April London Round Up

Matt’s Gallery Ÿ- White Cube -Ÿ Michael Werner -Ÿ Carlos/Ishikawa

‘Some lines shouldn’t be crossed’, ran the tagline for Joel Schumacher’s hammy 1990 thriller Flatliners. In the film, the vision of the afterlife momentarily encountered by the daredevil medical students is one of guilt, each haunted by past actions. The by-now familiar melodramatic scenes of near-death experiences (NDEs) – out of body perspectives, lights at the end of tunnels, encounters with long-gone kin – are all there. If Kiefer Sutherland being dead, even if just for 12 minutes, wasn’t enough for you though, you could find all the NDE tropes laid out in long form in Susan Hiller’s installation Channels, 2013, at Matt’s Gallery. A babble of voices streams from a wall of TVs and aged monitors, either blank, static or a solid blue screen, as if we have managed to stumble upon the same after-hours channel as the little girl in Poltergeist, 1982. Gradually an audible voice emerges from the noise, recounting their disembodiment, or feelings of universality and so forth. Despite the supposed insight of the confessional format, hearing a series of personal recountings in succession renders them generic, as though Hiller is not interested in the individual peculiarities of the stories themselves, underscored by their delivery with the flat over-enunciation of a voice actor. The barrier of screens reinforces this: it is a line we literally cannot cross. Hiller’s way of providing the collection of anecdotes acknowledges that whether they are true or not is not the issue but, rather, that we are well aware of these stories via any number of media sources, like Flatliners, The Twilight Zone or The X-Files.

For Hiller, the afterlife is irrelevant, it is already static and can only ever remain fixed at a distance. Wading through the late winter sea of reliable big-name exhibitions and sure-fire shows, though, the dead zone of the afterlife was never that far away. Kris Martin’s series ‘Lost Wax’, 2013, at White Cube Mason’s Yard might take its name from both the technique used to create his bronze casts of honeycomb and the original bees’ wax, but the material pun doesn’t make the end result any more interesting. The 16 panels sit mute, still clinging lazily to clusters of the plaster used to make the moulds. Downstairs, over a hundred tall, slim unmarked sandstone gravestones have been lined up in five rows like giant dominoes ready to be toppled with one push of the finger. That is, of course, if you were allowed anywhere near the sculpture. Cordoned off at one end of the cavernous basement, the work is stripped of any physical impact and might as well be a drawing of the one-liner it represents. The line of wire across the room ends up turning the work into a pun on its own death and the whole show a pointless paean to self-defeat.

On the other side of Mayfair, Michael Werner Gallery gathered a mini retrospective of the deceased James Lee Byars. A small room is crowded with sculptural anthropomorphic forms staring back at you, works from the 1950s and 1960s with craggy, cartoonish features and vacant round eyes. A small-screen plays the one-minute loop of Autobiography, 1970, which is mostly static, with a bluish tinge to the murky image in which a tiny figure in white appears at a distance for only a moment. A rope runs across the frame of doorway at the back of the room where we can lean in to see The Angel, 1989, on the floor of a back space. A pattern of large glass spheres that looks something like a stylised, curling plant – you can tell it is fragile – but all you can do is rely on the rote information handed to you about the work: that it consists of 125 hand-blown glass globes in the shape of the Japanese logographic kanji character for ‘man’: each made by one breath of the glass blower in Venice. Like the fleeting figure in the static mist of Autobiography, we are denied any direct, intimate experience of the work itself. Byar’s lifetime of work contained moments of quick, ephemeral poetry, usually presented incongruously alongside glitzy bombast; regardless of whether the combination appeals to you, this show managed to keep both at bay.

Steve Bishop, When the Lights Go Out You Keep Moving, 2013, Single screen projection and radio receiving audio channel

By contrast, we are explicitly told to ‘walk inside the wall’ when you enter Steve Bishop’s ‘An Escalator Can Never Break, It Can Only Become Stairs’ at Carlos/Ishikawa. You forget the instruction, or at least you don’t know what it means, until you have rounded the half-finished L-shaped wall partitioning the room and step over a radio playing floaty, Muzak-like piano riffs into a half-metre wide corridor within. Shuffling to the dead end, a small monitor on the floor plays When The Lights Go Out You Keep On Moving, 2013, a short video of what looks to be a showroom for revolving doors. We get close-ups of hinges and sliding doors in soft focus, the elevator music lulling us into feeling like we are stalking a closed, partly dismantled mall. In part, the show muses on the strength and mutability of corporate interior design: Lamp Looks in Different Light, 2013, is a set of tiny inkjet prints dotted around the room of one innocuous lampshade in slightly varying light levels: the difference is minimal. How Can One Thing In General Be Many Things In Particular?, 2013, is a cream-coated sheet of steel, at once resembling the panels that outfit any number of industrial constructions, whether a computer or a desk, while also positioned as a painting that could reference any number of all-white canvases from art history. (Bishop’s issue of MONO, released with the show, playfully reproduces several of these – photocopied in black and white, of course.) In one corner the door of a storage closet has been replaced with transparent film so we can see the mess of wood, boxes and packing foam inside, alongside a neon sign for the cafe that perhaps used to occupy the space. If Everything Has a Place then Place too Has a Place VIII, 2013, is part of the artist’s series of wall and partition removals across several of his exhibitions. It might expose some of the inconsequential, hidden aspects of the gallery workings, but here the casual Gordon Matta-Clark gesture seems of a different tone to the rest of ‘Escalator’, enacting a barrier crossing that undermines the studied, pointed blandness of the show.

