Debora Delmar is a little known Mexican artist but in recognition of 2015 as the ‘year of Mexico in the UK’ she has been invited to stage her first solo exhibition in Britain at Modern Art Oxford. Delmar’s desire for this exhibition is to demonstrate our dependence upon, constant interaction with and bombardment by global corporations: their brand images, slogans and eye-catching advertising.

This is an exhibition of “Aspirational Aesthetics”: orange juice, the image of ‘wellbeing’; the mock Ugg-boots, a status symbol accessible to all; tidy boxed hedges which border the American dream home. The exhibition gave off the impression of trying to overload us with these images, illustrating the explosion of communications technology and the infiltration of branding into every aspect of our lives. It was this ‘explosion’ effect that fell a little short: in the spacious, lofty, light Upper Gallery of Modern Art Oxford the exhibition looks too polite; even fifteen works in the gallery and large vibrant fabric prints hanging from the ceiling failed to imitate the feeling of living under siege from commercial bombardment. The “mass” of material looked like politely arranged mess.

Test Run: Performance in Public is definitely worth paying a visit to. Jeremy Deller, who curated the recent Andy Warhol and William Morris Love is Not Enough show is an artist in his own right too and his best-known work The Battle of Orgreave features in the current group exhibition. It is an hour-long video documenting the re-enactment of violent confrontation between miners and police in 1984. There were two identifiable main lines of enquiry within the exhibition: public engagement as a medium, to which Deller’s video belongs and performance interventions (or the documentation of) which seek to disrupt the unspoken codes of convention in public space, commenting upon their ungrounded authority. Documentation of Gillian Wearing dancing in public shopping malls explores the amusing result of recontexutualising dancing; placing it in a public space where it is received with amusement, bewilderment, ambivalence and indifference by shoppers.

Several performances have been commissioned in tandem with the gallery works including a walk led by Hamish Fulton on April 26^th. For Florence Peake’s Lay me Down, multiple volunteers will interrupt the predominance of vertical structures, tall vertical buildings and upright people in the street by lying down in the centre of town. So if you see something a bit strange going on in Oxford, it might be art. 

Upward Mobility and Test Run: Performance in Public will run until 17^th May, Modern Art Oxford, Pembroke Street. 

I’m nervous walking into the Richard Diebenkorn exhibition. The American painter is famous (rather, art-famous). This means I’ll give his work time, perhaps too much (wait long enough and anything: fried eggs, a urinal, Tracy’s bed, starts to seem deep and meaningful). Diebenkorn is also too recent; only dead for 21 years, his work might just be kicking around because history hasn’t had time to get rid of it. Time generally purges the crap, but the excrement of the present is always among us- the contemporary is always the worst period.

Also, Diebenkorn’s work isn’t realistic, or meant to be. This makes judging it hard. Realistic art is easier to critique, five fingers right, six fingers wrong etc., whereas you can’t go up to a Rothko and ask ‘why orange?’ When Abstraction cut painting’s umbilical cord to nature, it also cut the (tenuous) tether connecting critics and objectivity.  Art judgements have never been totally objective, but with modernism people gave up even trying. Public confusion over how to judge modernist art lead to the critic-tycoon type in 1950; a popular art critic would buy the works of a lesser-known artist, promote said artist, then sell the works for a profit. This brings us back to the fame-point; is Richard Diebenkorn famous for the market’s sake? I walk into the exhibition awash with waves of neurosis, disillusioned with the gallery-world. Then I see the art. 

The paintings don’t look great, or at least not Sistine-ceiling-so-great-it-ends-up-woefully-distorted-on-mugs-for-tourists-great. One painting, called ‘black pig’, looks as much like a pig as any black square with feet would. There is a series called ‘Albuquerque’; I grew up there, and am not convinced. On one wall is an orangeish painting, with a collection of shapes in the middle. It looks really good, which is peculiar, as it doesn’t look quite like anything. Each part of the painting is unattractive, but together it just works.  Several other paintings share this ‘just works’ quality, most of them in fact. The paintings feel totally convincing- I believe in the world they depict. ‘Abstract’ seems a misnomer. It’s like a room of lucky strikes, the one in a thousand work of accidental brilliance that each amateur hopes to produce. Only, there’s a room of these.

I walk into the second room, and god the relief. A wall of drawings- good drawings, with that special looking-like-the-things-they-are-meant-to-look-like quality. ‘Artist’s gaze’ is the kind of (usually) empty art jargon I hear a lot. Only, here it seems applicable: you can see in the work the process behind it, a drawing re-examined, redefined, with such concentration that you imagine looking through the artist’s own eyes. Intense observation underlies everything in the room. This doesn’t mean the work looks photorealistic.

