Mount Jupiter Reports

Full-dicked exhibitionism. David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Desire), from Ant Series, 1988.

Glasgow International II: reloaded?

Well, Glasgow International has come and gone. An abundance of dickless criticism will tell you that it has been a modest success, but this is to wholly understate the context of the Parry-era nosedive which now casts the mere semblance of competency as ample evidence of changed fortunes. The bedraggled community is satiated. Something of the biennial’s 2010s hey-day was indeed summoned—even for those not on that Gloriosa dinner list (the oysters were divine, big Tobes 😋).

GoMA’s main gallery hosts its first exhibition refresh in twenty long months (Jasmine Togo-Brisby, until 6 September). Shrouded in near-darkness, it’s hard to tell whether the leccy meter finally ran out or if the choice is artistic, but s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ anything new is welcome nonetheless. The Common Guild has a typically prissy little installation (Joanna Piotrowska, until 18 July). Very neat, very organised, very Margaret Howell. Glasgow Women’s Library has another project with flags (until 26 September). Tramway has folk speculating on the mystery identity of Jericho Mars 👀 (until 9 August), whilst the all-new Gulabi gallery has others embroiled in an escape room situation, hunting for clues on the self-made lore of scorned socialite Lisette May Monroe. Ugh, men!

After a very underwhelming Keith Haring display in 2024—some chalk drawings, spray paint on metal—expectations for The Modern Institute’s touted David Wojnarowicz show were tempered. Far from a shoebox of New York counterculture, however, Some day this will all be crumbling ruins (until 28 August) opens the commercial gallery’s new Carlton Place premises with a four-floor museum-spec survey of the late artist and AIDS activist’s multifarious work in photography, film, graffiti and sculpture. It’s really good, actually. Maintaining a state of dereliction, the waterside townhouse site envelops the work with dust, dampness and failed glazing quite befitting Wojnarowicz’s scenes of the abandoned Hudson River piers where he worked, exhibited and cruised. Without any obligation to explain itself and with little signage, the show leans esoteric so do read the wiki on the 1980s downtown scene first. It’s only shame is that the city’s underpowered public galleries could never justify an equivalent retrospective. Barbie: The Exhibition, now open at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, was sorely left off the GI preview schedule.

A handful of fat CRT monitors in the basement of 48 Carlton Place play films made with or featuring Wojnarowicz, totalling 90-minutes in runtime. With one immovable school chair posed to loosely imply viewability, the gesture portends far greater challenges to our attention and comfort to come. Time-based indulgences curse the festival’s big co-commissions at Kelvin Hall, spanning two hours of ambling non-linear narrative. Kate Cooper’s 30-minute Screen Bodies lacks any seating so we assume you’re meant to read the wall text and not really watch it. Rehana Zaman’s twin films Soft Fruit and Jo Kherray so Khaey share another 90-minute choreography that challenges even the most eager biennial apparatchik. If you still have feeling in your legs, Naeem Mohaiemen at the Hunterian is just a cool 80 minutes (until 11 October).

Alongside unruly runtimes, Mount Jupiter demands a rather more personal moratorium on: cyanotypes, dust (deliberate), June winds, uneven opening hours, and £7 Tennents at the Old Fruitmarket. There is more serious dissent, of course. In 2024, the festival’s delayed public endorsement of and subscription to the cultural boycott of Israel (i.e. PACBI) revealed the extent to which its autonomy is—and perhaps always was—compromised by the patronage of Glasgow Life. As they are wont to do, notorious pressure group UK Lawyers for Israel then got litigious by conflating critique of a state’s actions with racist persecution, forcing Glasgow Life to take ‘appropriate action’ against staff signatories. Concerns have again been raised by Art Workers for Palestine about the discretion and vagueness of this year’s PACBI statement; the genocide at the centre of it all remains unnamed and the visiting literati have moved on.

There are changes to celebrate. We strongly condone and wish to amplify: Brewgooder’s guava flavoured beer, the Laurieston Art Quarter™, tote bags with impressive gussets (though internal pockets are now de rigueur), and absolutely massive warehouses for art. In its opening—if never quite filling—of the gargantuan spaces at Kelvin Hall and the Briggait, the festival has surely affirmed that, despite feelings otherwise, the city does not lack unused space. Access thereto has no doubt benefitted from the armature of Glasgow Life, but as the festival draws to a close, rumours now abound of a severance. After years of humming and hawing on the cost benefit analysis of emancipation, it seems that mommie dearest might now kick out the kids and change the locks. GI is 21 after all. Is it time it supported itself?

Big shed, why no sculpture? Kelvin Hall. 

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Mount Jupiter Reports is a new monthly bad faith stream-of-consciousness and agony aunt service. Do you have artworld troubles? Write to mount.jupiter.conspiracy@gmail.com with your symptoms and an exorcism may be provided.