Mousse 71
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London-based artist Anthea Hamilton relies upon what the eye beholds; her art springs from her own understanding of certain moments. Against the backdrop of a world conditioned to impose, label, and define, her work is the result of a deep receptivity where everything and anything can be of potential excitement. Be it a photograph from a 1960 dance performance by Erick Hawkins or the feel of a piece of garment, Hamilton distills her wide-ranging sources down to concentrated, singular images, suffusing them with multiple layers of research. Engaging with the pleasures and politics of looking, her concise, often diagrammatic articulations feel particularly timely.
Virginia Overton had subtly reconstructed a new physicality for the material, shifting its signifiers into a salvaged elegance, an arbitrary otherness.
Jailed in 1962 for publishing forbidden material in his first novel, Sur un cheval (1960), French heavyweight Pierre Guyotat was also known for his Dionysian joie de vivre and artistic scandals.1 One of the great avant-garde visionaries of the twentieth century, Guyotat agitated the conventional novel with his signature linguistic materiality, blasphemy of syntax, and dismemberment of sex. His plaintive drawings slid down a vertical chute to a dystopic never-never land. He was the Lost Boy of self-exoneration, a degenerate tu-whit-tu-whoo. His stilt-walk over ethics, humanity, obscenity, and God sabotaged political prohibition, and, ultimately, even himself.
Christine Sun Kim’s works attend to sound beyond the threshold of the listening ear and emphasize the potential for a critique of identity as not essential but relational, of language as contextual and dynamic, and of time as multiple and disjointed.
