The meal deal: Jasper Johns, Paolo Gioli and Stuart Middleton

London or Los Angeles, where would you rather live? I asked myself this while reading Janelle Zara’s Frieze LA diary. In it, she captures the frenetic energy of a city where the rich and famous are just regular folks, and pool parties are a way of life. LA seems to have everything going for it: sunshine, money, smiles. Meanwhile, London… I always believed that my character, the same “practical bluntness and low-simmering anxiety” that Zara identifies in East Coast Americans, meant I was better suited to London. But recently I’ve come to recognise that I had it the wrong way round; what I thought was character was simply the weather. As soon as the sun’s out, I fall into the west coast mindset. Right now, there’s no chance of me moving to LA, so I’ll forgive Angelenos for all their crystal fads and health food habits if they can bring some sun over for London’s own Frieze Week.

Jasper Johns at The Courtauld

I like seeing artists’ drafts, they’re a reminder that artists aren’t geniuses, just people working out problems. A great example of this is Jasper Johns’ series The Seasons (1984-1991) at the Courtauld. The various sketches, proofs and prints show an artist working on the problem of time, over time. Like many artists before him, Johns uses the passage of the year as a metaphor for the passage from childhood to old age. No nature or portraits, instead symbols of his artistic development: cones, cubes, spheres, stars and stripes, signs, ladders, the Mona Lisa and rabbit-duck illusions. The only figure is a man’s shadow cast over each image. Johns worked on the series for years. His frequent revisions show a man dogged by doubt. The images remain roughly the same, but there are a number of small yet significant differences: a little less emphasis on the stars and stripes, a little more emphasis on the falling snow. And there are larger questions that are never settled: should the images be arranged like a book, a film strip or a cross? Each format implies a very different understanding of beginnings and ends.

Paolo Gioli at Amanda Wilkinson

For Paolo Gioli, photography’s potential lay in its past. His botanical Polaroids on display at Amanda Wilkinson are closer to the work of photography’s early pioneers, Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, than Gioli’s contemporaries. Each of the works are unique, handmade objects made by pressing the freshly shot Polaroid onto paper soaked with developers’ chemicals. The plants he photographed have the subdued tones of an aged photo album: steel grey and iodine brown. There are some splashes of colour – wholly unnatural cyan, magenta and yellow – where Gioli dissected the film to reveal its individual colour layers. In a few pictures, the leaves and petals are complemented by delicate, coral-like forms, the result of Gioli carefully peeling apart the sticky layers of paper. Gioli’s work is everything photography shouldn’t be: there’s little definition; no clean lines or natural colour; he’s messed with the developing process at every stage; there’s simply no way that these images could be mass-produced. It suggests that photography lost its way; let’s step back, take a second look and start again.

Stuart Middleton at Carlos / Ishikawa

Stuart Middleton’s exhibition at Carlos Ishikawa evokes something I like to call ‘Renter Saṃsāra’: the cycle of pressure and release you feel as you settle into a home, only to move again, and the churn of possessions as you acquire and lose things you never really needed. In one room are a pair of sculptures made of household junk skewered on steel torsion bars – spoons, TV remotes, sieves, footstools, kettles, towels, saw blades – if you rent, you’ll be familiar with this collection of crap and the irresistible catharsis of taking a drill to it. In the other room, he’s built a star-shaped ‘radial maze’ of thin synthetic duvets draped over tensioned steel cables. Outside, it has the appearance of a nomad’s yurt. Inside, it has a disorienting five-channel soundtrack of drones and vocal samples. It sounds odd, but inside the maze I found myself at ease. When you turn away from the outside world, your mind moves inwards. Either that, or I’ve been conditioned to embrace the chaos of shared living.