Reviews 1994-1998

Paul O'Kane is a freelance arts journalist who has specialised in concise reviews of contemporary art in London since 1994.

During 1998 he has published work in 'Third Text', 'Artist's Newsletter', 'Contemporary Visual Art' and 'Pride' magazine.

He has specialised in the work of artists of African and Asian descent as well as developing an overview of contemporary painting in Britain.

Paul O'Kane has been employed as visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art MA Painting and Goldsmiths MA Fine Art.

He is a graduate of Camberwell College of Art's Joint Honours course where he specialised in text works and History and Theory of Art and Design.

He has also trained as a journalist.

He has a background in photography and popular music
.
He is now reviving a photographic practise to complement his writing.

The work collected here is a mostly unpublished portfolio of writing from 1994-'98

Published Work
Third Text
Artist's Newsletter
'Pride' Magazine

" The telephone was not yet at that date as commonly in use as it is today. And yet habit requires so short a time to divest of their mystery the sacred forces with which we are in contact , that, not having had my call at once, my immediate thought was that it was all very long and inconvenient, and I almost decided to lodge a complaint. Like all of us nowadays, I found too slow for my liking...the admirable sorcery whereby a few moments are enough to bring before us, invisible but present, the person to whom we wish to speak, and who, while still sitting at his table, in the town in which he lives ...under another sky than ours, in weather that is not necessarily the same, in the midst of circumstances and preoccupations of which we know nothing and of which he is about to inform us, finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and all the sorroundings in which he remains immured) within reach of our ear, at the precise moment which our fancy has ordained." Proust

Paul O'Kane 16 Oct 97 Entwistle

Tim Sheward and James White . Entwistle . London 17 October- 22 November 1997
Once there was a time when newspapers appeared rarely and then only as a single sheet proclaiming one essential piece of information. Now, blasé and un-astounded by communications explosions, we squander each recent revolution in a burgeoning banality-fest. The miracle of Television merely planted crops of passive zombies and even the internet hums with hum-drum exchanges. But despite our distinct lack of thanks for what we have just received we continue to be saturated with gifts. We're never far from a late-night mega-market and technological toys rain down like manna while holes-in-the-wall wait like wells on every corner. It's as if we were recipients of spoils of some great victory won without even rising from our couches and, like shell-shocked veterans of all this non-stop, compulsory celebration, we hang on to life's carousel attempting to look honoured to be accepted by a society which in fact turns no customer away.

Greeting visitors to Entwistles, a powerful outboard motor is bolted to a pile of polystyrene blocks slapped together like an unfinished package-holiday hotel. This beached white monstrosity, entitled 'Gin Palace' at first conjures memories of Robert Maxwell's sudden demise but can't help being read as Modernism hi-jacked by its grandchildren and irreverently driven from its esoteric element to be stripped down by critical X-rays. The bleached skeleton thus exposed belies the puritanical surface of its former glory.

On a monitor placed high in a corner of the room, a film called 'Misconception of Relaxation (in the club style)' shows a hand-sized rubber puppet being repeatedly squeezed, forcing its eyes in and out of their sockets. This image is surrounded by a low budget video-effect like a drug-induced multiple aura. I gaze on until my own eyes threaten to turn cartoon spirals, but nothing else occurs and I feel I've witnessed stress-relief summed up as little more than a soft-drugged masturbatory loop.

Everywhere you look in this show there's a similar kind of blunted aesthetic at work, not least in beer barrels converted into picnic seats using hunks of baby-blue foam. Those smart arts and artists of the eighties appear increasingly keen and lofty compared with today's earthbound humility which softly bludgeons its audience into awareness of our shrinking space of critical freedom. The artists expand the 'Beer Garden' theme in doctored airport information signs, playing on our propensity to stupefy our senses even as we reach for the sky. We're reminded that even at slick modern airports humans en-route to plastic paradise may be found dumbly supping in a Disney-esque simulation of an 'olde worlde' pub.

Those remnants of belief which we long to take seriously are now arrested from us and trivialised by ever-ready entertainment. Anxiety is quickly satirised by grinning superior forces which occupy the territory once known as self. Thus we are robbed of our dignity and dignity is itself now too close to piety to wear with comfort. It's a funny new world in which the telephone has killed solitude and therefore supplanted poetry. Furthermore there's a micro-critical sense of time which causes disease-inducing stress if some complex task designed to be executed in one second should malfunction and dare to take two. But technology never has been fast enough, as Proust noted on early encounters with telephones:
" Like all of us nowadays, I found too slow for my liking the admirable sorcery whereby a few moments are enough to bring before us, invisible but present, the person to whom we wish to speak..."
In Entwistle's basement Sheward and White, -here re-christened as 'Bossferatu and Bossfradamus' - use film projections to compare our current info-decadence to the CB radio addicts of the 1970's. Two walls show different scenes. In one, James White relaxes at home watching T.V, a mobile phone constantly pressed to his ear. In the other, Tim Sheward drives around and around the same London block in a van blurting gibberish into his mobile. We're forced to ask if perhaps we've all descended to the dorkishness of Kris Kristofferson's 'Convoy' movie which White is watching. The information revolution is primarily quantitative and demand for constant communication commodifies and devalues more and more of our exchanges. Perhaps we are like long-haul truckers, life's expected duration ever increases but all our roads are over-familiar, we know each other's journeys all too well and so, with no more news to relate, our language becomes a pastiche dressed in code and slang to save us from gagging on monotony.

Sheward and White here reach some itches we can't scratch for ourselves bringing art closer to home in adidas pants and gold jewellery. If this work has any historical reference it reaches only as far back as the Wilson sisters or Sam Taylor-Wood and it's all the better for the lack of lineage. By the door as you leave there's a Blu-Tacked blow up of a 70s girl bikini-bathing in the glow of a thousand holiday brochures while apparently grounded at home in her carpeted apartment. The message of this show seems to be to not only scrutinise but firmly jettison all ideals, and then, no longer seeking redemption in some-where, some-one, some-when or some-thing other, simply revel in the comic-quotidian mazes our lives have become.

END

Paul O"Kane 17 October 1997 TALAWA
TALAWA THEATRE COMPANY. 'OTHELLO'. DRILL HALL 9 OCT-1 NOV'
Talawa missed the opportunity, and one must add, failed in their responsibility, to pull off a state-of-the-art Othello in the context of a leading black theatre group tonight. Austin Clark's essay in the programme promised to probe comparisons with O.J Simpson but in the end this text seems destined to be re-used by some future production. Talawa approached a glorious task with pioneering spirit only to return having established base camp for others to build upon.

In the first half the cast tried hard to put in solid performances but in vain. It may be that director Yvonne Brewster hasn't fully established a stylistic spine for them to revolve around or lean back upon. The result was that Dominic Letts' Iago was forced to provide a fulcrum for the play and in doing so seemed at times to overbalance its somewhat rickety progress.

