Sunday 23 February 2014

Sean Edwards: Ghosts Of The Meaningful.






Obfuscation and obscurantism are both great words to throw at a Scrabble board and guaranteed techniques for successful audience-baiting. 

Based on the Manchester (UK) side of the rainy Manchester / Salford border, the new ‘title date duration’ programme of studio-gallery presentations flirt with the above but purely in the interests of allowing ‘the art work presented to only be concerned with the act of viewing, and the will of the individual to view it.’

The first of the presentations ‘still,’ intriguingly ‘viewable between 19.12 - 19.14‘ of the launch bash, turned out to be the work of artist Sean Edwards.

Images of a cube of wooden wedges and a sheet of paper samples suggests that the neighbouring 1970‘s tabloid pictures are being born from, or about to be reduced to, paper or pulp. Could this be a direct reference to the inbred disposability of an obsolete medium? How is this really picked up in the simple chipboard and screw, homemade freestanding shelving units which pepper the space and obstruct the wall pinned elements? Any suggestion of DIY functionality is automatically undercut by the framing gallery-type space, the audience, scrawled diagrams, fragments of tabloid headers; it’s all basically a lexicon of suggestive bits.
These bits are, when stolen and recontextualized en masse, all materially solid and yet floaty, ambiguous signs in which contrary liminal impulses seem to coexist.

This is a ‘style’ of application which has gained considerable art world purchase in the last few years but Edwards’ construction retains a particular, individual conceptual gestalt which acts as a binding glue. 

Compiling stuff as a form of unfocused social anthropology which reveals a hidden grammar of communal discourse may initially suggest itself but is way off the mark. Edwards is playing a considerably denser game: here ‘meaning’ isn’t a vague, ambiguous straitjacket, it’s a tatty string vest, the comedy ghost of proud signification.

Rather unexpectedly it’s down to the temporary inclusion of a 2 minute VHS playback, about half way through the ‘opening’ event ( i.e. 19.12 - 19.14) of a very young incarnation of Bruce Springsteen explaining the live impact of Roy Orbison to make things a little clearer. A Springsteen trapped on a degenerating VHS tape singing the praises of Orbison’s otherworldly intangibility; a ghost reconstructing ghosts. 

Everything has become murky, vague; a straining towards meaningfulness is no longer possible but a presentation of the meaningless is equally impossible.

Like Joe Devlin’s recent invite-only ‘Black’ project, even if a sizeable percentage of the audience go home scratching their heads over the muddle-headed carry ons there is a genuine tone of questioning and application to the venture. The arts’ movements and shifts, its game-plays and potential contrariness, allows it to operate with a nimble tread and tone of aloof confidence which makes the whole affair either infuriatingly ‘elite’ or admirably cocky. 

What is beyond question is the fact that by contrast most of the city’s state-funded art institutions are left looking like a Brontosaurus thrashing about in a tar-pit; unwieldy, desperate and purely concerned with their own survival. 





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