Small Connecting Part

It’s exhibition number two in ‘International 3’s new compact Salford (UK) space and this time it’s a one woman affair: Hannah Dargavel-Leafe’s ‘Small Connecting Part’.

First the gripe. There’s too much stuff on display. Commercial pressures make obvious demands but Hannah Dargavel-Leafe’s combination of framed drawings, repeated girder motif wallpaper and sculptural ‘assemblages’ really require more space.

The small drawings look like exercises in carefully editing old-school technical drawings. Executed in pen, indian ink and pencil, these schematic abstractions of objects (a fluorescent light, a wine glass), an action (the skimming of stones on water) or the casual ripple of sound-waves (a yawn) are not quite images, not quite a traced motion, all encoded in the formal simplicity of a dry, pseudo-scientific shorthand. The obvious analogy is a musical score.

Actions petrified into abstractions and DNA templates for choreographing movement or sound, a musical score may be a formally simple thing but it’s implications are not: a compression of time and volume, intensity and delicacy, the featherlight insubstantial or an aggressively heavy slab of invisible weight. 

To further complicate things they are accompanied by four freestanding sculptural works, constructed from small hand sized ‘Crane Motifs’ each seated on roughly rectangular, slate thin slabs of cement set on  black metal frames looking like the supporting skeleton of a high stool from a corporate style bar

Far from being grotty little spit’n’glue maquette girder constructions they are well produced kinder-egg cute scaled down plastic architectural forms made solid by 3-D scan and print technology. 

They may hint at sculptural works so architecturally substantial that they escape the constraints of ‘art’ and directly impinge on the fabric of the social but they seem more indebted to Buckminster Fuller’s mathematical geometrical constructions than Manchester’s ’loft’ redevelopments.

The sculptures and drawings all forgo the pleasure of excessive detail but somehow all seem to insinuate an undergirding of psychological ennui.

Steven Gartside’s accompanying text quite reasonably notes that the drawings ‘ have a multiple existence, that of drawing, score, instruction, document: the choice helps to determine what might be made of the work.’ 

By strip mining chaos, editing the unpredictable - no matter how insignificant or even banal - Dargavel-Leafe leaves a directive thought as an elegant echo of the human need to organize, whether by architecture or ‘art.’

Indeed what is most telling is the viewer’s final interpretive choice, speaking volumes about the kind of art they need.

Tooth House

Staged at the Henry Moore Institute Galleries, Leeds (UK) from 20th March until 22nd June 2014, the Ian Kiaer 2005 - 2014 retrospective ‘Tooth House’, uses the basic organic, early regenerative powers of the tooth - apparently referenced by the speculative architect and designer Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965) in his concern with constructing free flowing architectural frameworks for genuine lived experience - as a binding concept for  'collaged' maquettes of implied modular architectural environments. 

A dependency on constructing from crappy studio leftovers - cheap, disposable packing polystyrene, plastic sheets, rectangles of mass-produced paper - ‘questions’ the actual worth of the historically acceptable materials of art practice; the end results further complicated by the addition of titles which reference ambitiously Utopian thinkers socio-architectural speculation as tools to fine tune his 3D-event sculptures.

Somehow this allows Kiaer to dispense with the sculptural as an illusion of absolute solidity; a stabilizing conceptual marker in an anarchically fluid universe: everything here is temporary and contingent. 

The effectiveness and affecting aspect of this show is the fact that the display of sculpture-constructions may be about the way we dream architecture, or the universal need to do so, but architectural textures have an appropriate scale, a rule which Kiaer’s constructions completely ignore and, in doing so, they respond to the textures of the real as experienced in life’s everyday routines. 

OK, these directive routines may actually construct any notion of selfhood but it’s always worth keeping an eye on them.

The best intentions of Utopian dreamers are often reduced to the playful jigsawing of leftovers into 3D sketches of other worlds which will never come. That said, maybe helping to maintain a freedom to be imaginatively playful with the quotidian’s crap is success enough in the current climate.

This Space We Are

There’s been a slow incremental migration of art-events, instigated by that peculiar hybrid the curator-artist, away from Manchester (UK) city-centre into the borderland with its tougher neighbouring city area of Salford.