The obviously available latent chemistry, which the audience seemed thirsty to taste, only kicked in towards the end. The interval seemed to invigorate the cast and Letts' enthusiasm was finally matched by the maturation into grandeur of Ben Thomas' Othello. The late shining of Sam Adams as Emelia provided a highlight just before a stilted tableau of a finale brought the proceedings to an all-too-traditional close.

One was left frustrated by scant glimpses of a potentially great idea. Could someone give Talawa time/money to develop this?

END

PAUL O'KANE - 8/10/97 - A1 PEOPLE @ 'TRACK' 333 CLUB OLD STREET LONDON 8 Oct 97
"...I Don't Believe that any body... I Don't Believe ... I Don't Believe..." DJ D-Zine is welding a chassis of dope beats under bursts of Oasis as I enter the 333 club's lo-pressure atmosphere. Alex Granditch has made a swithchback ride of a film, weaving rails, roads 'n' building grids shot through with controlled loss.

A1 People appear at 1a.m punching intense neo-electro beats through 2 taster tunes untill 3rd helping 'Drive-It' slits the umbrella of cool and lifts the vibe towards superfunkdom aspiring to the ice-cool of the freshosphere.

Someone's dropped an early 'Streetsounds' compilation ina shredder with 'Yello' then force-fed me hopecake made from the paste. These three witches brew! The drum side o' things shoots ground beneath post-Trip-Hop phatness and sets its cellulite sprinting!

Sim and Matt command a synth-laden stage melting down Rolands with Oooold Scool orch' stabs while DJ D-Zine features on scratch and rap. Sim croons into a vocoder mic, Matt pogos and manically laughs. The set tatoos impressions on the crowd to compare on journeys home through the rain .

END

 

HONKEYTONK

Gill Carnegie
Keith Farquhar
SimonThompson
Tim Sheward & James White E
Alastair Mackinven
Barry Reigate

November 22-12 December 97 - The Kitchen
When god thumped the table, sending the still-life of our cultural preconceptions flying, we ourselves also flew. Suddenly elevated like angels, our traditional anxiety became laced with elation and we trumpeted new songs, truly new songs to each other. And what made these new songs truly new? What made these new songs truly new was the fact they never knew the new was their concern and this was so new that it was ancient and so ancient that we had forgotten it or were uncertain if it had ever been the case at all.

Nevertheless, while we span in mid air, along with cups and saucers and bowls of fruit we saw for the first time the underbellies and undersides of things which we had become so used to looking down upon. Now we realised that not only was there much we hadn't seen but that culture, fixed as it had been was covered in grime and dust which had made us believe it had grown dull. In fact it only took a good thump of the table from God to reveal that something we thought faded beneath the patina of age was in fact just as bright as the day when it was made.

Furthermore, while we span like this in the air seeing the underneath of things and wondering why we'd looked down upon things for so long, we also came to see that we had been wrong to think that things had ups and downs and underneaths and overs, tops and bottoms, heads and tails. And not only that but we had also been wrong to think that we were somehow privileged to look at things without wondering if in some way they weren't also looking at us.

This happy time lasted for a period of time which could have been a second and it could have been 30 0r 50 years. No-one could say with any certainty now quite what time was or how it could be measured because we discovered that our measuring devices had evolved from our craving for utility and if we were spinning around in space and the thing we were trying to measure was also spinning around in space how could and why should anything be measured any more.Anyway, the point is that although no-one could be sure how long this time lasted we eventually reached a time when this time certainly appeared to be coming to an end and that time was about now and that is why this is being written.

So perhaps a time is over, a time of theoretically, historically underpinned idealism almost as guilty of dreaming as it's much maligned and revised antecedent. Some hair has grown back on the chest of art. Politically correct lifestyles seem nothing less than a sickness and we are in for a storm of sincerity where each enjoys their symptom at little cost to themselves but with violent implications for the over-protected body of society. Don't think that this patriarchal, authoritarian text is enforcing this upon you, please just accept that I, like you am helpless to avert the coming flood of which these words are the first sign of inclemency.What then can we expect to see and what can we no longer expect to see? Firstly don't be surprised to encounter supereboys and supergirls but no men or women, the meta-consciousness handed out to the eighties generation like the holy spirit descending, allows the superior strategy of childishness to reign over the pedantic bourgeois concerns of the adult world. Expect to find books ripped from their covers and pages and paragraphs ripped from these to be virtualised into one great book-without-covers written by both no-one and everyone and not for sale. Expect to see the return of showmanship releasing the inhibitions of its audience and no longer expect to see the artist as lecturer. (Did Jimi Hendrix, who is now part of our blue-plaqued cultural heritage, ever lecture?) Yes! there has been a vogue for smart art which baits both history and interpretation, the talent for which perhaps Jeff Wall has been the greatest exponent of. But magnificent as his achievements were they leave us longing for an art mysterious to itself and more innocent of the sometimes dubious motivations of the context into which it is born. Wall's built-in historification seemed meant to mirror capitalism's masterstroke of in-built obsolescence and yet it seems to dust his images with accidental gentrification as we sadly watch them age all too soon. Nevertheless they have reinvigorated painting and reconnected it to its history by pointing out that we can move backward as well as forward in search of the means to articulate the present and that doing so often hits the moving target of today's world (as John Currin has so well demonstrated with the discreet charms of what I like to think of as his 'parlour paintings')

For a long time Art considered itself to be in all things, and more recently saw itself as all-seeing, all-judging eye. But any fool should know that God can't be killed by the pen of an inspired man and if God has seemed absent for some time it was perhaps only to teach us the lesson of what we are without God. Now, God has returned and so art is moving aside, stepping down and ready once more to serve. Hence, if you look hard you will find in HONKEYTONK the presence of moral dilemmas contained within humble objects and the absence of moral dilemmas in far from humble objects. HONKEYTONK is a hurriedly put together affair
preaching the risks of pride in painting and exhibiting the moral concerns of a virtual land which an absent-minded God has fortunately remembered. There is no longer a need to be jealous, we are now all living the same life again. Events may seem to differ and yet my yesterday's disappointment will be yours tomorrow and your victory of today will soon also be mine. Life has long seemed like a debt to us which until paid we refuse to start living. As a result none of our philosophies has yet allowed us to live during our lifetime. Psychology has merely attempted to address the same symptom as religion while mistaking its new schemata for new realities. Religions address the God within and without. Art, when not respecting God tries to kill and replace God. Thus, for a long time Art
considered itself to be in all things, and more recently Art saw itself as an all-seeing, all-judging eye. But any fool should know that God cannot be killed by the pen of an inspired man and if God has seemed absent it was perhaps only to teach us the lesson of what we are without God. Now God has returned and so art is moving aside, stepping down and ready once more to serve. Hence, if you look hard you will find in HONKEYTONK the presence of moral dilemmas contained within humble objects and the absence of moral dilemmas in far from humble objects whereby the exception proves the rule. Seven magnificent HONKEYS play the blues.

Paul O'Kane November 97

7th November1997
re: HONKEYTONK
INTRODUCTION
On a world gone West its a winter's night in HONKEYTONK. A tiny town left lawless by a boundary change slip-up. Here, news of elswhere has such a hard time getting through that it arrives distorted and befuddled as a Chinese whisper that's seen the world. Cable won't lay comfortably here and satellite signals were found to bounce back into space due to the badness of the local atmosphere.

