Tights on Old Street

I went to a private view last night for a small exhibition just off Old Street. The four artists involved have been working on a collaborative sculpture and textile project for the past eighteen months, and this show marks the second of three temporary, planned pauses in their activity. This is the stock-take pause.

The exhibition comprises paper documentation and some examples of the work they’ve been making so far, in very straightforward museum-style cases and using plinths and mannequins. Not many people came and so there was space to spend time alone with the work, particularly in the ‘tights cubicle’, which was poorly signposted and difficult to find. The project is much the same: private, and understated, and with some pieces too opaque to really understand.

The artists are looking at the clothes we wear and the ‘clothes’ we don’t: textile constructions that we wouldn’t call clothes because for one reason or another they don’t fit around the normal parts of our bodies. Garments for hands that you couldn’t call gloves because they only cover your palms; knee-warmers; jewellery for foreheads; a kind of skirt for your neck, that straps tightly around your chin to keep you warm on cold days. Then there are the so-called ‘accoutrements’: functional objects made from wire and plastic to help you put on, take off or store the garments. The accoutrements were all in a display case, but there was a demonstration in the early part of the evening.

Review: Portholes to the Secrets of the Universe

La Viande, 3 Charlotte Road, London EC2 3DH

17 – 27 October 2007

 

By the time I finish this review you won’t have much time left to see Portholes to the Secrets of the Universe. (It closes on 27th October 2007). That’s a shame, as the artists have put on a strong and difficult show that demands careful attention. It’s an all-male cast: Jeremy Brann, Gabor Gyory, Michael O’Mahony, Christopher Page and Christopher Shilling. As with any group show (or any artwork shown in a circumscribed space) there is the temptation on the part of the viewer to draw the whole thing into one neat sentence, disregarding the individual artists, let alone the individual pieces. So, it’s a strong and difficult show. I feel reluctant to say anything more specific, especially about ‘the whole thing’. But, here goes.

It’s strong because each of the artists seems to be sure of what he’s doing, and is engaged in the process of developing a style and a visual language to suit that purpose. Regardless of what they’re actually saying, each has a distinctive style or voice: despite there being no indications in the gallery as such, it’s clear which works were done by the same person, even without a floorplan. It’s difficult because, aside from the evident visual pleasure of much of the work, the individual pieces are conceptually complex, drawing further away from the viewer the longer you’re with them, complicating the picture rather than resolving it.

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth

I haven’t seen the Doris Salcedo’s new work at the Tate Modern yet (I want to catch her associated show at the White Cube first), but Adrian Searle is one of the many who have, and his review on the Guardian Unlimited Blog is worth a look. Not so much for what he writes, but for the superb string of juicy comments that follow his closing paragraph:

“We are meant to think not about cracks in the floor, but about inequality and iniquity. Shibboleth risks being regarded as a banal cliché: the unblemished surfaces of the liberal art gallery riven by the ideological fissures opening up beneath. The real problem for Salcedo has been to work in the knowledge that liberal institutions absorb the shocks artists inflict by assimilation, and that Shibboleth will most likely be regarded as entertainment. That is art’s fate, and our loss.”

Here’s a handful…

Repetition and Repetition at The Approach

Peter Dreher and Stuart Cumberland both had solo exhibitions at The Approach this summer. Both were painting shows that focussed on variations among repeated instances of the same fairly straightforward representational image. The formal similarities pretty much stop there – the paintings themselves, and the projects they’re part of, are very different indeed – but I can’t ignore the cumulative fact of their repetition.

Cumberland’s paintings look good. The best ones are bright green and brave, with brushwork that’s succulent and brash. And they’re of bottles of Champagne. One is of a bottle of Champagne with a cartoon foot in it. It looks like Cumberland’s been trying things out, one after the other, and I like the feeling that none of them quite did the trick so he had to keep starting new ones. But repeated over and over again with a stencilled outline, the image becomes more of a motif or a mantra than a statement of its own, and the statement you’re left with is the bald fact of repetition: no longer ‘here is this’, but ‘this is here many times over’. And so for all the vocal strength of Cumberland’s works, they stay immensely quiet.

Quietness is abundant in Peter Dreher’s project Tag um Tag ist guter Tag (Day by Day is a Good Day), an ongoing series of over four thousand near-identical paintings of the same glass in the same place. An earnest, quotidian study, at once exhaustive and hopelessly incomplete. Only a couple of dozen fitted onto the walls at the Approach in the summer, where the scale of the project was amplified by the immense absence of almost all of it.

The Art School Brand (2)

Yesterday I wrote about the lack of genuine benefit the ‘cool’ CSM brand offers its own students and graduates. Now I find the current Art Monthly (310, p.19) is running a very short anonymous polemic that paints a bleaker picture, arguing that the costly cultivation of PR machines in universities actually reduces the standard of education the institution can provide. It stands to reason – the money’s got to come from somewhere.

It begins “Art schools are plagued by those who see them as ‘the brand’ and driven by profits”. The complaint is that in the interests of keeping profits high, art schools have cut costs by dropping facilities, reducing staff numbers and increasing class sizes. What remains, it reads, “are businesses and the managers that run them”. Seek out AM and see what you think.

Tamarin Norwood