Gallery / art ‘facilitators’ ‘International 3’ have followed suit, moved to Salford’s Chapel Street and are currently staging the group show ‘This Space We Are’ pieced together from works which self-consciously reference the institutional mechanics of and peculiar currency which is ‘art.’

The title ‘This Space We Are’ may sound like Yoda mangling a Lawrence Weiner text-piece but it’s entirely appropriate for this exhibition’s concern in which the space or arena of art activity is intimately bound-up with its efficacy and value as a cultural enterprise.

To further milk the spatial metaphor, the human impulse to paint things hasn’t been limited to flat, vertical surfaces. Or rather the impulse to paint things has been given free-reign on flat and unflat vertical surfaces - canvas, linen, the human face and the front door. One name artist Monty has painted the gallery door green and confidently titled the activity / object / gesture ‘Door’, twice named artist Bob and Roberta Smith aka Patrick Brill is responsible for the colourful ‘International 3’ sign outside the building; Andrew Gannon has taken things one step further and painted the faces of gallery staff in his sociable but unimaginatively titled ‘Face Painting Work’.

Oil on canvas hasn’t been completely omitted from the equation. Enzo Marra’s half dozen small paintings show simplified box-like interiors with figures drifting in and out of the frame, playing with undetailed rectangles, all rendered in pasty troughs of pastel hued paint. 

There’s three further small oil paintings, Evi Grigoropoulou’s ‘Future Contracts’, of banal comestibles - an onion, a mango, an orange - isolated elements from an alphabet of foodstuffs all centred on ill-defined, dark, horizontal surfaces. They look like something between a Dutch still-life and a magazine food promotion; highly literal presentations of the digestible as a currency for a consumer culture. 

Sculpture and the moving image have one representative each. Joe Fletcher Orr’s ‘Decoy’ is a likeably clumsy mechanized compact of elements sticking out of a plastic bag, it is, however. in the wrong show. Dante Rendle Trayner’s HD Video ‘Show’ isn’t but fits far too snugly: a narrator’s head, decorated with a shaving foam beard hovers on screen. a rolling transcription of the head’s monologue, peppered with repetitions, misrepetitions  and contradictions witters on and on about the importance of networking with fictitious curators and collectors. The sleepy somnambulant delivery is affecting but the strained idiosyncracy of the piece is finally a little wearing.

Louise Lawler’s entertainingly unhinged ‘Birdcalls’ (1972 - 1981) consists of Lawler’ bird-like trilling of famous male conceptual artists plus a text-on-the-wall listing the artists names.

The birdcalls themselves work very well - the sound of art’s frustrated potency invading the space of the white cube. Unfortunately the text aestheticizes and standardizes the piece, it becomes an example of the castration and normalization of the eccentric and the application of the critical. The space of the gallery has absorbed and defanged another critique.

It may be temporarily necessary for ‘art’ to pull up the drawbridge and hunker down for a period but no-one should forget the importance of its function as a sand-in-the-vaseline of social discourse. The self-reflexive turn of the more interesting recent Manchester exhibitions is fine and dandy but only if it leads to self-reflection and hardier mutant offshoots of art practice.

Martin Creed - What's The Point Of It?

At the Southbank Centre, London’s Hayward Gallery is staging ‘ What’s The Point Of It? ’, an expansive career retrospective of Martin Creed’s three decades of numbered works: all his ‘greatest hits’ are here and, to help muddy the critical waters, considerably more.

There’s his A4 sheet of white paper crumpled into a ball; a series of unsynchronized swinging metronomes; semi-erotic, eye-level football sized white protrusions seamlessly bulging from the wall - but everything has become more physically substantial with previously isolated works spilling into each others display space, overlapping; generally busying Creed’s previously reductive practice. 

In the first of the Hayward’s interconnecting gallery spaces, a thick wooden beam, acting as a base for large neon letters spelling out the word ‘Mothers’, rotates 360 degrees, horizontally, around and around and around. Although it is high enough to clear the head of any gallery visitor the sheer mass of the thing retains a threatening, oppressive potential for decapitation. It also acts as an early announcement that Creed’s previous predilection for isolating objects of formal and material simplicity is no longer a given, the space also containing a much reproduced photo of Creed grinning in an unreadably exaggerated manner and a wall hugging line of 39 clicking metronomes.