Instead, Diebenkorn has studied his subject so well that he can leave almost everything out besides the few key details that make it what it is. Scissors made metal by a few touches of white, a knife with a three-mark ebony handle. Through the exclusion of detail, Diebenkorn pushes his work up to the line between figurative and abstract. And once we’ve arrived there, we realise there isn’t a line at all, there aren’t even two different camps. His ‘abstract’ paintings are only coloured shapes, yet they look like fields, mountains, and (dubious) pigs. Similarly, his scissors could be just an X on the canvas and his ocean landscape, an abstraction. This is a simple point, but the most important of modernism: everything is just paint on canvas. 

The last room. Go and see it. I will lend you my museum pass. London is close, and Collections will soon be over.It is the best room I’ve been in. The paintings are huge. They are Californian days, warm sunsets, totally welcoming but not the least bit naff. (This tells you nothing about what they look like; so think ‘coloured squares’ and suspend judgement till you see for yourself). Diebenkorn has genius. The paintings shout ‘I am heaven’ and ‘I am some shapes’ simultaneously. They are so well-observed, but nowhere can you see a mark that ties the pictures to something specific. This is great, and it’s great because it’s great, but also because Diebenkorn’s being great means that the art world does something alright, the market can be trusted and everything is going to be just fine.

I always find it amusing to imagine that when Ed Miliband returns from a hard day of electoral campaigning, he is greeted by a Malcolm Tucker-esque figure who gives him one hell of a bollocking. “Fuck me! You were like a clown running across a minefield”, or something along those lines – preferably in Peter Capaldi’s Glasgow grizzle. Tucker was reportedly based on real life spin-doctors – most notably Alastair Campbell – who liberally oozed profanity in the workplace, and his overwhelming popularity with audiences proves that there’s something hilariously tragic about a politician coming back to HQ with their tail between their legs, ready for a spanking.

Politicians and their ilk get a pretty bad rap on screen. Why is it that we find Kevin Spacey’s Machiavellian Frank Underwood ten thousand times more appealing – and more believable – than Ryan Gosling’s handsome campaign manager with a gooey moral centre in The Ides of March? Despite polls claiming practically every week that people want to see more “down-to-earth” and “normal” politicians, film and television is repeatedly suggesting precisely the opposite. The realm of politics on screen is populated by either bumbling idiots or ruthless schemers. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Audiences seem to get a kick out of watching elected officials crash and burn – that’s certainly what made Spitting Image so popular.

There’s just nothing interesting about a “good” politician – that is to say, a politician who lacks significant controversy. How many films have there been about Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Prime Minister from 1899 to 1905? Conversely, how many times have biopics of Richard Nixon graced our screens? He’s been played by the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Frank Langella, and John Cusack. Why? Because he’s a President that made a big mistake. The Watergate Scandal was immediately capitalised upon in All The President’s Men (1976) and screen executives haven’t been able to keep their hands off it since. Even Winston Churchill – one of Britain’s most iconic and arguably beloved figures – is hounded by cinema because he served as PM during one of the most tumultuous and testing times in world history (plus he was a pretty interesting guy). And Michael Sheen seems to have made a career for himself playing the not-so-smooth and far from uncontroversial Tony Blair in a string of political flicks (The Deal, The Queen, The Special Relationship).

Slipping up seems to have become synonymous with the job description of an elected official. With great power comes great responsibility, and with great responsibility comes the inevitable likelihood of big mistakes. In spite of the intensive personal vigor and astuteness undoubtedly required to work one’s way up the political ladder, officials are so often viewed and portrayed as stupid. As soon as Arnold Schwarzenegger is elected President in The Simpsons Movie, he becomes simultaneously illiterate. Poor Margaret Thatcher couldn’t even escape the cutting knife of the silver screen when it suggested her post-politics decrepitude in The Iron Lady. Out of the 55 Prime Minsters Britain has held, 41 of them attended Oxbridge – isn’t it time we stopped pretending that they’re unintelligent beings?

As Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick in Election demonstrates, a lot of work goes into a political campaign, but when the tide of a whole country is mounting upon you, it just isn’t possible to please everyone. The simple fact of the matter is that film and TV love to see politicians embroiled in a good scandal – a good failure. It makes for a great story. I’m surprised there hasn’t been a miniseries about that time Gordon Brown called a voter a “bigoted woman”, or when David Cameron claimed that the Queen “purred down the line” upon hearing the result of the Scottish referendum. But with the success of hit series VEEP, House of Cards, and even ITV’s Newzoids, it doesn’t seem like screen executives are anywhere near finished giving politicians the Tucker-treatment.