Dark Art in London
by Paul O'Kane - Summer 1999

“How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity?”
Julia Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’.

Sight might be called the most common sense. We propagate a visual culture in which the unseen is held at bay as alien, as other. The night remains an unpredictable flip-side to rationalism’s sunlit home where the more we see and the more clearly we see the safer we feel. Modern life, with its well-lit cities and motorways, all-night TV and 24 hour supermarkets makes increasing inroads into darkness, chasing the devil to his lair, exposing the hideouts of our monsters and claiming previously inhuman space as inhabitable.

However, when darkness does come it comes inevitably, relentlessly, causing suppressed irrationality to erupt in response like the beat of underground urban culture booming in intoxicated ears until sunrise. Even couch-potatoes cross a late-night watershed into a slightly more risqué world of adults-only TV. At night, in night, we dream, dance and release ourselves from that morality patrolled so patriarchally by the sun that crimes committed ‘in broad daylight’ are judged more heinous, as are murders done ‘in cold blood’. The night, it seems, is a place in which passion is excusable.

This year, on the threshold of entering that enormous Other, a new millennium, superstitions and fears seem to multiply and disperse through media like the fears of children braced to climb dark bedtime stairs. Meanwhile, decorating this event like an appropriately ominous bauble of reborn mythology we welcome the guest appearance of a dramatic eclipse. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that some of the most arresting art currently found in London* pushes darkness, blindness and the night adamantly to the fore.

At The Photographer’s Gallery, included in the ‘Near and Elsewhere‘ curation of European landscape photography, there’s Sophy Rickett’s panoramic views of black emptiness which seem from a distance to be run through with a slither of silver light like the photographic equivalent of Lucio Fontana’s cut canvases. But step closer and far more than abstraction is discernible, though only just. Somehow it’s possible to grant a few drops of blurred light credence as evidence of a human figure. These are only faintly distinguishable from brief lines denoting road-bridge railings picked out by car headlights. Rickett, having made an impact with her earlier ‘Pissing Women’ photographs here takes her medium to the edge of it’s possibilities eschewing almost all tones but black and white while ostracising narrative events and didacticism in favour of a stylish formal brinkmanship. Nevertheless, narrative remains, hovering in a beguiling, subtle form which projects the viewer into the loneliness of this figure’s predicament.

Also showing at the Photographer’s Gallery, Annika von Hausswolff confronts us with a magnificent matrix of interwoven gazes in which a blind woman descends the vertiginous staircase of a clapboard house towards us. A rectangle of black describes the night behind and above her but night also seems to be her destination as she steps-out oblivious to the overwhelming wave of flash which over-exposes her clothes and ‘red-eyes’ her glossy black guide-dog. Those canine eyes stare for her, directly into von Hausswolff’s lens and we stare back privileged to witness this brief revelation of the precarious start of a dangerous journey.

Mark Hulson’s paintings at ‘5 Years’ gallery map a downbeat mindscape like stills from an oh!-so-sombre sci-fi movie. A strange, domed shelter sits amidst a blasted land of sinewy trees baring strange fruit. It’s eternally dusk on this planet drowned in deep orange and pink shadow where bleary eyes see in tinted monochrome. A consciousness clouded by thinking-the-worst goes walkabout here with brow well-furrowed in a lonely mezzanine between waking and sleeping, light and darkness, real and imaginary. Meanwhile something like rat’s tail or cat-gut repeatedly appears provoking visceral responses to add to the stew of emotions that Hulson stirs up with deceptively simple means.

Gillian Carnegie at ‘Cabinet’ gallery’s new EC1 space also ventures close to the unseeable armed only with brush and paint, peering at shadowy places and mastering their representation. Fearful zones redolent of hidden secrets illustrate an expedition beyond the limits of the city’s brightly-lit screens and windows to reappraise lost landscapes, here discovered but inadequately lit by searching car head lamps. Imagine you drove out of town in search of release or redemption only to find uninhabitable fields and an impenetrable night falling like a finale’ curtain. Elsewhere a river’s reflections are described as an entanglement of thick noodling paint and shadowy corridors are negotiated in eerie interiors while uncomfortably self-conscious human bodies attempt to examine their rear-view or skulk around in moonlit bushes as if pathologically shy.

Maggie Lambert steals some attention at the Royal College of Art’s photography MA show with day-glo-emblazoned images of asylum seekers, each of whom have their eyes obliterated for fear of recognition. It’s an arresting but paradoxical
design, as vivacious and captivating as an advertisement and yet simultaneously reticent, sinister and politicised. The explosive, simplified colour swathed across corrupted photographic images is reminiscent of Warhol’s electric chairs. These people are seekers who nonetheless hide, existing in a state-less limbo of difference, craving justice in a world unable to comfortably accommodate them. But their discomfort is no stranger to works by all the artists assembled here in which figures enter the night as if unable to help themselves, drawn or driven to another land like dissidents unwilling to maintain a facade of complicity with a far-from-acceptable milieu.

Hungry to establish a millennial aesthetic capable of acknowledging the discreet but uncompromising revolutions of post-modernity, these works provide evidence of a demand for a rupture in ideas of what art, and by implication, what the human experience, could or should be. If we have indeed become -as Georges Bataille once claimed- ‘tired of seeing’ these images can refresh our mental screens by leading us, like von Hausswolf’s red-eyed guide dog, as close as visual art presently gets to the non-visible realm.

END 1000 Words

* See also Circa 88 p.60 ‘Barcelona’ by David G. Torres concerning work by Joana Cera.

©1999 Paul O'Kane

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