This leads through to walls decorated with colourful stripes, a large clumsy ‘x’ of paint, bright simple painting-drawings of stacked blocks of colour repeated in the adjacent tiered sculptural stack of random cardboard boxes.  

Although his restaging of his 1998 audience favourite Work 200: Half The Air In A Given Space - white balloons piled into a room and the audience permitted to enter the area for a Wacky Warehouse romp - remains a self-contained affair; Work 227: The Lights Going On And Off (still available to experience at Tate Britain) now happens in a functioning gallery space which just makes looking at the other works pointlessly irritating.

There’s two reconstructed old wall pieces, one an isolated bulge, the other two parallel lumps, something between pale smooth cysts and cartoon breasts, both insinuate tactility whilst denying it. The stand alone wall lump seems altogether more ambiguous and therefore more threatening - is the mass being absorbed into the vertical surface or protruding into real space before splitting and spilling its contents?

When it comes to the subject of spilling contents, Creed’s taken this to its obvious conclusion with projected DVDs of individuals wandering into a static framed studio shot and vomiting on the floor. Some manage it with a casual indifference, others battle their gag reflex which makes things a tad uncomfortable. Following these snippets with someone having a shit is, let’s face it, just a display from the other end of the tube. 

Speaking of the other end of the two ends of a tube, another ‘filmic’ projection, this time outdoors on one of the Hayward’s city viewing balconies, has a side shot of a human cock becoming erect then flaccid in a constant seamless series of cycles. A neighbouring balcony holds a tall diagonal stack of various strata of brick further resonating with the interplay between erect penis and London’s skyline. A glaring literalness can just be the hallmark of poor art but Creed’s exercises in stripping things down to physical and mechanical facts can be smart-stupid and entertainingly unsettling in equal measure. 

Everything somehow fits together like the cogs of a larger mechanism, the exception being a line of childishly crap portraits; Creed’s intuitively skillful in adopting the pose of the wide-eyed and childlike but childish isn’t the same thing at all and should be stamped out immediately.   

The new giddy carnivalesque Creed just about pulls it off here even if it is at the expense of crowding out the little Zen nuggets of yesteryear. What is new is that which Creed previously avoided, a tone of cynicism; simple mechanical processes used to be pleasurable enough in themselves in Creedworld but now they seem to be becoming less than satisfactory repetitions, repetitions without a confining duration, pure and mindless mechanical process. 

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. 

Presenting Absence (No 2) : Joe Devlin's 'Necrophagous Shadows"

‘Black’ is a sequence of four short-term exhibitions / installations / events (delete as appropriate) to be staged over an eighteen month period in a domestic cellar space of artist Stuart Edmundson’s house in Salford, North-West England.

So far, so 1990s, but the twist here is the fact that only the first 20 of the e-mailed invitees to acknowledge attendance can actually attend the launch bash. Conversations about the ‘art’ displayed are the primary concern, along with a liberal dash of beery conviviality and a temporary fuck-you to the choppy waters of funding applications and the marketplace.  

Considering the fact that Edmundson has predicated the function of the space as an enforced absenting of a large percentage of a prospective audience, the perfect artist would be one who, if not exactly making an effort to remove the art-object from proceedings, at least makes an effort to trim things back to essentials. Hence the opening gambit of handing over the space to Joe Devlin and his new piece 'Necrophagous Shadows'.

 Devlin has previously used the marks, stains and readers doodlings left in library books as a starting point for his work, ‘Necrophagous Shadows’ is more physically ambitious than his usual neo-conceptual output but remains equally enigmatic and self-contained. A gaggle of plinths radiate from one corner of the cellar illuminated by a desk lamp sat on the floor. Each is topped by a freestanding image of the shadow of an art object cut-out from an image in an art magazine.                                                                                                                                                                                                       

The casual grouping of plinths are really clunky skeletal echoes of functional plinths: either too narrow, too shallow, too high, or too low to be blankly reusable display supports their peculiar dimensions dictated by their shadow images positions within the source magazines numbered pages.                                                                                                           

With an inflection of anamorphic distortion the small shadow-shapes are all profoundly different from each another - one a linear fine archers bow motif, another a wonky Poirot-style moustache shape, others a miniature flattened Brancusi, a black corn-chip curl, and on and on. It’s impossible to reconstruct the absent form producing these shadows.

