Reciprocal Fetishism by Ni Haifeng (2010) (the title brings to mind Duchamp’s note in the Green Box, ‘Reciprocal Readymade: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board’) references both the readymade and Minimalism. It comprises a variety of objects displayed on plinths, 3 rows of 6 in total. The things exhibited are pretty mundane, a snorkel, an old camera, a rice steamer, a pile of nutshells mixed with cigarette butts, a small teapot, and a very large bottle of Bordeaux. The text on the wall explains that they are objects, formerly owned by a Chinese Art collector –the association, then, with a collector provides a Midas touch that the name of the artist also provides, turning everyday objects into potentially priceless artworks. It is a work which demands reflection – it does not call primarily for aesthetic contemplation, instead it prompts consideration of the commodity. The gallery space makes the commodity’s ambiguity explicit: its oscillation between use value and exchange value is made emphatic. The readymade as a category of art production also serves to stimulate thinking about the nature of artistic work, and the artist’s signature as a kind of branding.

Lida Abdul’s Brick Sellers of Kabul (2006) is a short video piece depicting a scene of children standing in line, each waiting his turn to sell a brick to a man. After each exchange he adds the brick to a stack. The scene is accompanied by the sound of a howling wind, which gives the whole scene a dismal, despairing aspect. The film has a documentary look – casual, washed out, everything bleached by the sun and the wind. A subtitled piece of dialogue has the man asking a boy where he got the brick. ‘From the ruins,’ comes the reply.

Provenance (2013), a 40-minute film by Amie Siegel, adopts a different method. It is a stylish piece, composed of long, slow, meditative tracking shots, interspersed with static observational shots. It follows the movement of modernist furniture from a government building in Chandigarh in India to the minimalist inspired living spaces of the tasteful rich. It traces this journey in reverse from public to private, from the utopian ideas of Le Corbusier, who originally planned Chandigarh, to the quiet display of wealth. The film opens in London, stopping off in other European settings before a trip across the Ocean on a super yacht to the US. It’s all serene – not very many people to be seen – the rich are just like you and me, only less visible. Ostentatious display and conspicuous consumption are out. The camera glides over all this in an unhurried elegant way, its style mimicking the world it depicts. On then to a photo-shoot: we hear a photographer direct an assistant on where to place the model chair (designed by Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin). The cinematic space becomes more populous the further back we move in production. At the auction house the chair is ‘sold for $60,000’, then it’s back to a workshop where restorers strip tattered, dilapidated furniture to the bone. The camera eye hovers over a cargo ship, a stock image. We are reminded that containerization is the major driver of globalization – amazing the difference the efficient stacking of boxes has made to international trade! Then we see the modernist building – utopian dreams guarded by a few soldiers, monkeys climbing the structure, it looks beautiful in the bright sunlight. There are now more people, on computers in little cubicles, with bright modern furniture. We see a painting of ‘Corbusier the Great Master’ – an image of artistic authority that the film’s title, Provenance, attaches to the origin of the furniture. And so demand is fuelled. This film is paired with a short film called Lot 248 (2013). This documents the sale of Provenance at auction – paired together these works attempt to picture the constantly moving nature of capital. They also highlight the tensions and contradictions inherent in artistic work, which may attempt to critique or go beyond the system of its origin while this self-same system seamlessly swallows up and incorporates the artwork into its smooth functioning. A serendipitous accident allowed the soundtrack of howling wind from Brick Sellers of Kabul to haunt the serene spaces of Siegel’s room.

Victor Burgin’s Possession (1976) juxtaposes a statistic taken from an edition of The Economist, and an advertising image of a man and woman embracing. It was originally displayed as one of 500 posters installed around Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1976 – an attempt to directly intervene in public space to change consciousness. Burgin later abandoned this strategy, considering it too crude and as not reflecting how ideology actually works. Nevertheless I think it is a nuanced work, acknowledging both income and gender inequality, and the passage of time has made it, if anything, more vital.

Karmelo Bermejo’s Fiscal Oil Paintings (2014) at first glance appear to be monochrome paintings, but when viewed from certain angles the phrase ‘Undeclared Income’ becomes visible. This is an obvious allusion to the way that art has become a way for capital to be stored away from the prying eyes of government’s seeking tax. The paintings are accompanied by a transparent ‘Certificate of Authenticity’, printed and signed with invisible ink and placed in a display case.