Back in Matt’s Gallery, Mike Nelson’s untitled installation throws wide the floodgates with typical excess. A fantasy hillbilly graveyard, the room is filled with hundreds of bits of wood, metal and scrap trying to make themselves into sentient forms. Skulls and casts of monster masks perch on top of vaguely human-shaped assemblages, spider-like sprawls of iron wire squat next to chicken wire barrels that hold lumped blobs of concrete instead of fire. We are free to roam this wasteland of failed totems, the half-formed objects suggesting a setting (rather than Nelson’s normal commandeering of one), what feels like the abandoned, burnt out remains of a settlement built at a closed highway exit. This is Nelson’s sculptural afterlife, goading us to join him like Sutherland in Flatliners, ‘Today is a good day to die.’ Nelson’s only mistake may be in assuming he can force us to cross the line with him.

Originally published in Art Monthly issue 365, April 2013

Matias Faldbakken: SHALL I WRITE IT

Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, November 2 – December 22, 2012

The absent question mark and all caps in the title of Matias Faldbakken’s
exhibition, SHALL I WRITE IT, is telling. It’s a bored, sarcastic, rhetorical
statement, and even before we see anything we know as well as he does that
there will no such generous outpouring of words or meaning. But Faldbakken
still goes through the motions of staging a reply, opening his press release with
familiar negatory quotes from Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ (1853)
and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967): ‘”No” is, generally speaking,
a better answer than “Yes”.’ Hollow metal frames, empty cardboard boxes and
illegible images in a slick palette of black, white, and grey, Faldbakken’s stance
is one of tempered refusal, a game of half-hints filled with mute and resilient
objects that dare us to try and pick at their slick surfaces. The accumulative effect
is like walking through a foreboding, ruined pedestrian underpass, his work
creating a setting usually with the sense of some violence having taken place in
the near past, with the blood and graffiti, for the most part, scrubbed away.

Matias Faldbakken, SHALL I WRITE IT, installation view

The violence here is readily apparent: the crushed remains of two new fridges
hover at head height, strapped tightly together from either end of the expanse of
the gallery’s hallway by a long stretch of taut red and green belt, each appliance
crumpled and curled around the wall. Once the visual impact of Fridge Pull (all
works 2012) settles, though, it feels safe, its destruction more brattish than
anything else. Faldbakken’s strength lies more in obtuse threats. Two burlap
bags sit tied up on the floor: one holds, we are told, Neil Strauss’s pickup-artist
exposé The Game (2005), the other, well, it doesn’t matter, suggests the title
Sack of The Game/Sack of Another Book. After a minute, you notice the walls are
dotted regularly with screws. The framed photos they might have held up are
bundled up in two sets of Untitled (Image Sculptures) in the back room, fifteen
of them bound together in each with ratchets that have been tightened to the
point of bursting. The paired works sit dejectedly amid their own shattered
glass and splintered wood. In one, the print of a newspaper clipping gives
a view of a serene Scandinavian town, only two words legible in the cut-off
caption: ‘beautiful’ and ‘outcry’.

This is the most of an explicit narrative we’ll get out of Faldbakken. What’s
interesting is that this method, the solemnly performed ‘no’ of his work,
hasn’t changed or developed much over the past few years, so why does it
continue to feel relevant and alluring? As Greil Marcus put it in Lipstick Traces
(1989), ‘Negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that
the world is not as it seems – but only when the act is so implicitly complete it
leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing, that nihilism as well
as creation may occupy the suddenly cleared ground.’ SHALL I WRITE IT is an
incomplete negation: the world is exactly as it seems, but Faldbakken is still
trying to burrow his way through it. His work has the sort of frustratingly sleek,
calm swagger that tries to absorb everything and give away nothing. But in its
deliberate (and sellable) self-destructiveness it has the feel of consciously and even coyly trying to finger the dark, seething intestines of the consumerist game that the artist is playing. His sarcasm, at least, is honest.

