London Gallery Weekend in Art Monthly

To take part in the third iteration of the London Gallery Weekend (2-4 June), some 140 galleries paid what, compared with art fairs, was a modest fee on a sliding scale according to their number of employees. They were then part of an advertised scheme with extended opening hours, organised tours and special events. Only commercial galleries were involved and, even then, not all the main players took part - David Zwirner, for example, was closed ahead of an opening the following week. Nevertheless, around half the city's main art venues of all types took part, providing a focus comparable to October's 'Frieze Week'.

Contemporary painting made up around 30% of the shows - after all, it's what sells best. Chris Ofili at Victoria Miro, Frank Auerbach's self-portraits at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, Callum Innes at Frith Street and George Rouy at Hannah Barry were the pick, but this was by no means a dominating mode of production. At the other commercial extreme, there was a lively performance programme repeated Centre, South and East over the three-day span and, at Phillida Reid, Edward Thomasson provided filmed and live performances. Both tackled the awkward subject of ... awkwardness, and how that plays out in private and in public. In the film Grace and Harmony, 2023, Thomasson chooses to show the first time that a group of collaborators sing a new number together. Imperfect synchrony becomes the thematic point rather than a shortcoming, as flagged by the lyric: 'let's pretend we're in control'. In the ten-minute Security, performed regularly through the five-week run, a solo actor reveals his own mental insecurities, in monologue and song, through how he frets about the physical security of his flat. Yet, just as we think we have him sussed, he launches into a fantasy that revels perversely in the vulnerabilities he has conjured.

Painting won't be replaced by NFTs in what could be a sign that their moment has passed, the Mayfair gallery dedicated to the form has closed after just a few months but mainstream galleries do continue to engage with new technologies. Gazelli Art House has done so consistently and adventurously, so it was no surprise to find it mounting a comprehensive display of works by Jake Elwes, who uses the products of auto-generative programmes to reveal the biases built in to machine learning. The Zizi Show, 2020, concurrently displayed at the V&A, entertainingly highlights how straight data normally dominates the feed into facial creation programmes by adding queer examples to the database. In CUSP, 2019, variants of birds (sourced from the AI assessment of their most recognisable features) are projected onto a live screen filmed in the landscape. Bird watching becomes on the one hand easy, on the other hand troublingly artificial - perhaps all too predictively so, given the fall in avian numbers this century. The three screens of AI Interprets AI Interpreting 'Against Interpretation', 2023, bring a light touch to Susan Sontag's seminal 1966 essay.

One computer generates images from her sentences, another generates new sentences from those images. The result are off-kilter versions with some commonality of reference. It seems 'Against Interpretation' is itself proof against this type of interpretation. Perhaps art critics are safe, for now, from computerisation.

One show persuasively combines painting with IT. Across both Modern Art spaces, Jaqueline Humphreys's heavily textured and pixelated abstractions insist on their objecthood. At Bury Street, that's emphasised by their installation, viewable from either side, in the middle of metal framing systems designed for the construction of partition walls. When hung more orthodoxly at Helmet Row, they come across as painterly. Yet every mark is made by forcing paint through templates produced on screen by software programs recycling her previous tropes. The trace of the hand is erased, only to reappear through mechanical means. Humphreys's most recent series adds politics to the mix: what she terms 'pre-vandalised' paintings feature representations of paint thrown onto the surface in the manner of eco-activists' attacks on famous paintings. You could see that as a light-hearted claim for the significance of her own oeuvre, as a reclaiming of flung paint from Abstract Expressionism, or as a tribute to the way in which 'Just Stop Oil' actions (Artnotes AM461) have brought icons of art fully into the contem- porary political arena.

At the opposite end of the technological spectrum, but chiming with Elwes's CUSP, Sprüth Magers mounted what is, surprisingly, Jean-Luc Mylayne's first UK solo show since an appearance at The Photographers' Gallery in 1999: a dozen large-format analogue photographs of birds, each the only print made from the negative. For 45 years, Mylayne and his wife have followed a nomadic lifestyle to seek out ornithological encounters, often waiting months until the birds act naturally in their presence. Given the effort, the resulting images might seem amateurish: the birds are rarely prominent and are sometimes out of focus. Why so? Mylayne's subjects are the environment, relationships, time passing and the nature of fleeting encounters as much as the unobtrusive birds themselves, which could be depicted with more conventional veracity by less challenging, more technological, means. That's reflected in the titles, which don't identify the birds but spell out how long the couple spent at the site. Mylayne's practice coalesces into a philosophical one, using the camera in the opposite of a voyeuristic or controlling way to attend to avian life as representative of the non-human world as a whole - and how we treat it. In the gallery's words, 'the birds they capture become both symbol and symptom of a gaze that quietly puts the anthropocentric view of the world in its place'.

Several galleries represented historic work to good effect. Josh Lilley focused on Patrick Caulfield's working processes. Castor's promotion of the under-acknowledged Roberta Booth continued with her works on paper. Matthew Wong's paintings have come to widespread attention recently following his untimely death in 2019, but a case can be made for his large-scale drawings worked-up selections from the sketches of dreams which he always made on waking - as being equally interesting on the evidence of those shown at Massimo de Carlo. Waddington Custot revisited US photorealism comprehensively enough to require a two-part show. The must-see exhibition in this mode, though, was Ben Brown's 80-work survey of Alighiero Boetti's adventurous and still-fresh practice. Its curator, Mark Godfrey, homed in on the union of order and disorder - Regola e Regolarsi - across Boetti's production: not just in the maps, word squares and aeroplanes, but also in lesser-known works. For example, 16 Dicembre 2040 11 Luglio 2023, c1971, consists of two engravings on brass which follow the model designed for the offices of lawyers. Boetti commissioned one with the date 11 July 2023 (coincidentally during the run of this exhibition), which was his expected death date, the other with 16 December 2040, the 100th anniversary of his birth. That brings together order and disorder, as one date is definitely true (when the anniversary will occur) whereas the other was a speculative projection - the artist in fact died on 24 February 1994.

There was plenty of variety in London Gallery Weekend, then, and I haven't even mentioned my favourite multimedia group show (Goodman Gallery's 'One That Includes Myth'), the most spectacular installation (Marcin Dudek reconstructing a vandalised bus in Edel Assanti's hardly-more-than-bus-sized space) or the most satisfying quietly unassertive shows: Niamh O'Malley's subtly interrelated sculptures at Vardaxoglou and Matthew Harris's chance-driven textile collages at Alice Black. Those last two galleries, incidentally, have recently relocated - and that, of course, is a principal benefit of the Gallery Weekend framework: to find out what's going on and where. 

Published in print.