Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jesse Darling
British (English); 21st-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Oude Kerk (Exhibition: Jesse Darling: Godsworth)
23%
Godsworth. 2026. Multimedia installation
The exhibition is mostly sand spread across the ground of an old church, zhuzhed up by these carnival light things, random other stuff, some scaffolding, more light fixtures but they're less fun than the other ones, plants that look like they're really struggling, and some little altars with more plants and more random stuff in them. Oh and there's also this giant blue tarp hung from the ceiling like it's a human figure, which is probably, like, God or Mary or something. When I visited the show there were these puzzled old German tourists on their way out of the church asking the front desk person why the place was open if it was under construction. And who said art can't shock you anymore?! (Well it can if you're an old German tourist at least.) Anyway it's crazy that this type of shit still flies more than a half century after Robert Morris et. al. invented putting random shit such as sand in a gallery and so then it's art. That's a very general critique of this show, and not a very good one. A more specific critique is that Darling has no idea where within his composition he ought to "aestheticize" and where he should, um, "anti-aestheticize." Things that are supposed to have this detached non-art quality instead feel very ponderous and freighted with meaning, while things that ought to seem deliberate end up coming off as totally slapdash and arbitrary. Installation at this point in its history is basically as established a medium as painting or traditional sculpture, and so its conventions, such as they are, need to be dealt with. Darling seems capable of doing little more than filling up a big space with stuff. (TFS, 2026)