your thoughts.

Art censorship is alive and kicking in 2025

Over in the USA Trump has taken aim at The Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum, education and research complex. The White House is concerned that museum programming should not ‘divide Americans based on race’. Trump himself has spoken publicly recently on the issues he believes the Smithsonian has, including that the curating is too focused on ‘how bad slavery was’.

Presumably this would include artworks such as the recently acquired iconic African American Flag, by conceptual artist David Hammons. Red, green and black were the colours of the Black Liberation Flag created in 1920 by Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Pan-Africanist movement. Red denotes the blood that was shed, black is for the people it represents, and green the abundant wealth of Africa. For the artwork Hammons replaced the colours in the Stars and Stripes, calling attention to African American pride in a nation where he believed Black people saw little validation of their worth and contributions to history, culture and society.

No matter what you think of the artwork (and I’m sure readers’ opinions will be divided on this piece), any government intervention into what the public should and shouldn’t see is a troubling development. It’s a battle for control of the narratives of history, and in my view it’s Orwellian. This week The New York Times Daily podcast explored the story — it’s an interesting listen.

But there’s also another problem going on with freedom of expression in the arts which I think is equally as troubling, and that’s the issue of self-censorship amongst artists themselves. In May this year a British report from Freedom in the Arts found 84% of artists don’t feel free to express their politics. Nearly 80% report harassment for stepping out of ideological line, and 78% agree with the statement ‘people working in the arts wouldn’t dare own up to right-of-centre political opinions’. The result is, as the journalist Jo Bartosch has argued, a crippling conformity:

Safe art is not only unsatisfying, it is a product of fear and a sign of decline.

I couldn’t agree more. No matter what your politics, only art that speaks the artist’s true ideas, thoughts and feelings is worth calling art.

I would love to know your thoughts on this topic so please post in the comments section on Substack.

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Taylor Swift, American college football and manipulating audiences

And finally to Taylor Swift. The news that her latest release The Life of a Showgirl is imminent has filled this Swiftie with joy. I spent far too long the other day listening to Taylor in conversation with her fiancé Travis Kelce and his brother on their podcast New Heights. It’s not my usual listening stomping ground, but I was hooked in when Taylor started talking about the construction of her live shows, and the spell-binding spectacle that she intricately created on her Eras tour. She said this:

I wanted it to be references that I thought were really high concept and high value for fans, and for them to see things that they hadn’t necessarily seen before all in one concert. But I wanted to do it at the highest intensity, rapid fire, you’re seeing something new every 15-30 seconds, and so it feels like you’re scrolling in an algorithm. And when I heard reports of people saying that they got actual amnesia after the concerts, I was like, oh I think we did it.

It reminded me of the work of video artist Paul Pfeiffer, whose films recast the visual language of pop spectacle to investigate how media images shape our perception of the world. His films focus on mass audience events (live sports events, stadium concert tours, televised game shows), which he meticulously samples and re-edits to expose the manipulation of the crowd. In this video he talks the viewer through this process. It’s a fascinating — and revealing — watch:

And something that Pfeiffer said in this video struck me as perhaps one useful definition of art. What do you think?

I think of art as the finger that points. To me there’s a value of becoming more conscious of the manipulation. My agenda is to call attention to that process of mediation… to take something that’s the most familiar and to defamiliarise it becomes a process of breaking the spell. To produce almost like a kind of disturbance.

Three exhibitions I’d like to see

1. William Kentridge, Listen to the Echo at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. 4 Sept 25—18 Jan 26. Retrospective of one of South Africa’s most important contemporary artists. Kentridge grew up during the apartheid era, and is best known for his charcoal drawings and animated films, but also works with tapestry, sculpture and prints, and in theatre and opera. I love his work.

2. Jenny Saville, The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK. Until 7 Sept 25 so get in quick. British artist Jenny Saville paints the human body, describing her creative process as ‘laying down a problem’, destroying and rebuilding, until something that doesn’t at first make sense starts to make sense. Essential viewing.

3. Paul Klee + Ray Johnson: TYPOFACTURE at SFMoMA, San Francisco, USA. 23 Aug 25—April 26. Two of my faves in one show, exploring the influence of pioneering Bauhaus artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) on Ray Johnson (1927-1995), an American collage and correspondence artist. Klee’s merging of myth, symbol, figuration and expression shaped Johnson’s approach. Sounds excellent.

Calling all my artist readers!

Every week I will be featuring exhibition news from my artist subscribers around the world. If you’ve got an exhibition coming up, let me know! Hit reply, send me info about it, dates, venue, country, a link to find out more, and a striking image. Keep the info you send me short and sweet so I can quickly summarise. This is a growing community (4,000+ readers) so it’s a great way to get some eyes on your art!

That’s a wrap!

Thanks as always for reading, folks. I hope there were some good clicks here for you. And please share with people you think would love this newsletter. I would be very grateful if you would help spread the word.

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I’ve been thinking about lines this week — the ones that you can see and the invisible ones that you can only feel. There are spade-fulls of both in Frank Auerbach’s charcoal drawings from the 1950s and 60s, which I saw in an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London on Thursday. It is powerful art, and I’ll come back and talk more about it in a moment.

But first, more about lines. I’ve been reading a book by the geographer Dr Maxim Samson called Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World. Geography isn’t usually a subject I avidly lean towards, but I was tempted by the intriguing title and it was a fascinating read. Samson’s book is an exploration of the hidden geographies that affect the way we exist in and move through our physical environments. Rather than focusing on natural boundaries such as oceans, rivers, forests and mountains, he talks about the immaterial boundaries that we can’t see but whose presence impacts on us and how we engage in the world every day.

These are not lines that are visible, but we experience them nonetheless. We sense them. We feel them. We consciously and subconsciously process and act on them. Walking around any big city, for example, we might notice how demographics change, how architecture changes, and how the languages we hear being spoken change. These subtle shifts can affect the directions we move through space and sometimes impact on the way we communicate through our bodies. We might choose routes because we perceive them to be safer or prettier, or because we feel a stronger sense of belonging there.

Samson discusses cultural lines that categorise people in different ways in geographical space. Identity plays a huge role, both in how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us, and it affects our access to certain places and services. One of the many fascinating examples he draws on is the history of redlining districts in the USA, a practice dating back to the 1930s when government-sponsored mortgage lenders colour-coded neighbourhoods according to risk. Red neighbourhoods had predominantly black residents, whilst green areas had largely white populations.

This impacted on how banks and insurance firms profiled customers, often denying loans to people from red neighbourhoods. Redlining was outlawed in 1968, but its legacy continues today in cities like Detroit, whose 8 Mile Road is a conceptual boundary between the white, wealthy suburban neighbourhoods to the north of it, and the poorer districts south of it with predominantly black residents. Locals describe it as being like a border.

As I was reading about these ideas in Samson’s book I was reminded of a film I saw in an exhibition last year by the New York-based Argentinian artist Mika Rottenberg. Cosmic Generator (2017) explores ideas about the movement and restriction of goods and people, the visible and invisible divisions that are constructed to separate us, and who and what exactly can circulate freely in particular places around the world.

