Christian Newby: Parlour Apes @ Transmission

This review appeared in The Skinny on 19 September 2011.

A large-scale, intensely patterned marbled-ink drawing decorates a freestanding wall in Transmission’s basement space. It’s stunning and compelling, but the page – and your visual pleasure – do not go undisturbed: two screen-printed light fixtures are mounted on the wall, interrupting the swirling patterns.

Continuing his practice of constructing seemingly archaic spectacles from personalised histories, the black and white photographs in the 16mm projection look to be from the past. Some show photographic illustrations from old books, while others are less easily discernible. A shard of white light on black and a door peppered with bullet holes are reduced to examples of formal composition.

Initially, the varied subject matter of these images seems important, but in noticing the hand that holds the images to take the photo, or the edge of the desk, we are distanced from the film’s content. Instead of the image being simply the subject, we are also presented with the image as an object, a potential cultural or historic reference. It also draws attention to our own gaze. It is impossible to refrain from analysing the artist’s intentions as we watch. The objects or art works in the images – home interiors and lengths of metal piping – seem subordinate to the form of the film, or to a greater scheme of the artist’s.

Prompting these self-referential musings on theatrical and cinematic space is surely Newby’s intention. But the realisation that the film is made wholly of referents with perhaps no drama, no subject matter, at its centre is familiar and a little deflating. Such is the hard truth of many a work of art.

Parlour Apes runs from 6 September – 8 October 2011 at Transmission gallery, Glasgow.

 

Peles Empire: Carmen Sylva @ Sierra Metro

This review appeared in The Skinny on 29 August 2011.

Not often do you see contemporary art and marvel at its opulence – artists today are an ascetic bunch. Peles Empire, the ongoing project by Katharina Stoever and Barbara Wolff, is an anomaly in this respect: one reviewer described it as “so rich and lovely it’s hard to look at”, with a “teeth-gnashing shimmer”.

Peles, the Romanian castle of clashing architectural styles and lavish ornamentation after which the project is named, provides the artists’ source material. So far they’ve reproduced nine of its rooms, wallpapering exhibition spaces with A3 colour copies of photographs of its interiors.

This show at Sierra Metro marks their shift to 3D. The seven sculptures are based partly on objects found in the castle and partly on images they’ve created previously. One references an alabaster statue of Carmen Sylva (alias Queen Elisabeth of Romania), the cracks in the surface suggesting marble veining. Its low plinth displays images of the statue itself, enlarged so the veins are pixelated. Another sculpture consists of a fire hose wrapped around a Persian carpet, supporting a handmade ceramic nozzle.

Unlike the wallpaper, the sculptures effect no simulation of architectural space. They remain sculptures, not furnishings. Their arrangement, we are told, reflects the order in which the objects are encountered on a tour of the castle – a further complication to the concept of reproduction, but its relevance to the context of this space seems unsatisfying.

Where the wallpaper transformed the space, the sculptures are self-contained. And if you’ve ever seen images of the wallpapered rooms, you want that richness. Long deprived of any of that teeth-gnashing action, white cube patrons are gagging for some gaudy colour and frivolous ornamentation. Well, you won’t get your fix at this show. But the overall project is pretty incredible.

Carmen Sylva runs 7 August – 11 September 2011 at Sierra Metro, Edinburgh.

Heimat @ Patriothall Gallery

This review appeared in LINE magazine.

“Boys who sew, girls who weld” reads the show’s billing as listed in The List magazine – but don’t let that put you off. If you can ignore the troubling outmoded gender stereotypes, the show is actually all about making: sculpture with a capital “S”.  The show’s title, Heimat, is a Germanic word meaning “home” or “homeland”, conjuring thoughts of earnest crafting. Three of the five exhibiting are from Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, and all wield such traditional technical skills as are relatively scarce in contemporary art.

Duncan Robertson uses embroidery hoops as frames for his works – tanks, grenades and “nuclear warnings” embroidered incongruously onto backgrounds of floral printed fabric. In a similar vein, Tanja Römer’s Lullaby is a collection of wall-mounted stuffed fabric guns that play a nursery tune when you pull the dangling cords.

