See Views

The current exhibition in Manchester city centre’s ‘OBJECT / A’s elongated underground space may logistically be a relatively simple affair to mount but Rick Copsey’s ‘See Views’ play with BIG themes, self-consciously filtered through the unfashionable popularity of Gothic forms.

The Gothic novel regularly relied on driving narrative by the device of reproducing descriptive fictive letters, communiques between parties and primary characters in the story.  It subliminally co-opted the necessary fact of the reader holding text on paper into being an additionally seductive drawing-in of the audience, added a peculiar realism to the fantastical, made the book seem more like reportage than storytelling. 

There are obvious parallels here with photographic prints, flat objects masquerading as the truth of a scene; photography as a compressed selective misremembering of the space of experience and places experienced.

Rick Copsey’s works appear to be dynamic and overwrought photographic examples of the historically conservative genre of landscape, or more accurately seascapes; to be a gauzy haze of fixed actualities, insinuations of material substance as muted intimation of space and time.

The images are in reality digital parodies of photographic prints, microscopically small areas of paint on canvas toyed with and enlarged. 

These close-up and amended digital photographs of smears of paint on canvas begin to simulate semi-abstract seascapes - the sublime hidden in the mundane - and, like hallucinogenic CGI ‘stills’, radiate an ambient unnaturalness.

The clever double bluff here is that the viewers initial confused misreadings of the images can’t cancel out the fact that micro-panoramas of the slow-motion liquidity of paint actually fulfill the implications of the initial impression of the images perfectly.

For all their visual dynamism there is a wry knowingness about the whole display.

They are fake seaside snaps of the chaos of a broiling id, buffeting against the purity and constraints of a medium born from chemistry and the reductive aesthetic of the early years of Modernism, with its compartmentalization of human impulses into the administered and manageable. 

Copsey seems to be attacking the clear historical paternal referent of painting as a medium whilst begrudgingly acknowledging a nostalgic love of its aspirations and its failures.

The ‘art’ bit is not in Copsey’s transcriptive technique or compositional selection but in finding a way to anchor the overt assertion that the sublime is hidden in the mundane in a seductive and layered image. 

"...like dancing to dogs."

                                                                             Photo: Copyright Simon Pantling 

Maybe it’s something in the air, economic demands, or just a chin-rubbing reappraisal of historically bounded presumptions but Manchester / Salford (UK) is currently filling art type spaces with a long overdue reassessment of where painting has got to in the last twenty years.

On show in Salford is International 3 Gallery’s contribution in the form of Stuart Edmundson’s “...like dancing to dogs.” 

The ellipse and lowercase italics of the title already points to the show’s willfully fragmentary construction - paintings, a digital projection, a large freestanding screen, sculptures pieced together from studio detritus and the wall-hugging length of a digital print repeating out-of-focus illuminated icons. 

It’s an ‘installation’ which refuses to be a painting exhibition or a theatre-set but suggests both occupying the space at one and the same time.

The largest component is an eight feet tall, four panel birch wood screen. The surface is peppered with routed gaps to leave the whole thing looking like the wandering curls of a broad regular line framed in a rectangle. Both a functionally unsuccessful vanity screen and an unresolved drawing exercise, along with a two-part, floor seated digital projection, its linear movements are a nod towards the temporal dimension of a drawing and paintings production.

The portrait format halves of the digital projection touch on their vertical side. The left projection shows a static camera playback of a bay in Thailand covering the period of sunset. The horizon line is the point of contact between sky and sea. Little happens but the incremental shift in colours. The right hand panel is initially hard to interpret but formally similar. The top half is a grey blue awning, the bottom the infinite blue of an empty sky.

The bulk of the other component bits of the show are, for want of a better word, paintings which are abstract.

In the largest canvas, covering an area of the previously described digital print, a peculiar dominating shape looks like the slumped and overstuffed calcified innards of an old armchair or equally an anthropomorphic compact of object and human body. Furnishing, body, sculpture, the thing nearly pictured is, however, of no real consequence; the ability of paint to direct the viewers eye around the fictive space is.

The smaller paintings on display are equally unreadable spatial gameplays but blocky forms make the (non) pictures more architectural and solid.