Originally published in ArtReview issue 66, March 2013

February London Round Up

Before even having a chance to take in the small room, I find myself huddled close over a phone with two other people I don’t know, listening, shifting my weight from one foot to the other and looking around for a long five minutes. ‘The Romantics had at least been right about the feeling. The one thing the desert made you want to do was to stick something into it. All the empty space and hardly even a way to take a picture without it looking like something from a calendar for a half-passed year still shrink wrapped in the discount bin of a dollar store.’ A QR code provided on the only handout for Gabriele Beveridge’s ‘Newly Laundered Smile’ at Rod Barton leads to an audio file: a text by Paul Kneale read out by a woman describing a road trip, apparently to the Grand Canyon. It ends up defining the experience of the show: mentions of the desert, a Nikon camera and cigarettes in the audio find their physical correlations nestled among the faded colours of the four careful assemblages that make up the exhibitions. Close-up photos of female models’ faces, for hair or skin products or some such, are printed on perforated cloth that is frayed and peeling, with a few sad-looking potted cacti and chunks of amethyst propped underneath them. Their distant, hungry eyes follow us as we walk around, finding the magazine image of a rainbow stretching over the Grand Canyon, Gabrielle, 2012, held in a pastel rainbow frame, a lipstick box for Chanel Rouge shade ‘19 Gabrielle’ sitting on top. Beveridge’s skill is in hesitant photographic and sculptural collages that have the feel of a sort of bedroom-mantelpiece science; sun-faded salon advertisements sit alongside mementos and ephemera that might have been emptied out of a purse. The gathered surfaces create a set of anachronistic non-sequiturs, trawling up other times and places and letting them wax and wane uncertainly. Looking at a few concurrent, similarly sparse solo shows around London, they share this sense of understatement and evocation, but it is interesting to note what is needed to achieve that. ‘Newly Laundered Smile’ felt simultaneously too empty and overcrowded, the layers flattened and cancelled out by my experience of the other space of the accompanying audio text.

The breadth of two different practices manage to fit quite neatly somehow into an only slightly larger room at Arcade Fine Arts: Other People’s Trades featuring four works by Ardriaan Verwée and a single installation by Esmeralda Valencia Linström. Two empty canvas frames sit on the floor leaning on one wall, above them is the outline of a shelf made of the same wood, stained to a rich, dark brown-grey. A mirror rests flat on one side, holding up what looks like a small, overturned coffee table or stool. This gathering of Verwée’s work (each piece Untitled, 2012) has the sense of being a full-sized maquette for a furnished room, a model of an ideal sitting room of sorts already imagined in a form of disarray. This tone of ‘department store uncanny’ is reinforced by Untitled (diptych), 2012, where pieces of aluminium have been cut, painted and folded to appear like discarded scraps of blank paper.

Linström’s sculpture and double projection Nipple Drawing, 2012, crosses the floor with a set of parallel untreated planks of wood, the design offering some skewed advancement of Morse code or musical staves. Two digital projectors whirr away displaying still images: in one we can blurrily make out the ratty spines of a few books, in the other a green mould or fungal-like growth. On both a set of light lines mark the surface, as if each was a photo that had been taken to briefly by a toddler wielding a pencil. For the sake of vicinity we can find likenesses in Linström and Verwée’s work since both elicit a slow double-take through material alliances that appear settled at first; but what is more remarkable is that these two bodies of work don’t necessarily speak to each other as much as keep to themselves. It simply feels like two solo shows, each with a quiet potential that leaves you wanting to see more.

Élodie Seguin’s installation ‘Plan d’interrogation’ at Hilary Crisp is more shy and taciturn, turning one low-ceilinged room with a column into a shadowy game of hide and seek. Boards of MDF line parts of the floor, outlining the corners and crevices of the room. The hefty chunk of timber of Board, Gap, 2012, sits flat on the floor. A black rectangle is drawn on the nearby wall, as if the piece of wood’s shadow, but looking just ever so slightly off kilter. The large, upturned black ‘L’ of Crutch, 2012, stretches out from the column, almost lining up for a brief moment with another solid black rectangle on a further wall to make some semblance of a solid shape. But it is only fleeting: Seguin’s work demands motion, placing us as the motor in a constructivist mobile, where all the right angles give way to slightly misheard echoes, then to overlapping intimate whispers that ask you to lean closer, then to turn and walk back around another way.

Elodie Seguin, invisible boundaries (2012), Crutch (2012) detail

Seguin’s work is a strong example of one of the current practices that productively rattle some of the ghosts of Minimalism, noiselessly taking up their sense of phenomenology and a politics of exhibition display. But taking that awareness of context, a sense of politicised movement and understatement to another level is John Knight’s Quiet Quality, 1974, at Cabinet. Taking a stand at the Frieze Art Fair, Cabinet’s booth just held a table, some chairs, and a wall text with the name of the artist, the title and dates of the show in the gallery. The subsequent show consists of two largely empty rooms. In one, an electric blanket is folded into a neat rectangle in the centre of the room, its plug winding out from the wall socket. It doesn’t even feel as though it is switched on. A small clipping from a magazine advertisement is the sole occupant of the other room, a gushy ‘advertorial’ style quote for a California housing development: ‘large, dramatic condominium-style homes that could offer the spacious feeling of a private home, combined with the maintenance free living we were seeking.’ The flimsy white blanket takes on a monolithic feel, a pseudo-minimalist sculpture carrying the weight of the desires of ownership and home comforts, slowly unravelling as Knight lets us pick at the threads: the development and subsequent domination of suburban, commuter-culture America, tied in here with the art fair cycle, the taming of Minimalism and the relentless re-commodification of arts practices. Perhaps I’m stretching it, and Knight had the benefit of two loaded locations, but the method of his practice emphasises the common, necessary element found in each of the shows above: restraint, or rather empty space punctuated by slight signposts that let us navigate a way to our own conclusions.

 

Originally published in Art Monthly 363, February 2013.

Cracks in the Crossbeams

Apologies to the Queen Mary: an appreciation; and, an unintentional eulogy for Wolf Parade.

