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.

The show presents as modest and practical, and I’d like to take it at face value. But the space it’s in is an art gallery, and I wonder whether a community centre would have been better, or a stand in a trade fair, or on a smaller scale, a tabletop at a church hall bring-and-buy sale. The effect of the art gallery context is something I’ve discussed before, and here it’s at its most vocal, in my view almost wholly obstructing the work. The gallery context here relegates the physical artifacts to the status of products or museum relics, while foregrounding the activity of the producers and their relationship with the works we’re seeing. “We’re doing something special here”, it says, “and we want you to consider it in a special way”. If I’d found the objects on my own in some unexpected situation it would have been a very special thing indeed. But here, inside the gallery-frame, it feels like all the work has been done for me, and what’s left is just a little bit patronizing.

The artists are reticent about their intentions, but they all have varied, experimental practices outside of this collaborative project, ranging from performance to drawing to writing to video, and once again, I wish I didn’t know that. It throws the delight of the demi-socks and mono-sleeves into sturdy irony, and makes their gestures clumsy, obvious and uncomfortably worldly.

This exhibition is imaginary.

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.

The difficulty I had thinking through the show is, perhaps, symptomatic of the fact/possibility of the artists’ thinking being, before anything else, visual and material. You have to actually see the stuff if you want to get an idea of it.

Most of the pieces are flat and on walls. Most of them also pick up on the detritus of the material, discursive and visual world, and, rather than incorporating it directly, represent it within formal, conventional parameters. Maybe here we have the crux of the whole thing after all.

To be continued…

(I wanted to post this review provisionally, although it’s not finished, in case it might encourage someone to go and see the show before it closes. The rest of the post is still in draft form and actually talks about what things look like.)
images: (top to bottom) Christopher Shilling, Jeremy Brann, Christopher Page, Christopher Shilling, Gabor Gyory, Michael O’Mahony

Anton Viesel

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…

• Crayon: I dunno. The fall of art into entertainment often seems to be presented as if it works by force of gravity. Is it so one-way? I would trust some viewers at least to be able to sustain two ideas at once and to recognize that there can be sturdy, searching ambivalence that is not equivocation.
• Daddysgonecrazy: Why shouldn’t art be entertaining? It can be whatever the artist wants it to be, surely? I would admit that to be purely entertaining would make a piece of art one-dimensional perhaps, but to deny entertainment in art is to create a closed, inward-looking, and ultimately sterile art.
  
• ShatterFace: ‘Shibboleth’ is right. The work is designed to seperate those ‘in the know’ from the plebs. ”We are meant to think not about cracks in the floor, but about inequality and iniquity.” Only if that’s what you have been tought to think. Elsewhere I see inequality and inequity in the sweaty arse-cracks of the guys fixing the drains outside my office.
• Dodle: i have several cracks in the concrete in my back garden, which symbolises the fact i’m a lazy sod. utter bollocks.
• RevMoola: It’s a shame that a work cannot be allowed to speak for itself, and that the audience has to be led down a particular path of interpretation by hordes of critical ushers. Tate et al have missed the opportunity to see what the great unwashed would have made of it first before issuing forth their interpretive diktats.
• rs1001: This is what the artist says about her work: “It represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. “It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe. For example, the space which illegal immigrants occupy is a negative space. And so this piece is a negative space.” I am all for artists aiming high, but I just cannot appreciate this work in the way the artist wants me to. I cannot connect the physical work with the things it purports to be about, except at the level of the most throw-away metaphor. Is the idea that we look at the crack, and simultaneously get a new perspective on the experiences of immigrants? I can’t make this jump. This doesn’t mean I don’t like Shibboleth well enough as a diverting curiosity. But like so much conceptual modern art, it just doesn’t seem to have nearly enough concept in it. Is this me being overly literal and limited or are there people on the thread who appreciate Shibboleth as a political expression, not just a three-minute amusement?

… and so on, page after page. I won’t add any comment of my own until I’ve seen the work. I might add though – Arts Council England started their own Arts Debate months ago and despite their very best efforts, they have yet to inspire such a lengthy and honest engagement with the starter-questions they offer as online discussion topics. ACE is trying to work out “how people value the arts”, and I hope in their quest they’re scouring public message boards like this one as well as their own.

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.

Reiteration comes up a lot in my own practice because I work with translation, and I’ve found there’s something about translated texts that makes them resist being read. The meaning resides somewhere other than in the artefact you have in front of you. Translations enact frustration – they’re just off the tip of your tongue, or floating an inch from the surface of the page – and they excite the impulse to go back to the original and compare the two.

And just as a translation can never shake its original, so a repeated image can never stand on its own without recourse to its brothers. The Dreher exhibition is a quiet exercise in resistance. Even as you minutely watch the details of one canvas something is tearing you away, to look at the next one, or to stand back and survey them all at once. The possibility of such recourse is thwarted not only by their number but by the fact that most of their number aren’t even in the country – they’re on show elsewhere, or stacked up in the artist’s studio. The whole work is inaccessible; the work is wholly inaccessible; and this is all we can get at: it is the whole work.

So what are we left with, when our only access to the work is truncated, or whispered, or under erasure? We fall through. As each separate utterance of the physical thing is quietened we’re left with the space in between the words: the matrix-stuff that joins them. Cumberland’s Congratulations anthropomorphises the floating space in between, with some frustrated artist-persona springing to the fore, stuck making the same thing over and over again with a fervour that steals the limelight from the paintings themselves. But Dreher is private, and smooths himself out of his work. What he leaves behind is the cancellation of the project entirely; the pulse of insistent indecision; an anti-manifesto.

Tamarin Norwood

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