Sorcha Dallas

Ranging from a 1933 Minotaur etching by Picasso to new works by emerging talent, Ventriloquist’s 42 inclusions offer a tough (slantwise), riches-flaunting essay on how artists disguise or delegate their presence in their art. Embryonic or misfiring language is frequently used, as in Fiona Rae’s grid of painterly glyphs that teeter on linguistic signification, or Wawrzyniec Tokarski disconnectedly floating the word ‘Danke’ in a heavy-metal font over softly brushed trees. In the chewy 1984 Jasper Johns painting which provides the show’s title, iconographic cues lifted from ‘Moby Dick’ and proto-abstract Mississippi potter George Ohr allow Johns to poeticise Americana through the signifiers of others.

Of the inevitably outshone younger artists, non-painters unsurprisingly fare best: Marcus Coates, his accelerated footage of tweeting humans constructing a dawn chorus that emphasises humanity’s animalism; Pil and Galia Collectiv’s deadpan video of druid-like figures seemingly using Stonehenge as a vibratory musical instrument. Among the painters, Charlie Hammond’s green-brown abstraction feels weighty. But then enter Marcel Duchamp’s 1965 remake of his moustache-sporting Mona Lisa: the framed playing-card reproduction of the sixteenth-century original, untouched, seems all Leonardo’s; Duchamp, string-puller extraordinaire, calls it ‘shaved’ and it’s all his.