Montreal, April 2003:

Round-headed, contented misfit Spencer is invited to fill a slot opening for another band in town. A keyboardist, guitarist, and prolific writer, the gig’s offered under the impression he already has his own band; the concert’s three weeks away. Phoning up Dan, a guitarist he knew from living in British Columbia now residing in Montreal, he proposes playing together. Both throw in a few songs, and they start rehearsing backed by a drum machine, beginning with a catchy bit of scumbag romantic rock called ‘This Heart’s On Fire.’ They rope in a drummer just two days before the gig. Wolf Parade, “a retarded dog with four heads. At any given time, three of the heads is sleeping,” is born.

Vancouver, May 2011:

A less than capacity crowd are shrieking in the darkened room, barely holding together with a ramshackle chant of ‘Wolf Parade…Wolf Parade….,’ intent but not entirely sure how much they mean it, or if they will even be heeded. After a few minutes, the band amble back onto the stage one at a time. While tuning up, Dan Boeckner quietly thanks the crowd; “The important thing is that we haven’t learned anything at all in six years.” Spencer Krug leans through his hair into the microphone over his keyboard, inviting everyone to join them on stage. Then they crawl in to a rambling rendition of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’; the crowd obliges, trying as much as they can to liven up the cover, swaying, a few disjointed high fives. The instrumentation is pointless, it’s just a loose beat and a bit of guitar texture, every once in a while you can hear a bit of piano embellishment, the chorus taking off in a swirl of off-key yells. The indulgence of the gesture skews the song, passing by the Guns N’Roses version to align itself more maybe with Eric Clapton, Avril Lavigne, or Gabrielle’s woozy uses of the tune. It’s all excess fat tinged with bleary-eyed backslapping, on the audience’s part at least. Once they eventually fade out, someone yells out, not too loud as if almost in passing, “Don’t break up, don’t break up, don’t break up!”

I witnessed the energies of their performers separately at first, seeing Boeckner tear up the floor at 99 Feet East on London’s Brick Lane with his husband and wife electro-rock duo Handsome Furs. He looked ill, sweat dripping down his bony frame perfunctorily dressed in a sleeveless military top. He convulsed with every beat down on his guitar, looking every bit the embodiment of the punk spirit—that self same same spirit who’d had his photo taken too many times to have a soul anymore, at least for those of us too young to have had the chance to see the throes of rock and punk in the 60s and 70s, but still have it relentlessly re-narrated back to us. Through that prism, he seemed more Strummer than Sid, though between his wife and him writhing around on stage, mercilessly jubilant and undoubtedly off their faces, there was an uncertain underbelly allure, the fog of too many nights out to remember what they might have learned the night before.

Five months later, I saw Krug’s solo-project-turned-side-project-turned-full-band Sunset Rubdown in the attic space of Manchester’s Deaf Institute, Krug humble and shyly murmuring between songs. In his performance, though, he was defiant, almost aloofly so, gesturing like an eighties metal singer who hadn’t quite broken out of the bedroom, his eyes closed, framing the air around the mic with his hand. Seeing them together on stage as a band a year later, it added up. After three albums, and countless side projects that had subsumed the band, I could finally witness the dynamic tension that fixated their live presence. Krug and Boeckner practically ignored each other on stage, each knowing when to hand the reins over to the other, nodding occasionally. The music press loved playing on the antagonism; “Spencer’s side against my side,” Boeckner complained. “My side is ‘bone-headed, blue collar, roots  thing’ and Spencer’s stuff is ‘baroquely precise songs.’” But as much he might mock it, that knot that the media had recognized but never unraveled was part of what made them compelling and gave the drive and energy to their work.

That show in a boat in Bristol I saw was unsatisfying, the songs feeling mostly worked through like a grocery checklist, somehow creating a disassociation between the music coming out of the speakers and the people playing it. It sounded sludgy, tiredly rehearsed, predictable. But the rapport between the people on stage remained visibly charged all the way through. Reading through the substantial web reviews of the band’s live appearances over their time together, it’s readily apparent that all Wolf Parade gigs were a bit weird or off-kilter. And the band consciously cultivated that  tendency toward dissonance, like in Boeckner’s retarded dog quote above, or as Krug said in one 2005 interview: “I like that we suck sometimes.”

It was against a backdrop of references, name-checking and scene hype that Apologies To the Queen Mary was released in 2005. In a year that saw albums like MIA’s Arular or  Dangerdoom’s The Mouse and the Mask, a time known more for mash-ups, mix-ups and updatings, Apologies seems remarkably steady, almost reactionary. It’s recognizable pretty quickly as straight-up rock. But here that provided a slate of regulation, a sheen of normalcy on which to array a constellation of personalities, a pill for the delivery of something more inherently unsettled. This wasn’t the showy, jerking weirdness of Frank Black yelping on top of more steady bass and drum lines, or the out-and-out yelping of Animal Collective happening throughout the same period; this was close enough on the surface to bands like Bloc Party or Hard-Fi both of whom also emerged around the same time. This was a different breed of post-rock, another parallel timeline from the 70s which was less political, more packaged, but seething. In Apologies there were rolling tunes backed with uncertain, joyless sing-alongs; self-defeating anthems adrift with sonic tumbleweed. As the two main songwriters for Wolf Parade, both Boeckner and Krug constantly envisioned some sort of unearthly afterlife or post-existence – ghosts, hauntings, empty towns, spirits you don’t believe in but can’t help but be scared of anyway – but both approached it from distinctly different narrative and sonic storytelling methods and styles. That dynamic between them is most embodied, shared and productively mingled on Apologies.

