Critique OCTOBER 2018 : ISSUE 89
AIR
Art
Self-Portraits through Art History (Van Gogh’s Room), 2016 by Yasumasa Morimura . Image courtesy Luhring Augustine Bushwick
“W
e’re a gluttonous species, us humans. All we want is stuff... Stuff to wear, stuff to stuff our faces with,” begins Eddy Frankel in his Time Out take of the Mika Rottenberg review, at Goldsmiths CCA in London until 4 November. “The whole world is geared towards making stuff, selling stuff and buying stuff... Argentinian artist Rottenberg knows all about stuff, capitalism, consumerism and all that business.” Her work “translates perfectly to the CCA, animating and enhancing its somewhat labyrinthine spaces with her often elaborate films, installations and sculpture,” writes Louisa Buck for The Art Newspaper. “These use humour but also a keen sense of the grotesque to deal with the precariously overloaded systems and excesses of our interconnected global economies.” Her surreal videos “reveal porous architectures, within which absurd human tasks intertwine,” say the editorial team at Esse. “In the age
24
of globalised hyper-capitalism, she enjoys reminding us that truth is always stranger than fiction, wacky as the latter may be.” “With the advent of the internet, conspiracy has ‘gone from being super-latent, super-underground, super-subcultural – just the interest of people on the margins –[to being] mainstream, in a way,’” co-curator Doug Eklund told The Art Newspaper of Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy, at The Met Breuer (until 6 January). “Made between 1969 and 2016, the 70 works ... trace an arc of diversifying world-weariness from JFK’s assassination to the recent past,” explains Martin Herbert at Art Review. “More interesting than the concepts themselves is the way that some individuals compile their own investigative research on suspicious topics, creating accessible and expressive visuals soaked in data, philosophy, and their take on the truth,” writes Cat Lachowskyj for BJP-online.com.
Yasumasa Morimura is “The artist frequently described as ‘the Cindy Sherman of Japan’ for his elaborately staged, photographic self-portraits,” says Time Out New York of in The Art Room of History, at Luhring Augustine Bushwick until 17 November. “Here, he offers two bodies of work in his latest show: Self-Portraits through Art History (2016), in which he disappears into famous paintings; and One Hundred M’s self-portraits (1993-2000), in which he portrays himself as Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot, among other celebrities.” Elaborates Alfalfa Studio, “Working as a conceptual photographer and filmmaker for more than three decades... he masterfully transforms himself into recognisable subjects, often from Western cultural canons.” Taking photographs “is generally an act of ‘looking at the object, whereas ‘being seen’ or ‘showing’ is what is of most interest to one who does a selfportrait,” quotes Artnet of the artist.