Meschac Gaba, Kathi Hofer, Susanne Mooney all deal with the manufacture of desire and the production of value. Gaba uses money to decorate the frames of his paintings, making it useful and discounting its exchange value; Kathi Hofer utilizes gift wrapped boxes as sculpture forms; Suzanne Mooney presents photographs of empty display features, unmoored from the commodities their function it is to sell – these take on the appearance of generic, minimal art works. Christopher Williams’ cool, mannered photographs question the medium’s commercial uses, re-photographing works removed from their original contexts. Raqs Media Collective’s text-based, site-specific work Please Do Not Touch the Work of Art stresses the intertwining of desire with vision; it also emphasize the injunction against touching artworks in galleries, one of the strategies for protecting their special status.

Non-commercial art galleries occupy an ambiguous position in the contemporary world. They are simultaneously spaces that are public – potential sites for debate contesting the dominant social and political discourses – and spectacular buildings, bolstering notions of the creative city (proclaiming that this city is an investment opportunity). The Glucksman is a space for the display of objects that are at once baubles for the rich, art for contemplation and objects expressing the labour of their oftenconflicted makers. Except for Burgin’s work, none of the pieces in the show make an obvious critique of the current neo liberal form of global capitalism, none attempt a radical gesture against the market (and perhaps wisely so). Rather the works reflect and depict the market. They are aware that the market determines them – the collapse of a currency allows Gaba a material that will add aesthetic value to his works; Fischl’s market as subject necessarily depends on its subject; etc. Burgin’s works remain an artifact of a time at the dawn of neo-liberalism when direct tactics of critique seemed appropriate. Everything Must Go was a show befitting its context, acting as a reminder that the market is all space, everywhere and everything – no place is inauspicious, explicitly stated in the wall text next to Lida Abdul’s bleak, ruin-filled Brick Sellers of Kabul, which stated, ‘her poetic film offers a glimpse of optimism from the ruins of war-ravaged Afghanistan, and an insight into how markets can emerge in the most inauspicious circumstances.’ Not perhaps how I would have framed it, but certainly fulfilling the exhibition’s stated aim.

Everything Must Go was on view 28 November 2015 – 6 March 2016.

Arriving in the foyer of the Crawford Galley there was a small crowd waiting, flanked by a similar number of black-clad ushers. An announcement was made that each usher would be paired with an audience member. The ushers then led us upstairs to the first floor painting room, where Gaitkrash member and sound artist Mick O’ Shea sat behind his desk of strange instruments conjuring up a discordant sound scape of bleeps and wails. There was an air of expectation as people waited for the actor to arrive. I noticed after a few minutes that people were being led from the room. My usher asked if I felt comfortable wearing a blindfold; I responded affirmatively and was led from the space. It is peculiar to be thrown so suddenly into such close physical proximity with a stranger. This is the component of the staging that demands trust from the audience and a willingness to give up control.

 
I was gently guided into a lift, which was filled with the sounds of bird song. A lift is an everyday space, which always evokes an uncanny feeling in me, the closeness to strangers and the slicing movement through the innards of buildings. Being unable to see led me to have an acute awareness of sound. I know the physical space of the Crawford Gallery well, but I felt disoriented and the distance I had travelled did not seem to correspond to the space I thought I knew. Placing one foot tentatively in front of the other I suddenly found the ground changed and I seemed to be walking on grass. I was asked to sit down on a bench and I concentrated on the sounds in the space as I waited. There was a soundscape of whispering and water; it seemed to combine both electronic and natural elements. I could feel other people’s presence in the space. After approximately five minutes we were instructed to remove our eye masks. We were in a small dark room with the only light focused on the mouth of the performer. The words spewed from The Mouth in an almost unbroken stream. ‘Into this world tiny little thing’. Repetition – ‘all the time the buzzing’ – there is no real beginning or end to the piece – it seems like it could loop back on itself over and over, forever.
 
The Beckett estate is notorious for its strict control over the performance of his work; Gaitkrash remained faithful to his text while employing a unique approach to its staging. Their production encouraged attentiveness to perception, to our body in the world, bracketing out a space for a more intimate engagement with Not I.

This aesthetic focus disconnects politics from the organized struggle of working people, making politics into what spectators see. Artistic products, whether actual commodities or commodified experiences, thereby buttress capital as they circulate from the streets to the galleries. (The Communist Horizon, 2012)

