Free things to do in London this weekend

What is working-class England if not grey, sullen, broken, monochrome, damp and sad? That’s the classic vision of this crumbling nation presented to us by photography, film and TV. But in the early 1990s, photographer Nick Waplington rocked the metaphorical boat by showing another side of England; one filled with colour, laughter, love and happiness. ‘Living Room’ documented the community of the Broxtowe house estate in Nottingham. The book was a sensation, and this amazing little exhibition brings together previously unseen photos from the same period. It’s the same families, houses and streets, but seen anew.  There are scenes of outdoor life: dad fixing the motor in the sun, oil staining the tarmac, his kid in blue sunnies hopping on her bike; a trip to the shops to pick up a pack of cigs; everyone out grabbing an ice cream in the sun or play fighting in the streets. It’s ultra-basic, super-mundane, but it’s overflowing with life and joy. But it’s in the titular living room that the real drama plays out. This room is the stage, the set where the community acts out its relationships; a cramped, filthy, beautiful world unto itself. Babies are fed, toddlers are cuddles, fags are smoked, teas are split, clothes are ironed. It’s ultra-basic, super-mundane, but it’s overflowing with life and joy. Everyone is laughing, playing, wrestling.  It’s also brimming with signifiers of late-1980s English working-class life; the clothing, the hair, the brands. Some of it shocks (the mum f

Turns out, not only does Harmony Korine make difficult obtuse films, he makes difficult obtuse paintings too. His show at Hauser & Wirth is full of psychedelic, violent, eye-searing paintings of scenes from his latest film, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’. The movie (starring Travis Scott and Jordi Molla) takes you on a dizzying, weird, fully infrared trip into the world of a masked assassin, patrolling deep undergrowth and lavish villas on a mission to kill a demonic crime lord. The paintings are full of that same tropical violence, 8-bit menace and throbbing, silent aggression. Figures brandish machine guns, they slice their way through dense foliage with machetes, stalk around deserted corridors, all rendered in acidly bright yellows, pinks and oranges.  It’s obviously and heavily indebted to modern ultra-violent videogames, which makes it feel teenage and adolescent, immature and stoned, a 2am gaming sesh rendered in paint. But freezing these gaming moments highlights the intensity and weirdness of the activity: gaming allows you to embody a character who’s out to kill, it allows you to take a life in an act of leisure and relaxation. These paintings act as a sort of kink-infused celebration of violence as distraction, as fun, as a break from reality. A brilliant, atmospheric, intelligently dumb look at violence and leisure But Korine is an artworld interloper, an outsider, he’s doing it wrong; where’s the fine art degree, where are the art historical references, where are the necessary c

Chelsea’s annual floral art show is back, bringing luscious colour to King’s Road, Sloane Street and other iconic locations.  As ever, the streets and squares and more than 120 businesses of SW10 will be transformed with wonderful floral displays created by retailers in the borough, and you can even vote for your favourites from 5 pm on Monday May 20. This year’s theme is ‘Floral Feasts’, so expect high-class horticulture inspired by The Very Hungry Caterpillar (by the team at All For Love London), Willy Wonka (by Maison de Fleurs) along with The Lady and The Tramp on Sloane Street and a take on Winnie The Pooh on the Kings Road.

At Between The Bridges every Sunday this summer, SoLo Craft Fair will hold the eclectic South Bank Summer Market. With over 60 traders, you’ll find a wide variety of bits and bobs to take home with you, from art, jewellery, fashion, kids’ products and more, all created by independent designers from across the capital. If you want to try your hand at making something, there’ll be free workshops on site. Food and drink, live sports screenings and DJ sets will keep you occupied between shopping.

For an artist so ubiquitous, rich and successful, Jeff Koons sure isn’t popular. But I am an unapologetic Jeff Koons apologist. I know he’s the ultimate example of art avarice and market cynicism, but I also think that all the glitz and dollar signs hide an earnest heart; there’s a real artist behind the balloon dogs and price tags, I promise. Even in this show of not-great works on canvas from 2001-2013 there’s good within the ugliness. The ‘paintings’ are collaged hodgepodges of nicked imagery. Nude women’s bodies overlap with inflatable toy monkeys, piles of pancakes, horny fertility talismans, sandwiches, feet. God they’re ugly, a total mess.  I mean, obviously this is revoltingly cynical, hyper-capitalist trophy art for gross millionaires. But it’s also really base and vile and erotic and pleasurable and fun and ecstatic. This is just Jeff’s own joy and kinks on display: food and skin, toys and tits. It’s Dionysican, stupid, real and – whisper it – kind of good.

Obsessive, repetitive, maximal: Nnena Kalu’s art is like an act of physical, aesthetic meditation. She takes textiles, plastic, unspooled VHS tapes, netting and rubbish and binds and rebinds it over and over. In the process, she creates hanging bundled forms of countless colours and textures. They hover like disembowelled organs, hearts and guts constructed out of detritus. They look tense, dangerous, ready to burst. Her drawings are even more intense - whirling whorls of fierce spiralling marks on coloured paper, that double back on themselves over and over - but you can only just spy them in the office in the back of the gallery.  But it’s not as objects or images that Kalu’s work is the most interesting. Kalu has ‘limited verbal communication’; creating these sculptures and drawings is an act of expression, a feverish striving for visual communication, a plea for language. The objects are a symbol of that endeavour, but to see them is to be spoken to, reach out to, and brilliantly communicated with.