The album sits towards the centre of a widening spiral of bands, scenes, and larger cultural roles. On top of the name-dropped associations from which they emerged other names began to appear with more and more regularity: Sunset Rubdown, Handsome Furs, Swan Lake, Fifths of Seven, Moonface. The successive Wolf Parade albums felt like each songwriter trading slots, with less and less influence on the other, a shrinking shared space. Krug and Boeckner became typecast, fulfilling set rolls for themselves and each other, the layered influences of the other members of the band also seeming to wane. But that sense of role-play is what also made the stories and sounds of the band interesting. The titles of all three of the albums Wolf Parade produced together – Apologies, At Mount Zoomer, Expo 86—all come from experiences they shared communally as a band. They are the characters inhabiting their own songs.

Their dynamic wasn’t just a dichotomy between Boeckner and Krug, but also the various influences of drummer Arlen Thompsen, guitarist Dante DeCaro, and sound artist Hadji Bakara. Like any band, it was schizophrenias with multiple personality disorder, though here it was more readily apparent in the songs themselves, the seams constantly showing themselves, pushing and almost splitting, eventually breaking apart. The characters stalking through their apocalyptic landscape, flighty and staunch, are their own visions of themselves, sometimes in a completely raw state, others more caricatured. I would argue that, whether consciously or not, they used rock like some form of Brechtian epic play. The two  ‘main characters’ are stock of particular type, one being Krug’s – who might have picked up his character out of the erratic special military services depicted obliquely in Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974), bringing along the sensibility of sonic jump-cuts between more contemporary compositional motifs and pop break-outs. Boeckner’s role is some sort of cynical drop-out from Springsteen’s Born to Run (1975), caught in an eternal struggle with nostalgia and adrenaline. Around them is a shifting chorus from a Greek tragedy, yelling, shouting, singing along, or just trashing the place before leaving.

In its making, production, and content, Apologies is positioned in a place that connects it to a series of markets and myths. Krug and Boeckner’s relationship resurrects a favourite trope of the rock critic, from Lennon and McCartney, Hell and Verlaine, to Carl Barât and Pete Doherty, a sort of shadow-puppet play of the contrast between the cults of Dionysus and Apollo. But through their rehearsal of those roles, playing them up though not necessarily exceeding them, Apologies provides an insight into how rock’s relationship to itself and its own past has shifted. The making, marketing and release of the album say a lot about the aspirations and direction of what was defined as ‘Indie’ and its relationship to the ‘mainstream’, and the tensions of the ‘characters’ are reflected in the tensions of the production and wider scene itself—the urges of Do-It Yourself, internationalism, and the terms and conditions of success. On top of this, I’d make the claim that Apologies provides, if not its own commentary, but then at least a viewing platform on the role of nostalgia, retrospection, and the power and allure of anachronism and hindsight. A momentary platform, like I envision of the exhausted or estranged couple in ‘Fancy Claps’: “we can sing/ to cracks in the crossbeams.” Lying on their backs staring at the ceiling, using sound to edge between and explore the structure they lie inside, some sort of intimacy mixed with critical exploration, a short imagined respite before growing old and passing on.

Fernando García-Dory: A Dairy Museum

Mostyn Llandudno, 22 September to 6 January 2012

‘Awareness raising’, that pursuit of campaigners, activists and educators, is an endless task. In the 1970s, Yugoslavian-born artist Radovan Kraguly began addressing what he saw as humankind’s alienation from the natural environment. Using the figure of the cow as an overarching symbol for the animals with which we regularly interact (via their milk, skin and so on) but largely ignore, he embarked on a decades-long series of drawings, paintings and sculptures that sought to redress that balance. Figurative images of cattle resting beside obtrusive, angular constructions gave way to later, more abstract black-and-white canvases, some of them bearing the recognisable patched markings of Holstein dairy cows. At some point in the 1990s, Kraguly began work on a ‘National Dairy Museum’, a cultural institution dedicated to ‘art in the rural space’; it would have a library, offices, cafeteria and lecture rooms, with entrances both for humans and animals – cows would spend a day there and visitors could learn how to milk by hand.

We learn this through an interview with Kraguly in the video Re-enacted piece #2, all works 2012, as part of Spanish self-described ‘artist, activist and agroecologist’ Fernando García-Dory’s ‘A Dairy Museum’. The exhibition takes Kraguly’s work as a jumping-off point for a set of four so-called ‘re-enacted pieces’, which are more like translations, modifications and updatings. García-Dory’s work, similarly to Kraguly’s, addresses our relationship with the rural, but his approach to the same issues is of a decidedly different tack. His work has in the past involved the establishment of a shepherd school in the Pyrenees and a conference of nomadic peoples that led to the establishment of the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Pastoralists (WAMIP). Often mediating between commercial, governmental and cultural fields, you could see García-Dory as similar to the ‘incidental person’ free agent put forward by the Artist Placement Group in the UK but, rather than formatting and inserting himself into a larger bureaucracy, instigating his own systems, connections and new forms of dispersed management. Here at Mostyn, his strategy is more of a post-conceptual game, with texts and actions that follow in Kraguly’s footsteps in their own wayward fashion. In Re-enacted piece #1, García-Dory recreates a lost drawing, a study for a sculptural installation from 1997 which only exists as an image in a catalogue of Kraguly’s work. Re-enacted piece #3 sees García-Dory re-imagining Kraguly’s 1998 dance-performance The Cow in the Imagination of Radovan Kraguly, of which he knows only the name and a few scant documentation images.

