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.

Art Party

Scarborough is one of those British seaside resorts which seem forever stuck in an indeterminable period of the not-too-recent past. As such, it’s an interesting meeting place for the more daringly nomadic representatives of the various UK arts bodies and sub-cultures. All there to attend a collaborative event at Sarborough’s ‘The Spa’, organized by artist Patrick Brill a.k.a. Bob and Roberta Smith and the Crescent Arts Centre, and aimed at ‘debating the future of arts and education.’

Politely referred to as faded grandeur, ‘The Spa’ is a post-Apocalypse Tracey Island multiplex perched at one end of the bay. It has the ambience of a conference centre after a ten year bender but it’s still affectingly impressive. 

The three central hour long group presentations used the standard art chat format of half a dozen people seated at a table drinking water and opining on things in general. The potentially irritating delivery of laboured philosophical haikus, trips down memory lane and disconcertingly odd tangential musings still could not hide the fact that the contradictory creature the career artist is clearly much better at entertainingly performing itself than an administrator is at justifying the castrating box-ticking ‘professionalization’ of art. 

Less a debate than a series of loose meanderings and interjections, with no clear binding core values, it at least had the strength of not being easily transcribed into a sound-bite for the ‘culture industries’ and of being prepared to criticize the suffocating authority of the economically useful as a simplistic fuel for future ‘arty’ fiddlings.

 Unfortunately, these days even that seems like an achievement.

Things never got really heated just a tad tepid when the realpolitik of ‘creative partnerships’ attracted a less than flattering aside, much to the irritation of one of its peevish advocates.

Rather than the pallid grip of further bureaucratization, at the moment the UK ‘arts scene‘ is desperately in need of a liberal dollop of anarchic creativity (both smart and witless).

Bob and Roberta Smith’s ‘Art Party’ might suffer from migraine-inducing onion-layers of intention - whilst quite possibly still being art - but if it’s a bit muted as a full-bloodied party at least it’s an effort in foregrounding the social boxing of a post-’Relational Art’ event as a positive starting point in addressing some thorny issues.

And the fish and chips were pretty good.

  

Three Cheers For Objects

‘Images’ are ‘free-floating’ - needless to say, fundamentally different from the finite expensive object. Even though there’s been a rearguard action in the art-market to push the financial worth, the cost of art objects, through the ceiling (Hirst’s ‘appropriated’ jewel covered skull being the most high profile contemporary example), instinctively there just seems something plodding or inadequate to this display of wealth-power, tiresomely heavy-handed and unimpressive. 

Its not just the obvious second-hand ‘playing the markets’ strategy; the still relatively new fluidity of images through electronic networks, their speed of movement and disposability, makes the exchange value of objects just curiously old-fashioned to the point of being completely pointless.

Or is it that simple?

Any flow of energy can be dammed, redirected, downright manipulated, whilst being made to appear organic, chaotically unmediated, a purity to merely experience.

So let’s start considering the commodity-fetish (after all Santa is on the way) as peculiar way stations, gnomic fingerprints exposing social mores and cultural perspectives.

Worryingly, maybe we can’t even see ourselves, can’t step back from being enveloped in a skin of motivating desires and concerns, without the object, the wilfully crafted stuffs of the world, as a distancing device and an inroad into a communal psyche.

Scheibitz And Pieces

Form as Content. 

Content as Form. 

It’s a quandary.

The previously discredited contentious investment in Formalism’s insular bickering, a monastic essentialism both irritating and pompously magnificent in its vague certainties, has seemingly and ironically been given a new lease of life by the emergence of parallel Formalisms; quirkily reductive morphologies tweaked to carry their producer’s fingerprint.

Currently housed in the Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art, Gateshead, North-East England, ‘One-Time Pad’, a sizeable Thomas Scheibitz retrospective of work done over the last five years, is a fine example.

Scheibitz plays with an apparently feigned essentialism which is in reality as indebted to the functional forms of bottles and containers as it is to Cezanne’s pictorial building blocks. A restricted alphabet and architecture of basic dunce-hat cones, cubes and rectangles cross-fertilizes 3D sculptural assemblages and large painting / drawings which use occasionally mixed and unrefined toxic primaries. 

The paintings graphically parade a space which is impossible outside conventional geometries, the spatial concision making even the smaller, human-scaled pictures ones that imply forms temporarily congealing or being reassembled: not exactly fluid but completed by instability and absence.

The material weight of paint is never foregrounded as heavy, shitty, coloured muck and only really exposes itself as a light scruffy scuffing coating some of the free standing sculptures; the convenient trope of the mannered ‘painterly’ taken to task as a vehicle of expression.

Scheibitz ammunition is actually both obvious and irritatingly archaic: Modernism’s tenants of reductive functionality; decoration as boisterous seduction; paintings perceptual mobius loops - so why does the exhibition work so well?

The shows title, ‘One-Time Pad,’ a type of encryption apparently ‘alludes to the coding process the artist employs in his work, which the viewer is invited to unlock.’

In reality it’s not a matter of ‘unlocking’ the ‘encryption’ processes alluded to in Scheibitz’s promo blurb, the hybrid oddness of the works comes from a friction between presumed conventions of artistic application, parallel complexes of codes coexisting, eroding certainties and leaving the viewer stranded in an interpretative wilderness.

And that no longer seems a bad thing but strangely liberating. 

Nonsense And Gaps

Artists. 

They really don't know who they are. 

Or do they?

Following his death in Lisbon in 1935, Anglophile Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, although rarely published, was discovered to have accumulated a substantial back catalogue of scribblings and musings regarding the act, and fact, of being a writer. 

His contemporary standing is built on the fact that much of his output, discovered in a trunk of articles following his death, was executed in the voice and language of a parade of ‘heteronyms‘ - extreme versions of pseudonyms with distinct biographies and personalities of their own.

In contemporary ‘art’ practice the idea of the ‘double’ is nearly always a thinly veiled ‘me,’ even if that ‘me’ is a compilation of ‘us’-ness using undigested theory-text picked up from dust-jackets and half-remembered college seminars as a platform for a moral high ground ( often neatly sidestepping responsibility for addressing the problem of a qualitative dimension).  

Here’s where the apparent autobiographical volte-face of literary anarchist and S and M buff Alain Robbe-Grillet becomes a useful pointer

‘ “Articulated” language,...,is structured like our lucid consciousness, which is to say, according to the laws of meaning. Thus, it follows directly that it is incapable of accounting either for an external world that is precisely not us or for the restless ghosts within us. But at the same time, I do have to use this material, language, however ill-suited it may be, because it is this lucid consciousness - nothing else - that finds fault with nonsense and gaps.’