The film is set in the cities of Calexico and Mexicali where the US/Mexico border meets, and in the mind-bogglingly vast Yiwu Market in China, a global hub for the trade in plastic commodities. Yiwu is where 80% of the world’s Christmas decorations and two-thirds of the world’s toys are bought and then shipped around the globe. The significant Chinese population living in Mexicali, whose presence dates back to the early 20th century when merchants and farmers first came to the area from China, connects Yiwu and these two towns on the US/Mexico border in this film.

The residents of Calexico and Mexicali are divided by a 7.5 metre high metal barrier, and movement north across the border is severely restricted for the population of Mexicali. It can take hours to cross the international checkpoint, and apps have even been developed by locals to calculate waiting times.

Meanwhile US citizens crossing the border in search of cheaper goods and services in the southern city are fast-tracked in both directions. Mexicali is known for its underground network of tunnels through which local residents subvert this restriction of movement from the physical barrier above ground. Rottenberg’s surreal film explores these ideas of permeability, restriction and division, the collapse of time and space in our world, and the attempts by authorities to reinforce the lines. She talks about these ideas in this 5 minute video:

But back to Frank Auerbach and his charcoal portraits. Auerbach is one of Britain’s most revered contemporary artists, whose paintings are characterised by his thickly layered impasto technique. He really slaps on the paint in heavy, textured strokes, building up layers of colour which he barely mixes together. The effect is very expressive, and there’s often a visceral feeling about them, like he’s communicating a raw truth about the sitter. He paints the same people repeatedly, friends and family members, over long periods of time.

Auerbach’s charcoal portraits are interesting because they share a similarity with his paintings in their texture and rawness. He has talked about how he would draw the faces of his sitters over and over again, spending hours on a portrait only to rub it out, unsatisfied, and to start again all over. He would use the same piece of paper, which would disintegrate through this process of constant erasing over months. He just patched up the bits of paper that had fallen apart and carried on.

The finished works are characterised by strong black lines which lead the eye around sharply contrasting light and dark areas. But the drawings are also infused throughout by a sort of ghostly blur, which is evidence of his previous lines and his repeated failed attempts to capture the essence of his subjects. One of the sitters we see several times in this show is Stella West with whom Auerbach was in a relationship for many years. Auerbach recently said this about his charcoal heads:

When I got down something that looked like even a fairly skilful adumbration of the thing in front of me it seemed somehow too slight, and the relationship between myself and Stella who was sitting for me seemed too momentous in order to leave it at that. So I would rub it out again and again and again and I would do it three nights a week.

It seemed to me as I was looking at Auerbach’s charcoal portraits that his strong black lines (and those that had been rubbed out underneath) represented another kind of invisible boundary in space — that boundary between two people that we can feel and sense but we can’t see. This recent podcast interview with Auerbach, in which he talks about his childhood growing up in England as a refugee from the Nazis and his life as an artist, is well worth a listen:

As always, Gallery Companions, I’d love to know what you think about any of the artists and ideas I’ve talked about here. And please share your experiences of the invisible lines in our world that have had an impact on you.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the practice of looking closely at things. It started when one of The Gallery Companion readers sent me some wonderful writing and drawings that her boys Henry (age 10) and Rufus (age 9) had done in response to an exhibition in London that I reviewed a few weeks ago. The show is called When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture, and it explores the history of contemporary static-but-dynamic sculpture.

With a brief to write what they thought about the artworks, my young friends spent over an hour deeply engrossed in looking closely at them. Henry drew the sculptures that interested him as well as describing the works in formal and sensory terms, comparing them to things he recognised in the world.

Rufus was philosophical in his response to the artworks, and thought hard about what it could all mean. He said that writing his ideas down helped him decide what he thought. Here’s some of what he wrote:

When forms come alive… what could it mean? What is a form? How is it alive? The first thing I see on my way in is the statue of only the bottom half of a human. Maybe a form is human, as humans are alive?

I’ve just entered and the chandeliers are jumping like jellyfish in the sea! The next piece of art is made of foam. Or at least I think it is. Jellyfish-like lights and foam are both watery, so a ‘form’ could mean watery? Then there’s what I call ‘liquid bricks’ melting over chairs. To prove my point on form meaning watery, the sea is alive, so ‘when forms come alive’ could mean ‘when oceans come alive’.

The critical thinking and stretching of imagination evident in both boys’ observations made me think once again about how valuable art is for children’s learning. This is a subject I’ve written about before. The benefits spill over in every direction, not only in the process of making art but also in thinking about it. Kids learn to identify patterns and structures, think about scale and perspective, describe and question, imagine and analyse.

Then there’s the social and emotional learning that goes on. Contemplating the meanings in art helps children to develop their self-awareness and relational understanding, as well as stimulating them to think critically about the world around them. This recent video from the education team at MoMA demonstrates how they use methods of teaching and learning to effectively engage children in their programmes:

The practice of looking closely, of slow contemplation, is the opposite of what is going on for the majority of children nowadays, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Discussions of his new book The Anxious Generation have been dominating my podcast feeds this week, and it sounds like fascinating reading. In the age of social media and smartphones, Haidt argues that the mass migration of childhood from the real to the virtual world has created a generation of kids who are more lonely, risk-averse and anxious than ever.

One of the many compelling arguments Haidt makes in what he calls the ‘Great Re-Wiring of Childhood’ is that current levels of smartphone usage are likely to have a detrimental impact on brain development. The pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain that allows us to formulate tasks and carry them out with sustained concentration, develops rapidly between the ages of 11 and 16. And just at that crucial age we are now giving our children devices that are designed to distract them constantly. The American teenager receives 250 phone notifications per day on average. That’s 250 times a day when their attention is interrupted.

It has always been hard to get teens to focus on their homework, but doing it repeatedly day after day helps a child’s brain to develop good executive function. Without this training of their young minds, Haidt asks what this might mean for their functioning in adulthood. This podcast interview with him is really interesting (and concerning) listening:

But back to the art of looking closely. As I was scrolling through my Instagram feed this week one image I saw made me look longer than a second. It was a photo of two manhole covers on a pavement, posted by the artist Tiffany Arntson:

The accompanying words read:

ATTEN-SHUN!
Two dots.
Also...
a colon without a sentence
2 circular grids
64 squares
2 embossed WATER signs
6 fluffy white broken blossoms
some moss
a grass stalk
many raindrops
1 square foot of tarmac

Things like this sometimes catch my eye as I pass. It looks like nothing, but there’s enough of a pull to make me turn and look again. Then look some more. I find something in the looking but I’m not really sure what. Attention. That’s what. It kept me staring at this small patch of pavement. When you pay attention, and follow the thread that’s pulling you, there is an intangible connection to be had. Don’t shun it. Especially when it looks like there’s nothing there.

I spent a good few minutes staring at this photo, looking for all the things that Arntson saw in it, and thinking about the way our minds go here, there and everywhere. I love the relationship between images and words in Arntson’s creative practice. It’s like a double shot. Looking, and then being gently encouraged to look some more.

