Matthew Darbyshire @Tramway

This review appeared in The Skinny on 27 February 2012.

In what is Darbyshire’s largest public exhibition to date, he has sought to fill the massive space of Tramway 1 with an installation that simulates a building site: a huge vinyl banner stretched from pillar to pillar, printed with a trompe l’oeil architectural render of the impending development.

Continuing Darbyshire’s exploration of the non-specificity of today’s design language, the sketched buildings take inspiration from the Mackintosh style but reduce it – in a typically homogenised developers’ vernacular – to bland and generic motifs.

According to the exhibition literature, the space is supposed to be eerily silent and present us with a hypothetical scenario where Tramway has been bought up by developers. But it isn’t eerie – only empty, which is often the case if you visit Tramway midweek, and the installation is simply unconvincing.

Not helping our suspension of disbelief is the sight of more artworks lurking around the edges of the ‘virtual village’, produced collaboratively with other artists. One of these, a series of wall-mounted photograms, features lurid lime and sunset-hued photos of vegetables. They appear to reference a style of advertising design that we would now think of as ‘bad taste’, but have no discernible connection to ‘Mockintosh’ architecture.

The exception to these confusing collaborative projects is a video which pans over housing exteriors while architectural critic Owen Hatherley narrates in ‘developer talk’ about housing as a barometer of social trends. The video crystallizes many interesting ideas behind what would otherwise have been an even blander installation. But this aside – if Darbyshire wants to open our eyes to the standardising effects of design, the installation would be more effective as an offsite project, masquerading out among the real architecture of Glasgow’s Southside.

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).

Keren Cytter: The new ‘kit(s)chen sink’

Four Seasons, Tramway, Glasgow

Right at home in today’s culture of mash-up, Keren Cytter takes elements of seductive, Hitchcockian noir, hammy melodrama, home videos, and social realist ‘kitchen sink’ forms, and melds them together in non-linear, many-layered narratives that showcase their own fakery.

Four Seasons (2009) tells the tragic tale of Lucy/Stella, a wayward Hollywood beauty in a leopard-print dress who climbs the stairs to her neighbour’s flat to request that he turns his music down.  Through the scrambled re-wind of events that follows, she is led to discover that she’s not Lucy, but Stella, and is, in fact, dead.

Far less elaborate than Hitchcock’s famous title sequences, the red ‘Four Seasons’ title is nevertheless just as evocative of the film to come: straight out of an old Christmas edition of The Radio Times, it promises a fake Christmas tree with lacklustre baubles, green plastic doilies, and a ‘70s-esque cream gateau birthday cake; tawdry treats and a celebration of kitsch that the film doesn’t fail to deliver.

In its use of ‘80s kitsch particularly, the film points to culture’s gross, routine fetishism of cultural iconography from the recent past, whilst itself being complicit in this act.  Classic cinematic clichés such as the smoky, winding staircase, and the thick, sticky Ribena blood running down white bathroom tiles are not about encouraging the viewer to suspend her disbelief, nor are they a revelatory exposé of the artifice of the screen – this, of course, is old news.  Instead, they express a greedy lust – if not love – for the material stuff of drama, raiding the mise-en-scène archive and recycling its most overt motifs.

Although Four Seasons is very much a product of today’s cultural climate, an effect of these multiple, clashing styles is that it seems, oddly, to exist at no clear point in time.  The absence of historical continuity, in addition to the typically avant-garde discontinuous narrative, prevents it from being easily “read” in a linear fashion.  In Cytter’s wonderland of stylistic impurity, conventional tools of interpretation are defunct, and only the artificiality is constant.

Rather than parodying these forms and subjects, however, Cytter portrays them with warmth.  A reviewer of the New Museum’s 2009 survey show The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, in which Cytter exhibited, observed in the New York Times that characteristic to the artists included was a preference for sentiment over irony.  This is certainly applicable to Four Seasons, in which the voice of the female lead is the source of whatever sentiment we feel towards the characters.  Speaking brightly in a slightly-too-loud, earnest, almost childlike voice, Lucy/Stella directs her chatter to the male character, but at times seems to be speaking to herself; an unofficial narrator of the events as she sees them.

With a murder of passion, a domestic setting, and almost certainly a bit of IKEA furniture, the drama can be likened to a TV soap opera.  But its integrity is in doubt, the viewer’s alliance with the characters changeable, and verisimilitude a moot point.  In the current age of mash-ups, re-interpretations, re-makes, re-hashings, homage, pastiche, and still other forms that adapt existing material, any new product is essentially read in terms of its relations to the canon.  Keren Cytter’s films, then, can be seen as bringing the kitsch to ‘kit(s)chen sink.’

Four Seasons runs from 16 April – 20 June 2010 at Tramway, Glasgow.