Radovan Kraguly, A Dairy Museum

The living heart of the show is Re-enacted piece #4, where García-Dory sites a working-scale model of the Dairy Museum within the gallery. The walls are lined with Kraguly’s drawings of different versions of the museum – it is a slick, rounded constructivist science-fiction building that wouldn’t be out of place in Star Wars. One of the drawings is set aside and framed, and it is this version that forms the basis for the crescent-shaped construction of wood, cloth and plastic piping before us. Kraguly’s aspirations for the museum in the video conversation seem a bit cute and old fashioned, talking about the social and didactic as balms for the virtual world we now live in. But just inside the model museum, you are hit with the distinctive smell of a dairy, the musty mixture of hay and cream. It is filled with objects donated from local farms: grazing plans, an ‘Electric Shepherd’ fence system battery, photos here and there of ‘a favourite cow’, an outdated automatic milking machine, a photocopy from a recent issue of British Dairying magazine on the dropping prices of milk being paid by the larger dairies who control the industry. The museum has also become a set where the Young Farmers Club is recording videos for online streaming, and as a place to voice concerns and raise issues to a wider public. García-Dory has imagined the Dairy Museum as a platform where gallery and pastoral constituencies might meet, but also where issues of representation remain openly problematic. His method of raising awareness is to bypass Kraguly’s abstract representation of an issue for more ‘direct’ representation with objects and statements from the farmers themselves, but he consciously and visibly traces a line between the two. His re-enactments link abstract practices and methods of object display, re-invigorating Kraguly’s work and abstracting the objects in his model museum, emphasising the mediation involved in both. Through García-Dory’s sketch, we can imagine an institution that might continually question these connections and somehow bring such disparate audiences into engagement, but perhaps its potency is in that suggestion, in its contingency and temporariness.

First published in Art Monthly 361, November 2012.

September London Round-Up

Cartel, ASC Gallery, George and Jørgen, Jonathan Viner Gallery

‘When preparing a disappearance and identity change, it is best to consider who might be looking for you and the means they are likely to employ trying to find you.’ Wise words, lifted from Doug Richmond’s manual How to Disappear, reprinted in Bik Van der Pol’s publication The Disappearance Piece, 1998-, as part of the group show Last Day at Cartel curated by Paul O’Neill. Richmond’s advice also comes as a handy insight, not so much into O’Neill’s show itself but into his curatorial approach. Positing the phrase ‘curatorial constellation’, O’Neill has attempted in his work to disperse the definition of the work of the curator among a range of activities in and outside of the gallery space. When it comes to actually making an exhibition, then, O’Neill seeks to dissolve the curator as directing auteur and instead promote the group show itself as a medium. The show at Cartel ostensibly has a ‘theme’, its starting point a found painting with the words ‘Last Day’ which becomes more of a gravitational centre around which a range of responses and approaches by 13 artists can cluster and then slowly drift away from. This is best exemplified in Mark Hutchinson’s On The Last Day, 2012, a list of 26 statements hand painted in blood red on the outside of Cartel’s black container. They riff on the ways you could conceive what ‘last day’ might mean, from ‘Different endings are always conceivable’ to the slightly more pessimistic, ‘Melancholia, the large blue planet, relentlessly pursues Earth through space until it engulfs the Earth, obliterating it’. Luckily some of the works get away from this literal response to the brief, and where the exhibition starts to get interesting is the communication and tangling between the works themselves.  Håkon Holm-Olsen’s small triptych of black-and-white collages unassumingly feels like the real gravitational centre of the show; in Logic, 2012, kids play with shapes on the desks in front of them while wooden blocks float in the air above, like a snapshot from a Steiner school for telekinetics. These shapes undergo a dream-transformation to Rhona Byrne’s oversized tangle of thin black balloons It’s All Up in the Air, 2011, hovering over a calm seascape in one photo, and which also hung as a sculpture over the gallery on the opening night.

The mysterious abilities of these children seem to manifest themselves again Ronan McCrea’s black-and-white video Autodictat, 2010, in which a solemn young girl plays a solo game of tag, darting around and climbing the innocuous public sculptures among the brutalist architecture of University College Dublin. Here we find the suggestion of an odd optimism, the young refashioning what to us might seem like an ominous, doomed future. Here it is the works and not the curator which provide meanings. But, as Richmond asks us to consider, if O’Neill is attempting to reposition the identity of the curator, is anybody going to notice the change? ‘Last Day’ does provide glimpses of the self-forming group show O’Neill describes, but it is hard to not see the role he has imagined as not so much about the absence of curatorial judgement but rather one in which he has exercised his judgement at an earlier stage. What is also interesting to see is that the end result of O’Neill’s arch stance isn’t that much different to a handful of other group shows running concurrently around London.

