Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers

When we were in London for the interim show, I made time to see Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers by Sarah Morris at White Cube. The attendant told me off for trying to take pictures, so these are scraped from the website.

I had wanted to see the show anyway, but it ended up being one of those exhibitions that stays with you because it leaves you circling around things you are still trying to work out. I came away feeling energised but also slightly conflicted, which is probably a good thing. It made me want to get back into the studio. It also made me think again about a difficulty I keep returning to in my own work; how to balance some sort of political critique with aesthetic output.

That question feels especially pressing because I increasingly think that what I am doing needs to be more political, whatever that means in practice. I do not mean illustrating political messages or producing works that simply announce a position. It is more that the subject matter I am dealing with, particularly around AI, is already super-political whether I like it or not. It just isn’t good enough to treat AI as a new image-making tool. It is bound up with extraction, labour, energy use, corporate power, environmental damage, and the concentration of infrastructure in the hands of a relatively small number of companies. Once you start making work about AI, those conditions are already there, whether they are explicitly named or not.

One consequence of this that I have already experienced is that a lot of people will default to assuming that if you are making work that addresses AI, you must therefore be in favour of AI. The terms of the debate have hardened very quickly. Positions have become entrenched. In that environment, nuance can read as endorsement. To engage critically with AI imagery, to use it as a subject, or even to work through its implications in a painterly way, can easily be mistaken for advocacy. I would argue that my own position is much more ambivalent and critical than that, but ambivalence is difficult to communicate when public discussion tends to flatten everything into a binary: enthusiasm or rejection. This creates a communication problem. How do you make work that inhabits a contradiction without having that contradiction resolved for you by the viewer before they have even really looked?

Seeing Morris’s exhibition brought that problem into focus in a different register. Her paintings are SO convincing as objects. They are highly finished, highly controlled, seductive in all the obvious ways: scale, colour, surface, precision, confidence. You can absolutely see why people are drawn to them. I was drawn to them. But standing in front of them, I found myself wondering about the status of the critique they appear to stage. I can see critique there, or at least I think I can. There is something in the coolness, the compression of architecture into graphic systems, the slickness of corporate and urban visual language, that suggests distance or disapproval. Yet I also wonder how much critique really remains once that language has been transformed into such desirable objects.

The paintings reminded me of Marc Augé’s idea of the non-place: spaces of transit, circulation, administration, and temporary occupation defined less by lived identity than by systems, instructions, and movement. Airports, hotels, motorways, corporate lobbies, financial districts. Morris’s paintings seem close to that terrain. They evoke systems more than places, surfaces more than depths, movement more than dwelling. But that is also where my uncertainty begins, because there is a fine line between diagnosing the aesthetic of non-place and fetishising it. At a certain point, one has to ask whether the work is exposing these structures or simply rendering them glamorous.

That is probably the uncomfortable question that stayed with me after the exhibition. These are objects that the people who own BlackRock would probably like to have on the wall. I guess that that is a glib way of putting it, but I think that it gets at something real. Is this a form of critique already perfectly adapted to the spaces it might claim to resist? Is it just a way of commodifying a gentle tone of disapproval? The work does not fail because it is seductive; the seduction is part of what makes it compelling. But there is still a question about what happens when critique takes a form so easily absorbed by the circuits of luxury, branding, and institutional prestige that it seems to comment on.

A slight sidebar, though not really unrelated, is the sheer level of production on display. The production values were insane. Everything felt immaculate. That in itself says something about the contemporary art world and the way it delineates expectations around professionalism and finish at different points in the system. When I was at GSA, only a few years ago, there was a huge premium placed on something called ‘provisionality’. That word was everywhere. It was often framed as a virtue: a way of keeping work open, experimental, unresolved, not closing things down too quickly. I do not think that is wrong, and I do not think experimentation is something I need to leave behind. But it can feel slightly dissonant as a student to be told that work should stay rough and provisional, then to walk into commercial galleries and find them full of immaculately manufactured objects. You start to wonder how one relates to the other. How do you get from one to the other? At what point does provisionality stop being useful as a method and start looking more like something that belongs to a particular stage of the system? I do not have a fixed answer to that, but seeing Morris’s exhibition made the contrast feel especially sharp.

For all of these doubts and questions, I loved the exhibition. I like it when a show does not let me settle too quickly. More than anything, I like it when you leave wanting to get into the studio and make work. That is what this exhibition did. It did not give me answers about how political my own work should be, or what form that politics ought to take. But it made the problem feel urgent in a productive way. It made me think that perhaps the task is not to choose between critique and seduction, but to work harder at the point where they become difficult to separate.