Can art save the world? Can it lead to world peace? Nah, probably not, but Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) believed it could. In the 1980s, the giant of post-war American art launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, pronounced ‘Rocky’ like his pet turtle), an initiative that saw him travel to countries gripped by war and oppression in an ambitious act of cultural diplomacy. He visited places like Cuba, Chile, the USSR, touring a retrospective of his work and making new art in response to all the visual stimuli he encountered. The results are on display here in the first gallery show dedicated to ROCI since 1991, and it’s all classic late-period Rauschenberg. Overlapping, clashing screenprints are a chaotic mess of imagery: architecture, road signs, animals, monuments, flags. Symbols of statehood are overlaid with symbols of everyday life: a bust of Lenin, a topless bather, a squealing boar, the Twin Towers, machinery, newsprint. Rauschenberg is documenting the visual reality of 1980s life under oppressive regimes around the world. By touring the work around those very countries, he hoped to offer a way out, a path towards liberation. It’s a very old fashioned and now-problematic form of cultural outreach. It’s the Western artist as saviour, it’s Rauschenberg thinking that showing his art in oppressed nations will help free their people. It’s naive, arrogant American imperialism under the guise of art. He’s left no space for the artists of these countries, it

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, at 2:54pm, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were being told that he had only a few years to live.  A bout of chicken led to his immune system attacking itself. He was hospitalised and paralysed from the neck down. But the doctors were wrong: he survived.  Those years in hospital, then in recovery, stuck immobile on a ward, lost in his thoughts, awakened a deep creativity in him. Film, TV, cartoons and sport were his escape, and his path towards art. This show is the culmination of all that struggle and creativity. Two vast orthopaedic boots stand like totems as you walk in, but these aren’t austere miserable corrective devices, they’re psychedelically patterned, ultra-colourful - they’re Wilsher-Mills reclaiming his own history and trauma and turning it into joy. Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening A huge body lies on a hospital bed in the middle of the room, its feet massively swollen, its guts exposed. Toy soldiers brandishing viruses lay siege to the patient. Seb Coe, his head transformed into a TV, is the figure’s only distraction. The walls show comic book daleks and spaceships, Wilsher-Mills reimagining his static body as futuristic vehicles or beings with wheels and jets and thrusters. Every inch of the space is covered in pop trivia, or dioramas of happy memories. There’s a hint of Grayson Perry to this, mashed with pop culture and grizzly medical ter

Danica Lundy paints like she’s omniscient, like she can see in multiple dimensions. Her images are full of everything. She takes you inside someone’s chest, through electrical fittings, sends you traversing through the guts of machines and bodies. Time, space, density, memory, love, lust, all can be burst open in her grubby psychedelia. The first painting here shows a fragile, premature baby in an incubator, the artist’s own. A pair of arms reaching in to treat it have been bisected at the elbows; now you, the viewer, are in the scene, caring, healing, in this world of gore and fragility. Then your view shifts to within the mouth of a high school athlete, gulping down water as your teammates stretch around you. Everywhere in these worlds you see exposed rib cages and viscera, you see out from inside machines, or behind a mirror as high schoolers kiss. It’s all rendered in filthy, thick pinks and purples, but with these little goops of clarity and trompe l’oeil precision, with all these endlessly repeating symbols of chewed apples and Umbro logos. It’s very good painting.  The gallery wall texts blather on about power structures and consumerism, but it’s hard to see how that relates. Instead, this feels diaristic and personal, like Lundy is documenting both the most mundane and the rawest, most intense moments of her life–- teenage loves, childbirth, deaths, diners, sports, workplaces – but going so far that she tears it to shreds, exposes too much. It’s as if by ripping the w

Turns out, the line between erotic and bawdy is pretty thick. And right here in Clapham you’ve got Tom of Finland on one side of it, and Beryl Cook on the other. Studio Voltaire has brought the two artists together for a duo show exploring the links between Tom’s hyper-exaggerated homoerotic pornography and Beryl’s titillating seaside British comedy naughtiness. Let’s get this out of the way, duo shows of long-dead artists like this don’t work. You’re meant to explore the supposed similarities between the works, but you spend your whole time thinking about a nonexistent relationship between artists who never knew each other, instead of just thinking about the work. It’s curation over art. Tom and Beryl are done no favours by being shown together. They both depict bums a lot, but that’s about the extent of the similarities. This could and should have been two separate solo exhibitions. They both depict bums a lot, but that’s about the extent of the similarities But it’s too late for that, they’ve done it, so here we are. Both artists are brilliant in their own way. Tom pushes macho musculature and hyper-male bravado to an erotic extreme. His leather clad bikers bulge and ripple, they tease and play, smirk and pinch, fist and lick and spurt and penetrate. It’s idealised masculinity, it’s attraction, musk and spunk being celebrated, glorified, revelled in at a time when homosexuality was illegal. It’s brave, fun, sexy art. And he makes poor Beryl look tame, which is a bit unfair