Arntson’s practice of sustained looking reminded me of something I heard the British landscape painter Rackstraw Downes say about what he calls ‘the wandering eye’. He says, ‘you don’t see an image part by part, it unfolds’. When he looks at his surroundings he sees height, depth, unusual shapes and structures, the drama of light moving across the space. And he is constantly learning as he transfers those elements to his canvas. The interest that initially attracts Downes to paint a scene disappears as he gets caught up in the details of what he’s looking at and the challenge of how to represent them on a flat two-dimensional surface with coloured paint.

In this video he talks about his practice of close looking. I found his thoughts on truth, perspective and painting as a metaphor for reality really interesting:

As always, Gallery Companions, I’d love to know your thoughts on any of the ideas and artists I’ve talked about here. And give Henry and Rufus some feedback on their exhibition reviews — I’m sure they will be reading your comments.

I’ve often heard artists talk about how making art for them is not optional, it’s essential. Life-saving, even. I was thinking about that this week as I was watching an interview with one of Britain’s leading conceptual artists, Martin Creed. As well as making videos, he's a musician, he paints, creates installations, uses lights and neon, and makes stuff.

The first question he was asked in the interview was ‘what do you do?’ I found his response really interesting. Instead of saying ‘I’m an artist’, Creed said,

I try to live my life in the world that I find myself in. And I spend most of my time trying to help myself to feel better because most of the time I don’t feel so good.

What he does every day, he says, is ‘to try and find excitement and beautiful things and people’ as a coping mechanism for the way he feels — and it’s an endless quest. The interview is one of the clearest explanations I’ve ever heard for the meaning of the phrase ‘art is life’. As Creed understands it, there is no separating line between what he creates and anything else he does in his day. Other people might call what he does ‘art’ but he’s not sure what ‘art’ actually is. ‘Art is what people collectively think it is’, he says. ‘It’s really hard to pin down, like love or magic’.

I know what he means. Readers who have followed me since the early days of The Gallery Companion will know that Creed is one of my favourite artists. I think it’s because I see a relatable struggle for something in everything he creates. That’s the connecting thread that runs through his diverse body of work. His art is his thoughts and feelings, boiled down to a basic something. What that ‘something’ is I haven’t been able to express clearly until now, but I’ve felt it when I’ve seen his work and it has made sense to me in that fleeting moment.

Take Work No: 3071: Peanut Butter on Toast from 2018, for example. The 'toast' is made of patinated bronze, the peanut butter is covered in gold leaf. He's used the traditional materials of classical sculpture to represent a slice of bread. He has made something so ordinary, so pedestrian, such an everyday thing for so many people, into a valuable sculpture and put it on a pedestal. It’s a bog-standard breakfast, but also I can’t think of anything more delicious.

It’s the simplicity of his ideas that gets me. This particular work is funny and a bit bonkers, and yet there’s a profoundness in it. Creed said his inspiration for Peanut Butter on Toast came from the time he once stayed in a Buddhist monastery. The monks would line up for breakfast and devour jars of peanut butter, spreading it thickly on toast. Creed said, "Everything that they’ve given up — greed — or that they were trying to give up, was all in that peanut butter.” It’s a representation of humans being human.

I really connect with the repetition in Creed’s work, too. ‘Repetition is comforting’, he says. Yes, it is. You see it in a lot of what he does. His neon sentences, for example, in which he solidifies the throw-away phrases and words we repeat to ourselves, drawing attention to the ritual language we fall back on in many situations to comfort each other. We roll out the phrase 'Everything is going to be alright' all the time. This light installation, Work No 790: Everything is going to be alright (2007) has been repeated in various forms and contexts around the world over the years including at the remote Braemar Castle in Scotland in 2018. It’s like he’s trying to catch something evanescent in material form, to pin down something that can’t easily be grasped.

Many viewers put his work in the ‘hard to understand’ conceptual art camp. Worried there’s some deeper meaning that they are missing. ‘Why is that art?’ is quite often the (angry) reaction to his work. One gallery-goer threw eggs at the wall in response to his Turner Prize piece Work No 227: The lights going on and off back in 2001, mournfully shouting that artists' skills were dying out. But Creed is not trying to be clever. He’s trying to make things as simple as possible, because, he says, ‘simplicity is something you can hold on to’.

This artwork, for example, Work No. 3113: Trees, Flowers, Seas, Please (2018). In it he represents a landscape in coloured, layered words. In our everyday lives we feel the power of those different elements, trees, flowers and the sea, when we take time to stop and look. The simplicity of Creed’s request is almost child-like. It’s a profound yearning for nature that we all feel, and yet there’s an uneasiness we also all feel about what he’s communicating because of the constant narratives around human-driven climate change.

Listening to Creed talk about the ‘why’ of his practice in this interview — his mental struggle to grasp on to something real to help him get through the day — has put all of his work in a new light for me. He says this:

A work is helpful because it’s a solid thing, it’s something you can rely on. That square of red, it’s like a relief. That’s what I think when I see a painting by Frank Stella, for example. One of his black paintings. I think, “that’s a relief“. You know?

Yes, I do know. It’s definitely how I feel when I have a connection with a work of art or a piece of music. I can’t think of a better way to describe it other than to say that it’s a relief.

I would love to know what you think about Martin Creed’s art, and any of the ideas I’ve talked about here. And if you have time to watch it, the interview is great. It’s about 30 minutes long, but it flies by because he’s so interesting to watch and listen to. There’s a 4 minute video piece that he talks about in the interview called Work No. 1701: You Return that speaks to all of these ideas about repetition, simplicity, the struggle, seeking beauty and the relief of art. I’d love to know your response to this, too, even if you don’t have time to watch the interview:

This week I’ve been intrigued by a story that has been in the UK headlines. It’s about the somewhat unscrupulous and highly profitable commercial world of human egg freezing. Now stick with me here, I will get to the art eventually.

Apparently women who are paying to prolong their ‘reproductive window’ by having their eggs extracted and put on ice for the foreseeable are being ripped off left, right and centre by the private medical companies that provide these services. These clinics are not always transparent about costs — which can spiral when you add in the additional hormonal medications that you might need, the annual freezer storage space, and the eventual IVF treatment on top of the basic package.

And now we learn according to a BBC study that over 40% of clinics are potentially in breach of advertising guidance on the success rates for pregnancy. It can be a painful and emotionally draining procedure, and there are concerns that patients are undergoing treatment that they might not need and which might not work anyway.

Back in 2009 there were just 230 egg freezing cycles in the UK, when the technology was used almost exclusively for medical reasons for women who were undergoing chemotherapy or experiencing conditions known to cause infertility. Since then there has been a dramatic rise in the number of women who are having the procedure done for non-medical reasons, in what is called ‘social egg freezing’. The latest data from the UK’s regulatory body, the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority, shows that egg freezing and storage had increased to over 4,000 cycles by 2021, nearly doubling in number in two years from 2019. These statistics are just as dramatic in their rise in the USA.