The gathering of 22 artists at ASC Gallery made it clear from the title of the show that they wanted to dissolve the efforts of not just the curator but also the audience: There Is Not and Never Has Been Anything To Understand! Posed as a Communiqué from David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan’s fictitious group PlastiqueFantastique, the press release is phrased in mock-disbelief at the group’s baffling behaviour, claiming they were ‘interested in making an exhibition through layering or accretion, a process more akin to the production of a noise or crystalline object than curation’. The result is a dense matrix of sculptures, diagrams, glitter and angular oration that feels like a surrealist conspiracy theory and occult capitalist critique. ‘Do you think the volcano serenades? That the ocean is playing a rhythm just for you?’ asks the incredulous alien narrator of Benedict Drew’s video Lecture on Everything, 2012. Looking like some sort of toxic mutant cousin of Zig and Zag, the black foam puppet emits buzzes and blips that are subtitled as a condescending talking-to about humanity’s attitude to noise. In the next room, the droning automated voice of Dean Kenning’s Value – A Visualisation, 2012, describes a factory of zombie workers who secrete a ‘congealed human labour’ goo from their bodies. Burrows and O’Sullivan’s cryptic diagrams line the walls, circles bouncing off owls, dogs, rats and crystals, making an unsifted, unsettling rant that is like the combined dream-babbling of Karl Marx, Aleister Crowley, Aldous Huxley and Doctor Who.

Karen Knorr, You May Meet its Members, from the series ‘Gentlemen’, 1981-83

Between the seven artists in Capital at George and Jørgen there was no such chatter, being a more thought-through collection of work – to the point of being stiffly overconsidered. Assembled by artists Fergus Heron and Martin Newth, photographic and video works traced London’s hierarchies of visibility. But as in Heron’s shots of empty shopping malls, or Emma Charles’s After the Bell, 2009, where we see City office cleaners doing their jobs at night from mostly a vantage point outside the buildings’ glass facades, they only lightly trace the surfaces. Thorsten Knaub’s cute double projection London/London, 2010, shows super 8 footage taken by the artist’s father on a family holiday to the city in 1974, complete with panning shots of the iconic sights and those awkward, bored moments when the family is captured on film. Knaub replicates the footage shot for shot remarkably accurately, but what is more remarkable is how little things have changed. The groups of tourists are the same but the presence of CCTV cameras and the absence of the family and the artist himself highlight the capital’s increasingly intimidating impersonality. What felt like the main backbone for the show was Karen Knorr’s ‘Gentlemen’ series, 1981-83, a set of black-and-white photographs of London’s illustrious private clubs, their members posing ostentatiously among extravagant studies and parlours, while quotes from Parliament and news of the day subtitle the images – several of the lines obliquely referencing the Falklands War that was happening at the time. In You May Meet its Members, a trim, suited man poses in front of a vaulted window, the words underneath gently gibing at what you assume is the club’s description of itself, its members ‘branded with the Stamp of the Breed’.

Deliquesce at Jonathan Viner, curated by Emma Astner and Laura McLean-Ferris, was more concise and well-directed – not just because it was only five artists but also simply due to the order of the works. In Emily Wardill’s short black-and-white film The Pips, 2011, we see a sole gymnast training in a studio, twirling the long ribbon found in the Olympic Rhythmic Gymnastics discipline. The camera follows her dotingly as she gracefully moves around the room, twisting her body into unlikely arrangements, the ribbon a flowing extension of her body. Then the image warps slightly, folding in on itself, and a spare foot appears and drops to the floor. The dancer continues unperturbed as a leg, a hand and another leg bob to the floor, and she finishes her routine resting poised among the discarded appendages. This startling moment is the last thing you see in the show, but returning back upstairs to the rest of the exhibition it manages to transform what felt like a gathering of heavy puns and unfinished posturing into a more tangible and lyrical affair. The posters of Euro and Pound coins draped over trapezes in Nina Beier’s The Demonstrators (Drowning Coins), 2011, inherit some of the gymnast’s poise, while the dark forest photograph printed on aluminium and folded into a rough flag-like X in Oscar Tuazon’s Untitled (Photograph), 2012, suddenly demands that you acknowledge the body that bent it into that state. What Astner and McLean-Ferris allow for in ‘Deliquesce’ are spaces for contradiction, change and multiplicity, a feat much more notable in a smaller group show. But it also highlights that the shifts O’Neill attempts to articulate – that group shows be multiplicitous and self-managing – are common and spring from the necessary facts of placing multiple artists and works alongside each other. Despite attempts to redefine or diffuse their identity it seems that, in the making of group exhibitions, the curator remains an ambiguous shadowy figure who must stand back but at the same time be willing sometimes to emerge and be identified.

Originally published in Art Monthly no. 359, September 2012

July London Round Up

The gauntlet was thrown down early in the day. In a talk titled Parasites Like Us: Studies of the Possible in Impossible Times, educator and researcher Janna Graham described most exhibition models as following what Paulo Freire had described in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968, as the ‘banking model’: the audience is an empty vessel filled up with culture, which is handed down from above by the artist via a curator. Graham, a member of collective Ultra-Red and curator at the Serpentine’s offsite Centre for Possible Studies on Edgeware Road, proposed a series of other possible bottom-up and lateral models where these roles could be shifted, shared or dispersed.

