Haunch of Venison’s new premises are the former spaces of the Museum of Mankind, in Burlington House, where for decades fetish sculptures from exotic lands used to stand around. This history provides the taking-off point for "Mythologies." The catalogue says the show is concerned with "the stories we tell about the world in order to understand it." This cute little book’s mixture of tones — twee, hard sell, and worthy — goes with a distinct feeling that no one involved in its production has ever thought about anyone actually reading it. Not even the collectors, who of course only require their purchases to have had some verbiage generated about them, as a tedious but necessary rigmarole in the art-speculation business.

Everywhere in the show there is narrative and imagery, and appeals to a popular sentimental sense of "art." But at the same time a laid-on atmosphere of remote, learned, profound high-mindedness: quotes in fancy script high up on the wall from philosophers and magic-realist authors, and a catalogue full of lengthy, zombie-like references to the same kind of authorities. Photos of child soldiers in Africa with superb production values are disturbing in all the wrong ways — atrocity chic. Sculptures and paintings that look like voodoo dolls and conjure up looming Spanish Catholic atmospheres and looming Indian Hindu ones are fun and shallow and eminently buyable. A right old festival of clichés — where’s an art terrorist when you need one?

Intervention in ideology
Return to Merlin Carpenter. Painting the words BANKS ARE BAD or KUNST = KAPITAL on a canvas isn’t really raising issues about anything. It’s just being idiotic. Also at the Simon Lee event, you could watch Carpenter paint the words SIMON LEE UTTER SWINE, STOP ART, KUNST, CUNTS, and BEUYS IS A BAD BOY. It is tiresome, performative attention-seeking, done according to an easy formula. But on the other hand, how easy is it? It easily could go wrong, and he could lose his market (which of course he totally hasn’t, unless everyone has). You have to make insults work, just like anything else. One successful aspect of Carpenter’s act is clarity. Contrast is a key element. Black versus white, crap versus luxury. He is strategic and clever with his silliness and laziness and narcissism. It’s the other way around to the "Mythologies" show, where vacuousness is larded with arty gloss. That show asks, in a fakely innocent way, something like, Is being spiritual the way to go in a recession? And then it simply lays on some sampled global religiosity and cooked-up mythologies, whereas Carpenter makes genuine bitterness into the material for a theatrical version of politics.

He has been exhibiting for many years: His shows have featured real cars and speedboats, hand-done paintings of fashion models and ads (a lot of which use the episcope), plenty of scrappy flotsam and jetsam, and an endless stream of sarcastic slogans and titles. He exposes the artworld’s elitism, consumerism, racism, and general cheesiness. But you have to work hard to get past the initial impression — trendy anything-goes contemporary art — and see the broad social point in each case. And even then it is as if he feels a trendy look is simply inevitable, and the only thing to do, if you’re an artist and you have any politics, is to make sure the audience simply has to register some kind of broad political issue at some point while they’re getting decadent pleasure. If this sounds like not much, it is actually sort of something. You could ask if Guy Tillim’s photo series Portraits: Mai Mai militia in training, in "Mythologies" doesn’t force you to think of politics too. But the very superbness of the series, its high production values, keeps the politics remote. Carpenter obviously is thoughtful about production values, but his are all about attitudinized roughness or obvious junk, thoughtfully positioning the idiotic and the inept. You move from a declarative journalistic politics to a politics of personal intervention. Your own complicated head comes into the frame a bit more.