Within the framing boundary of the paintings, Edmundson seems to want to leave the impression that, although in reality mixed, colours which retain the freshness of a primary have been forced into proximity. The synthetic brightness is quietly undercut by considered complementaries which balance the exercise. There may be a lack of modeling graduations but nuanced smears and shadowing hold the picture space together, no matter how intentionally ambiguous that space may be.

   

Paradoxically it’s the limited ambient colours which insinuate themselves into the air, the ones which punctuate the gallery even by their spatial absence, which are equally important.

It may be most useful to assume that alien washes of muted pinks and blues have invisibly invaded the space and occasionally reveal themselves: in the ambient buzz of a digital projectors images; in the staining of canvas rags crudely sewn together, and as a creeping tonality in almost all the paintings in the show. 

It’s actually this limited palette of colour which acts as the real visual glue to the whole thing; grounds the physical spatial play of punctured screen, wire mesh construction material, the legs and rectangles of a table  shaped plinth sketched in space. 

This brings the mucking about with space back to the fore.

There’s a very limited range of terms habitually used to discuss ‘the visual‘ and therefore a very limited way of thinking about the experience of looking.

For Edmundson the problems of painting aren’t a problem at all just a fact. The fact is that painting is purely and simply coloured stuff in space. Everything else is an unnecessary and noisy embellishment. 

The more thoroughly one considers this suggestion that the noise of discourse really is just noise, the more thoroughly destabilizing Edmundson’s perspective is and the more significant the deadpan humour which underpins the exhibition becomes.

Just because something’s colourful doesn’t mean it isn’t quite dark. 

Real Painting

Once more it seems that painting is the new currency; the old-new currency indicating the stubborn interchangeable fact of substance as both commodity and a means of questioning the limitations of our apparatus of perception. The twitchy economics of the world always seem to cycle back to this situation. 

In 2015, there is the added complexity that the selective ownership of physically substantial things becomes an announcement of status whilst also being an indefinably appropriate response to the tsunami of information and images which surround and define us. A refined editing on a number of levels.

The overt compulsion to respond immediately, to merely react, to the missives, directives and info piped through the not-so-new ‘new’ media is a primary aspect of those medias operations.The peculiar bastard offshoots of reductive painting and Minimalist sculptural play which sit around, hang around, and perch on the wall of, the Castlefield Gallery (Manchester, UK) retain a sulky slow-burn aspect which the flash, buzz and zip of the technology of the Post-Post-Modern doesn’t.

The ‘Real Painting’ exhibition, co-curated by Deb Covell and Jo McGonigal with supporting text by Craig Staff, seems to both reach back to Merleau-Ponty’s holistic, experiential phenomenological model of perception and attempts to gather examples of contemporary (non)-painters who are firmly corrupted by the conceptual speculations thrown up by ‘Painting’ (with a capital P).

To their credit they proceed with an obvious understanding that ‘painting in the expanded field’ is a tired mantra only ever really expounded on by academics who approach the topic with a joylessly forensic sensibility and a selective memory of paintings produced in the last 100 years. 

Painting may have failed to be the liberating playground for free expression dreamt of by left-wing art critics and jazz fans but it does have a surprising ability to absorb, mutate and become a subtly different beast decade by decade.

So the works here show the relatively flat architectural unit of that thing considered as ‘a painting’ being deformed, damaged, turned into boxy constructions, inflated like overstuffed cushions, hanging as a sheet of pure paint or curled up and attached to lengths of painted wood.  

A typical Alex Harding (‘Hood’, 2012) shows an ice-cream pink skin of paint forever threatening to slide vertically off its wooden support. 

Angela de la Cruz has three very different works on show and, unusually for a group show, her larger pieces are some of the best exhibited - ‘Compressed 1 (White)’ (2010) looks like a partially crushed kitchen wall unit, its white oil paint coating giving it a cartoon smoothness; ‘Battered 4 (Red)’ (2012) shows its painting and sculptural influences, a rich red balloon cushion appearance with intentional flaky patches of paint revealing a shiny silver aluminium support.

A small simple off white encaustic and gesso-on-wood by David Goerk (‘Untitled (12.28.12)’ (2012)) seemed to have 10 small oval holes which turned out to be dabs of paint on its surface. Its bold simplicity made it one of the best works in the show.