Clearly there is something going on. It’s partly of course the fact that this procedure exists on the commercial market now and more women know about it, helped by a number of celebrities who have been open about putting their eggs on ice. And with this celebrity endorsement comes the sense that perhaps it’s the normal thing to do. There’s a lot of chat on the internet about the relief and empowerment that women feel once they have done it, describing it as an ‘insurance policy’ against nature and the passing of time. In the BBC documentary Egg Freezing and Me, released this week, the women who opt in to this procedure can afford to do it, and seem happy with their choices.

There are many things about this phenomenon of social egg freezing that I find fascinating: what it says about the strong biological urge to reproduce; the expectations of and on women around career and family; social norms about motherhood; the uses of scientific knowledge; the increasing amount of non-medical procedures that women put themselves through; and the new industries targeting women with culturally-generated anxieties about their ageing bodies.

But what I find most interesting about this story is what doesn’t really get talked about much: who exactly is having these procedures and why. As I was watching the BBC documentary it occurred to me that the connecting threads were the women’s socio-economic circumstances and their age: they were professionally successful, educated, financially solvent women in their mid to late thirties. But the common assumption is that most women who freeze their eggs are twenty-somethings who want to delay childbirth as they pursue their careers. Egg freezing is a way of keeping their options open.

In her recent book Motherhood on Ice, the Yale anthropologist Marcia C. Inhorn has explored the factors that motivate women to freeze their eggs. What her research has found runs counter to this conventional wisdom about the who and why of egg freezing. Inhorn argues that there is, in her words, a ‘mating gap’ — a shortage of partners for university-educated women.

Of the 150 American women she interviewed, just 36 had frozen their eggs for medical reasons. The others were overwhelmingly in their thirties and motivated by partnership problems. 82% of them were single and at or near to the ‘fertility cliff' of 37 when women’s fertility starts to decline significantly. They wanted to be mothers, but couldn’t find suitable reproductive partners who had the three ‘E’s: eligible, educated and equal.

Inhorn’s explanation for the rise in egg freezing is about social class and power dynamics between the sexes. Her research is backed up by demographic data that shows there is a growing educational disparity between women and men in the USA, a situation that is mirrored across the global north. The women she interviewed often talked about their experiences of dating — how men feel intimidated by their success, how they didn’t like being with a woman who is better educated, more accomplished, or makes more money than they do.

Women have historically engaged in hypergamy, or ‘marrying up’, partnering with someone slightly older, better educated and wealthier. And it makes me wonder whether the reverse of this could ever be the norm for men? In another world maybe, but definitely not in this one. It’s that age-old thing that many men struggle with: the threat of powerful women. If socio-economics is the underlying reason why more women are turning to treatments like egg freezing, then the future of co-parenting looks bleak for a large — and growing — number of women.

The extension of women’s fertility through science and technology is a subject that the contemporary Chinese-American artist Xin Liu explores in her work. She is at the age now where she is thinking about her own reproductive potential. Friends have advised her to freeze her eggs: ‘Just do it, don’t even think about it’. The frozen mixed-media sculptures in her recent work are inspired by biological and medical innovations in the field of cryogenics and egg freezing. Some resemble bone structures that look warped and twisted as she imagines the changes in her body from these procedures. Liu says this about it:

Reproductive technologies claim to solve all our problems, but in fact dramatically change our bodies. We freeze time in this biological machine because we need to get a better career, we need to go study, we haven’t found a good partner yet. I feel like it’s all about productivity, whether time is useful or not.

In this sense she links our bodies to capitalist ideas of labour, time and efficiency. This is something I’ve written about before. Liu is a believer in the good stuff that comes from science and technology, our ability to change our lives and the world through our ever-increasing knowledge — as am I. But I also agree with her when she says,

let’s hope there’s a limit we can reach, because it also strips away the fundamental idea of what it means to be human. In this calibrated, measured world, art allows beauty and emotion to be part of the process.

I’m really interested in Liu’s art, which is a mix of video art, performance and sculpture. It ranges across different subjects from space exploration to the materiality of oil to ideas of home, reproduction, mutation and more.

This Art21 video landed serendipitously in my inbox this week just as I was thinking about these issues of women’s fertility. And it reminded me once again (if I ever needed reminding) of the value of art to keep it real and human. I think she’s a really thoughtful artist and I’d love to know what your response is to her work and the ideas I’ve talked about here.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see the Yoko Ono exhibition at Tate Modern in London. I’ve been putting off writing about it because, well, I didn’t quite know what to say. It is a huge show spanning a prolific creative life over more than fifty years, and frankly any contemporary artist that has a retrospective of this size in one of London’s biggest public art galleries is surely worthy of serious consideration.

Ono is a much maligned and misunderstood figure in the popular culture of the past half century because of her marriage to the musician John Lennon. She’s the incarnation of the idea of female manipulation: a siren who lured Lennon away from the lads and broke up his band The Beatles. All nonsense of course, but because of this narrative she has been the target of possibly the worst, most vitriolic criticism that any female artist has ever received. The misogyny and racism directed at her over the years has been extreme; it’s the kind of abuse that makes me rage against our patriarchal system.

So I was already primed to embrace her career’s work and come away thinking how underrated Ono has been. And I really tried. But the speed at which I walked through the exhibition spoke volumes: I was almost as quick as my students were — and that’s saying something.

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not that there was nothing interesting to see here. There were at least three works amongst the more than 200 on show that made me linger more than a minute. I’ll come back to those. But I have to admit I found most of it a bit boring and some of it cutesy and quite naff. There wasn’t much depth to a lot of it. That’s fine in itself — it’s not a requirement for art to be deep or hard to understand to be considered ‘great’. Look at the success of the Impressionists, for example.

But it did make me ask once again a question that I don’t have an easy answer to, which is what makes an artist ‘great’? As much as I want to consolidate the groundswell of critical opinion that is positively reassessing Ono’s artistic legacy, all I can say is that I can appreciate her art as a part of our cultural history but most of it I think is completely uninteresting.

The most significant part of her career in this sense was in the 1960s. At this time artists were once again breaking the boundaries of what art could be, developing in different directions the conceptual work that the Dadaists of the early 20th century had begun. Lots of experimenting with words, with the body, and with audience participation.

Yoko Ono was groundbreaking in all of these areas after being influenced in her education in the 1950s by experimental musicians and artists like John Cage and George Maciunas, who emphasized how art could be made by anyone and could happen anywhere. We are used to this idea of art now, but it was radical at the time. Ono’s early text-based ‘instructional’ pieces developed this idea, describing artworks in words typed on sheets of paper, leaving the viewer to complete the piece by doing the action, or even just imagining it.

Her book Grapefruit, published in 1964, is page after page of these ‘instructional’ artworks. Each one is thankfully short, often quite surreal and dreamy; but after a while they become a bit tedious. In Dawn Piece from 1963, for example, Ono instructs the viewer to ‘Take the first word that came across your mind. Repeat the word until dawn’. In Painting to be Constructed in Your Head (1961) we are told to ‘Look through a phonebook from the beginning to end thoroughly. List all the combinations of figures you remember after that.’ There’s only so much of this I can read.