The lucky seven who inhabit the place fiercely enforce a conduct of cool which is so rigorous no tourist can stand the heat for long. The community media is hooked up by a maverick apparatus
overseen by a spaced out would-be telephone operator
who's addicted to anything which turns reality inside out.

Tonight in HONKEYTONK the sky is turning beetroot and hunks of tumbleweed, (rumoured to be the collected fluff from the suit-trouser turn-ups of 20th century men with clout) lurches about the street. In the tin shack where the centre of communications resides, the operator begins his nightly game with a carnival of sockets, plugs and wires sending messages to people who'd rather not be disturbed, crossing the lines of those who least want others to know their business and disconnecting conversations at crucial moments.

Putting up with this foolery has become the meaning of the lives of the inhabitants of HONKEYTONK and to struggle against this mess their language has evolved into short crisp sentences which can't be misconstrued and which stand a chance of being grasped even if they're bisected by a technical interruption.

In each HONKEYTONK household a visitor would find a plaque inscribed with a series of commandments which are the only text underpinning the local consensus. They read:

It is not merit but morality that we champion.

It is not chaos against which we struggle but opinion.

The only fact remaining is that the world is magical.
What some call common sense we call superstition (and vice versa)

When you are not dancing you are dying.

None of us will be the other's vampire

Superman or Death Wish our only prospects

We accept that we will fail

We will have no king but laughter

and finally:
It having been proved impossible to live long in the beauty and terror of the real, we concede that our task is to continually decorate its translucent surface thereby saving the community from the

excruciating sight of extreme joy and unbearable fear.

God is back. Standing astride technology and nature as they steadily pull apart, white Western humans feel a strain between their legs while an abyss of soft-porn-sin and scatology opens up. Homogenising institutions fracture and thus, jeopardised, daunted, toppled from their throne they bend over backwards to meet their maker. Meanwhile, seven magnificent HONKEYS play the blues.

For a while, art considered itself present in all things and recently even came to see itself as an all-seeing, all-judging eye, but any self-respecting fool should know that God can't be killed by the pen of an inspired man. HONKEYTONK is a shack off the beaten track beneath a lightning lacerated sky. where, like tumbleweed blown by divine breath, misfits assemble to preach the perils of pride in painting and exhibit their mortal concerns. Like it or not, we're up to our red necks in God, haven't our lives long seemed like debts which must be paid before we start living? As a result none of our isms have yet allowed us to live during our lifetime. Psychology addressed the same symptom as religion but mistook convenient schemata for new realities, now religions, addressing the undeniability of God within and without, bring promised lands closer while art steps down, ready once more to serve the immeasurable force. If you have eyes to see you will find in HONKEYTONK moral dilemmas contained in humble objects and the absence of moral dilemmas in far-from-humble objects. God's recent distance served only to teach us the lesson of life without God. Now, in a land which an absent-minded God has fortunately remembered, we again sense a glimpse of our destiny. Art, frustrated by its shortcomings and forgetting in its haste that the universe takes a millennium to breathe in and a millennium to breathe out, tried to kill and supplant God. Our maddening sense of heterogeneity is caused by this outward breath sending all energy spinning away from God's lips. But the table is turning again and within the greasy heat of time's off-centred axle we find some toiling white folk all mixed up with colour, revealing to the snow-blind the implicit eroticism of allowing the spirit to enter you.

Paul O'Kane November 97

 

HONKEYTONK

Gill Carnegie
Keith Farquhar
SimonThompson
Tim Sheward & James White
Alastair Mackinven
Barry Reigate
Nov 22-12 Dec 97 TheKitchen

Tim Sheward & James White
'Girls in adidas' 1997
Polyurethane rubber, steel, latex paint, wood, crash mats.
180 x 121 x 117 cm
Keith Farquhar
'The Doctor And The Soul' 1997
Oil and marker pen on canvas.
6' x 4
Alastair Mackinven
'...and another thing, if a monkey was to build a fence around a coconut tree starvation would force you to steal from me. (New Providence Toil)' 1997
Ink on canvas.
50'' x 66''
Gillian Carnegie
'Untitled' 1997
Oil on canvas. 44'' x 30''
Barry Reigate
'Juice' 1997
Acrylic on canvas.
20'' x 17''
Simon Thompson
'HONKEYTONK' 1997
Paint, fibreglass, Styrofoam.
8' x 8'
Paul O'Kane Nov 22 1997 HONKEYTONK

'Honkeytonk' @ The Kitchen 65 Clerkenwell Road London EC1 22 Nov - 12 Dec
On the walls of this promising new space, surrounding some twisted style-gymnasts, are paintings by new and nearly new names. Initially these works seem so diverse that only a kamikaze critique would dare try to collect them on a skewer of shared meaning, and yet the secret policeman latent in every reviewer is seduced by the scent of a hot issue being simmered on The Kitchen's back-burner.

'Honkeytonk' would be a painting show if not for the welcome intervention of Tim Sheward and James White's 'Girls in adidas'. This floor piece presents rubber figures of fashionably boy-ish white girls contorting themselves on crash mats in brightly coloured track suits. This has been described as an illustration of the painful and ultimately vain search to find an identity through style, but 'girls...' also has a charming quality which makes people reach out to squeeze the figures' failing flailing hands. Perhaps this is because the bendy material and simplified features remind them of toys they had as a child, or is it that the audience empathises with their plight and can't hide the desire to rescue them ?

Researchers at Warwick University recently published a book called 'White' in response to a call from black intellectuals for other races to investigate themselves from the point of view of skin colour. 'Honkeytonk', though primarily a stimulating showcase by a varied group of up-to-the-minute artists, implies by both its title and contents the subtext of a similarly progressive racial awareness.

White guilt, and consequent abjection, however apologetic, unfortunately remains 'white-centric' (what might be called 'cultural narcissism'), while the increasingly established multicultural world-view demands a non-fixed, non-specific cultural view-point. Therefore white culture is now called upon to go beyond its period of atonement and capitulation in search of a new pose to strike in the global arena.

White, western man, the central figure of blame against which a range of oppressed 'others' have oriented themselves, has theoretically run a gauntlet and collapsed as an abject identity. If this flimsy figure has served the purpose of both its accusers and its own conscience, how can it go on? It can't assimilate any of the ascendant, progressive airs of recent feminist or black politics without stepping straight into the crossfire of its own guilt-ridden history, and yet neither can it be more abject than it already is. It seems in need of a new stance and some kind of role model.

Perhaps the only escape from white culture's dilemma then is to self-efface and assimilate some of the old minority identity which 'others' are eager to trade-in for uncompromisingly ascendant poses. Hence the advent of 'Honkey' politics based on the same sophisticated strategy of positive self-effacement utilised by 'Dyke', 'Queer' and 'Nigger' politics.

