Most people know Eduardo Paolozzi through his public sculpture but some of his earliest defining works are collages. Entitled “BUNK” after Henry Ford’s famous line “History is more or less bunk ... We want to live in the present”, they are the conceptual heart of this survey show, Collaging Culture, which takes in Paolozzi’s five-decade career. It emphasises how this father of British pop art spoke to the “now” and strove to reach a broad audience. It also reveals that whatever Paolozzi made, he thought of himself as a collagist. This is evident throughout the exhibition, from the well-known bronze machine-creatures (which originally evolved from assemblages of scrapyard junk) to the jarring engines or nudes superimposed on to countryside and cityscapes in Paolozzi’s rare foray into film.
Pallant House Gallery, to 13 Oct
SS Photograph: Paolozzi
Hamilton’s surreal installations seem to poke fun at the concept of human desire. The British artist fashions her own version of kabuki from yesteryear’s pinups: cutout silhouettes of lovely legs in wood or clear Perspex, kimonos and vegetables. Like the traditional form of Japanese theatre, it’s elegantly stylised, bizarre and full of male players partial to a bit of face paint and dressing up. Previous shows have featured the huge sweatband-clad head of Saturday Night Fever-era John Travolta, a young Karl Lagerfeld in a revealing onesie, and a tattered poster of Luke Perry with a painted black cauliflower doubling as his brain. In Let’s Go, the dominating image is one of Robert Crumb’s intimidatingly muscular, sexually overblown cavewomen.
Bloomberg SPACE, EC2, Sat 27 Jul to 14 Sep
SS Photograph: PR
Bruce Nauman’s poetic ambiguities and provocative ambivalences gain an extra degree of evocative resonance in the deconsecrated medieval church setting of York St Mary’s. A dedicated stone, thought to date back to the 11th century, bears an inscription of the builders’ names, Efrard & Grim & Aese. If it were transposed into flashing neon it could quite easily pass for a typical piece of Nauman intrigue. He is the one major artist who through the latter half of the 20th century took on the stream-of-consciousness innovations of such literary figures as Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs. His visual use of text is a matter of its look, its sound and its suggestive presence. A neon sign here flickers between the words “violins”, “violence” and “silence”.
York St Mary’s, to 10 Nov
RC Photograph: PR
Emma Hart’s latest hybrids of sculpture and video, entitled Dirty Looks, are inspired by her old job in a call centre. Seems like it wasn’t the calmest place to work: in one ceramic, a glistening pink tongue makes a huge snaky “Bleugh!” over a clipboard. The long, lusty tongues also double up as a door handle, rosette ribbons and even napkin rings. These are all staged in a makeshift chipboard office, replete with its own handmade water cooler. Hart also brings to life the hectic noise of the call centre, her chattering videos complementing the wagging tongues. As with an earlier show where Hart dressed her cameras up as birds, she brings an irrepressible sense of fun to the occasion.
Camden Arts Centre, NW3, to 29 Sep
SS Photograph: PR
The structure and light in Helen Baker’s paintings shift between the north-east of England (“The edge of a redundant empire”, as she puts it) and Rome (“The past master”), where she has recently enjoyed an extensive period of research. So in this show, Raw Colour, the no-frills cheek of Tyneside culture is subtly infiltrated by the illuminating resonance of the Italian sun. Bold chunks of plywood are sensuously adorned with colours that suggest flights of heated reverie. Baker’s work is rigorously abstract but always evocative of real places and remembered experiences. Rome seems to have renewed her creative daring: while past work tended to be seductive and charming, these recent pieces come across like raw visual intuitions.
Customs House, to 13 Sep
RC Photograph: Colin Davison
Predictably, most of the artists in this exhibition of some 500 years of witch fantasies are men. Fluctuating between hideous hags and sexy seductresses, the show shifts from Dürer and Goya’s hook-nosed, toothlessly grinning harridans to the swooning goth of Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle and the sleepwalking sirens of Paul Delvaux’s The Call Of The Night. But it’s only with women artists towards the end of the 20th century that we see a less uptight, more enlightened perspective. Paula Rego recognises a feminist parable in the 1612 Pendle witch trials and Cindy Sherman parodies the fear of the female with portraits of herself dolled up as an erotic nightmare.
Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art, Sat 27 Jul to 3 Nov
RC Photograph: PR
Filling two levels of the BALTIC are more than 200 works by the renowned German painter, including a rare, specially commissioned sculpture and an accompanying display of his source material: newspaper clippings, quotes from favourite books, and distinctly odd found objects. The title of the show, One-Time Pad, refers to an unbreakable encryption method, and viewers of Scheibitz’s paintings are confronted by a bewildering pile-up of cryptic signals. Architectural pillars and struts form the geometric framework for sproutings of minimalist trees and racked displays of unlabelled commercial packaging. Everything is in muted primary colours, hard-edged, sharp-angled and spooky, like a surrealist board game.
BALTIC, to 3 Nov
RC Photograph: Jens Ziehe
This sculpture show has made the roof of a Peckham car park a summer destination, (that and the catering offered by the adjacent Frank’s Cafe). The emphasis is on art as a social experience. Highlights include Ruth Proctor’s giant eye mask made from rainbow-coloured bunting, and Nina Beier’s minimalist mattresses, which explore work and fatigue. Or kick back in Jimmy Merris’s old Merc while, each Thursday, listening to Ghanaian music. Much of the work is live performance, and there’s even a Dining Room where artist-conceived banquets are brought to life by Frank’s.
Peckham Rye Multistorey Car Park, SE15, to 30 Sep
SS Photograph: PR
