Grim news from gallery-land, where even Manhattan’s mega-blue chips are shedding jobs by the truckload. ‘The market’s fucked,’ one soundbite-handy dealer told me last week, admitting that the reckoning was probably long overdue. For artists, this is bleak: the oligarchs are stuck in Moscow, public funds have run dry and, short of shilling for the Saudis or tech barons, there remains only one street on which to beg: fashion.
The prestige rag trade has always had a synergy with the art biz: both hawk luxury goods, at least nominally underpinned by visionary genius, for ludicrous prices. Artistic careers have been made by shows at tax-efficient fashion foundations and both domains are notoriously exclusive. Yet even Damien Hirst isn’t selling his work in airports – not yet, anyway – and ‘visual art’ is really just a shorthand for any creative exercise that can’t be otherwise described. Fashion, to be clear, does not share its joyous absence of purpose.
There’s nothing affected about Marten: she really is that kooky
The two worlds, however, have collided, with fashion gaining the upper hand through sheer economic might. Take the example of two female artists of roughly the same age, both of whom came to varying degrees of recognition around a decade ago. Britain’s Helen Marten (b.1985) won the 2016 Turner Prize for a whimsical set of sculptures that reminded me, at the time, of props from The Clangers. Some art screams; this squeaked. Her current showing at Sadie Coles is a film produced in collaboration with Miu Miu, which wisely avoids co-opting its patron’s aesthetic and cleaves hard to Marten’s own winsome vision.
The film transposes her sculptural register to video without missing a beat. It’s structured into five segments, each rendered in a slightly obsolete video-game aesthetic, each accompanied by a stream-of-consciousness voiceover. It traces a woman’s life from cradle to grave, thus giving us an infant’s monologue to her pet – ‘I could be a dog, too, but I have such small teeth’ – then similar from a mother, a lover, and so on. Even in its racier moments, it’s twee as hell. Yet the piece, annoying as it is, is highly accomplished. And as I understand it, there’s nothing affected about Marten: she really is that kooky.
The same can’t be said of the German Anne Imhof (b.1978), whose reputation rests as much on making terrifying art as it does on her stint working the door at a totemic Frankfurt techno club. Her schtick is part avant-garde performance art, part black-metal kitsch – and at the 2017 Venice biennale, she successfully allied the two. That show turned the Nazi-era German pavilion into a claustrophobic hellhole in which kill-ready Alsatians barked up at visitors through a perforated metal grid: this was Holocaust soul-searching taken to its most unhinged extreme; I can’t think of any recent work of art quite so memorable.
Her current solo show at Sprüth Magers doesn’t come close. She summons the old magic by plonking massive sets of pristine steel riot barriers into the gallery shopfront, and in its basement showrooms; it’s a simple but distinctive gesture, obstructing light and passage and inducing instant claustrophobia. The rest is forgettable: there are some terrible, sub-Emin figurative drawings and a video that lies somewhere between a runway shoot and a satanic ritual. It all looks like an advert for the Goth-core American designer Rick Owens, a friend of hers; and while her cringe towards high-fashion aesthetics is undoubtedly conscious, it undermines what could so easily be a singular vision.
Imagine Mike Nelson let loose in the offices of Croydon Council and you’ll be halfway there
I would have travelled further for this column, but I got knocked down by a taxi en route to the Photographers’ Gallery and did my ribs in. I nevertheless suffered a painful, three-hour slog to Deptford during the Tube strike, and I’m glad I did: for Dutch artist Melle Nieling’s installation-exhibition at Deptford’s Plicnik Space Initiative was unusually thrilling. Nieling (b.1992) is interested in truth and the distortion thereof, in buried secrets and the ways in which we imagine they might be concealed: imagine Mike Nelson let loose in the offices of Croydon Council and you’ll be halfway there.
You enter a room lined with cardboard boxes – repositories for hidden information? – as a largely AI-generated, Adam Curtis-esque voiceover parrots randomly generated conspiracy bullshit from a recessed corner. There’s a false wall, designed to look as commonplace as possible, separating the obvious exhibition space from an institutional-looking corridor papered with cultish motivational posters. Elsewhere, noise and lights pulsate from behind an unopenable door backing on to an exterior wall. Everything here is staged, controlled and carefully selected, right down to the precise shade of magnolia covering walls both fake and real. It’s a mad but entirely sober articulation of today’s paranoid style, executed with considerable verve and an impressively straight face; it is, I’m certain, one of the exhibitions of the year.
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