Sticking with the shows larger remit of testing for paintings essentials (whatever they may actually be) Deb Covell had a long hanging sheet of white acrylic paint,‘Nowt to Summat’ (2014), reaching from ceiling to floor and interrupting the main rectangle of the larger basement space. 

It worked well as a spatial pivot for the show especially when mapping the larger space with wall pieces of varying scales but it did highlight the fact that there really is twice as much stuff present than there should be.  

Covell’s co-conspirator seemed to take the whole enterprise to the next stage of head scratching. Jo McGonigal’s ‘Yellow Yellow’ (2015) had a cotton t-shirt knotted into a handshake with a silk scarf. Both bits, not surprisingly, being yellow: a paintless painting which demands, because of context, to be interpreted according to older diagnostic models.

‘Real Painting’ works as show not because it repeats older questions about the flexibility of things to qualify as paintings, the ‘expanded’ notions of painting, but because it makes clear the undefinable nature of the physically substantial without some baggy, mutually agreed rules.

Whitworth Galleries Relaunch

When it comes to the newly revamped, extended and rebranded Whitworth (Manchester, UK) Gallery, timings the thing. 

Or rather, a misstep and a series of unsynchronized stumbles. 

The truth is that the relaunch has been, well, a bit creaky.

On the up side, the new spaces are pretty impressive. The visitors can flow around the building taking in the shiny glass and light of the very large, over-priced cafe, bob into the sizeable side galleries, slide through the shifting ambience of the cluster of spaces. It has turned the act of visiting the Whitworth into something of an event. A job well done. 

Then the dysfunctional aspects of the rebuild start to show - toilets are a bit thin on the ground, the intentionally photogenic cafe is basically an uncomfortable glass corridor on stilts serving poor coffee.

Obviously the ‘creative industries’ shop model raises its cynical and oxymoronic head in every institution paying back its government funding. 

So there’s twee papery ‘objets’ that pepper the gift / bookshop; wooden things, tasteful notebooks, expensive faux-artisanal trinkets allowing the middle-brow ex-graduates to feel distanced from base consumerism whilst feeding their inclusion.

War references pepper the displays. Presumably because the relaunch was originally to be last November and synchronized with the commemorative 11th of November’s Red Poppy day.

Cai Guo-Qiang’s huge 45 metre long, 4 metre high gunpowder drawing “Unmanned Nature” does look vaguely like a landscape drawing minus any delicacy of line. The DVD playbacks of his vast firework and gunpowder displays seemed to enjoy blowing things up far to much considering the dour thematics.

Cornelia Parker’s a decent artist with a backlog of irritatingly efficient and occasionally playful works. The apparent simplicity of her smaller object-based neo-conceptual work: silver dollars reconfigured as threads as long as Niagara Falls and The Statue of Liberty are high, a glass drum, orangey-beige rectangles of canvas linings from Turner paintings, and so on, are her real strength.

She also has a tendency to produce larger gallery-filling installations; casts of pavement cracks lying horizontally but raised from the floor; crushed tubas and trumpets, flattened silver service utensils, all hovering off the ground on fishing line strong wires. I suspect that the local art schools will soon be filled with the suspended flotsam and jetsam of students bedrooms.

Reconstructed here, her most successful example is probably the early ‘signature’ work ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’: the component bobs and bits of a garden shed literally suspended mid-explosion. A centred light bulb throws large elongated shadows on the gallery walls giving the work a scale way beyond its physical heft, It’s still a visually effective construct.

Less successful is Parker’s new ‘War Room’ installation, a high-ceilinged oblong room with its walls and ceiling covered by large perforated sheets, left-over paper negatives resulting from factory production of commemorative red paper and plastic poppies. It feels like a large porous tent but lacks any atmosphere.  

Off on a tangent is the Karpadis Foundation’s dumping (or donation depending on how you want to look at it) of a 90 piece collection of American and British art - paintings, prints, photograph and photo-process based pieces. The Lisa Oppenheim 2011 reprint of 1876 heliograms look like grey circles stamped onto burnt baking trays. Almost reflective, almost an image they work remarkably well.

