CosmiKnot

Invisible. Art about the unseen. This show at the Hayward is sublime. It is also by turns maddening and hilarious. It’s like your very own immersion in the joke about trees in the woods making a sound when no ones there to give a shit. Or like you stepped into a film delighting in the extended agony of art pretentiousness. Wear a polar-neck. It’s that good. It's also very like being in a sci-fi lunatic asylum. Right now that’s out of my system I can admit that I did come away thinking I will never make any art again. It’s like the world is too cluttered with culture already. I thought about the words of Salvator Rosa in his stoic self portrait, "Be quiet, unless your speech be better than silence". Despite the fact that this show is literally nothing except explanations on walls about nothing (spoiler alert) the same life/art dialectics resurface again and again. Teresa Margolles is a fully qualified forensic scientist who specialised in autopsies of victims of viole...

Michael Craig Martin has selected the work for a room in the Summer Show. I really like Humphrey Oceans painting called windscreen in there. The Richard Wilson homage to the Italian Job is nice too. I particularly like it as he sets the coach atop the Delaware pavilion and I was born in Bexhill-on Sea which is my own Eden from which I was expelled at the tender age of four. This room is nice enough and Bill Woodrowe has a brilliant sculpture on display. However the overall effect I found was stasis. Like a Batsman playing forward defence ad infinitum. THunk thunk. All thunk up. Michael Craig Martin says he wants to combine words and images in startling ways (or words to that effect) but his fate/gate is nice like a funny postcard on a retro fridge. It's all on the surface. No depth i.e. profundity. He talks the talk and presents a good case but it left me feeling hollow. My face set to drool.  Martin Creed's chairstack is more minimal and yet more resonant. He is somehow no...