Andrea Geile – presumably the “girl who welds” – presents a series of models on plinths featuring miniature electricity pylons, seemingly propositions for utopian worlds. In no way do these appear to refer to the artist’s sex.

Most interesting are Michi Gräper’s intricate wooden boxes, reminiscent of cuckoo clocks, in which miniature figures carved entirely from wood feature in tableaux. A trained wood carver, Gräper’s figures evoke Grimm’s fairytales, the Black Forest and the tableaux that line the Romantic Road (Romantische Straße) that runs through rural Bavaria.

Traditional crafts being generally out of fashion within contemporary art, Heimat feels almost more like a design exhibition. And yet the concepts underpinning the work are from the realm of fine art, evidenced in artists’ statements beside the works (although the statements themselves smack of a project brief.)

Where craft does appear in contemporary art, it is often used subversively, an obvious example being the work of Rosemarie Trockel. Duncan Robertson is a man, his work involves florals and embroidery; this may be unusual, but it’s no longer – thankfully – subversive. The converse relationship suggested by the show’s billing burdens it with conservative, regressive and cringe-worthy values. They might just as well have titled it “Women Who Weld”. Dodgy concepts aside, the show is a decent diversion for a wet afternoon – of which there’ll surely be plenty more.

Heimat runs from 1-28 August 2011 at Patriothall Gallery, Edinburgh.

Mystics or Rationalists? @ Ingleby Gallery

This preview appeared in The Skinny on 2 August 2011.

Katie Paterson: Lightbulb to Simulate Moonlight (2008), a set of 289 lightbulbs.

“Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” Number one in Sol LeWitt’s famous Sentences on Conceptual Art (1971) provides the title for the group show of conceptual heavyweights at Ingleby Gallery for the Edinburgh Art Festival.

LeWitt’s Sentences are forty years old now but they could easily be referring to the art of today – with similar criticisms levelled at it, and similar conflicting ideas of what an artist is.

For Jeremy Millar, the artist is akin to a shaman, taking objects from the world and divining their significance. Sitting on a bed of purifying rock salt, his mirrored cubes also hark back to the classic conceptualist Robert Morris, who famously exhibited mirror cubes way back in 1965.

The impressive line-up also includes Cornelia Parker, the artist who persuaded the British Army to blow up a garden shed for her, suspending the remaining pieces in an atmospheric installation. Here she presents a page of silver, fashioned from the particles left over from the photographic developing process. The mirror-like surface hints at the ghosts of old images.

Susan Collis also makes work in which all is not what it seems. What appears to be a line of white spattered paint on the gallery floor is in fact Collis’ Down to the Mother (2008): a line of finely inlaid discs of mother of pearl.

Others in the show share this inclination to elevate the banal. Ceal Floyer’s previous works include Nail Biting Performance (2001), in which she stood on the stage of Birmingham Symphony Hall and bit her nails into a microphone.

Also boasting Cerith Wyn Evans, Katie Paterson and Susan Hiller, the show promises to be visually succinct but intellectually complex – better go with your head screwed on. As LeWitt noted, “the idea is the machine that makes the art.”

Susan Hiller: 'Homage to Yves Klein: Levitation (Man)' (2011)

Mystics or Rationalists? runs from 4 August – 29 October 2011 at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

Photos from warmstruggle opening night

Photos from the opening night of warmstruggle, which ran from 21-24 May 2011 at Studio 41, Glasgow. Photo credits: Mag Chua (thanks Mag!)

Responses to warmstruggle exhibition

Art writers Alistair Quietsch and Gwenan Davies have created written responses to warmstruggle, an exhibition I co-curated at Studio 41 with Emma Forbes.

Click here to read Alistair’s response.

Gwenan Davies writes:

“This writing comes from a misunderstanding of what the show warmstruggle was about (before it opened) and how I had miscommunicated this to the gallery managers. This assumption of what I thought warmstruggle was about or would look like without seeing the work beforehand, based on my own taste and point of view, stayed with me and changed my reading of the exhibition when I finally saw it.”

