Roundup #8: The Best Artists This Week on artreview.com

Our guest critic, the independent curator and regular reviewer for ArtReview magazine, Laura McLean-Ferris, makes another selection of outstanding artists on artreview.com. See her selection last week here.


Alice Bradshaw, Blown Light Bulb, 2006

Context, it almost goes without saying, can make or break particular kinds of artwork, and this column often generates discussion about the internet as an unhappy medium for certain works. It's fair to say, for example, that painting and sculpture rely on phenomenological experience and physical sensuality, and both these things can get a raw deal when seen via pixels. These questions are, of course, nothing really new. Much work struggles to maintain a satisfying presence even in the physical world: consider locus+ or Fluxus interventions and Kaprow happenings, of which one can usually only see documentation as a substitution for the real thing (although many Kaprow pieces were recently restaged in LA). There are similar historical problems with books and print: flattening work to 2-D.

However, even removed from context and onto the computer, it has been interesting to see a lot of wonderful site-specific and intervention work on artreview.com this week, and we might start off by taking a look at how some of these works function online.

Alice Bradshaw is an artist, a curator and the co-director of the artists' collective Contents May Vary in northern England. Bradshaw often shows her works in houses and domestic contexts, which relate to her sculptural objects. The Blown Light Bulb above is exhibited as if discarded on a shelf in a house rather than in a rather grander white cube space. Though the bulb part of the sculpture is a balloon, it looks more like crumpled glass, a fantasy of physics which seems to run throughout the much of the artist's work.


Alice Bradshaw, Rail, 2006

This Rail, hanging, as it should be, over a window, has had the same treatment: collapsed by some incredible force that has twisted the wood into an angry knot, now sitting like a deformity or a scar on the house.


Alice Bradshaw, Mint Residue, 2006

Bradshaw's degree show at the University of Manchester also brought together site-specificity and domestic material. For Mint Residue she cleaned the interior of the gallery space twice every day with a toothbrush and toothpaste. The gesture of 'cleaning' the gallery or museum with surreal touches invokes artists like Marcel Broodthaers and the legions of institutional critique, and manages to draw attention to architectural details – a simultaneous revelation and veiling.

Another member to join this week is the anonymous 221019613112, a pseudonym which, the artist explains, is an attempt at invisibility in a world that demands constant visibility. The profile locates them in Antwerp, but this may be as non-place as any. 221019613112's projects are performative, collaborative, theoretical and theatrical – work that one might consider difficult to represent on a website. But there’s lots of documentation and statements of intent on the profile page, for those of you who would like to take part in some further reading.


221019613112, Abstract painting based on the lives of others, Shanghai Issue, 2008

Abstract painting based on the lives of others comes from a project in which 221019613112 gave some people with low incomes a monthly wage that must be spent within seven days, and tracked their spending (Brewster's Millions, anyone?). The artist was attempting to investigate different models of economy and the possibilities of gifting. 221019613112's complex theoretical positions are presented alongside the work, and every part of the project is apparently documented in a publication.

There are some paintings added this week which, when viewed on a computer screen, act like interventions. Matus Lanyi, a recent graduate from Technical University Košice, Slovakia, makes acrylic paintings mimicking windows 'panic' messages.


Matus Lanyi, Error!

The pathetic uselessness of the Windows 'Help' button is laughable in the face of Biblical terror and plague, and 'windows' becomes a metaphor for opening boxes and doors to hell, fire and brimstone. This work puts us in a strange position because we are presented with a level of unbelievability: when you see a computer-realist painting (did we just found a new genre?) on a screen, how can you tell if it's really a painting?

The Kansan Beniah Leuschke is another artist playing with comedic misuse of language. He employs palindromes and anagrams, opening a critique of the aggressive language used by archetypal male figures in war and sports, among other things.


Beniah Leuschke, united we stand; a widened stunt

As soon as the unity and strength of 'United We Stand' is broken up, every new sentence made in this Jacobs Ladder invokes collapse and instability: wine, teen, wet nest, stunt, undid.


Beniah Leuschke, monkey bars; break my son

Here again the anagram works against masculine bravado and fatherly encouragement. The words and letters, like the hoop and presumably the boy too, are broken, and twisted.

The art of game-play is also employed by the wonderful Wisconsin-er Matthew Slaats, our last artist in our performative plethora this week. His work includes a 1v1 football game (soccer if you're in the US), exploiting the ceremony and drama that attaches itself to both art and sport. Did the reds win on penalties in this game I wonder?

Part of the joy of Slaats' work is that the documentation itself works in a formal way: the visual lusciousness of clean kits, competitions and fanfare are all recreated brightly and lovingly, and made in reaction to his specific sites. The artist has a lot of interesting writing on the subject of game-play and more work on his website.


Matthew Slaats, 1v1

As well as the chance at play, Slaats also presents viewers with ego-baiting challenges. In Any Takers: 835 8744, participants are invited to run around a space in the best time. The artist makes no mistake in pushing to the fore the competitive aspects of the artworld. Are you competing against yourself? Or is there someone else…


Matthew Slaats, Any Takers
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Laura McLean-Ferris is an independent curator and critic, and a regular contributor to ArtReview magazine.

For more artworks picked out for the Roundup, see the slideshow.

Roundup #7
Roundup #6
Roundup #5
Roundup #4
Roundup #3
Roundup #2
Roundup #1