The curators have tried their best to bring some of this dry, theoretical stuff alive. We are invited, for example, to participate in Painting to Hammer a Nail from 1961 in which Ono tells us to,

hammer a nail into wood every morning. Also, pick up a hair that came off when you combed in the morning and tie it round the hammered nail. The painting ends when the surface is covered with nails.

We are provided with the basis of the ‘painting’ in the form of a white wooden surface, a hammer and some nails, and encouraged to give it a go, closely supervised by a gallery attendant. God only knows why you would though, unless you’re a bored child.

Many art critics have described Ono’s work as ‘hopeful’: shake hands through a hole in the canvas; play a game of chess where no one can win because all the pieces on the board are white; gush out something lovely about your mum on a post-it note and stick it on a wall. But if you’re a cynic like me you’ll be more likely to find the invitations to participate in this sort of thing a bit cringe. I rolled my eyes at A Box of Smile from 1967, which is a mirrored box you are invited to open and smile back at your reflection.

There’s lots of this peace+love messaging in her art, which is interesting in that it situates her early career in the countercultural hippie era. It’s an artistic response to a particular period in our history, and that fact I can appreciate. But a lot of the art itself is as sophisticated as a school project.

It’s only occasionally when Ono actually creates the work from the instructions and documents it on film that it becomes engaging for me. I loved her visual expression of Lighting Piece from 1955. The instruction is brief: ‘Light a match and watch till it goes out’. Ten years later in 1966, when Ono was part of the Fluxus art collective, she made the most beautiful film version of it. In Film No.1 (‘Match’) we see the match being struck and then the flickering flame, shot with a high-speed camera and then played back at a standard speed, burning and then dying away at an impossibly slow rate. I was mesmerised by it and watched it all the way through, twice.

There are a couple of other films that stood out for me too. Firstly, it was interesting to watch again her most famous artwork, Cut Piece, which Ono performed in 1965 in New York’s Carnegie Hall. In this film Ono sits motionless on the floor of the stage with a pair of scissors next to her, which members of the audience use to snip away her clothing.

While some of the audience are tentative in their takings (largely the women), the same man approaches twice — once cutting a hole in her shirt so that her breast pokes through, and later coming back to remove the top half of her slip and cut the straps of her bra beneath. Ono sits passively throughout, though occasionally her eyes flicker, and at one point she moves her arms to hold her clothing up around her breasts. There’s something deeply moving about watching this film. It’s a quiet expression of the powerlessness that women feel in certain situations. And it’s one of the truly great performance artworks of the 20th century.

The other film that stopped me in my tracks in this exhibition is called Fly, directed by Ono and Lennon in 1970. It depicts a nude woman lying on a bed in front of a window with houseflies crawling over her body, accompanied by a soundtrack in which Ono warbles and screeches. I walked in to the screening room just as a fly was making its way over the woman’s labia. I hadn’t read the blurb on the wall before I went in and got quite a jolt faced with a full-on close-up shot of her vagina. It’s not often that I’m shocked by art. Here’s a snippet of it I filmed:

It was an extraordinary short film, and I was deeply engaged right from the start in watching her motionless body as the flies moved over her skin. It was sort of gross but also beautiful. I thought about how controlled the young woman was in not succumbing to swatting the flies away. It must have been ticklish. And the freedom of those flies, going where they wanted. I’m not sure whether Ono intended this as a feminist statement, but that’s how I read it.

This is where Ono’s work is occasionally very powerful and profound. In a recent BBC radio documentary to mark her 90th birthday we get a glimpse of something deeper than the surface-level positivity that dominates most of her work. She said this of her experience of life:

I felt like I was taking life lying down. I think a lot of women feel that way. In terms of survival I think that many times we have probably had to.

These thought-provoking, viscerally engaging works are, in my opinion, few and far between. So I come back to the question of what makes an artist ‘great’? Yoko Ono’s art is heading into the hallowed halls of the canons of Western art history, underscored by art historians, curators, collectors and cultural institutions. But is it because of the quality of her work or the intersection of her life with other significant cultural figures?

Being a pioneer doesn’t make your work interesting, although it should at least get you due credit. Text-based art became a big thing later in the 1960s as it was taken up by male artists who have been given more attention and praise than Ono for it over the years - artists like Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. This is all of course part of the familiar story that has devalued and minimised women’s achievements throughout the history of art, and is an injustice that many other female artists have had to endure too. I’m sensitive to this, which is one of the reasons why I find it really hard to decide whether Ono’s work is worthy of this level of attention.

As always, Gallery Companions, I’d love to know what you think. Am I being too harsh about Yoko Ono’s work? If you’ve seen the show in London let me know your thoughts on it. And what do you think makes a ‘great’ (as opposed to a ‘good’) artist?

In the fog of doubt and existential ‘what am I doing with my life?’ thoughts that fill my mid-40s mind at the moment, I’ve managed to connect some positive dots this week, with the help of a few things: words of wisdom from a stranger; the art of Barbara Kruger; and something very lovely that one of you said to me.

First up, the stranger. Although she doesn’t feel so much like a stranger because I’ve been reading her weekly emails for years now. She’s called Helen Perry, and she gives advice on small business marketing — building mailing lists, social media strategies, content creation, that sort of thing. I also know about her puppy, I know about her piles of washing, her weekend plans, her skiing holidays, and what she watches and listens to for business and pleasure. When her email lands I always open it. I’ll usually find something valuable in what she shares but mainly I just love how she says it.

In this week’s email Helen told me about how she hasn’t really posted on Instagram at all this year. She used to put out a lot of small biz content, and it was really useful stuff. She has been wondering whether anyone had noticed that she had stopped posting. To be honest I hadn’t.

Why the silence though? ‘It’s not that deep’, she said,

it wasn't planned and it's not an I've-had-it-with-Insta thing. It's about knowing what to post about. When I opened the account 6+ years ago I stuck a yellow post-it note to my computer that said "is it valuable to others?" and it's a yard stick I've used to measure my work against ever since. I'm not sure exactly where the business is going this year or what I'm selling. So if it's not valuable (or doesn't feel authentic) don't post it. 

Aside from the wisdom of avoiding pointless Instagram posting just to be visible, her question made me think about what value my work brings to others. And it also made me think about the exhibition of recent work by the American artist Barbara Kruger, which I had seen the day before at the Serpentine Galleries in London.

Kruger has been making art since the 1970s, and is known for her bold text-based images, which address mechanisms of power, gender, class and capital. All the juicy stuff I love. Through her provocative slogans and images appropriated from mass media, Kruger challenges viewers to critically examine societal norms and values, and asks us to consider what it means to have something ‘useful’ to say in a world saturated with visual and textual information.