Click here to read the rest of Gwenan’s piece.

warmstruggle featured new works by Sumin Bak, Karen Grant and Lingbo Liu. Click here for photos of the opening night.

'Underground' by Karen Grant - warmstruggle exhibition

Installation view: 'Too late or too early' (installation) by Sumin Bak

'Aping a Beauty' by Lingbo Liu

British Art Show 7: It’s Time

This article was first published in The Skinny on 27 June 2011.

The British Art Show is sprawling across Glasgow with more art than you can shake a stick at. The Skinny finds it operates across time as well as space.

Still from Christian Marclay's 'The Clock' (2010). Single channel video, 24 hours.

The five-yearly beast that is the British Art Show has come to Glasgow for the summer, and for the first time it has a subtitle: In the Days of the Comet. By using this motif, curators Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton hoped to free themselves from the constraints of producing a comprehensive survey show.

Describing the comet as “utterly indifferent to human affairs,” they’ve claimed that they’re not interested in crowd-pleasing or in providing explanations for the art they’ve selected. Nevertheless, there are some works that are distinctly pleasing to just about anyone.

Christian Marclay’s epic work The Clock is a 24-hour film composed of thousands of film and TV clips that each refer to time. Assembled so that the film itself is a fully-functioning clock, it’s a masterpiece of editing and the result of mammoth effort. Continually racing against the clock like an action movie, its strong narrative sensibility sucks you in – and yet, paradoxically, it fails to reach any resolution. It’s hugely entertaining, and a relief to anyone who fears that the British public at large see contemporary art as obscure and dry as a biscuit.

Nathaniel Mellors’ film Ourhouse is another that bridges the gap between art and mainstream film. Likened to Eastenders, it features a family of wealthy bohemians who grow suspicious of their son’s reading habits and keep watch through binoculars for their nemesis, the Council. Unfortunately, the absence of any seating and the odour from Mellors’ vomiting animatronic sculpture makes watching the whole thing a challenge.

Installation view: Part 2 of Nathaniel Mellors' video 'Ourhouse' (2010), at CCA.

This aside, the curating at CCA is pretty spot-on. Not so at Tramway, where the setup seems about as sophisticated as that of a degree show. You might think if ever there’s a time to have your curatorial cake and eat it, the British Art Show is it. Well, Tramway proves that you can have too much of a good thing, as the massive space of Tramway 2 is overcrowded.

Centre-stage, Spartacus Chetwynd’s Folding House is overbearing and vacant, while many smaller sculptures have got lost around the edges. Karla Black’s delicate pastel installations could more than hold their own in the centre but instead, they are off to one side – an afterthought. One is a heap of stratified soil bordered by paper-thin steamers dusted with pink powder paint. It appears composed solely of surfaces or relishes, as though having dispensed with a bulky framework.

Hogging the space with eleven works, artist duo Cullinan Richards could be seen as a provocative choice by the curators. Their low-fi paintings and assemblages make a feature of tape and plastic sheeting, while the ostensible “content” of the works appears irrelevant – a self-conscious embodiment of the worst stereotypes of contemporary art. But beyond guessing wherein lies the irony, there’s not much to them.

Meanwhile at GOMA the deserved centrepiece is Charles Avery’s vitrine, part of his extensive project The Islanders. Encased in the vitrine, a female mannequin – “Miss Miss” – is watched by a one-armed snake in a scenario that relates to a whole mythology of the artist’s creation. The project already a decade long, Avery’s work joins Marclay’s in beating everything in BAS7 for sheer time and effort that’s gone into it.

Being well-crafted or arduous isn’t currently seen as important criteria for art, at least in the art world. But these things continue to impress those who are less picky and often know a good work when they see one – namely, the public. The curators might claim indifference to audience expectations, but the best of BAS7 is work that the public still values.

Installation view: regurgitating animatronic model that accompanies Nathaniel Mellors' video 'Ourhouse' (2010).