Roseanne Lynch at a talk she gave at Copley Street spoke about the space itself being on show. Her photographs occupied this space in a very subtle way. She exhibited four large-scale pieces, three photographs and one sheet of aluminium. The sheet of aluminium was a dull silver monochrome which reflected back aspects of the space and possibly alluded to the use of silver-based processes for capturing images in the early years of photography. Two of the photographs, which were printed onto vinyl stuck directly to the wall, were placed side by side. They depicted an architectural space, which looked very similar to the space of the exhibition: on turning my back to them I discovered they seemed to have been taken from about the spot where I was standing. The place where the third photograph was taken was harder to identify, it seemed to be a photograph of a wall, perhaps it was a photograph of the wall that it covered? The photograph seemed to picture both scars and gouges on the wall and scratches on the print itself. Lynch’s photographs seemed to prompt the viewer to spend time looking at the space of the exhibition as opposed to the work displayed. At her talk she spoke about attempting to get the viewer to experience what she experienced, so the photographs are used as tools, as a way to prompt the viewer to pay a heightened attention to the space itself. Entering an exhibition space asks of the visitor that they become more attuned to their surroundings, that they perceive things with a heightened sensitivity. But do the photographs actually do anything to increase this attention to the surrounding environment? The placing of the photographs in the space in which they were taken certainly foregrounds this question – but it would recede once the photographs were moved to a different location. They function in this particular space, they are site specific – I’d even propose that the show is an installation. Boris Groys in Politics of Installation, after all, claims that ‘the installation transforms the empty, neutral, public space into an individual artwork—and it invites the visitor to experience this space as the holistic, totalizing space of an artwork.’

 
The photographs in Zhang Kechun’s show measured approximately 24 inches by 16 with a white border of approximately one inch. The prints had a beautiful quality, they seemed to combine sharpness and diffusion, and suggested to me a particular dewy quality of skin. They invited a dual mode of viewing: to look at them as photographs, to admire the particular surface quality of the print, while also looking through them, treating the photograph as transparent, looking through them to the scenes depicted. A group of people wearing orange swimming hats accompany a portrait of Chairman Mao balanced on a black rubber ring, the water and sky are virtually indistinguishable from each other, the horizon disappearing into the all-over washed out foggy haze. A man sits in a small pagoda, atop a structure which looks like it was built by giant termites. Two men up to their chests in water approach a circular stone ruin, perhaps the giant leg of an unfinished bridge. As a viewer I can see through the picture to the scene depicted but I don’t have the ‘local knowledge’ to interpret what is happening. I can’t know if the diffusion of the light is a result of pollution, if the flooding is the recent result of global warming, dam building or something stretching much further back in time. Zhang Kechun in his statement about the work at the show describes how in following the course of the river with his large format Linhof camera and tripod he was able ‘to quietly watch on the river for the season, stare at it through this journey’. The artist through the use of photography is given the opportunity to look for longer, to spend time in a particular place. The photographs are artefacts resulting from this time spent absorbed within the landscape and, as in Roseanne Lynch’s Show-, they seem to function as aids to heightening a sensitivity and appreciation of place, for the viewers in Lynch’s case and for the artist himself in Zhang Kechun’s. Both artists use analogue cameras and so retain the link with the photograph as index, a sign which is a physical manifestation of a cause, light reflections captured on a sensitive surface.
 
 
There There ran from 19 October – 3 November 2012.

In a corner of the gallery a space roughly the dimensions of the Situation Room painting has been painted blue. The paint strokes are very visible, immediately signalling the artist at work but also recalling the smeared dirty protests of hunger strikers. The expanse of blue might suggest the beyond to which the body of bin Laden has been dispatched: the deep blue sea, down where no one will be able to visit the grave of the great martyr; or perhaps it is the beyond of the heaven where bin Laden will frolic; or perhaps most of all it will constitute the blue screen upon which collective fantasies can be projected.

 
A TV monitor facing this wall plays a loop of what appears to be a CNN out-take involving one of the presenters from the other video. His dialogue is a parody of a particular idea of America. ‘I’m going to get my hamburger and coffee,’ he quacks like a duck and holds what looks like papier-mâché replica of a Scud missile. The video reflexively acknowledges the apparatus of production, the presenter messing around, dragging the cameraman into shot. The crew become actors playing in a movie called War in the Gulf or No Problem, or Operation Enduring Pizza brought to you by YouTube.
 
The artists employ a kind of slapstick that oscillates between despair and fury, and describe in an accompanying statement their attempt to confront their own ‘relevance, redundancy and reluctance to shape anything of any real significance.’ The show communicates an impotent rage against the numero uno artist in the world, the all-powerful image-producing machine of the mass media. All other artists are but little fleas, trying to draw some blood from the gargantuan mega-artist. The overall affect produced by the exhibition is one of cluster phobia. As a show it holds up its hands and surrenders to the impossibility of getting to grips with this story or indeed any story in our over-stimulated image-saturated world. And gets shot through the eye.
 
 
A Title in a Haystack was on view 12 June – 30 July.