There are several really thought-provoking artworks in this show, which brings together room-sized installations, videos, sound and large collage posters. Everything demands your full attention, partly because the information and images come at you thick and fast so it’s hard to keep up unless you stay laser-focused. Blink and you might miss something.

But also because the meaning in every combination of text+image seems profound and really important to absorb. She directly addresses the viewer in single-word statements or short phrases, similar to the visual language of headlines, which creates a sense of urgency. It’s almost like she’s the Oracle.

Take this artwork, for example, in which Kruger has superimposed the words ‘You don’t need to concentrate all the time’ on to an image of a light switch:

It’s true that we can’t actually concentrate constantly, that we have to switch off sometimes. And it’s particularly hard in the face of the firehose of digital information coming at us every day now. But in the context of Kruger’s disconcerting juxtaposition of image and text it feels like she is warning us not to switch off at all, but to do the exact opposite — to keep vigilant about what’s going on around us, what we take for granted, and what we’re not seeing when the lights are off.

Kruger often emphasises that her work is not issue-specific. ‘It’s more of an ongoing commentary’, she says. For me though this piece is about democracy, and how it dies in darkness. With democracies around the world under increasing strain, those fighting for their freedoms and the rule of law urgently need to keep concentrating and shining the spotlight on the erosion of rights happening in plain sight.

I find Kruger’s artworks valuable because they make us critically reflect on the extent to which we question the words and images we see everyday. Frankly, we don’t question them enough. Critical thinking is not only useful, it’s essential. It’s my number one aim in my undergraduate teaching, and it’s what I try to communicate through my writing here too.

So I was really touched by something that one of my readers told me this week about the value my work brings to her. Although I’m paraphrasing a bit here, she basically said she loves what I say about art and how I say it. She told me about an exhibition that she had recently been to see, and how she had spent more time looking at the artworks than she ever would have done in the past. Since she had started reading and listening to The Gallery Companion she had learnt to think about art in different ways. I had given her the knowledge and confidence to look more closely and to trust her own responses.

You know who you are: thank you for sharing that with me. Hearing lovely feedback like this definitely helps in my bleakest middle-aged moments when I’m cursing myself for my lack of financial stability, questioning everything I’m doing, and wondering why on earth I haven’t started saving for a pension yet. In a world saturated with so much vapid information I know at least that there is value in my voice.

As always Gallery Companions, I’d love to know what you think about the art and ideas I’ve talked about here. Are there any writers or podcasters whose content you always read or listen to? What is it about what they say that you love? Please share your favourites in the comments!

You know when you’re looking at art and somehow it manages to convey feelings or sensations that are going on for you at that particular moment in time? I had that experience over and over again this week as I walked round the new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London called When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from this show, although if I’m honest I was just ticking a ‘show them some sculpture’ box for my students before the end of the semester. I definitely wasn’t expecting to be moved by it like I was. Looking at some of these works was almost the equivalent of physically touching and feeling them with your eyes. In the words of the curator Ralph Rugoff, they invite us to look with a ‘tactile gaze’.

When Forms Come Alive is a show exploring the history of contemporary sculptural forms that are static and yet have some sort of dynamic tension in them. The different levels of energy emanating from the objects is palpable. The exhibition is constructed like a sort of theatrical set, with lighting and sound adding to the drama of it. These inanimate objects are the actors on the stage, communicating softly and then loudly, one taking over from the next, speeding up the pace and then slowing it down, as you move through the spaces of the gallery.

‘Restless’ is a great word to describe the sculptural forms in this show. There were works by several big-name artists including Ruth Asawa, Phyllida Barlow and Lynda Benglis, and others whose names were unfamiliar to me despite some having had decades-long careers. Almost everything was interesting. But there were three works in particular that I totally connected with because they perfectly conveyed in material form how I feel about my body, my energy levels and my state of mind at the moment. The concept that ‘form is feeling’ has never been more in evidence for me.

My first ‘ooh wow!’ moment came quite quickly, in response to the Polish artist Olaf Brzeski’s two untitled works from his Little Orphans series (2009). In these artworks he has twisted raw slabs of cast iron in such a way that they resemble thick spongy mattresses which are sort of draped, or rather slumped, over lightweight chairs. The heavy forms bend around the backs and seem to almost slide off the wooden seats, as though they don’t have enough energy to sit up properly. Gravity is pulling the objects down and it feels like only a matter of time before they slip off the seat completely, or collapse the chair under their weight.

There’s a sense of exhaustion conveyed in these forms, a tangible tiredness that pulls you in. It made me think about being stuck on the sofa half-asleep late at night, lounging uncomfortably and desperately wishing I was in bed but being unable to muster the energy to move.

Next to Brzeski’s sculptures was a huge wall of *something*, but it took ages for my brain to compute what my eyes were looking at. A scaffolding structure holds up large black plastic troughs overflowing with what looks like bubble bath foam. The white foamy shapes cascade down the sides, as if suspended in motion. From a distance they look more substantial than just soap suds. Are they made of solid foam? Whatever they are, they are so lightweight that they sway and twinkle almost imperceptibly in the half-lit atmosphere of the gallery space. I stood there for ages looking for movement and trying to understand it, and eventually gave up and read the blurb about it on the wall. I was right, it is bath foam.

In this artwork the French artist Michel Blazy has created form that slowly grows, mutates and eventually disintegrates. In a week the foam shapes will look very different, but the changes are taking place so slowly that you barely notice the movement. It’s a slow performance with an unpredictable material that the artist can’t control or contain. My takeaway in the current fog of my brain was that things may not be clear, who knows what the future looks like, but one thing’s for sure: nothing stays the same.

And my final shoutout amongst this treasure trove of an exhibition goes to Senga Nengudi’s Reverie ‘D’ (2014), an artwork from her ongoing RSVP series, which she began in 1976. In this sculpture, two pairs of nylon stockings are nailed into the wall and stretched taut horizontally, whilst a third pair is pulled down in a diagonal direction to the ground by the weight of what appears to be a sack of sand. The whole thing looks like it might ping or rip at any moment.

Nengudi has compared these stockings, stretched to their limits, to the elasticity of skin, which adapts to the way in which the female body transforms over the course of a lifetime: it can stand so much push and pull but eventually gives way, never to return to its original shape. There’s a latent energy in the tension of the stockings and the pendulous sack of sand, and it all made me think about ageing bodies, stretch marks and breasts losing their pertness. None of these thoughts made me jump for joy as a woman in my mid-40s, but even though it was a bit anxiety-inducing there was also something universally truthful in it that was comforting in a way. Nengudi has talked about how the strain on our bodies has a symbiotic relationship to the strain on our psyches. She says:

As human beings, we’re fragile, yet we’re so sturdy…there’s a lot of tension simply existing as a human being and so I like to incorporate that energy of what it means to exist.

