Abstract Capitalist Realism’, large-scale paintings that play on commodity culture.
6.30-8.30pm, info:www.generalhotel.org
30th Oct–5th Dec 2009
MacKinven’s humour satirises the value systems of the art world, whilst wryly deflecting to a more corporeal practice of involuntary evaluation.
Alastair MacKinven (born Clatterbridge, UK, 1971, lives in London) has an obsession with the body – its limits, idiosyncrasies and various behaviours. In his 8mm film All the Things You Could Be by Now if Robert Smithson’s Wife Was Your Mother (2007) he transferred a pile of dirt from one area of a lawn to another, remaking the 1979 work Star Crossed by Nancy Holt (who was Robert Smithson’s wife) MacKinven embedded a large pipe in the pile, undressed, then passed naked into the pipe and came out, wrapping himself in a silver blanket like a newborn child. Like the title, the work refers to conception, birth and supposed transformation; the artist’s bare body becomes a base from which MacKinven questions art’s myths, and in particular its associations with the transformative.
