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	John Armleder Institute of Contemporary Art Steven Stern
‘It starts here,’ said the museum guard at the entrance, pointing visitors towards the right side of the first-floor gallery. As the ICA’s John Armleder retrospective was (per the gallery notes) installed in ‘roughly chronological’ order, her advice seemed helpful – good to know the proper...

	Aleksandra Mir Kunsthaus Zürich Adam Jasper
When the Fluxus artist Ben Vautier painted the words ‘La Suisse n’existe pas’ (Switzerland does not exist) at the 1992 World Exhibition in Seville, he merely confirmed the suspicions of many. Prosperous but internally complex, with four official languages and 26 independent cantons, the...

	Next to Kin Galerie Daniel Buchholz Manfred Hermes
Shouldn’t it be ‘next of kin’? Paying homage to Next of Kin, Atom Egoyan’s movie from 1984, the oddly shifted preposition of ‘Next to Kin’s tries to make a statement: it questions the importance of biologically determined human relations. This approach can only be embraced; I always thought...

	Janice Kerbel Artangel/BBC Radio 3 Sally O’Reilly
It is a constant source of frustration that UK broadcasting networks rarely apply even their more obscure channels, stations or programmes to the task of creating or disseminating art works. Arts programmes are generally confined to documentary coverage and critical commentary, or a guest spot...

	David Noonan David Kordansky Gallery Julian Myers
‘The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.’ These are the fearsome words that begin Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), written in exile...

	Seth Price Friedrich Petzel/Electronic Arts Intermix/ Reena Spaulings Fine Art Megan Ratner
Decapitation rears its severed head throughout Seth Price’s work. Earlier pieces referred, for example, to Daniel Pearl (the American journalist beheaded in Pakistan in 2002) and to a widely circulated Jihadist execution video. In his three simultaneous and closely related projects at...

	The Vancouver Special Various artists Maria Fusco
The Vancouver Special comprises artists’ publications produced by the newly founded Charles H. Scott Gallery/Emily Carr Institute Press in Canada. In issuing these four natty tomes, each radically different in form and content, the series’ editors, Christoph Keller and Kathy Slade, have sought...

	The Mountain Announces Scatter Sam Thorne
Glasgow-based avant-folk collective Scatter are aptly-named. The revolving cast of musicians has counted Nick McCarthy (of Franz Ferdinand) among its number, while their current line-up shares a cellist with Belle and Sebastian. Scatter’s impressive second album, The Mountain Announces, their...

	Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita Julie Ault Martin Herbert
In 1960s’ America a place existed that ‘was renowned for its lively interdisciplinary environment, in which multiple films were screened simultaneously, pop music played on the stereo, and large-scale collaborative projects were usually in process’. It wasn’t The Factory. In fact, it is never...

	Deborah Turbeville The Wapping Project Brian Dillon
Deborah Turbeville, you might say, is the anti-Helmut Newton. Her most abiding images, the ‘Bath House’ series, produced for Vogue in 1975 (and reprised in the similar ‘Steam Room’ photographs of 1984), present models whose misty lassitude is the antithesis of Newton’s athletic automata....

	Strange Powers 64 East 4th Street George Pendle
One of the most surprising features of ‘Strange Powers’, the latest show by the perennially entertaining public art organization Creative Time, is its sincerity. When it comes to the supernatural, many would think a nudge and a knowing wink prerequisites to viewing. But, like ‘The Perfect...

	Graffiti Composition The Museum of Modern Art James Trainor
Piet Mondrian didn’t title his 1943 painting Broadway Boogie Woogie by accident. It was a recognition that image and sound, exuberant musicality and the brash energy of a city on the make, are interchangeable. Several years earlier, German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann acknowledged the same thing...

	Vidya Gastaldon Alexandre Pollazzon Charles Danby
Ulephant (all works 2006) was one of a large number of French artist Vidya Gastaldon’s framed drawings on paper that lined the walls leading into the main gallery space of Alexandre Pollazzon. Within this work, as with others on show, was a universe located in an ample surround of untouched...

	Nina Katchadourian Wave Hill Garden and Cultural Center James Trainor
Close your eyes and imagine the sounds of a perfect late summer’s day in the country, and you may conjure in your mind’s ear the breeze swirling through a meadow of tall grass, the rustling of leaves high on a great oak bough or the drone of crickets in the undergrowth. You are less likely to...

	‘Silent Sound’ Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard Jonathan Griffin
In 1865 the Neo-classical St George’s Hall in Liverpool played host to a week of performances by the Victorian Spiritualist sensation the Davenport Brothers. Satisfying the twin Victorian appetites for the paranormal and the spectacular, the brothers would sit, bound with rope, in their sealed...

	The Eighth Square Museum Ludwig Dominic Eichler
At the opening of ‘The Eighth Square – Gender, Life and Desire in Art Since 1960’, an emphasis was placed on the ‘historic nature’ of the exhibition. Including around 260 works by 80 artists, it is the first large survey in a major German art institution dedicated to what the press release...

	Liverpool Biennial Various venues Jonathan Griffin
It would be churlish to knock the stated intentions of Liverpool’s fourth Biennial of Visual Art. While other biennials may draw criticism for riding roughshod over their local contexts and audiences, Liverpool’s organizers continue to be keenly attentive to the city’s many thousands of...

	Momentum 2006 Moss Melissa Gronlund
There are some words which, if they acquire any more meanings, are going to become blank ciphers keeping company with the hieroglyphics that weren't explained by the Rosetta Stone. I am thinking of, in particular, ‘subject’ (and its corollaries ‘subjective’ and ‘subjectivity’), ‘spectacle’ and...

	Hans Bellmer and Pierre Klossowski Whitechapel Gallery Sally O’Reilly
The net of history appears to have closed around Hans Bellmer and Pierre Klossowski, lumping them together as ‘sensualists’, as it might be put in polite circles. Tangential and direct connections can be traced throughout their work and lives: both were associated with the Surrealists and the...

	Adam McEwen Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery Peter Eleey
The two bodies of work that constituted the bulk of Adam McEwen’s show ‘8:00 for 8:30’ at first seemed distinct from one another, and awfully simple. One room featured a sequence of nine identical pictures of a building in Lefrak City, a massive housing complex built during the 1960s alongside...

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