Promoting 'Honkey' politics might, like 'Dyke', 'Queer' or 'Nigger' politics, help to dispel the patronising, false homogeneity imposed by political correction; our world remains a 'ball of confusion' and learning to sincerely mirror that dystopia will be more productive than forcing it into a short-lived, ultimately arbitrary ideal. As in all debates, humour is an essential lubricant and anyone encouraging such a self-effacing identity for what is at heart a decadent culture must avoid simply circling wagons into a defensive separatism and ensure that they are making a positive contribution to future muticultural accord.

'Honkeytonk' strikes the right balance between art, politics and entertainment by reflecting the latent insecurity and increasing heterogeneity of white, western, culture which, having killed its God became, first the devil, then the fool of the world, inviting the wrath and ridicule of other Gods who remained alive and well.

In Gill Carnegie's 'Untitled' oil painting, pale-skinned, strangely small figures loll about in a swampy river made ominous by thickly applied, snake-like brush marks
representing the water's surface. Her figures here seem to suffer from retribution at the artist's hand as well as from the gaze of the viewer. These ailing men and women stand in for the decadence of a whole culture backsliding towards extinction in the primeval swamp from which its God-killing science claimed it came.

White-coated Western medicine has today so ostracised us that we increasingly return to our diminished sense of spirit in search of a cure. Keith Farquhar has taken the schematic cover design of a mid-20th century psychology book and offered it a place in art history by rendering 'The Doctor And The Soul' in marker pens on a glossy cream ground reminiscent of a dry-wipe board. Farquhar's layered educational references gang-up to ridicule all forms of patronising eurocentric pedagogy while the painting itself plays a game of brinkmanship between self-assured abstract art and self-conscious, fragile irony.

Next, one heaven-sent post-human receives a toe-job from a clone who's skin turns green. Barry Reigate, hot out of the Goldsmiths blocks, continues to disrespect the heady subtlety of neo-conceptualists, going instead for the thrills of chromed eroticism against a cosmic sky in a small, vibrant air-brush work called 'Juice'. Rosenquist is the only canonical figure nodded to here as Reigate disregards the story-of-art's given Gods, preferring to join the world-wide guild of the crafters
of fantasy. Maybe fantasy figures. with their variable appearances, special powers and hybrid forms, evade the searching honesty of post-politically correct readers eager to acknowledge racist, sexist and homophobic tendencies in both themselves and their arts.

Alastair Mackinven has appropriated the concept of 'righteousness' from black culture to guide and strengthen him in painstakingly producing ink drawings on canvas. The work shown here prominently features black men dancing with white women set against the backdrop of a mountainous frontier. Beyond these mountains must lie a promised land, although the only omens in the sky are scrawled words alluding to 'redneck' courting methods. The title is '...and another thing, if a monkey was to build a fence around a coconut tree, starvation would force you to steal from me. (New Providence Toil.)'. Mackinven's mixed moral might be : find the right dancing partner before you give away your heart, and never lay claim to that which is free.

Simon Thompson's 'Honkeytonk' is an eight foot square carnival of colours, varnishes, glosses and matts, in occasionally scatological relief which loudly proclaims a funky, freestyle pattern vaguely reminiscent of an atomic structure diagram. Great boggling eyeballs seem to roll over a ground stripped from the razzmatazz of old juke boxes and fruit machines. This is the kind of art whose reputation is likely to precede it. Thompson's lack of inhibition and disconcerting disregard for compromise succeeds in pressing us into a hesitant oscillation between repulsion and attraction, but until our tyrannical taste buds concede to go beyond this either/or dilemma we are denied the more enlightened reading of this painting as a map of the way to Nirvana.

END
words 1200

Paul O'Kane Nov 22 . 1997 HONKEYTONK
'HONKEYTONK' @ THE KITCHEN, 65 CLERKENWELL ROAD (entrance ONSLOW STREET) EC1. OPEN FRI,SAT, SUN 22ND NOV-12 DECEMBER 12.OOP.M-6.OO P.M

Is this is the fanfare of 'Honkey' politics or just a satisfying visual feast? Either way it's not to be missed if you're hungry to know the hot new spaces and bright new things. Honkeytonk is a vibrant showcase of new painting talent wrapped around a floor piece by Tim Sheward and James White. The Kitchen's launch show has been carefully selected to entertain us with the latest news from the edge of cool while subtly hinting at the emergence of a self-effacing stance for 'white' culture in a post-politically correct world.

Keith Farquhar continues his dialogue between abstract art and pedagogical schemata while Gill Carnegie's traditionalist oil technique uses near-intestinal brush marks to damn some soft-porn figures in a swampy river. Simon Thompson intimidates, astounds and repels us with his howling eight footer made from the 'bad mix' colours paint shop clients couldn't handle and Barry Reigate beckons us deeper into his air-brushed universe of post-human fantasia where skins turn green on an overdose of heaven-sent 'juice'. Meanwhile Alastair Mackinven's laboriously transcribed ink drawing on canvas suggests that a promised land awaits inter-racial dancing couples who, like Romeo and Juliet, take the risk of breaking tribal taboos. In the midst of all this, Sheward and White's 'Girls in adidas' bend over backwards in bright yellow track suits searching for identity in a culture confused by its complex reflection yet hell-bent on reclaiming a lost future from the burden of ancestral sins.

END 250 WORDS

 

(THE) OBLIQUE ALTERNATIVE Chs 1-2 - spring 1996

Paul O'Kane

PAUL O'KANE 9/11/97 GILLIAN CARNEGIE
You may have heard of turtles who lay their eggs in sand or fish who ram themselves at beaches trying to spawn on land. Occasionally we witness an instance of sea life beaching itself in a seemingly suicidal folly guaranteed to play on late 20th Century human heartstrings. If we believe in those theories which created convenient schemata by which we were to understand the progress of evolution, then we accept that all life began in some primeval stew the size of an ocean and that somewhere in our distant past human beings took the form of liberated amphibians relieved to have served their time as legless submariners. Should we then disbelieve our eyes when we find in a pair of contemporary paintings, young-ish, white, men and women wallowing around in ominous looking water making slightly orgasmic grimaces towards the viewer while apparently unaware of each other's existence? Here, a woman stretches her tongue to lick her own breast and there, a man idly contemplates his penis while nonchalantly floating as if quite at home in murky water.

The scene shared by these paintings is a river or lake. In the distance, which is not far, the horizon of this waterworld is a slim band of riverbank or water's-edge finely rendered at the top of the canvas. The remainder of the paintings, although dominated by a variety of greens; some sombre as ivy, some cool as cucumber, seem to become emotionally charged as they fall towards the foreground, and the medium's visceral pleasures are increasingly apparent the closer we come to the lower edge. The original intention seems to have been the representation of a reflective water surface, perhaps disturbed by breezes, but we are forced by these over-demonstrative marks into an awareness of a second language in the paintings for it is difficult not to read the squirms and squeals and snake-like entrails of light and shade as a far more direct manifestation of the artist's emotional or philosophical condition, albeit consciously revealed.