Speaking of all things Karpadis, Johnnie Shand Kydd’s “Hydra” is a length of corridor wall covered by 3 panels of black and white photographs from Shand’s ‘extensive and varied portfolio focus on his yearly trips to the Geek island of Hydra at the invitation of the art collector and Whitworth patron Pauline Karpadis.’  (as present in wall C’s photograph number 2 and number 16)

Shand Kydd’s (see wall C’s photograph number 35) holiday snaps aspire to being a historical record of the group of artists cursed with the title ‘Young British Artists’ as they rose to playful moneyed success. They succeed very well in these terms but the rather cheaply done book of these images piled in the Whitworth Gallery bookshop suggest a cultural value that they can’t really justify. 

The self-regarding, look-at-me-mummy dimension of Shand Kydd’s work could be compared to Warhol’s homegrown stable of wannabe superstars; louche urban-types just hanging about. 

Warhol got away with it because his scattershot reportage jigsawed into an overview of a social system which had critical bite, both of Capitalism’s playground indulgence of the narcissist and the seductive banality of accumulated images. 

Shand Kydd’s pictures may, however, be entirely appropriate to the tone of the YBA - a recycling of historical models and a case of diminishing returns - but there’s a further problem. It seems tonally incorrect for the revamped 2015 incarnation of the Whitworth to restage a point in history when art as commerce openly ruled the roost, a celebration of socio-economic conservatism and critical surface skating, which is both decades old and, even first time round, a little lacking in substance.

And speaking of Young British Artists, Sarah Lucas (see Johnnie Shand Kydd’s wall A photograph number 6 and wall C’s photograph number 10) has a mini-retrospective upstairs. There’s three walls of wallpaper showing a regular pattern of domed breasts made from cigarettes or as tabloid-loving Lucas prefers “Tits In Space”, seedy stuffed stocking sculptures, large photos of Lucas scowling in a fuck-you kind of way - the usual Lucas alphabet of things. It’s all fine but really just another outing for things which have been seen time and time again.

By the time one leaves the building this tangle of implied nepotism and retro-staging of New Labour style grinning optimism leaves an uncomfortable niggling in the stomach.

Parker’s side room projection of a Noam Chomsky interview, one in which he does his usual informed unpicking of global feudal power structures in the tone of a tired and disappointed headmaster, suddenly seems depressingly appropriate.

The Day My Mother Touched Robert Ryman

Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery (UK) has been extended, buffed and recently reopened to a fanfare of audience-attracting publicity. And, to be fair, prior to its temporary closure for redevelopment, it’s had a decent run of shows.

The history of a city’s moments of significant application to this thing called ‘art’ is not however built on firework displays at the launch of gallery extensions but on an investment in an art practice which needles, resonates or questions its own function.

The splendidly hermetic exercise that is the gallery / project space / event ‘facilitator’ (delete as appropriate) ‘titledateduration’ continues its determination to head in the opposite direction of government funded institutions and promote work which refuses to be easily comprehensible. 

Currently on display at ‘titledateduration’ is Stefan Sulzer‘s film and book combination ‘The Day My Mother Touched Robert Ryman’. The touching in question being fingertips on a white canvas rather than Mr Ryman himself.

Sulzer recounts the possibly fictional story of a woman’s encounter with Robert Ryman’s work followed by the woman’s homeward bound reflection on the encounter, intercut with a secondary author-narrators speculations about Ryman’s work. Narrated through the text in a book and as a voiceover on a short film it builds its own complicated layering of surfaces remembered, surfaces implied and the digital ghosts of surfaces experienced.

In the digital projection a static camera has recorded the landscape moving past a train’s rain blotched window, twitchy sliding layers of visual information. The camera’s lens doesn’t appear too clean. There are gaps in the houses, cars and trees of the world passing by outside exposing a misty haze blurred horizon line of mountains. 

Impressively vast expanses of water suggest a wavering coastline but are probably the muted grey-green mass of the Hudson River, as referenced in the accompanying book and DVD’s documentary-style voice over.

The suspicion remains that the text has been edited from the film’s accompanying monologue. Alternatively the soundtrack could be an expanded version of the written piece. Or possibly neither. The voice transcribing writing into speech may be doing just that. 

What is certain is the eccentric spacing in the layout of the printed sentences: blank pages alternating with isolated sentences sandwiched between short paragraphs - basically a lot of white paper infected with language.

Ryman is understood to be an artist who operates a balancing act between the idea-based blankness of Conceptual Art and old school abstract monochrome painting by the simple act of painting white paintings; paintings with no reference point outside the fact of paint on a flat surface.  