Visible vacuums, the tracing of an absence, vagrant bits; these are echoes of absences, awkwardly contextualized in a domestic space with a limited audience and blankly refusing a meaning, with the lack of a written attempt to elucidate the critical dimension of the piece acting as an additional absence.

The titling of the install - ‘Necrophagous Shadows’ - seems to be another destabilizing addition to the affair; a sarcastic acknowledgement of the excessive gothic lardings favoured by some contemporary practitioners and a pointer to the conceptual notions undercutting the display.

The life of an art object isn’t predicated on it being fixed, motionless, but on its semi-transparency, its fluidity as a trigger of associations which themselves shift in relationship with each other. 

Of equal importance, a play with stuff - materially imperfect, bloody-mindedly solid and soiled - has the added ingredient of the auric quality of matter and the additional edge of psychological invasiveness that thingness brings.

The simple fact of things in the world, stubborn reality, allows a shifting perspective to be applied but is completely indifferent to defining constructs, no matter how smart or insightful.

Things simply are. Any art work degenerates into an embodied ideology, which is both inevitable, necessary, and, often, rather tragic. 

Crikey, somehow the whole event seems to make sense!

Presenting Absence (No. 1.)

Considering the fact that writing organises human thought into a structured linearity (a narrative event), it’s sobering to reflect how insanely random everyday thoughts generally are: like a bee in a bucket or idiot spaghetti in a badly made crate. 

In response, plenty of contemporary art embraces the chaos and excess of day-to-day existence; other work pares things down to the point of using different forms of absence as a productive device.

From its establishment as a visual trope, the place of the monochrome within the historical lineage of abstraction seems fairly straightforward. In reality the skeletal framework of potential interpretive perspectives on any bastardised contemporary offshoot of the ‘genre’ is a much more tangled and chaotic mess than any A to B to C simple family-tree model may suggest. Matters are not helped by artists insistence on taking the reductive simplifications of Modernism up strange creative side-alleys. 

One such example is Deb Covell’s exhibition ‘Zero’ at Manchester’s increasingly impressive ‘Untitled Gallery’; a half-dozen rectangles of acrylic paint playing with the physical fact of paint as stuff.

The intentionally grey walls of the show’s installation helps to emphasis the extreme contrast of the yin and yang of black and white layers of paint glued together by the hidden infrastructure of an acetate sheet. A simple twinning of absences.

It goes without saying that the act of building a painting is not the same as constructing an image. Equally the use of paint itself doesn’t necessarily indicate the procedure of ‘painting’. Here Covell seems more interested in forcing paint into a sculptural form more indicative of a sheet of paper or swatch of cloth; the surfaces, however, lack the purity of absolute flatness, the smooth fluctuating thickness of the paints topography radiating a stubborn thingness.

One piece brings to mind a cartoon handkerchief hanging on a nail, or a sleeping bat; another horizontal floor piece an accidentally kicked floor rug; two others show a tasteful fold to a corner revealing a pliable marzipan thickness to all the pieces. A constant is the light repelling, dead plasticity to the deformed rectangles of acrylic paint.

The end results are impersonations of paintings; comic narratives of hapless substance afflicted by the gravitational tug of time.

Under the primary pressure of its concrete object-ness, the surfaces are never allowed to act as a support for brushstrokes or marks, the pieces serve as absences, architectural punctuations and surfaces at one-and-the-same time, without comfortably satisfying any of these criteria.

So finally as three-dimensional events refusing a function the spectre of ‘aesthetics’ is allowed to sneak into the frame. 

That’s really asking for a fight. 

Tasteful indeed but maybe they’re not so polite afterall.