REVIEW: Kevin Harman at Hunted Projects
Kevin Harman, ah ah ah AHCHOO, 2025
A Necessary Glitch in the Art Machine
“Philosophy, as we understand it, is the conceptual proliferation of theoretical weapons aimed at the order of things. Anything else is mere collaboration.” – Anti-Oculus (1)
Capitalism flattens art. It’s why the entire art industrial complex – from institutions and big dealer galleries to art schools – is having something of an existential crisis right now. This deflating is mirrored – at least metaphorically – in a new show Rubberneckers by Kevin Harman at Hunted Projects, one of a handful of new independent galleries re-energising the Edinburgh art scene.
Will Kevin’s airbag show save us from the business ontology that art has become? Probably not. Art now exists in a state of permanent crash conditions: every artwork you see at an art fair is an after-image of an impact already absorbed by capitalism’s totalising loop of production, consumption, and justification. It is the cushion between comfort and acceptability, safety and spectacle – a padded system built to prevent art from ever doing any real damage.
To call Rubberneckers trash is to tell both a truth and a lie. The works were found in a scrapyard, after all. Yet the show makes for a perfect philosophical Petri dish – and what grows there isn't just a question about authorship or the readymade, but something more unsettling: what happens when the machine itself becomes the artist, when representation is fully automated, when human intention is just another variable in a cybernetic loop?
At first glance, the show is built on a simple premise. A series of airbags are placed equidistantly around a small, box-like gallery. Each one has been chosen for the visual strength of its embedded ‘portrait’ – created in a single, violent instant by the distinctive imprint of a driver’s made-up face. The paint is foundation, the pigment is powder, the brushstroke is impact. Maybe it’s Maybelline, but either way, these unintended, unflattering, and unintentionally funny portraits are born from the antithesis of beauty. You don’t have to look hard to see a squashed nose, a smudged lash, a weirdly pursed kiss. There’s a laughable sadness to these auto-portraits (not least because we hope all these women survived), and most viewers would likely leave it there: a cute show that raises a smile in a slightly quirky way.
These are not self-portraits, however, but records of a contact zone between flesh and code, body and machine, and – quite literally – life and death. It’s one of the clearest demonstrations I’ve seen of cybernetics finding form as art. More on that later. What’s immediately apparent is that the role of the artist has been reduced to that of witness, the gallery to a kind of distribution hub – which begs the question: do the artworks need either?
The fact remains that Kevin hasn’t really ‘made’ any of the works in this show. Instead, he’s selected them for presentation, exercising discernment rather than creation. What was recently scrap destined for the yard (airbags can’t be reused for their original purpose) has now been transfigured into art. This means both the artist and the gallery have ‘created’ a body of work between them, without making anything. The legitimacy of these works now rests entirely on the context in which they’re encountered – namely, the gallery.
That isn’t new. The everyday-object-in-a-gallery trope – the readymade – can trace its lineage back to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917. Half a century later, Andy Warhol closed the circle. Once his soup cans and Brillo boxes entered the museum, art became self-referential, if not self-consuming. (2) As the role of art to the casual observer diminished – it now took art to know art, nudge nudge – the industry unwittingly began its accelerationist freefall into a crisis of relevance that still defines it today.
Yet it’s precisely this paradox which makes the show so utterly compelling.
Gilles Deleuze warned (3) that artists often succumb to a 'conceit of subjective presuppositions' – we like to think we're 'thinking differently', but most ideas in art are built on the plinth of common sense, with narrative structures that exist only to uphold the universally conventional. Keeps the sales good and the visitor numbers bangin’, so who cares? Even this show's press release reaches for familiar cultural props like J. G. Ballard's Crash, as if to reassure us the work already fits within a recognisable lineage.
But what happens when the familiar structures of intention, authorship, and representation begin to dissolve entirely? When the machine itself starts to create the image, rather than simply mediate it? That’s where cybernetics re-enters the frame as a system that already governs how meaning is made, distributed, and absorbed. And as our individual agency continues to be relentlessly atomised under a deluge of social media brain rot, AI, digital IDs, right-to-spy legislation, and surveillance capitalism – maybe it’s time to prepare yourself for what’s coming?
Cybernetics – the science of control and communication – first emerged with early automation, but it’s only recently that critical theory has begun to expose its cultural logic. In Anti-Oculus, Acid Horizon describe our world as a planetary machine “defined by the production of capital and the management of life to ensure the machine’s stability and endurance.” They go on to note that while life is an undefinable expanse of possibilities, “this cybernetic machine functions to restrain and represent those possibilities in order to sell them back as refined and neutralised products.” (4) That’s the art industry in miniature: a system that metabolises everything, especially resistance, and returns it to market as safe critique.
What’s most exciting about Rubberneckers is that the act of representation itself has been fully automated. Meaning becomes algorithmic, recursive, and strangely devotional. The airbag performs its machinic function perfectly – invisible intelligence, barcoded identity, life-saving precision – and in doing so leaves behind a relic: a vehicular Turin shroud of impact, a brief record of contact between flesh and machine. It’s art that has escaped the limits of its human maker; an idea not just timely and prescient, but also pretty fucking terrifying.
And yet Kevin finds humour and warmth where theory often finds despair. Amid the cold precision of the system, welcome traces of humanity still show through. There's something unexpectedly generous about these images – their absurd beauty, their accidental tenderness. Now, as the cybernetic machine turns its attention to us, perhaps these accidental portraits – born from genuine collision, unmediated by artistic intention – represent a glitch the system can't quite absorb. Maybe there’s hope for us yet?
Either way, it’s one of the most unexpectedly important shows you’ll see this year.
Scott Lawrie, 9 October 2025
Kevin Harman, Rubberneckers. Until 2 November. Viewings by appointment at Hunted Projects, 8/4 Murieston Lane, Edinburgh EH11-2LX. Contact: info@huntedprojects.com
NOTES:
Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape by Acid Horizon, Repeater, 2023. This book offers an accessible overview of current theories around cybernetics. Quote from p2.
Arthur C. Danto’s book ‘What Art Is’ explores this much further. Yale University Press, 2013.
Adapted from Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 131–134.
Anti-Oculus, p3.
All reviews are independently written. Views are mine and may not be those of the artist or presenting gallery.