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).

Ric Warren: Talkin’ ’bout our gentrification

This article was first published in The Skinny on 6 April 2011.

Ric Warren explores social and spatial boundaries. As he faces his biggest solo show yet, The Skinny meets him at his studio at the Glasgow Sculpture Studios and asks if he knows what he’s up against

Going by its title, Borders, Boundaries and Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division, Ric Warren’s forthcoming show at David Dale sounds pretty serious – like an essay. Well, his practice is nothing if not comprehensive. Dealing with the demarcation of territories in urban space, it touches on issues of society, regeneration, civil unrest and war, as well as the work’s immediate surroundings – in this case the gallery itself.

But the allusion to an essay, Warren explains, is a deliberate foil. The aim of the show is not to present conclusions, but to prompt unavoidable questions for the viewer. It is Warren’s first major Scottish solo exhibition and he hasn’t shied away from the big issues, or from large constructions. At the centre of the show will be an imposing wall of lacquered wooden panels that cut right through the space. The panels are adorned with batons, referencing those on construction site hoardings, designed to prevent fly posting.

Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s modular structures, the wall will have a macho, minimalist look. “It suggests a quiet, territorial war that’s constantly there but you’re not really aware of it because it happens slowly,” says Warren. “It’s also about the temporal nature of construction sites – once the barriers have been removed, the boundaries are still there. Whatever reason is behind the regeneration of the area, it constitutes a sort of conceptual barricade.”

But he also wants to give a nod to the more aggressive, militant implications of demarcating territories. To contrast the panels he is creating pointed structures based on anti-tank barricades as well as incendiary devices known as Molotov cocktails. “With these, it’s going back to civic unrest and more an obvious, blatant violence in terms of a push and shove for space.”

Having viewed the show as a means to focus a period of studio time rather than an end in itself, Warren has countless options to draw upon. He won’t decide the exact format of the show until he takes all his works down to the gallery in Glasgow’s East End. Which brings us to the unavoidable question of David Dale’s context. The work clearly references issues surrounding gentrification, ‘ghettoisation’, and that most thorny of issues, class – is the work all about Bridgeton?

“No, but it is about Glasgow, as much as it is about any city. The fact that there’s this inevitable period of regeneration or dilapidation, gentrification – it’s constantly shifting. That’s what I like about Glasgow. Even in the time that I’ve been here, it’s changed so much.

Clearly, Warren’s subject is one that comes with baggage. It has a loaded vernacular and a hefty political dimension, before one even begins to consider their own stance. But pressed for an answer, how would he position himself in relation to the bigger issue of regeneration of the city’s more rundown areas?

“Well, I sit on the fence to some extent. I am coming from some sort of socialist perspective, but it’s not necessarily about me taking a really harsh political stance on the middle classes. I’m from a working class background, but I went to art school, and that’s a pretty middle class pursuit.

“I do think it’s important that I mention ‘ghettoisation’ as much as I mention gentrification because the work’s not about the middle classes being the baddies.” He glances around the studio, grins and leans over to whisper, “Although sometimes, it is.” ⎔

Borders, Boundaries and Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division runs from 2 – 24 April 2011 at David Dale Gallery & Studios, Glasgow.