Furthermore once this (designed?) expression is seen as the context or element in which to set the aforermentioned figures it is tempting to suggest that the noodling strokes evoke the unpleasant truth of internal human biology and the way that fear and subsequent denial of our own crucial make-up might have evolved through a form of sublimation into the idea of sex as sin. The figures seem to to be isolated from eachother by the very sexuality which nature intended or God designed to bring them together.

Our reading of the paintings now leans towards a vision of an ailing humanity or at least a glimpse of a sickly white-western-liberal-Christianity, helpless and yet, like Nero, careless of it's plight. The world ends, said T.S Eliot, not with a bang but with a whimper and it seems as though these figures, many of them extracted from soft-porn magazines, might be awaiting an extinction caused, not dramatically by a howling meteor storm as has been claimed for the dinosaurs, but by backsliding into the primeval stew from whence they came.

Cultural decadence is a slow and ignominious death unlike that of heroes. The latter, if taken from us suddenly at the heights of their powers, transfer those powers to their milieu intact and even magnified via the trauma of their absence and obliteration. Only an entire culture swiftly extinguished in its prime could hope to be as influential in death as a tragic individual. In this way decadence is the most comprehensive death, slowly and irrevocably divesting power of all it is built upon, prohibiting it from choosing its successor. E.M. Cioran has written "only the man who strives to fail deserves our trust." Decadence is evidence of a great moral force eager to balance the scales of justice by doling out malevolent entropy to winners who win too long.

Carnegie's figures are not so much individuals as faceless representatives of a specific culture seen as if carelessly stereotyped by a distant, ignorant eye. These are after all models, not going freely about their lives but ordered into poses and tableaux for the profit and gratification of strangers. However, now recontextualised, they seem doubly sorry creatures apparently also suffering at the artist's hands from a kind of moral retribution.

But what of the finely painted illusion of the golden planted far bank where all is calm and where the artist has so reigned in her emotions as to almost hide her activity altogether. There, as in all horizons, lies a future, idealised and, though brought down-to-earth without a hint of sky, still a charming place far-removed from the turbulent and unsavoury obstacles coming between us and the attainment of that ideal. Somewhat like Seurat's bathers we now gaze with the painter across the river at an alternative, perhaps better life, however, unlike that famously resigned proletarian gaze, we glare through critical shades seemingly tinted by the enduring legacy of Courbet's hard realism.

If we feel little empathy with the paintings' figures, some of whom appear to be badly failing our audition, then the essential questions left in our lap are precisely who 'we' are and what, given the situation in which the paintings place us, 'we' will
do next. One is reminded of the confrontation with Jeff wall's unnerving suburban vampires; should we jump in to what might be a cesspool encouraged by shouts of "the water's lovely!", could we cynically use these losers as stepping stones to our own destiny, or should we simply glean what we can from these strange apparitions and turn away wiser to the puzzles laid before us on life's way.

END 900 words

Paul O'Kane 12 /11 /97 Alastair Mackinven
Some people sleep soundly in sumptuous beds, others prefer a humble structure closer to the floor or even a simple blanket laid across bare boards. Sophisticated rich-westerners long ago began to wonder what fitted carpets and wallpaper were all about and traded them in for the bare plaster and stripped floorboards of the Conran age. This pervasive embracing of austerity-chic, itself now challenged by a new generation's heroin-chic, may seem a superficial aesthetic affectation, but dig a little deeper and you'll soon hit the underlying seam of morality working away beneath the surface of culture's consistent smile.

Alastair Mackinven has similarly stripped the idea of painting down to an almost painful austerity. Apparently abandoned by colour, he also denies himself the fluid pleasures of paint and brush and chooses to build up his images with a finely pointed nib, reminiscent of a beak or claw, repeatedly dipped in ink so that an average drawing can take him up to eight months to enlarge from sketchbook to gallery-size. Furthermore, until recently he denied himself the pleasure of feeling stretched canvas give beneath his obsessive pen and instead scratched away long days and nights on unresponsive plywood boards.

But what's behind this seemingly masochistic method and how does it tie-up with the images he chooses to draw? Talking to the artist it doesn't take long before the word 'righteousness' begins to infect our sentences and therefore our reasoning, and so this word becomes the ring-pull with which to open the work to strangers and hopefully let loose some of its unlisted ingredients.

Although born in Chester, raised in Canada and trained at Goldsmiths, Mackinven's images consistently poke at the underbelly of North American 'redneck' mentality. Having used lassoes and tornadoes in earlier works he now kicks sand in the face of his own grandfather by celebrating the Japanese destruction of Pearl Harbour, going as far as to recommend that momentous occasion as the ideal backdrop against which to charm your girl once you've driven her up to 'Inspiration Point'. This drawing carries the lengthy title of '...what were you waiting for? waiting to get milked like randy cows by foreign bitches?'

Another drawing appropriates from Ku Klux Klan-type propaganda warnings against the consequences of 'bussing' (a sixties term for sending black children into white schools.). Here black men dance with white girls but instead of being framed by the night they're juxtaposed against a mountainous frontier beyond which must lie a promised land. Another lengthy title, based on an old blues song, adorns this piece '...and another thing, if a monkey was to build a fence around a coconut tree starvation would force you to steal from me. (New Providence Toil)' It seems as if Mackinven's titles might be involved in a conversation from which we are excluded but on which we eavesdrop.

Curiously, most of the artist's references are drawn from the prime of either his parent's or grandparent's generation. It's as if he's not only stubbornly turned down chances to develop his medium beyond the basic pen and ink of school-book doodles but has also refused to acknowledge the changing world outside the classroom window preferring to freeze slices of time until questions which pressed hard on previous generations have yielded explanations. This may reveal resentment aimed at parents who enjoyed the luxury of true righteousness gained by a battle-winning frontier mentality which we can no longer achieve. 'When I was your age..." begins the well-worn admonishment and "It's so hard for young people today... " replies the disabling excuse note. For an upcoming show in Copenhagen, Mackinven has produced a sound piece called 'If it wasn't for me young man you'd be speaking German now' featuring an old man's reminiscences of war. For us the real has become too hot to handle and slipped through our fingers and it seems we'll never taste this degree of righteousness and so we're forced to simulate or generate it out of sight of a pampering state, a booming economy and the all-hours media nurse. Wealth? that would be great, Fame? take it or leave it, but Righteousness? isn't that something to aim for today, isn't that a future economy and also the oldest of old moneys?

Perhaps the reason an air of unsolved mystery pervades our age is that morality has infected an arena designed for pure economics, or rather, the capitalist arena has been exposed as being built upon ancient foundations of a moral economy just as Christian churches overlaid sacred pagan sites. Once revived, this moral economy might destabilise the hackneyed rule of territory and commodity, this is why 'righteousness' can now be part of an artist's palette where once there was merely figure, ground and concept. Perhaps this is also why we needed a Baudrillard built upon the foundations of a Marx.

