r/AmITheAsshole Art and Other Stories
ICA workers's Tuesday and Moki Cherry's Here and Now
I got to the gallery to see Tuesday, a one-day-only group exhibition put on by members of the Institute of Contemporary Arts’s payroll. It’s happened before, they called it Monday, on a Monday back in 2019, and this one, this time, happened on a Tuesday, June 13th 2023. It’s got all the hallmarks of a big-ish group show. Loads of different materials, we’re talking multi-media. Nary a thread holding the whole thing together, other than something arbitrary conjured up by a curator. Like a show called Liminal Space, in the year of our Lord, 2023, liminal space. Tuesday is thankfully free of weird spin, which I appreciate, the curation is ‘well, we all work here.’
Through the door, I asked someone where the show was and got sidelined by the Moki Cherry exhibition on display, on the way to the upstairs gallery. I didn’t know anything about the Swedish artist before I arrived (totally not unusual), I didn’t know anyone in the group show either (neither’s that), both struck me as wildly personal.
Maybe recently I’ve been stuck thinking about the coldness of artworks in the white cube. I went to the Royal Academy School’s degree show the other day and was left baffled by the character of the majority of the work, not knowing really what anyone was into—bar some, there were some. Can art feel overproduced? Like reality TV?
I read Moki Cherry’s notes, held in a vitrine, eyed over her tapestries, big quilted hangings suspended from the walls and ceiling, paintings, threads mashed together parallel, one over the other, in a claustrophobic zig-zag stitch. She writes about approaching a New York art collector or gallerist, feeling excluded, out of the loop. There are photographs of her home, from where most of the works were pulled and shown for the first time in the UK, fourteen years after her passing.
Looking through Tuesday, past Cherry’s work and upstairs, felt (similarly) like holding a little record of what some people were thinking at a given point. Maybe it's something they care about still, maybe it’s not. Maybe it came from their walls or it was tucked under their bed, their studio desk, laying inside a stack to itself. There’s a sad little chimney drawn in graphite sitting atop a cloud, smokey, crying rain tears and writing among a star-pocked sky. Armed in broken wood painted pink and green, the arrangement is stuck with daisies and thistles. It’s called Diary of a cloud (2022) by Lyndon Harrison and it’s so sweet I could cry.
One of my favourites, for its callousness, and its tender sender, is a three-page letter laid out in a vitrine. Love a vitrine at the ICA. Scribbled in rough handwriting, it’s called BOY BYE!! and the artist presenting it has maintained their anonymity. The letter is a breakup document, an apology note, written in 2022. It starts, ‘Wasn’t sure when to reach out,’ the two, the artist and sender, have stopped talking. He’s ‘been thinking about it a lot…that we weren’t able to work things out.’ He’s sent the artist chocolates from Switzerland. He seems clueless. ‘…what’s happened between us walking the dogs and now…’ It’s a sad little read, it’s contextless. Who’s the asshole? Maybe he is? Is it the artist? For airing out their dirty laundry? The work’s titled BOY BYE!! Two exclamation points!! Maybe it’s fiction? He’s got to be the asshole. But what psycho put this in a vitrine in the ICA? I love it.
And (to round out with textiles so I can loop back to Moki Cherry,) there’s I Just Can’t Help Myself by Ellen Clarke-Quy, a digital knit of a heron(?), against a backdrop of pebbles and shells inside a halo of fish, its poised head captioned with the red stitches ‘I Just Can’t Help Myself.’ I get the feeling it’s meant to be deep and sad, forlorn, but I find it crazy funny. Look at this shamed little bird on a digital knit hung up in a gallery with fish hooks dangling from the bottom. Chef’s kiss. Poor bird.
Art's endless, we’re really out and about doing whatever we want. Cherry’s got a tapestry of a skull and bones crowning a red-nosed dog(?), a reindeer(?), Rudolph(?), idk, and a place setting, the face flanked on either side by knife and fork (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1979). Maybe it’s a person and I’m mistaking a mouth for a nose. There’s energy in the possibilities of all these images. Cherry was a collaborator of Jazz musician Don Cherry, I watched a bit of a video from a TV show (Piff, Paff, Puff, 1971) of him singing (beautifully), and Moki working around their piano. The subtitles read; when he modifies, when the music shifts to something else; ‘melody changes.’ There’s a rhythm to the eclecticism of Tuesday, a show seemingly grounded in a shared sentiment, ‘we all work, we all want to show art, we’re artists,’ and then the melody changes.
Apologies for not writing more. There were 30+ artists and I named three. Moki’s got 30+ artworks and I named one. Whomp-whomp.
—Andy x
Author’s note: I haven’t bothered with writing about exhibitions for a minute in a casual way. Perhaps it was overexposure, exhaustion, the idea that someone else has got it. Have you got it? Alight, that’s ok, I won’t then. But I feel bothered now, I’m feeling ENERGISED.(Probably just overdue sun exposure.)