Saturday 23 April 2022

Archives At Play - Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK

 


The impulse to collect, connect and structure things and information, to build an archive, is one which has been tapped by the gallery system for a very long time.

More recently, exhibitions built and staged in galleries have referenced the act and importance of their own archives as material snapshots of the tone of times past; as records of cultural production and the shifting social and ethical prioritising of themes and focus.

It’s both a positive and negative game-plan. An easy and affordable way to regurgitate past presentations and satisfy funding bodies which regard broad, usually politically neutered, gripes about social and economic inequalities, rejigged as entertainment with a moral edge, as presumably wholesome and satisfactory entertainment for the various sub-groups assumed to accurately constitute the viewing public.

Alternatively, it can be a barbed critique of simplistic thematisation as enforced from the political centre, as a complicating and enriching self-flagellation by a representative of that cynical oxymoron the culture industry.

Confusingly, the ‘Archives at Play’ exhibition, about to finish its run at Manchester UK Castlefield Gallery, seems to be both and neither as it takes considerable mental contortions to cello-tape the concept of ‘the archive’ and that of ‘play’ together to satisfy the suggestion of the exhibition title.

The term ‘archive’ is the misdirective mcguffin in the mix.

The exhibition seems more concerned with the possibilities of a productive friction between the playfully subjective arena of the imaginal, with its own opaque structuring systems, and the ideologically grounded structure of gallery display and archival recordings.

Curator Thomas Dukes starts the ball rolling with a display shelf and alcove littered with a range of material reproduced from the gallery’s archive boxes. Records of exhibitions from the gallery’s history, supporting promotional hand-outs, contact sheets of instal images, hand-written and therefore less formal correspondence between artists and Castlefield staff, etc all co-exist on a display shelf and invite visitors to dive into the information as they wish.

It is unclear if the information displayed has been carefully or randomly selected so a binding logic is there to be constructed by the reader / viewer. Which presumably is the point. Alternative perspectives and histories mingling like unstructured fragments of memory: the personal and the institutional fighting and co-mingling.

Most conceptually close to this display, Chester Tenneson's small, squared text paintings address the ‘archive’ aspect of the exhibition title, alternatively, Tenneson's toy-like sculptural collisions of mass-produced objects wrestle with the ‘play’ bit.

The plastic falseness of a bright yellow construction hat topped with a blue propellor (‘Bright Lights from a Giant Wheel’) or a surprisingly large model railway’s terraced house mounted on a bike’s stabilising side wheels (‘That River’s Flowing’) are enjoyably playful re-stagings of an old Surrealist trick. But Tenneson’s strongest works are the familiar text paintings which, over the years, have often been a witty highlight of group and joint exhibitions.

Previously acting as efficient standalone pieces (even when huddled in groups with an overarching title) they work best here as cross reference-able units as the text used has been lifted from the gallery’s archive literature. Tenneson’s signature tone of sarcasm (think Mel Bochner rather than Jenny Holzer) threads through the selection of phrases: ‘The Persistent Theme Of The Transformation Of The Mundane To The Extraordinary’, ‘A Location Which Is Ideally Situated’, ‘A Dance Which Leads To Friends And Potential Lovers’, as well as very Tenneson-esque pronouncements ‘A List Of Contents Which May Vary’ or ‘Parapsychologists, Mediums, Magicians, Sociologists & Ken Russell’. 

Dr Yan Wang Preston’s ‘English Gardens’ growing collection of photographic prints use the elegant, spartan aesthetic of Chinese flower paintings and Victorian pressed flowers. The relative newness to UK soil of the now common selected plants, and their natural thriving, makes obvious metaphorical points about migration and renewal with aesthetically engaging artworks.

The use of actual plant-life and additional chunky curves of shop-new plastic plumbing make up Gregory Herbert’s ‘Entanglement Ways of Being’. Transparent areas and missing piping allow the eye to burrow into the buildings (redirected) circulatory system.

It appears that the relentless push of organic growth is also acting as a physical incarnation of an alternative structuring principle to the ideological underpinnings of the gallery system. In reality, the thing displayed shows the superimposition of a conceptually ‘perceived’ circulatory system onto a necessarily practical system whilst acknowledging that nothing here is actually necessary. The ‘user value’ of art may be the final sideswipe of the work.

Half of the main downstairs Castlefield space is filled with a sizeable installation by Kelly Jayne Jones which continues the knotting together of organising belief systems (inevitably both ideological and social).

The low lighting intimates the muffled greys of twilight. There’s a theatrical mixture of materials; organic rocky lumps and chalk scrawled rectangles of slate, sharp punctuations of spermy white motifs extending into unreadable technical drawing type patterns; a freestanding frame of cheap timber, and both cheaply reflective tin-foil bright moon crescents and projected silvery circular moons.

The overall effect is something between a site of techno-pagan moon worship and a build for a school play. Either about to begin or having just finished.

Accidentally, this seems to loop back to the archive shelf in suggesting that communal mis-readings and mis-rememberings may be as productively constructive as exhuming hidden histories and perspectives from the archives.