Left to right: The Artist Taxi Driver, ‘Where Does Hate Come From?” (2024) Mark Essen ‘You Suffer But Why?’ (2024) Gavin Wade, ‘Abstract Kab (2023)
Minor Attractions
Terrace, 1st Floor and Upper Terrace
14.10.25 - 18.10.25
The Mandrake Hotel W1
The Artist Taxi Driver
Mark Essen
Gavin Wade
The Artist Taxi Driver - News on Demand
Performance - twice daily, live, as it happens.
Daily Mail Paintings
Ink and white acrylic on newspaper
30x35x1cm
RRP £100 pay what you can at the fair, see editions for more information
Corgi eating, car scratching, tap dripping, baked bean pushing and Jane Goody kidnapping, such acts are often reduced to spectacle or dismissed as provocation. Yet to view Mark McGowan aka The Artist Taxi Driver aka Chunky Mark, merely as an agitator is to overlook the philosophical depth of his practice.
McGowan’s work occupies a unique space in contemporary British performance art. Improvised, visceral, and confrontational, it resists categorisation. While frequently framed as “activism,” his output is better understood as a form of media critique, an embodied engagement with how we as modern subjects navigate the spectacle of news, authority, and political discourse.
McGowan emerged from the post-war consensus into the ideological terrain of Thatcherism and neoliberalism. His work channels the disorientation of a generation caught between analogue realism and digital saturation.
To fully grasp McGowan’s project, one might recall Nietzsche’s critique of newspapers: as instruments not of enlightenment but distraction, flattening complexity into consumable outrage. McGowan does not oppose this condition from the outside; he inhabits it. Through excess, repetition, and emotional extremity, he reflects the logic of media back on itself.
His videos and performances constitute a kind of lived Nietzschean theatre in which the self becomes both subject and casualty of the spectacle. He does not seek resolution but rather overloads the system, collapsing its absurdities into their logical conclusions.
McGowan’s work is not simply art about politics, the left, the right it is art as the politics of perception.
Mark Essen - forget me nots (2025)
Display framed ceramics, 27 Hand thrown tea-bowls
Upper Terrace.
The Return of Mark Essen. One Decade on.
Our relationship and conversation with Mark Essen began ten years ago this month. A year later, he co-curated and orchestrated a pivotal exhibition for Division of Labour; Looking at People Looking at Art (2016), which probed the dynamics between viewers, artworks, and the conditions under which observation itself becomes a form of labour. Through a careful selection of artists and works, Essen foregrounded how looking, traditionally understood as passive reception, can instead be seen as an active, socially embedded practice shaped by power, gaze, and context. The exhibition questioned visibility, spectatorship, and exchange: who is looked at, who looks, and what structures enable or constrain that looking. By doing so, Essen opened up a space in which the act of observation was made visible, unsettling assumed hierarchies between art object, artist, institution, and viewer. The show became a touchstone for exploring how art can both reflect and disrupt the labour implicit in contemporary visual culture.
Our presentation at Minor Attractions 2025, on the upper terrace, is entitled forget me nots (2025). It consists of a series of 27 hand-thrown tea bowls inscribed with the names of galleries that have closed, recalled from the artist’s memory. forget me nots extends the conceptual concerns first articulated in Looking at People Looking at Art. Whereas the earlier exhibition examined spectatorship and the social labour of looking, forget me nots turns that gaze inward, towards the institutions that once mediated those acts of viewing. Both projects interrogate the invisible economies that sustain and dissolve the art world, the labour of attention, the fragility of spaces that frame artistic exchange, and the collective memory that persists after they disappear. In Looking at People Looking at Art, Essen explored how viewing can be an active, embodied form of participation, while in forget me nots he transforms remembrance into a tactile, ritual act of making, each bowl a memorial vessel marking both loss and continuity within the cultural ecosystem. Together, these works trace a line from the politics of seeing to the poetics of remembering, revealing how art endures through the communities, gestures, and materials that hold its memory.
Gavin Wade - Songs of the Modern World
Minor Attractions Performance Night
Performances highlighting this year’s participants: Cabanon (Paris), Division of Labour (Salford), Miłość (London), and experimental music platform Lateworks (London) (TICKETED - LIMITED CAPACITY) - https://minorattractions.artsvp.com/8343c0
“Song of the Modern World is one of a whole series of songs I discovered over the last twenty years and sung to myself. By discovered I mean that I am a feral songwriter grasping at tunes and words that appear to me. The question of the song feels like something that has been there my whole life. Still to be answered, solved, joined, drawn out, sung” - Gavin Wade