A youthful culture with no history to take pride in still insists on taking pride, and may be justifiably accused of rummaging through the garbage of others, dragging up oppressions it never suffered, anxiously reaching for a redemptive meaning in a moment of philosophical bankruptcy. Thankfully, the current super-liberalism that awards us a gender-less, race-less, culture-less perspective upon ourselves means that today an artist like the musician 'Beck', (with whom I can't help comparing Mackinven) can weave together strands of 'redneck' style with heartfelt blues, or layer slices of hip-hop with a discipline inspired by 70's future-nerds 'Devo' without batting an ironic eye. Such eclecticism continues to fairly mirror our personalities, fractured and multiplied as they are by globalising media and the capitulation of homogenising institutions.

"In an emotional versus rational equation" says Mackinven "righteousness gets rid of the rational. Like the preacher, I need to play to the emotional to get ideas across." When I suggest that righteousness is a way to enable sincerity to replace strategy he agrees but also concedes that sincerity can still be strategic. As Deleuze says, both canvas and paper are littered with cliché before we even begin to paint or write, but we ignore this red light and progress any way that we can, finding untrodden paths which result in an uneasy new. This is the search of many artists today, opening frontiers between, rather than beyond, previously established frontiers, outwitting language and categorisation, evading 'sincerity' just as much as avoiding 'strategy'. Righteousness seems to me now to be Mackinven's tiller, his compass or simply his 'way', a way appropriated from another time and another culture like his images, and used to limit, focus and direct the work. Utilising the carefully chosen concept of righteousness in this way is proof that Mackinven exercises heightened consideration and deeply personal reasoning in assembling all aspects of his practise.

As well as using righteousness to steer him through temptations and choices Mackinven appropriates the obsessive faith of proselytisers to produce work which is both rigorously consistent and imbued with the unarguable value of invested time. This 'folksy' value system, the type Greenberg disliked, does in fact protect an object with a 'magic' aura of self-respect (as Mike Kelley once obliquely acknowledged in the piece: 'More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid' 1987). Those propagandists, preachers and travelling salesmen who draw on disparate sources to uphold their argument, sell a belief system as a haven for victims in whom they've aroused a storm of uncertainty. Mackinven emulates these methods as he convinces us of his own "new world history" created from disturbingly loaded imagery re-contextualised in a way that draws on the influence of John Heartfield, "pasting quotes together to make a new quote".

Heartfield's colleague George Grosz would use titles such as "The world made safe for democracy" or "Be submissive to the authorities" with images which blatantly contradicted the sentiment of the title, thus producing cutting irony. However, when encountering Mackinven's blow-ups of interracial couples or rising-sun shaped explosions blasting the US navy it's uncertain exactly what judgement is being presented to us even with the aid of his lengthy titles. Deleuze says "artists struggle less against chaos than against the cliché's of opinion" and it's true that opinion seems to some to be more foe than friend. When art is ambiguous, just as when we are ambiguous e.g. when whites aspire to blackness, or men wish to become women or the young envy the old, opinion's authority is first snubbed but then expanded to accommodate these disturbances. Opinion without art would silt up like a backwater, with quotation marks becoming attached like handles to tired words as if ready to lift them out of our way. When this situation persists opinion turns to art for action. Art's mercurial behaviour seeks to escape restrictive opinion and yet, running the gauntlet of opinion offers art a trajectory which in turn creates it's dynamic. Opinion may constrain but we need heed its laws only enough to give our freedom form while roaming irreverently between its habitual oppositions, its causes and effects. Far from fighting chaos we do indeed "summon" it as Deleuze says, hoping to become it, having glimpsed in chaos our most acceptable reflection. And yet chaos, like heaven, is merely an image we can only dream of one day inhabiting. It is in this lasting promise of access to chaos that artists, not least in the obscurity of their work, provide us with a window through which an alternative is assured if not immediately discernible.

For Mackinven the artist retains this comforting function only by maintaining his own discomfort. He is a "malcontent" and, should he find himself beginning to enjoy the West's riches he simply makes things more difficult for himself or discards another crutch. For him creation is toil but there is a promised land even if it must first be appropriated, scaled to fit and pasted together to become believable. What we believe in sufficiently will eventually become our substitute for the now un-graspable real. Mackinven admires the famous 12-step programmes used by 'Alcoholics Anonymous' and other similarly righteous organisations and makes a welcome connection between this and the 70's paintings of On Kawara. Both Mackinven's and Kawara's work looks like a life depends on it; Kawara hung nothing more nor less than the reason for the day on his blue canvases while Mackinven takes a magnifying glass to this process and ticks away each second with a laborious scratch of his nib, simultaneously notching up credit in the big bank in the sky.

END 1800 words

Paul O'Kane 16 /11 /97 Simon Thompson
Our most acute experiences are initially more likely to come through sex, drugs and music than through art and some of us first came to plastic art naively expecting to be able to represent such intensities only to find the results fall short and appear ironic as a result. You could dance or make love or do trips or all three in an art gallery but even then you might find the power of the context reluctant to retreat and hard to throw off. Actions in art's arena soon fall under its judgmental gaze just as if you were in the home of a deity or a court of law. This power of the art context may be indestructible, but like any authority it plants seeds of irreverence and rebellion in its subjects who then remain mesmerised by their engagement until such time as they find themselves feeling justifiably victorious or destroyed.

When you talk or write about Simon Thompson's painting, you feel a little off balance because something about it first asks you if its a painting at all. Though appealing to be included in art's sacred realm, it simultaneously drops a clanger the minute you invite it in. For a start there's no nice traditional canvas of the kind that's so seductive that Robert Ryman could use it as a plate on which to flatter a serving of dried white. Instead there's a fibre-glass-skinned polystyrene base forming a resilient wall from which to build out from should the need arise to extend the relief surface into full 3D. This inflexible skin flings your gaze back at you ten-fold, multiplied by an array of glosses, matts and varnishes.

Then there's the paint, apparently Thompson trawls London's paint shops looking for tins of 'Bad Mix' i.e. colours that went wrong in the mixing machine or which the client found inappropriate once tested in situ. These orphans had been gathering dust in back rooms until Thompson began rescuing them to press into the service of his art. The 'bad mix' strategy allows no chance of making conventional colour considerations and Thompson is left at the mercy of popular taste by only allowing himself to endorse what the rest of the world has rejected. Despite the myriad colours we're asked to take in, they all manage to thrive without greying out through overdose making you wonder if perhaps there's some strange antithesis of colour wheel theories at work here just as valid as the rule of complimentaries we were taught in school.

But what are we actually confronted with when we see this work? First of all its big and bold and seems keen to dazzle you with complexity. It's as if Thompson believes he can succeed where many others have failed in making a painting that really competes with the intensity of visual stimulus available beyond art's walls. Way before reaching Thompson's present position many painters quit this seemingly foolish pursuit and divert their energies into cooler, more heady works collaged from issue, content and self-conscious reference. The gut however, from which emanates pure laughter and pure cravings, must sometimes be allowed to rule over our overworked heads to provide a balanced picture of who we are.

Promoting impulses common to all and capturing them before they're channelled and sublimated through the filters of cultural identities may be the only way to surprise ourselves out of our present non-committal, post-everything strait-jacket.

