Luke Skrebowski on the art of Mike Nelson - Artforum International
OVER THE PAST THIRTY YEARS, Mike Nelson has expanded the avant-garde’s long ragpicking tradition. His dense, material work reconfigures the discarded and the obsolete to produce naturalistic installations that subtly reveal their own artifice. The artist’s famously phantasmagoric production avoids didacticism while rousing us from our own ever more dysfunctional neoliberal dreamworld. True to form, Nelson’s survey “Extinction Beckons” at the Hayward Gallery, organized by Yung Ma, was a deliberately off-kilter not-quite-retrospective that was highly self-conscious about its own positi...