Nengudi is an American artist who has been creating art since the 1960s, although I’ve never seen any of her work before. I really like it, and I love the ideas about the female body that inform her work. Here’s a short video of Nengudi talking about her career:

I also love how lightweight, ephemeral and easy-to-pack-away her work is in contrast to the traditions of heavy carved stone or cast metal sculpture. With a limited market for her work as a female artist Nengudi has always valued the portability of pantyhose. In an interview for the LA Times back in 2011 she said this:

There was always an issue about money, my concept was that I could take a whole show and put it in my purse. I could take it out of my purse and there would be no costs for installing or shipping. I liked this idea that a woman’s life is in her purse.

There’s so much more I could say about many of the other artworks in this brilliant exhibition, and I would encourage you to go and see it in London, if you can. As always I’d love to know what you think about the art and ideas I’ve talked about here — and if you’ve seen the show already, please tell me your thoughts on it.

Here’s a question: how often does art make you laugh? The other day I was standing in front of Marcel Duchamp’s famous ‘readymade’ artwork Fountain (1917) at Tate Modern with a group of students. It’s a manufactured, mass-produced urinal placed on its side on top of a pedestal, and is considered to be one of the most significant artworks of the 20th century because it questioned the value of art and how it is made.

I asked them what they thought it meant. As we all stood there solemnly looking at the piece, one of the students started to laugh. He couldn’t explain why, although perhaps it was his response to the absurdity of being asked to contemplate the deeper meanings of a toilet. The other students started to laugh too, and looked almost sheepish as they did so.

It made me think about the culture of contemplating art, particularly in the hushed environment of art galleries, and how we approach it with a seriousness that often precludes laughter. I wonder whether we are so primed to search for deeper meanings and wholesome lessons from visual art that we police ourselves in our responses. Laughing doesn’t always seem like the ‘correct’ thing to do.

I saw a really interesting lecture recently about the science of laughter. How laughter has evolved over time in mammals, the ways that humans use laughter to communicate much more than just humour, and the importance of it in our interactions with each other. Its function is primarily social, it’s a complex non-verbal form of communication that we use to get us through all sorts of situations with people. Laughter can show our playfulness, our understanding and recognition of others, and we use it to navigate stressful situations.

I wonder whether the student’s response to Duchamp’s urinal was not that he actually found the artwork funny but because he wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean, and he navigated his way out of a situation he found difficult by laughing.

There are plenty of artists who use humour in their work. I’m thinking of David Shrigley, for example, and Banksy, and Maurizio Cattelan. But I have to say, their work never makes me actually laugh out loud, perhaps because there always seems to be an underlying *something* to it that casts a bit of a questioning shadow.

There's only one artist as far as I can recall whose work really does make me laugh, and that’s Martin Creed. He is a British artist, whose practice spans various media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and performance art. He is perhaps best known for winning the Turner Prize in 2001 for a controversial piece titled Work No. 227: The lights going on and off. It was an installation in an empty gallery space in which the lights came on at intervals.

If I had to characterise the thread that runs through all Creed’s work I would say it’s something to do with uncertainty. Being sure one minute and then unsure the next; having a determination to behave in this way or do that thing, followed not long afterwards by a lack of clarity once again.

In this 60 second video Turn Over a New (2020), for example, Creed captures in just a few repeated words the pressures we feel and the resolutions we make to try harder, do better, keep focused — and the inevitability of falling off the wagon. He speaks in such an earnest manner that it amplifies how ridiculous it is. He concisely communicates a pattern of thought that I recognise in myself:

Not all of Creed’s work makes me laugh, and now that I think about it, it’s just his performance art that does. Perhaps it’s because it is so close to comedy that if you didn’t know he was a visual artist, you might think he is a comedian.

I haven’t quite figured out yet what my thoughts are on this subject, except to clock that visual art rarely makes me laugh — and I wonder why. I would really like to know what you think about this. Do you agree that visual art is rarely funny? And are there any artists whose work makes you genuinely laugh?

I was listening to a podcast this week about homelessness in Finland, and how they have largely eliminated the problem there. It’s a small country of just five million people, and back in the 1980s they had really high homelessness numbers. The government tried a radical approach to address the issue, which involved giving homeless people their own apartment with no strings attached.

Most other countries attempt to tackle homelessness with what’s called a ‘staircase model’, which is founded on a ‘treatment first’ philosophy. Homeless people are typically only placed into ‘normal’ housing when they exhibit evidence of what is called ‘housing readiness’ i.e. that they have demonstrated basic living skills, sobriety and a commitment to engage in treatment. Finland’s pioneering ‘housing first’ approach turned this model on its head, with the new premise being that if you sort out someone’s housing issues first then they can start to sort out the other problems in their life.

In 2007 the Finnish government funded a project to rent out apartments to homeless people at rates they could afford, which were covered by their housing benefit. Shelters were converted into single units with a communal space, and support was available 24/7 for as long as the tenants needed it. In this affordable supported community, people can learn new skills like growing and making food for the shared kitchen, and they are helped to find jobs in the local neighbourhood. This support is what stops many tenants from falling back into homelessness. It has been a huge success, with just one in ten tenants becoming homeless again.

There was of course a big investment outlay at the start because they needed to convert shelters into individual units, and then train up support workers. But the cost savings now are 15,000 Euros per person every year because tenants are no longer drawing on expensive emergency services from the police and the health sector, and very few now end up in prison. Some of these people become completely independent again, although others need support for the rest of their lives. What I loved about this story was the acceptance in Finland that that’s ok, and is the reality of complex societies in which we collectively provide a safety net for the most vulnerable.

I wonder how this sort of policy could work here in the UK given that there still exists a strong current of Victorian sentiment focusing on individual responsibility as the solution to poverty, and that people who draw heavily on social support are ‘lazy scroungers’. So I was pleased when I googled ‘housing first’ to discover that there are in fact pilot schemes in a number of locations in England and Scotland.

But a different kind of homelessness is now emerging here because of government policies over the past few years that have led to a chronic shortage of affordable housing and steeply rising rents. The profile of people who are losing their homes is moving beyond those who would usually be perceived as most at risk. Increasing numbers of individuals and families can no longer keep afloat with the rising cost of living. They can’t make the rent, no matter how many hours they work, end up getting evicted and then can’t find other affordable accommodation to move into. The problem is particularly acute in London.

Local authorities in the UK have a legal obligation to help homeless people find shelter, which is increasingly hard to source. Many have been put up in ‘temporary’ accommodation such as hotel rooms and BnBs, and end up staying there long-term. Meanwhile, charities have been warning that food banks are at breaking point with millions using the services every week. Something is going very wrong in our system when so many people find themselves in such a precarious position that they can no longer cover the basics of food and shelter. ‘Housing first’ isn’t the solution for this variety of homelessness.

Yesterday as I was walking around the exhibition of work by the American artist Pope L. at the South London Gallery, I was struck by how much his art resonated with these issues. The exhibition is called Hospital, and in the main gallery there is a huge sculptural installation which looks like some sort of dystopian ruin. It is a towering mess of tangled wood, old plastic bottles, newspapers, broken fishing rods and overturned toilets dangling precariously in mid-air, all covered in a white powder, accompanied by amplified creaking sounds and the smell of alcohol. On the walls a sticky brown liquid is dripping down from glass bottles on shelves. The structure looks ready to fall, like it is on the point of collapse. And in my mind, with all the stuff on homelessness I’d been thinking about this week, it felt like a sign o’ the times.

