Daid\u014d Moriyama: Ink
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If it\u2019s a crime to have a crush on an elderly avant garde Japanese street photographer then lock me up and throw away the key, because I have some seriously strong feelings for Daid\u014d Moriyama<\/a>. His ultra-confrontational, high contrast, aggressive take on photography just gets me blushing, what can I say.<\/p>\n This little exhibition is Moriyama at his artiest and strangest. In the 1960s he discovered Warhol and became obsessed. The works here find him playing with repetition and silk screening, printing up ghostly, painterly, effervescent monochrome images of stacks of soft drinks, neon lit crosswalks and peep show adverts. This is the grim, gritty side of Japanese urbanity, but you can see American capitalism creeping in and taking hold, slowly suffocating the streets.<\/p>\n He repeats an image of lips like Warhol\u2019s Marilyn Monroe, duplicates a photo of people walking down a street, their bodies becoming indistinguishable from the adverts hanging from the high rises around them. Then he snaps a woman lifting her skirt, another stomping down the road in thigh-high boots. It\u2019s like Warhol without the pretence, and with added filth. Jenkin van Zyl: Enclosure Jenkin van Zyl<\/a> is hellbent on cementing their place as English art\u2019s ultimate hyper-camp weirdo, and their new show at Somerset House Studios is a pretty persuasive argument.<\/p>\n The exhibition is centred on a speculative sci-fi movie about some bleak company where tourists can inhabit other people\u2019s bodies. But when the central character, a starlet called Mercy, comes to end the lease on her body, the line between reality and fiction starts getting anxiously blurry. Who is the real Mercy, and who is the clone? Who controls your identity? Who has access to what makes you you?<\/p>\n Its grubby atmosphere is reinforced by an immersive installation that replicates the film set as you walk in, with broken automatons, flickering lights and piles of rubbish, all bathed in a pink glow. It\u2019s an unsettling, uncomfortable, dirty, dystopian bit of art cinema \u2013 like an overblown, fetishistic take on Terry Gilliam\u2019s Brazil<\/a>. Van Zyl has a singular aesthetic, and this is pretty much as watchable as this kind of art film gets. It stays with you long after you\u2019ve escaped its unnerving clutches.<\/p>\n The gallery handout wants to make out like this is about technological advancement and ideas of authorship. But like all good sci-fi, this feels more obviously allegorical than that. It\u2019s about identity, the versions of ourselves that we present and preserve online, or in public, and how easy it is to lose your grip on the true you. Like a lot of artists these days who grew up with the internet and reality TV turning their brain into gloop, Van Zyl is trying to make sense of a post-reality world, a place where identity can be constructed, but never fully controlled. George Shaw: Albion Groans Part Two There\u2019s nothing all that pleasant, or even particularly green, about the England of George Shaw\u2019s paintings. There are no rolling hills or quiet pub afternoons here in this excellent show of small works by the 60-year-old artist. Instead, there are endless potholes, crumbling masonry, darkened alleys and damp, muddy, miserable, mid-winter landscapes. This is the England of council estates left to rot.<\/p>\n His landscapes \u2013 always based on his native Coventry \u2013 are devoid of life. There are no humans here, only the places they\u2019re desperate to escape. Every sky is overcast, every tree barren, every path sodden with puddles. A union jack has been left crumpled on the pavement near an empty bottle of booze in one, endless knobs have been crudely graffitied on garage doors in another. There\u2019s a painting of a single cloud blighting a blue sky, another of a robin lying dead on its side. Suburbia has leached into the countryside like a toxic spill.<\/p>\n They are gorgeously painted, especially the smaller works: sticky with enamel, glossy and horrifyingly alluring, like staring at a car crash.<\/p>\n But the car crash here is England itself. Sure, Shaw has been painting the same views of the same bit of Coventry for 30 years, but in that time the country has continued to erode. His whole career is a living portrait of England\u2019s slow collapse. This time it doesn\u2019t just feel like perpetual decline \u2013 it\u2019s terminal. skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Art Weekly<\/p>\n Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Tanoa Sasraku: Tropical Ken The thing that\u2019s so good about the main work in Tanoa Sasraku\u2019s Turner prize installation \u2013 open now at Mima in Middlesbrough<\/a> \u2013 is how perfectly it marries image with idea. Sasraku\u2019s collection of corporate paperweights from oil companies acts as a horrifying symbol of the greed of that vile industry. Perfect.<\/p>\n Here at Vardaxoglou, Sasraku is showing works from another series, some of which are also on show at Mima, that don\u2019t quite hit the same dopamine receptors. They\u2019re all paper cut into the form of torsos, held together with clips. She places acetates of military camouflage on top of them and then pops them in a tanning bed, leaving behind the faintest impressions of the patterns.<\/p>\n They\u2019re meant to evoke warfare, weapons crates and fruit boxes, all while alluding to Ken dolls, but they just look a bit like tea-stained gilets. The gap between image and idea, between the concept and its ability to communicate itself visually, is just a bit too wide. Ce Roser: Running With the Sun, works 1961-2014 You\u2019ve got to hope you turn out like Ce Roser<\/a>. The 101-year-old American artist has only got better with age. They call her an abstract painter, but all the flower paintings here feel pretty figurative. The earlier, flowerier works from the 1960s are nice, fuzzy, dreamy things. But the stuff from the 1970s, and then the watercolours from the 2010s \u2026 that\u2019s where it gets good. Her work gets sparser and more minimal, but no less pretty. Landscapes and flora burst apart and writhe across expanses of white \u2013 they have all the aesthetic warmth and floral calm of the earlier stuff, but pared back and made lighter. I\u2019m definitely worse at everything now than I was in my 20s. Let\u2019s hope things pick up when I hit 90.
Hamiltons Gallery, London, until 30 October<\/a><\/p>\n
\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606Unsettling, dystopian film \u2026 Enclosure by Jenkin van Zyl. Photograph: Jenkin van Zyl<\/p>\n
Somerset House, London, until 29 November<\/a><\/p>\n
\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606Hardly green and pleasant \u2026 George Shaw, The Ancient Britons, 2026. Photograph: courtesy the artist<\/p>\n
Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London, until 7 November<\/a><\/p>\n
\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606Faint impressions \u2026 Tanoa Sasraku, The Interior (I), 2026. Photograph: Lewis Ronald\/\u00a9 Tanoa Sasraku\/courtesy of Vardaxoglou Gallery, London<\/p>\n
Vardaxoglou, London, until 31 October<\/a><\/p>\n
\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606Ce Roser, Voyage Into Discovery, 1990. Photograph: \u00a9 Ce Roser\/courtesy VeneKlasen, New York and London<\/p>\n
VeneKlasen, London, until 3 December<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Daid\u014d Moriyama: Ink\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606 If it\u2019s a crime to have a crush on an elderly avant garde Japanese street…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":924305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-924304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/924305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}