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).

Jeremy Millar: A Portrait of the Artist as a Drowned Man

This article was first published in The Skinny on 25 March 2011.

Artist-cum-shaman Jeremy Millar makes work about the greats. Ahead of his new show at CCA, Jac Mantle hears about the ghostly apparition of one of his heroes.

Jeremy Millar likes the idea that artwork can have an effect; can bring about a change in the world. At a time when contemporary art seems under ever more pressure to rationalise the world, he prefers to see the artist as a kind of mystic.

Magic, rituals and transformations, Cabinets of Curiosities and shrunken heads fascinate him. ‘It’s interesting how an object can become activated, and how it becomes deactivated by being placed in a museum,’ he says. ‘What’s its state when it’s not performing in that ritual? Before the priest or the shaman chants on it? Nothing changes, but during these rituals people treat it in a completely different way.’

For his show at Glasgow’s CCA Millar is presenting a combination of new and existing works, including sculpture, photography and video. Formally quite disparate, his works evolve through a process he tries to have as little control over as possible. Instead, he lets himself be guided by others who have gone before him.

One such work is the photographic series A Firework for WG Sebald, a paean to the late German author, whose genre-defying novels are semi-autobiographical meanders through obscure histories and English countryside, and someone Millar hugely admires. Following a chain of random connections, he paid tribute by lighting a firework at the site where Sebald died. Upon inspecting the documentation of his memorial act, Millar claimed that Sebald’s face was visible in the smoke.

Meeting the artist to chat about the show, I was keen to find out more. Surely he didn’t actually believe he has captured an apparition of Sebald. And more importantly, does he seek to persuade the viewer of the presence of supernatural phenomena in the work?

‘It really sent a shiver down my spine,’ he says. ‘I took that as an acknowledgement – I mean, I know it isn’t him, coming back from the dead, but it feels like he’s acknowledging the gesture that I made. Everyone who’s seen him says it really does look like his face, so I know it isn’t just me projecting because I want it to be true.’

It’s something of a relief to find that he doesn’t claim to imbue his pieces with any kind of ritualistic power. On the contrary, he identifies connections that already exist in the world, rejecting accusations that he attempts to do otherwise. ‘When you say you’re “making connections”, stretching them – well, that’s not good enough. It feels like you’re forcing it and it never works. You have to be patient, because work needs time to develop.’

This patience is well evidenced in the show’s centrepiece, a newly commissioned and suitably dramatic life-size cast of the artist lying face down on the floor. Self-Portrait of a Drowned Man (The Willows) has emerged from a journey of literary and historical links which are each as developed as the sources themselves.

‘I don’t have a rich imagination at all,’ Millar claims, ‘but the world is so rich that I don’t need one. There are so many amazing things out there, and if you allow them to start joining together in unexpected ways, they sort of amplify each other in unexpected ways, too.’

Nothing could have been more unexpected, he says, than making a sculpture of himself dead. On seeing it finished, he had an out-of-body experience and needed a stiff drink. Viewers of a nervous disposition beware. For everyone else, the prospect of encountering something shocking and repulsive on the CCA floor couldn’t be a more welcoming surprise. ⎔

Resemblances, Sympathies, and Other Acts runs at CCA, Glasgow from 26 March – 7 May 2011.

How We Go On Now symposium, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow

The Long Loch: How Do We Go On From Here?, a “discursive exhibition project” at Glasgow’s CCA by Kate Davis and Faith Wilding, pledges to question how we dream and desire to go on in the future in relation to a feminist heritage.

The project comprises visual art installations, a temporary reading room in CCA’s foyer, and a programme of reading group meetings developed in conjunction with Glasgow Women’s Library; an online resource of Feminist Lines of Flight – suggested reading material by “co-inspiritors” to Davis and Wilding; and events such as a one-day symposium.

Feminist texts and reading as a “grounds of possibility” figure strongly through each strand of the project. The texts or ‘Lines of Flight’ that writers, artists and academics have suggested at the artists’ invitation now await discovery on specially constructed reading desks in the foyer, while Davis’ films and sculptures reference the works of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Yvonne Rainer, and Eva Hesse, as well aspects of her and her mother’s lives.  In the exhibition pamphlet, Dominic Paterson writes that ‘the relationship between feminism and reading is central to the work we encounter in The Long Loch insofar as it […] creates an imagined community in which, as Wilding puts it, it is possible to take inspiration from “conversations with the living and the dead.”’

The one-day symposium, How We Go On Now, was free but ticketed, and open to the public.  Like the “here” in the project’s overarching title, ‘how we go on now’ seems to loosely reference the common perception of feminism’s current state as being at a sort of crossroads or existing in the aftermath of its past.  Here, it is suggested, is a position of known, shared, and fatigued theoretical and philosophical conflict, and “how to go on,” whilst obviously having no simple or single answer, nevertheless, seems to propose a discussion of a practical nature.

The first presentation of the day, given by Canadian artist Elizabeth Zvonar, did relate to a contemporary, daily reality.  Zvonar spoke about feminism as a framework being antithetical to capitalism, the dominant framework that we live within, and thus being frequently misunderstood and undermined.  She stressed the importance of emotion and said that it shouldn’t be suppressed or pejorised in favour of intellect, which is increasingly endorsed in our culture as having supremacy.  “Emotion is limited to an ever-empty and unfulfilled desire within capitalism, which does not allow the full range of emotions to exist.”  More and more, Zvonar explained, she had been thinking about human relations, and that the way in which she prizes her friendships, “discovering each other’s differences in order to grow towards a longevity,” is antithetical to capitalism, which promotes the opposite – convenience, hedonism, instantaneity – as our natural right.