“Every day I set less store on intellect,” writes Marcel Proust in the essay “Against Sainte-Beuve,” privileging instinct and sensorial experience instead. In Ugo Rondinone’s first major London show, he would seem to work in the same spirit, since the exhibition’s melancholic title—“zero built a nest in my navel”—clearly speaks to gut feelings. Indeed, audiences at the Whitechapel Art Gallery initially have little else to go on, experiencing a considerable interlude of rebuffed quizzicality on first entering the galleries, followed by the realization that Rondinone’s cryptic installation is

In 1973, Harald Szeemann—while working on his Museum der Obsessionen—became himself obsessed by the Swiss utopia Monte Verità, near Lake Maggiore, and eventually a museum was established to celebrate the site’s history. The mountaintop retreat—nominally founded by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (at a time when it was still known as Monescia) in the 1870s—flourished between 1900 and 1940, when it attracted anarchists, nudists, and Theosophists alongside such figures as Martin Buber, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Rudolf von Laban, Isadora Duncan, Hermann Hesse (who famously had his alcoholism treated

Brother-and-sister act Bob and Roberta Smith (no relation to the New York Times’s art scribe) is one—or, more accurately, two—of several pseudonymous identities that the British artist born Patrick Brill has adopted while distributing his homespun, semi-anarchic output over the past decade. But more than that, I am Bob and Roberta Smith—or so stated several button badges purchasable at Hales’s entrance; another recurrent phrase was ART NOT WAR.

Declarative sentences, usually brightly painted on salvaged wood and reveling in the inept graphic flourishes of a novice sign-writer, are the tragicomic