I love my friends at the loucher fringes of the art world, but every now and again, someone does something so obviously stupid that it calls certain such ties into question. Last week, a pal’s poor judgment engendered a Salo-grade spectacle so nightmarish that I can’t bring myself to elaborate. Suffice to say: some parties present will never shake off the trauma; and that the instigator was extremely lucky to avoid castration.
It gets worse, too. I’d just returned from Margate, where I’d spent ages taking notes on the locale’s second-most-famous artist: a noisy, blue-haired ceramicist called Lindsey Mendick (b.1987). Mendick is fluent in the art-historical resonances and material subtleties of her chosen medium. And on a technical level, her art is significantly more accomplished than anything Grayson Perry has produced of late; it is also a lot more annoying.
Her ceramics are more accomplished than anything Grayson Perry has produced of late – and more annoying
Her current exhibition is broadly concerned with romantic attachment, specifically Mendick’s own bond with her husband and her dog. A lot of money and thought has gone into it, but it nevertheless sees the artist play to her worst tendencies: her tendency to crowd pieces with zany, quasi-surrealist detail; and her apparent compulsion to overshare.
