Art

Lee Krasner (1908-1984) spent her life fighting for the right to be herself. She couldn’t be Lena Krasner, she had to become the androgynous Lee. She couldn’t be a realist or a cubist, she had to rip her work to shreds and collage it into new, unique forms. And she could never just be her, she always had to be the wife of Jackson Pollock. That’s part of the deal with mid-century modern art, it’s a sausage party; and abstract expressionism was the blokiest movement of all. So what you see in this exhibition is an artist clawing a space for herself among the fellas and nudging her way to the front of the twentieth century art class photo. Early works here deal with life drawing and cubism before diving into small canvases made of billions of marks and colours. These ‘Little Paintings’ are like explosions in a garden, thrumming with manic intensity and precision. Works from the late 1940s are more restrained, built of endless layers of geometric shapes, like feverish sheets of automatic writing. They’re all nice enough, but not the work of a fully developed artist. It took two major events for that to happen. The first was an exhibition where none of Krasner’s works sold. In anger and despondence, she tore up drawings and glued them to the canvases from the show. The result is art of anger and frustration, all tightly and aggressively composed. These blackened, vicious works look like nothing else from the period, full of clashing shapes and forms that fight and jostle, tha

Art is a weapon. I mean, not always. Sometimes it’s just something pretty for rich people’s walls. But in the hands of octogenarian American artist and activist Faith Ringgold, art is a weapon. Art is a way of fighting back. Ringgold is a black artist, born and raised in Harlem during a time of civil unrest and social upheaval. The early paintings here show rich white bankers next to kissing interracial couples, an educated black woman near a bunch of featureless white men in suits, all captured with thick lines and flat planes of cream and blue and black. But something about straight-up painting feels too close to established art tropes to be effective here. It’s when Ringgold ditches canvas for the power and history of quilts that things really start hitting home. Influenced by Tibetan fabric art as well as the American quilt tradition, Ringgold starts combining storytelling and painting to stitch together narratives about black American history and the fight for equal rights. Panels alternate between written words and painted images. There are stories about Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr and pancake-mix icon Aunt Jemima. The images show horrifying visions of drowning slaves, but also New York subway scenes daubed with graffiti, people dancing in jazz clubs. Some of it is painfully harrowing, some of it brilliant empowering. Using the power of folk tradition and her own fighting spirit, Ringgold condenses the black American experience down into little nuggets of

Gender identity has only recently become a hot topic in mainstream society. I know, it’s hard to imagine what the tabloids wrote about before they could announce that gender-neutral toilets would be the downfall of humanity. But in art, the fluidity of gender has been a subject for centuries. From Jusepe de Ribera to Claude Cahun, art has almost always been a fertile place for radical gender thinking, and this show traces the last 50 years of it, featuring a wide array of non-binary artists. It’s an exhibition filled with photography. There’s Lyle Ashton Harris dressed as Billie Holiday, Peter Hujar’s candid, deeply moving images of New York drag performers, the powerful, alien goddess-like imagery of Juliana Huxtable. The camera is used in some of these works in its traditional role as a documenter – of unseen communities, of oppressed individuals – but it’s also used, more importantly, as a tool of transformation. In the hands of someone like Juliana Huxtable or planningtorock, the camera is a means of representing their true selves, or of creating a world shaped in their own image. The camera is a weapon against intolerance. The only problem is that once you get to the second room, the images are presented so boringly that you lose interest, and maybe even realise that photography is the least interesting thing here. Much better is the video installation of drag artist Victoria Sin performing Cantonese songs projected on shimmering white sheets, or Hunter Reynolds’s s

Tate Britain is filled with the corpses of British industry, the long dead, rotting remains of this country itself. Strewn across the massive central Duveen Galleries are chunks of enormous abandoned machinery: presses, clamps, welders, cutters. Some have been left untouched, others have been piled on top of each other. Their wires are frayed, their oils have dried, their spindles have rusted. Nelson spent months collecting these objects from salvage yards and asset strippers. As our national industries waned, debt collectors waded in, seizing equipment and discarding the humans who used it. On the one hand, Nelson has repurposed these machines and turned them into sculptures, laying bare their aesthetic qualities, their twists and turns, shapes and shadows. But on the other, the narrative of these objects is inescapable. Even when he places a concrete ring on a bed of telephone poles, or an engine on a pile of sleeping bags, you’re still haunted by the pasts of the machines. Nelson makes it a claustrophobic experience. The works tower over you, threaten to crumple on your soft, fragile body. And it never ends, there are doors to push through, spaces that unfold, an unending trip through the misery of Britain. You can see it all as a metaphor for the death of Empire and British pride, for the impact of Brexit, for the dire sadness of modern life moving forward too quickly. Or you can see it as an ageing man who is finding a reflection of his own body and mind in the cru