Having said that there is of course no mark or object presented in an art gallery that doesn't carry referential baggage. Here its hard not to see the multicoloured ground as an emulation of the kind of razzmatazz once capable of tempting coins from pockets into fruit machines or juke boxes. This forms a kind of retro-thrill on which to lay a brash pattern that looks a bit like a diagram of an atom - that pride and joy of mid-20th century science. However, the pretty floral mandala which hard-nosed Western boffins convinced us makes the universe go around, seems in this case to have it's axle a little off centre. Perhaps this is why we've been feeling queasy ever since the critique of institutionalised knowledge really got into gear.

Its long been the frustration of the artist that art's esoteric realm can never achieve the unifying experience and immediacy of the music with which it shares its time. There are always artists interested in attempting to achieve this as well as those who split their allegiance or quit art altogether to become musicians or DJs. But stubbornly continuing with this debate and hammering it out head to head can produce less predictable rewards and the results of such a bout are partly what Thompson offers us here. The group Radiohead were recently heard to cry "No alarms and no surprises please", and this heavily ironic, plaintively delivered lyric conjures up images of a neighbourhood-watched suburbia keeping culture contained within Sunday supplements and the edges of television screens. Similarly, such surprise and alarm may be just the medicine doctor Thompson orders to rescue an art audience prematurely nodding off into gentility.

Thompson might feel obliged to tell you the story of his life if you ask him about this painting, explaining his youth spent raving and experimenting with drugs and what club art was and meant, but it would be contradictory to pad an interpretation with such references when the painting cries out to escape from the claustrophobic reading of the work-of-art-as-symptom or as the front cover of an enacted biography. Art and psycho-analysis may be fond of each other and occasionally this back-burner romance erupts into an affair but nevertheless they are distinct entities, one far older than the other, possibly even rendering the relationship indecent. Perhaps we need a critical apparatus which doesn't rise and fall with theoretical fashions, something timeless perhaps, something like morality or conscience?

But unfortunately, and significantly, apart from the presence of goofy eye-like shapes Thompson's painting resists attempts to seek out any moralising element and therefore evades the arms of any art/morality thesis. This work is exclamatory, daring the softly written word to approach it with confidence as it barges its way into the arena demanding to be considered. In some ways it's a particularly pure painting laden with enthusiastic experiments in the pleasures of the medium. Alive as it is with the results of refusing to go down the predictable road of increasing sophistication, it embodies anti-neurosis and encourages physicality. Whenever cross-roads are arrived at, choosing to take either less smart, ridiculously ironicised, or more disreputable paths means that we end up away from the nervous flock and hopefully find an oasis removed from that sterile land of capped culture now incapable of flying beyond the cloud-cover of its self-imposed correction. This, (YES THIS!) ultimately is one of the successes of Thompson's painting; dragging words into a critique of their own purposes while they champion the painting's incongruity against what it can't help but make appear timid.

END

1200 WORDS

 

Paul O'Kane 16 /11 /97 Keith Farquhar
You can't trust anything but art these days. That's because art doesn't claim to be trustworthy and nor does it trust itself. (Maybe we'll put some philosophy on this low pedestal too). Keith Farquhar's paintings pit the shortcomings of science against the vast universe of doubt we cope with the moment we open our eyes from sleep. Is any body's mind a shape? and if it were would it stand still long enough to be drawn? Perhaps that's the reason for the dry-wipe aesthetic, the implication is of the briefest of sittings. These are no oil paintings, the generic forms of lost idealism are playfully rendered in a careless fashion, mistakes become focal points, rare points of interest by which we orient ourselves. The fastest thing in the universe, human mind thinking of human mind is approximated as a clumsily crafted, second-hand form.

Is it graffiti-like? juvenile? Yes, juvenile in a complaining, transgressive way and yet perhaps containing a twisted kind of homage to the heroic grandfathers of abstraction. Should one paint? Its OK but don't take it seriously, if you do then no-one will take you seriously. This is the age of sophisticated irreverence. Sophisticated irreverence is the only thing to take seriously. Art teaches something books don't teach. Art doesn't intend to teach you anything, art is a book with no cover to tell where it begins or when its been read (after all you are not a child).

But first, the past. The past (that is) from which painting strives to escape and yet the same past into which painters often dive, why? perhaps to bathe in lost glories or to go and insult their grandfathers.

The past is like something which becomes attached to a shoe while walking, something which we are reluctant to allow to delay us and which thus causes us to begin a farcical dance, half walking-on and half attempting to discard the unwelcome appendage, trying to take all this in our stride. No-one with any clout wallows in the past, the past is a trove to be ransacked by unscrupulous, fast-buck merchants. When you hear that a past is the new, be sure this is not what you were waiting for but merely something to kill a little more of your precious time.

Next, question. Are there any problems? Question is itself now in question. Who created all those difficulties with which the West worried itself to death. Freud suggested the questions of children all arise as "relays for the one they do not pose, the question of the origin." This, it seems is and always was the question, proliferating, bifurcating, erupting through time like a flame thrower of doubt, eradicating all peace, that burning question that we ourselves are.

Keith Farquhar is unable to take the past seriously. He collects mid-century paperbacks by the likes of De Bono, Said and R.D Laing, not because he hopes that they contain anything which will help us understand ourselves, (today we sneer at such conceits) but because of his fetishistic admiration for the diagrams on the covers.
Who cares? Keith Farquhar makes paintings. He makes paintings by reproducing these book-cover diagrams on canvases. He primes the canvases with thick grounds of creamy white gloss so that he can then apply the pattern with a felt marker while stepping into the skin of a teacher or perhaps a speaker at a business conference educating with the help of a dry-wipe board.

So what? The results are fragile-looking, which also means vulnerable-seeming and they seem to stare back at you and ask a daft question, a question from the stupid past, the past that expected to answer questions. Just as now we are happy to entertain the idea that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, (this notion being not the least obvious sign that heterogeneity is the buzz word of the 90s) it would also seem that questions and answers have dissolved their long-felt affiliations and attractions to become autonomous entitities floating around purposlessly amidst the wreckage of a universe once pregnant with the promise of a meaning.

For all the hypotheses contained within Farquhar's book collection, not a single carefully chosen, hard-won and artfully placed word, carries more or less reassurance than the enlarged rendition of the cover diagrams which he marks on canvas (glossed, creamed, Ryman-ised canvas). You can almost hear the squeak, almost smell the spirit. You can also sense the inadequacy, both of Farquhar's respect for painting and of our belief in anything but art.

You can't trust anything but art these days. It doesn't matter now, the pleasures, the entertainments of art are as sophisticated as they ever were, requiring connoisseurs to appreciate them, to gain pleasure and entertainment from them. What is not esoteric is common and what is common is not art. The difficult has been sought out with difficulty by the artist, sophistication is the result of a thousand roads not-turned-down, of hundreds of less-than-surprising options refused. The artist is the only one awarded carte blanche, (literally, in the whited spaces of studio, gallery, page and canvas) and thus becomes the genius of choice charged with the responsibilty of exhibiting revelations denied to others. The artist's product hovers (you will have noticed) slightly above the ground of everyday things and rubs shoulders only with other elevated things, things elevated by sophistication and difficulty. Sophistication is like helium pumped into the artist's product. Difficulty is what makes us stretch to reach it.

