Alastair Mackinven (1971–2025)
158Jan. 17, 2025
Multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer Alastair Mackinven, known for wryly humorous performances that crackled with critical energy and, later, for dreamlike figurative paintings in dusky hues, died last week at the age of fifty-three. His death was announced January 8 by his London gallery, Maureen Paley. He had been diagnosed with cancer eight years ago. Working across installation, film, sculpture, painting, and performance, Mackinven created works that evinced his own curiosity and openness and sparked the same in viewers. Typical of his early oeuvre was a 2008 performance at London’s Camden Arts Centre, in which he glued his hand to a gallery floor and waited to see how long it would be before anyone offered assistance. The work was titledCut Off My Hand to Spite My Cock.Though his concern ultimately shifted from the corporeal to the canvas, he remained staunchly committed to pushing boundaries, including those of painting, his audience, and taste. “Good ideas,” hetoldAdam Lehrer in 2021, “are terrible for art.”
Alastair Mackinven was born in Clatterbridge, just outside Liverpool, in 1971. He earned his BFA from the Alberta College of Art, Calgary, in 1994 and his MFA from Goldsmiths in London two years later. Drawn in the early stages of his career to performance, he focused on the body and its capacity to endure. He often filmed these works, as he did a 2007 performance titledAll Things You Could Be by Now if Robert Smithson’s Wife Was Your Mother, which saw him shovel fourteen tons of dirt and crawl naked through a pipe embedded in the mound, performing a birth that recalled Nancy Holt’s 1979Star-Crossed. “I was London’s nude artist” after that, he toldMAP Magazinein 2009. After shedding this label by performingCut Off My Hand to Spite My Cockfully clothed, Mackinven increasingly turned to painting, tongue firmly in cheek. A 2007 series, “Critical Theory,” shown at Art Basel, portrayed various star ratings, from one (poor) to five (excellent) and were, at his request, priced accordingly, with the one-star paintings going for the lowest amount. A year later, he was bitterly disappointed when the canvases appearing in an exhibition at the London Institute of Contemporary Art were described as beautiful. “I wanted the work to point a finger at the audience and accuse them of being decrepit old spastics who need the aid of grab bars to help them do another lap of another gallery,” he lamented toMAP.
Nevertheless, he stuck with the form, in 2008 producing the “Abstract Capitalist Realism” series, which collaged in silkscreen and oil patterns from his utility bills in works whose titles variously referenced topics as diverse as Slayer and the economic crisis. He later turned his back on the series, deriding it as “embarrassing.” “I feel like a puppy that is dragged back to a poop it left on the carpet,” he told Lehrer, when asked to revisit the paintings.
In the past decade, Mackinven shunned what he termed the “Neo-Conceptual dogma” he’d absorbed at Goldsmiths and began making hallucinatory paintings in which shadowy figures stood, wandered, and appeared to lie idly about, frequently preparing his canvases with oxidized iron powder, which recalled the dry-powder pigment used in frescoes and lent his works an air of slow delicquescence. “The eye slowly explores the artist’s endlessly blending and separating hues, which one can imagine were arrived at only gradually,” wrote Barry Schwabsky in a 2021 issue ofArtforum, reviewing a show by Mackinven at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York. “Yet the images trapped in these surfaces seem transitory, as though one could blow them away with a single strong breath, leaving the gorgeous colors floating there, as it were, naked. These chromatic polymorphous compounds are enormously satisfying, and one comes to wonder whether the paintings’ impenetrable encounters are meant simply to redirect viewers to the nonrpresentational—to send them the long way around, but giving them so much to observe along the way.”
Concurrent with his art career, Mackinven played guitar in the Country Teasers, a seminal Scottish art-punk band known for its erudite, ironic lyrics and discordant twang and for its influence on modern bands from Fat White Family to Protomartyr. Following the dissolution of the Country Teasers, Mackinven teamed up with the band’s leader, Mark Waller, under the name the Stallion for a three-disc remake of Pink Floyd’s 1979 double albumThe Wall, incorporating free jazz, speed metal, and reggae, among other styles. “I preferred their version ofThe Wallto the Floyd one,” Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker toldThe Quietusin 2019. Mackinven also taught art, serving as a lecturer in painting at London’s Slade School of Fine Art and as a visiting lecturer at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Mackinven remained excruciatingly aware of the divide between art’s intention and its reception—a gap only widened by the digital age. However, he never stopped trying to close the lacuna. “If you could hear my timing,” he emailed Lehrer, “you would be wetting yourself with laughter.”