There are arguably two distinct types of art being made now. Roughly – and this probably isn’t the place to go into details, so forgive my unsubstantiated sweeping claims – art that is, in its form and subject, social and outward looking, dealing with external politics and histories; and art that looks in on itself and sits in dialogue with art history and take cues with from the theoretical conversation going on within the art world itself. And it seems that the cavern between these two camps is shifting further apart – with institutions, magazines, curators defining themselves within either to a greater and more absolute sense than ever before.

Now this is undoubtedly happening, but it is from the point of the viewer a false dichotomy. After all, at the point of delivery, all art has to deal with the real world. The white cube might like to think of itself as a clean room that the outside world cannot contaminate unless the artist invites it too, but this, as common sense tells us, is not true. Real life seeps in like a virus, and the most common carrier is the viewer. In they come, full of fears, desires, emotions, thoughts and baggage that the artist has no control over, scrambling the communication channel between them and the objects in the room.

Now, the job of the critic has traditionally been to ignore these external factors and produce copy devoid of outside interference. Well, again this is impossible. Despite what they say, critics are not robots! Therefore, what follows, is a horribly infected account of seeing three shows round the east end of London on a recent Wednesday morning.

It so happens, by a maelstrom of bad luck, bad planning and heavy workload, visiting the exhibitions for this gallery tour was only my second appointment of the day. The first saw me getting a train out of London, back to my hometown, some forty minutes north, to visit my very poorly grandmother. I won’t go into the details, but needless to say this was saying goodbye. She was in bed, a shard of spring sunshine slicing the room through a gap in the heavy curtains. A carer pottered in and out attempting to get some food inside her; silent, her breathing heavy and eyes glazed. I think she knew who I was, but I can’t be sure. It sounds heartless then, when typed out cold, that three hours after sitting at that bedside, holding my grandmother’s hand, I should be entering the doors of a commercial gallery to look at art. Yet filling my head with the distractions helped block out the obvious sadness (she, for her part, would have thought this all nonsense, and the artists complete charlatans, but that’s another matter).

So, to trot out the cliché that comes so often in mourning, perspective comes to the fore. This was not an afternoon in which I was in any mood to give the benefit of the doubt. My expectations were (perhaps impossibly) high. AA Bronson’s first exhibition at Maureen Paley , Hexenmeister , should have been cathartic. His older works were often meditations on death after all. The AIDS crisis haunts the work he did as General Idea (alongside Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal) in the 1970s. His later works insert an interest in witchery and spiritualism. Here we get this odd mix mashed together, but never quite gelling. Black AIDS (prototype) , Bronson’s 1991 black square oil on canvas hijack of Malevich’s year zero for abstraction, remains pretty powerful. While the Russian suprematist sought to reboot art with the motif, Bronson’s work suggests that the AIDS crisis was a moment that queer identity, almost snuffed out to nothing, must rebuild itself. This idea of a new broom, a new beginning, is reiterated unnecessarily in Broom Closet (2015, attributed to J.X. Williams, a pseudonym used by authors during the 1960s when writing dirty novels), a vitrine containing a handsome broom which the artist had used to sweep the pavement outside the gallery just prior to the show’s private view. The other major queer part of the exhibition – a collection of zines drawn from the collection of Printed Matter's Philip and Shelley Fox Aarons and none particularly engaging – seems also to unintentionally point to the fetishisation of historic identities at the cost of any active contemporary political engagement. On the witchery side, we get a big new installation Treehouse (2015) a hut, outside of which a taxidermied fox jumps up to a blackbird in a stunted bare tree. Aside is Red (2011), a light box featuring the artist naked in a forest covered in red body paint, shaman-like. Are we so divorced from our own subject that we have seek solace in fairies? It’s a depressing thought.

Moving out of Maureen Paley, into the sunshine. Down the road to Herald St’s tenth anniversary show , a birthday celebration then, put together by Glasgow International director Sarah McCrory. Black paper chains by Donald Urquhart, dip down from the ceiling. The twenty-five works are all by gallery artists, many reference previous shows and in-jokes abound. There’s not much to review curatorially, in any great theoretical or critical sense, I don’t think that was the intention and it doesn’t matter. I find the whole enterprise quite sweet and there’s a few works that cheer me up. I recognise that it is (because I’ve met him a couple of times) Herald St artist Scott King as the man drawn spunking up his polo shirt in Cary Kwok’s characteristic blue ink on paper, The King Has Arrived (2015). Gallery director Nicky Verber and a grinning Matthew Darbyshire look on in this fantasy scene. I make a note that I should to pay more attention to Alexandra Bircken, after seeing her Herstory (2015), a sizeable plinth-mounted concrete lump with protruding cotton abscess. Everything is looking bodily to me today. There’s scratched graffiti evident on the concrete side. It hits some very now-ish spots – the Anthroposcene, ecology and the place of identity in this posthuman rigmarole – yet does so without being childishly voguish. One could just as happily invoke Louise Bourgeois and be content that someone is working in the French-American’s legacy. Before leaving I spend an enjoyable few minutes sizing up Michael Dean’s 177cm high Kryptonite-green sculpture in concrete, perhaps also invoking geology, but not one of this planet.

Mottled, carved, weathered lumps emerge as the theme of the day with the final show I visit, Lydia Gifford’s To. For. With at Laura Bartlett Gallery . It’s a collection of mostly white and off-white (in the gallery’s very white light, white gloss space) wall and floor-based sculptures here. Made from a mixture of wood, cotton, hessian, and plaster, most of the works look like they could pass for not art , i.e. that one could encounter them, as beautiful, as they are, washed up on a blowy beach. My mind immediately whirls back to a happy few days spent in a house in Dungeness, on England's southeast coast, the sunlight of those vast skies warming the sea detritus spread out on the pebbly dunes. The couple of works that take on painting’s classical appearance, the gesso and ink daubed chipboard of Clip (all 2015) for instance, conveniently sized at just over a metre in height, are not so interesting. These become just art objects, ones that look at us looking at it and saying, yes, you should be thinking of the history of abstraction. In my mood – and I know this isn’t criticism in today’s cold theoretical sense but merely subjective projection – I didn’t want to deal with that. I wanted something that matched the emotional heights of all that stuff that happens outside the gallery walls. The shitty, funny, boring, lovely stuff of being a finite human. So far more intoxicating were Gifford’s rougher works. The mounted stained fabric of Brace (I) and Brace (III) (the latter looks almost mouldy in parts), their surfaces contorted by diagonally studded nails, pulling the material this way and that, resonated for example. The misshapen totemic flotsam and jetsam of Jamb and Pry ; the straggling mounted hessian of Clacked and Baring – these works feel that it’s actually an object of life that’s looking at you. Life in its messy, horrid, dishevelled, glory. I walk out, I head home.

AA BRONSON: Hexenmeister
18 April — 31 May
at Maureen Paley

X, curated by Sarah McCrory
18 April - 24 May
at Herald St

LYDIA GIFFORD: To. For. With
26 March – 10 May
at Laura Bartlett Gallery