In actual fact, Ryman plays with scale, the different material supports of the paintings and the variety of ways that a square can be attached to a wall. The seductive material complexity of Ryman’s practice is usually overlooked.

Central to the practice is an emphasis on the fact that displaying blankness isn’t a simple reductive repetition of sameness, it’s a battle with the impossibility of a blankness which can only be represented or re-presented by difference.

In Sulzer's work the various material supports of white paper, filmed glass, ill-defined horizon lines and the mental interiors of fictive narrations seem to suggest the impossibility of a pure visual experience of staged near blankness. 

The one thing required is the experience-event of a Ryman painting to wipe the slate clean and silence all this muttering. Which may be Sulzer’s point. Or maybe not. 

It really doesn’t matter. 

Any exhibition / show / presentation which leaves a visitor wrong-footed in such an insidious and polite way is an automatic success. 

Playtime

Once upon a time in Manchester (UK) there was a politically convenient, widely held (and strategically promoted) belief that Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery only showed the works of tired old men, all churning out blocky abstract paintings.This was a period of insular playground scuffles over potential ‘arts’ funding so Castlefield had become a target for hungry young ‘art’ types enviously lusting after the filthy lucre keeping the thing economically afloat. 

The combatants of the period have retired, bloody-mindedly continued their practice or now have a gallery and / or teaching position. The infighting is subtler and, more often than not, concerned with maintaining rather than acquiring status in the local / provincial / UK ‘art world’ (delete as appropriate). 

In the Manchester of now a recurrent gripe is the Cornerhouse Galleries over-reliance on cinema related, themed or inflected exhibitions. Actually, looking back a few years at the rolling programme, this isn’t true. Of course pictures that move about a bit or the ubiquitous ‘digital media’ feature fairly regularly but, for god’s sake, it is 2015 and to be expected. 

A fairer criticism is the obviousness of most films referenced - here artists have to take a considerable amount of the blame - leaving a post-exhibition feeling that you’ve attended a powerpoint display by a middlebrow academic. Not uninteresting just a little tepid.

The current exhibition, and the last one prior to the whole art centre’s rebirth as ‘HOME’, is very solidly film related as ‘...nine artists take inspiration from film director Jacques Tati’s 1967 comedy masterpiece Playtime...’  

In actual fact five of the of the exhibits pre-date the exhibition by a number of years. The appropriate thematics of four of these pieces means that they can be conveniently shoehorned into the show. With a little more curatorial rigour Gabriel Lester’s ‘Melancholia In Arcadia’ - lace curtains seemingly suspended in time whilst being ruffled by a light breeze - would have been saved for a future  retrofitted affair.

Tati’s film is stylish and odd and extremely hard to date accurately; it’s from 1967 but feels like a 1957 speculation about the future. In it Tati’s avuncular and ‘befuddled’ gent gets lost in the blocks and clean lines of a Modernist Paris. Pieces in Cornerhouse’s ‘Playtime’ occasionally reference particular scenes from the film or work as compact tonal critiques of the contemporary urban world.

Lester’s other work here is ‘Bouncer’ (2014) a horseshoe shaped series of thirty saloon-type swinging doors, one after the other, which crash too behind the gallery visitor only revealing yet another set of the swing doors. Physically they’re clumsy things: the hinges are too large, the wooden doors surface have the quality of cheap compressed laminated board and the crash on closing is mildly irritating rather than sonically effective.

Niklas Goldbach’s ‘Habitat‘ (2008) is a looped DVD showing the same man crossing his own path in the enclosed greys and brown blocks of a French Modernist estate, finally chasing himself until the routine starts all over again. 

The other ‘film’ piece is Shannon Plumb’s ‘Madison and E 24th Street’ (2008) in which Plumb, with fake moustache and dressed as a disheveled and harried businessman, stands in front of a screen showing the streets intersection and feigns hailing a taxi. 

Andy Graydon’s ‘Untitled (Plate Tectonics)’ (2009) has four record players, one each side of a square central pillar; each surface has shallow shelves with vinyl records sat on them. Each record appears to contain the ambient noises of different gallery spaces around the world. Four can be played at once with the sounds muffled, but amplified by, speakers attached to the surfaces of eight squares of plywood hanging in a circle around the record players.