Maquettes have traditionally allowed sculptors to test out ideas and forms, and Baumgartner’s works are one-to-ten scale models for larger pieces. The models are primarily constructions of wood and mirrors; they present smooth, finished surfaces and were fabricated by a carpenter with whom the artist has had a long-term working relationship. They reference different kinds of architectural features and spaces. Some pieces are opaque and closed when seen from certain angles and, though small, have a monumental aspect. Others are seemingly more playful and open: we can look through windows into some of the pieces, while others employ periscopes, making clear the preoccupation with point-of-view and the framing of vision.

As we look our gaze is refracted and reflected through a hall of mirrors. In the accompanying text Baumgartner makes reference to Jacques Lacan and his celebrated theorization of ‘The Mirror Stage’ – the idea that the young infant, before having acquired a stable sense of self or the capacity to speak, jubilantly recognizes his or her own mirror image. This image is more unified, upright and coherent than the infant in fact experiences itself to be. For Lacan, this is an important step in the formation of the ego. But the mirrors in Baumgartner’s works do not reflect back a coherent whole; they more often than not break up the image of the viewer.

The pieces also seem to have an optimum viewing position and, if such a position is adopted, the mirror effects break up the viewer’s reflection into parts. At the exhibition’s opening the artist showed my friend and I the preferred position from which to look at 5 Figures, a wood and mirror construction, suggestive of a guillotine. If scaled-up and built, the structure would become the platform for a dancer, and through the placement of mirrors each viewer would see another viewer’s head in place of the performer’s. The pieces, then, are maquettes for environments for performances; this raises the question of how exactly we are meant to confront the work. Are we meant to view them as objects in themselves, or to imagine their manifestations with performers; are they models for stage-sets, or are they sculptures?

The contextualizing material for the show speaks to the viewer in a casual, conversational tone, opening with the words, ‘You asked me about Martin Buber’. This textual supplement signals a relationship between the artworks and philosophical influences. Indeed, there is a demand in the field of contemporary art to legitimate artwork with reference to theory and philosophy, and Baumgartner’s statement acknowledges this but at the same time does not entirely play the game, His tone is too relaxed, it does not strive for seriousness, he name-checks Lacan but confesses to often not understanding the writing, enjoying it instead as poetry. The same strategy of equivocating between sincerity and irony is at play in his use of kitsch. For example, Stable, a tasteful wood and mirror construction in a minimalist style, is inhabited by two small plastic horses; plastic wrap is employed to signify liquid in Fountain, (the title signalling to Duchamp’s infamous 1917 urinal); Twins, a minimal construction of mirrors slotted into a wooden base, is occupied by two tacky miniature baby dolls; Hell’s mirrors are backed in hot pink.

Komm, an audio work made in collaboration with Black Mariah director Ian McInerney, plays from behind a partition made by the artist Mollie Anna King. This structure, corporate minimalist in style, marks out an administrative space within the gallery. It is made up of different lengths of horizontal and vertical grey painted metal slats and one horizontal, coloured plexiglass panel. It is technically a separate space, although its openness allows viewers to look at other viewers or at the gallery administrators. Komm is a low-fi, looped vocal piece of approximately three and a half minutes in length. The phrases ‘I and Thou’ and ‘Ich und Du’ are repeated at various volumes and pitches, and this has both a disturbed and ridiculous aspect, the vocal sometimes breaking into coughing and laughter. It illustrates the way minimal repetition produces rhythm and exemplifies the tendency of Baumgartner’s work to oscillate between different tones.

Inside Manhole was hung above the ubiquitous Apple lap-top which sat on the office desk. It consists of a photograph of the artist in a mirrored environment, a full-size realization of one of his maquettes. It has a theatrical quality, the artist seeming to stare directly out at the viewer, his skin reflecting the blue fluorescent lighting and his limbs holding stylized postures. The space is confusing and ambiguous, the photographer’s reflection appearing small and upside down in the top right hand corner of the image.

There is a tension in Baumgartner’s exhibition between features that seem very finished, and looser, more casual and throwaway elements that worry the pristine surfaces. The show’s meaning alters on different visits. It had a performative aspect at the opening, encouraged by the interactions between multiple viewers. On another visit, King’s partition/ artwork, in conjunction with two young art administrators, served to accentuate the bureaucratic function of the space, and the hallowed art atmosphere receded. There is a tentative aspect to Baumgartner’s artworks, which trouble gallery protocols; they don’t seem entirely confident in relation to their position as exceptional objects, and highlight just how contingent the status of the artwork is. We look, this show suggests, but a network of discursive frameworks and structures always underpins what we see.