Her critical and claustrophobic talk was a keynote presentation as part of ‘Exhibition as Medium: End Symposium’, a day of presentations at The Showroom capping off a year-long programme at Margate’s Crate Studio and Project Space curated by Toby Huddlestone. Huddlestone had sought over six ‘experimental’ exhibitions and various events to explore process over product, ‘alternate modes of exhibition format via the presentation of research through production’. Much of the day consisted of talks describing the six exhibitions, and though each proposed a slightly different approach – such as a group of artists collaborating in reaction to Fischli & Weiss’s The Way Things Go, 1987, or six curators creating works based on instructions from Scottish artist Desmond Church – each time the constrictions of the framework imposed were raised as an issue. It seems that Freire’s hierarchical model ran through much of the project and by the end of the day was still standing.

The only speaker to raise the issue of audience in the equation was Dave Beech, who began to speak about hospitality and the viewer of an artwork as a form of guest, only for his Skype link to break off. Huddlestone, in the closing discussion, further qualified this: ‘we want curators, writers, artists to be our primary audience’. Together, these statements implied some sort of sustained relationship and involvement, and precipitated a discussion of the contradictions inherent in the day: the paradoxes involved in presenting a series of Margate-based projects, which were spoken of as ‘ongoing, middle points’ rather than end points, at an ‘end symposium’ with an uninvolved, though not uninterested, London audience. Given the necessary mediation and narration that process-led, self-generating projects require, perhaps it is not so much exhibition as medium or, as participant Neal White jokingly commented in passing, more ‘symposium as medium’.

But despite the symposium’s silent implication that object-based exhibitions were more ‘finished’ and somehow less involving, a number of concurrent exhibitions around London lit on different aspects and problems brought up that day. For instance, according to the press release for ‘Maquette for an e-card’, Gino Saccone’s solo show at Supplement, ‘It’s all of a process, but a process is resolutely not a story (let’s not get carried away)’. The physical contents of the show itself are scattershot, a constantly shifting arrangement of hastily painted cardboard, draped cloth, piles of varnish and wood. Two cat-flaps sit at either end of a length of unprimed canvas covering one wall, while a projector lights up a dull orange bulb protruding from its socket. A lit candle sits next a photo of a drawing on a dilapidated billboard, and in this light it seems we are part of an odd séance. The gallery has effectively been Saccone’s studio, all of this merely a preparatory sketch to culminate in a digital image available on the gallery’s site at the show’s finish. The conglomeration of working materials and quirky objects, like the glazed ceramic that looks something like a swollen jester’s hat, are an alchemy of arbitrary essentials that will be eventually distilled to more digital ephemera. Saccone seems to deliberately overstate the flattened, provisional nature of the objects in front of us, staging the whole thing as an anti-climax, a long-played-out pun on being just another exhibition you could see from your computer screen.

Similarly precarious, but on a very different timescale, was the gathering of over a hundred sculptures, images and objects in Gareth Jones’s ‘Untitled Structure’ at Raven Row. Spanning from 1987 to the present, the gallery’s ground floor was a dense madhouse of found and gently reworked materials. The works ping pong between a homemade formalism and a playful manipulation of pictorial representation, whether it is six years’ worth of milk-bottle caps collected in a glass cube (Untitled,2006-12) or the pieces of a puzzle glued back at intervals onto a square mirror (Untitled, 2012), making the Venetian postcard scene just barely comprehensible. It is an effective cumulative portrait of a practice, the works retaining a sketch and maquette-like quality but in their sheer volume suggesting more of an attitude, a constant anarchic reshaping of the stuff that surrounds us. Jones’s ever-expanding ‘structure’ seems an underappreciated contributor to the post-readymade dialogue, and also reminds us that ‘research through production’ is not the alternative but the norm that is often willingly overlooked.

Such a glimmer of hope is barely visible in Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson Institute’, an archive, curated exhibition and research proposition inhabiting Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries. The institute is an unpacking of the work that went into his film Robinson in Ruins, 2010, widening his historically aware dérive by including artworks from the Tate collection. Though this third film in the Robinson series lacked the pace and narrative tension of the first two films, here Keiller productively revisits his exploration into the history of British land ownership, the rise of the industrial and oil-reliant society, and the perception of the countryside, by means of a fertile range of images and artefacts, such as Situationist maps of Paris, meteorites fallen in 1795 and 1830, and a clip from Quatermass 2, 1957, where a Shell oil refinery is presented as a food factory housing a giant, evil alien organism. Keiller’s critical pastoralism, seen alongside the work of Henry Moore, John Latham, Jiri Kovanda, and Nigel Henderson, feels like an unspoken thesis, one that grounds artistic experimentation in the possibilities determined by political events. The 2010 film’s fanciful suggestion to ‘establish an experimental settlement … to pioneer the renewal of industry and agriculture, after the decline of the global dollar, and the disappearance of cheap oil’ seems now even more prescient and idealistic, as if Keiller has laid out the geographical and cultural maps for exhibiting after the apocalypse.

Originally published in Art Monthly no. 358, July-August 2012