Pope L. (1955-2023) was a multidisciplinary artist (writing, painting, performance, installation, video and sculpture) and although he isn’t a household name with audiences, his influence on other artists over the years has been profound. He died last month aged 68. Back in the late 70s he started to make a reputation when he did a performance called Crawl (1978). In this work he dressed himself in a cheap suit bought from a charity shop, sewed a yellow square on his back, and crawled the length of 42nd Street in New York on his hands and knees. Passers-by were forced to confront the incongruity of a man in a business suit crawling along the busy sidewalk.

It was a genius performance, which drew attention to the homeless people that the average upright citizen walking along the street often tries to ignore. And it probed assumptions about race, poverty, and how we should and shouldn’t behave in public space. At the time several of Pope L.’s close family members were living on the streets. Afterwards he described the response he got from onlookers and the police, who had tried to move him on. He said,

People got pissed off because I’m black. If you’re not drunk, if you’re not ill, if you’re not crawling to Jesus, what are you doing?

It was uncomfortable to watch, and it got right under people’s skin in the way that only the most powerful art can.

He repeated Crawl several times over the years and the meanings shifted in different contexts. This is the way in which Pope L. worked throughout his career, creating what he called ‘families’ of artworks. Hospital is part of a family that started back in 1991 when he did a performance called Eating the Wall Street Journal. It was in response to an advertising campaign that suggested that a subscription to this American business newspaper would bring you great wealth. You didn’t even need to read it.

Taking this assertion to its absurd conclusion, Pope.L created a series of performances in which he ate pieces of the Wall Street Journal whilst sitting on a toilet on top of a tall wooden tower, wearing just a jockstrap and doused in white flour, a manufactured and consumable form of whiteness. He added milk to lubricate his chewing in an attempt to ingest the wealth that the advertising promised. The work was a critique of capitalism, and the systemic inequities that shape the lives of the disenfranchised.

In this version at the South London Gallery the context and the meanings have changed from these earlier works. Pope L. himself wasn’t performing, but he intended the materials to do that performing instead. The huge wooden structure is teetering like it is about to give us its final dramatic act of collapse. You might read it as a metaphor for the systems in our world that we are told are on the verge of collapsing too — not just the housing system, but capitalism itself, democracy, and the delicate balance of the natural world.

None of it has collapsed yet though, and there’s something quite playful about this particular piece. My young gallery companions quickly spotted the bowl of flour and the invitation to grab a handful and chuck it over the installation. Perhaps it was Pope L.’s suggestion that we have some agency still in all of this, and that we can make change happen.

I think his work is really interesting and layered with lots of meanings. There’s no easy or clear reading of his work; it doesn’t give you immediate answers. It’s not pretty and it’s not comfortable. But if you stay with it for a while it gives you a feeling of something that sort of makes sense, if you know what I mean. And that’s the kind of art I really connect with.

As always, Gallery Companions, I’d love to know what you think about Pope L.'s work and any of the ideas I’ve talked about here.

This past couple of weeks I’ve been deeply engrossed in fine-tuning my teaching content for the Spring semester, which has led me along some fascinating research paths, and to a reignited obsession with the electronic music band Depeche Mode. More on that later.

For many years I’ve taught a history of modern and contemporary art module to American undergraduates who are in London for their study abroad programme. Last semester I started teaching a new course on modern British history, which has sparked all sorts of cross-fertilising ideas that I hope will make the two modules really rich and interesting for my students. In particular, thinking about ideas in modern British history has reaffirmed for me just how valuable and underused artworks are as historical evidence for providing insights into cultural, social, political, and economic contexts and ideas from the past. And how we might understand ourselves better today.

One of the enduring myths of Britain is its role as a civilising force in the world, a country that brought prosperity, education and peace to millions of people throughout its imperial territories. Politicians today like to wax lyrical about the British values of fairness and decency, how respect, tolerance and the rule of law are embedded in our history and national fabric, as though the impetus driving everything we have ever done hasn’t been about protecting British economic interests and making money in the most ruthless way. British imperialism over the centuries spread little except slavery, violence and disease, and centred on economic exploitation, the stripping of other countries’ assets, and political subjugation. And it’s all there as evidence in art.

I’ve been thinking about how to present alternative views and definitions of Britishness to my history students, and who better to turn to than the contemporary artist Jeremy Deller. His work often explores themes related to British culture, history, and social issues. Deller is particularly interested in creating art that involves and reflects the experiences of everyday people.

One of Deller’s most famous artworks is The Battle of Orgreave from 2001, in which he organised a re-enactment of the clash between striking coal miners and the police during the 1984 miners' strike in the UK. The re-enactment involved over 800 participants, including former miners, activists, and members of the public. He documented it in a film, combining his footage with archival material from the original confrontation.

The project aimed to explore issues related to collective memory, historical representation, and the impact of political and social events on communities. Militarised policing at protests like this is one of the legacies of Margaret Thatcher’s government from the 1980s. This particular event still generates the most passionate emotional responses in people whose lives and communities were affected by it. Deller's work sparked discussions about the legacy of the miners' strike and its broader implications for British society, and it’s an example of how art can be used to revisit and reinterpret historical events.

Artworks like this encourage reflection and dialogue about the past and its impact on the present — something that is absolutely essential if we’re going to address the prejudices and overcome the differences between people in our society. After all, history looks at the past but it’s only relevant because it’s about understanding the issues going on in our world today.

Like a lot of conceptual artists, Jeremy Deller has been widely criticized for his lack of technical skill. But he’s so straight up about that, and doesn’t really care that he can’t draw for toffee. For him art is all about the ideas, and it doesn’t matter to him that other people actually make his work. In this video he talks about this, and about how his art addresses ideas around British identity:

I think his art is wonderfully provocative and political and I’ll definitely be using his Battle of Orgreave film in my teaching about Thatcher and the rise of neoliberalism this semester. I’m looking forward to hearing what my students make of it.

I’m also trying to figure out how to include Deller’s brilliant documentary film Our Hobby is Depeche Mode from 2006, which explores the band's impact on people's lives and the intense devotion of its fanbase. Depeche Mode is a British band that first became big in the 1980s, and if nothing else you’ve probably heard their catchy tune Just Can’t Get Enough:

The documentary features interviews with Depeche Mode fans from all around the world, capturing their personal stories and the profound influence that the band's music has had on them. At its heart is an exploration of how music can become a significant and transformative part of people's identities. It’s amazing what music means to people. I related to so much of it, and this week I’ve been bingeing on Depeche Mode’s back catalogue. Taylor Swift has finally been knocked off her number one position in my Spotify playlist. The film is mad and joyful, and does all the good things for me that art can do. Any ideas on how I can legitimately weave it into my teaching will be gratefully received…

As always, Gallery Companions, I’d love to know what you think about any of the ideas and art I’ve talked about here.