Rosa Barber’s ‘One Way Out’ (2009 - 2014) has the gallery floor penetrated by a human scaled transparent tube. The lower level has a floor projector positioned presumably to feed a long loop of running film celluloid through the gap’, the accompanying sound spilling through to infect the space. Unfortunately, the mechanism was broken so it was an elaborate hole and projector combination.

Functionally ‘interacive’, Naomi Kashiwagi’s ‘Swingtime’ (2014) is a slightly raised plateau of rubber mats with a centred frame and two childrens swings which trigger pre-recorded outdoor sounds; it’s clunky and underwhelming.

Jan St. Werner’s ‘Molecular Hypnotics’ (2014) (or ‘Molocular Hypnotics’ according to the wall text) is ‘a bespoke light and sound environment’ or rather a spartan white and grey-blue room, electronic throbs, pulses, and squeals accompany Mark E Smith’s voice snarling impenetrable narratives through his phlemgy disdain. As often happens, even for the dystopian sci-fi simplicity there’s too many ill-considered elements - confusion over the title and a small square framed kaleidoscopic fragmented image (possibly an iris to keep the ocular bit going) - which niggles even when experiencing the thing.

In the face of freely roaming corporate corruption and economic instability, the atmosphere of the time is one of confusion and resignation hidden by an enforced rictus grin of affability. The show may actually be very revealing of the cultural tone of the time but to a large degree by accident. ‘Playtime’ really requires at least the suggestion of the flutter of an anarchist’s heart to pose the possibility of a healthy opposition to the castrating banalities of bureaucratization.

Gretta's Gabriel, Gabriel's Gretta

Now perched on the Manchester / Salford (UK) border, ‘International 3’ gallery is currently home to Maeve Rendle’s two-screen installation piece ‘Gretta’s Gabriel, Gabriel’s Gretta’.

Gretta and Gabriel are a husband and wife couple Rendle has lifted from James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’; a story in which an Xmas get together terminates in Gretta’s attention drifting from her husband’s advances due to the distant warblings of a male tenor’s interpretation of the old Irish song ‘The Lass Of Aughrim’. 

With this starting point in mind Rendle has filmed tenor Michael Jones in the act of learning how to perform the song.

Far too often the formal construction of the component bits and pieces of an exhibition ape the spacing and space of a clothes shop or apple boutique without any attempt to take on board the centrality of this formal architecture to the substance of an ‘art’ show. Rendle’s displays foreground this aspect of staging, often in an idiosyncratic combination of the pragmatic and the anthropomorphic. ‘Gretta’s Gabriel, Gabriel’s Gretta’ is no different.

Two Sony playback cubes of different sizes show DVDs of Jones getting to grips with ‘The Lass Of Aughrim’, their plinths are different heights and a slightly diagonal spacing has the backs of the devices facing each other so the looped DVDs can’t be seen at the same time. Viewers circle the piece and alternate the visual playback experienced. Not that there’s much to actually see, a left shoulder and the cheek and chin of a turned head listening to headphones. One head seems to be gauging the tuning shifts by tentatively whistling along to the song being played back, the other singing in unison to the presumed playback of the song.

But there is a degree of trust on the audiences part; the tenor may indeed not be hearing or singing anything, soundtracks are as easily applied to electronic images as they are to the imaginatively remembered.

The indulgent and maudlin implications of using an old Irish song never takes hold over the piece. The unpicking of the insular mechanics of language, a straining towards articulation by the singer, retains the feeling of a performative distance from emotional sincerity but insinuates a keening aspiration to learn by rote how to actually engage with emotional demands. 

Joyce has always seemed smart, cold and aloof but drawn to and drawing from the intimate and particular. Distance and ill communication in one migraine inducing package with a healthy dollop of sentimentality (knowingly mangled along with the English language).

Joyce’s ironic detachment from his own biography allowed him to deal with the intimate at several removes, a myth-making process which helps the minutia of the everyday in his books resonate with an additional significance, and helped him to make the provincial feel universal. At odds with this is a certain literariness which both hides expressive intent and allows its articulation. 

Rendle’s installation echoes these onion layers of complexity by transcribing them into spatial intimations of intimacy and distance, closeness and rejection, engagement and performative indifference and yet still retains a human warmth to the whole gameplay.