But is a pseudo-psycho-analytic reading also fair for it could be claimed Keith Farquhar's products are not unlike Keith Farquhar. Like dogs and owners, painters in particular soon become synonymous with their works (if they are committed to them and if their particular choice of the means to say "this is me" has been arrived at arduously). But there's 'very little, almost nothing' to write about here? Keith Farquhar says he seeks to make the work "mute" and I think he succeeds. A painting like 'The Doctor And The Soul' seen amidst figurative works is like a great pacifier stuck into the gallery wall. This is the work's sophistication, its difficulty, but it is a painting brought forth into the arena by an artist lately lionised a little, thus it's art history. The product becomes charged, magnetised by the audience, by the photographs taken of it, by the gazes thrown upon it, by the words referring to it. It has become such an object, now available to any curator's thesis.

END 1100 words

Paul O'Kane 6/12/97 Tim Noble & Sue Webster
21 NOV - 20 DEC 1997 @ 20 RIVINGTON STREET LONDON EC2A 3DU
Flash. the far-off lights of Las Vegas seduce an endless queue of suckers eager to lose (losing is after all an adequate substitute for meaning). Flash. Similar lights lure adventurers to the soured hearts of ominous cities, there to gamble frail lives against the mighty indifference of capital. Flash. The fairground, encrusted with pulsating coloured lights, reeking of candy-floss and diesel, a travelling extravaganza of the irrational, brings strangers, ghosts, disorientation, fear and foolishness to disrupt complacent, repressed communities. Flash. At 20 Rivington Street the home becomes art, love is stripped bare and ascends the staircase nude.

A pulse of one kind or another is always a sign of life. Seeing is a film edited by blinks. Its a lyrical cliché to suggest that the hearts of lovers beat in time and another to think of the economy as a great machine to whose relentless, rhythmic operations we're enslaved. Yet we're usually unaware that what we think of as continuum is in fact the product of rapid oscillations. Science explains colour and sound perception as the result of vibrations, everything is always between here and there, on and off, yes and no, in and out. Pulse is what we are and, like fire, articulations which echo that flicker will always captivate us. Anxiety and paranoia are mental oscillations between possibilities, between goods and evils, oscillations which can accelerate into blind panic, and yet it's only when we slow the pulse down that we can even glimpse what it is that our minds might be running from.

Noble and Webster, having made the happy discovery of turning this process and all its references into an art form, now create sparkling signs using computer-sequenced coloured lights. From the myriad promises available, specifics have to be chosen and for this show there's the classic tattoo design of a heart run-through with a sword. It gradually fills the darkened ground floor with red light as the heart itself fills with 'blood' why? Sue Webster talks of tattoos as commitments comparable to true love, a theme connected to the glorious fountain of eternal youth trickling blue lights over a glowing golden chalice up on the second of the show's three floors.

These signs are certainly appealing, visitors tend to hang around, mesmerised and even made cosy by the warm flickering works. But a further climb to the third floor quickly dispels such homely complacency. Like most people's attics, Noble and Webster's contains things they don't want to look at and yet can't live without; here the detritus of daily life, turned-out pockets and emptied drawers has been formed into strange lumps held aloft on poles and poorly lit by a single dim bulb, how sad. But wait...Flash. our presence trips a remote-control switch and a light pours across the room onto these objects, projecting, to our surprise and amusement, perfect profiles of Noble and Webster's faces on the wall beyond. We're intrigued to find that the seemingly careless lumps of uselessness have in fact been carefully made so as to cast these very particular shadows. The shadow heads extend only to their ragged-edged necks making them appear like the severed heads of punished star-crossed lovers impaled face to face on spikes and doomed to gaze into each others eyes for the wrong kind of eternity.

Flash. The light goes out again turning our attention back to the plain lumps of rubbish. We are now moving within the time span of a slow flash, a five-minute-long flash, a flash slow enough to enter and look within and within which we find this horrific subtext of the show's up front theme of love, commitment and eternity. It's as if we were miniaturised and miraculously taken behind the shroud of everyday illusions to witness what really happens every time each Las Vegas or fairground bulb flashes, seeing the painfully true works where lurk electrickery burning, and mathemagics deceiving. Like lovers seduced by a blissful serenade suddenly made aware of the cat-gut of the violins and the trumpeter's saliva, from our new, immanent perspective we lose the sparkling plot of promised eternal youth through life-long commitment and instead have our faces rubbed in the inescapable criticality which so many of us now carry about like an affliction.

Once returned to the gloomy, purgatorial formlessness that we ourselves become without the light of one faith or another, we're able to look closely at the make-up of these lumps and see: plenty of discarded contraceptive pills (each one itself a potential life-long commitment), elsewhere there are old tickets to art events, cigarettes, packs and lighters (the unsolicited commitment of addiction). For a few minutes we're drawn to map these little planets of banality, lit by the pathetic sun of a single dim bulb, and have just begun to revolve around this topography of tawdriness when, either our movement or the arrival of another visitor trips the switch again and...Flash. our attention is returned to the profile shadows projected on the wall. In that moment, in the turn of our heads, we seem to be transported from one culture to another as if an airliner had crashed in a remote land, spilling food trays and emptying refuse over a landscape where bloody, sacrificial practises continue un-sublimated by Western sophistication. And yet we are still home, at home, the artist's home, cleverly redesigned under the guidance of curators Caragh Thuring and Stuart Shave, the home becomes gallery where the life of the critical mind is denied escape into domesticity. Here the bird of question no longer lands. "The era of chair bound artists is over." (Camus).

What at first seemed to be three autonomous pieces separated by floors, take on attributes of one large installation once we notice a fourth piece in the corner of the first-floor space. This column of red flashing lights represents dripping blood falling as if from the severed heads above, down toward the wounded heart on the ground floor. The home itself is revealed as leaky, fractured, unreliable, the home becomes art, love is stripped even more bare, now descending so nude it drips through faults in the fabric without need of a staircase. At the deadlock of deconstruction, with our literary-critical X-Ray visions oblivious to all surface, we see nothing which is not already aware of its own deconstructed potential. Thus we live a permanent autopsy perhaps secretly yearning for something still sacred. The flash is a holy code, a binary language of 0s and 1s. Technology promises this matrix is capable of anything, but we know better, we live and breathe the gap between. Webster and Noble might have begun to articulate possibilities as great as the system that's running things, but only when they slow down the pulse do we glimpse what both we and the system might be running from.

END 1170 WORDS

'Sunday' Cabinet Gallery Brixton February 8th - March 1st 1998 Paul O'Kane
The day of worship, on which suburban cars are washed and waxed remains special despite the shopkeeper nation's insistence that it be treated just as any other day. Still that familiar, peculiar air hangs almost palpably over it so that if you inadvertently chose a Sunday to came out of a long coma you could probably still correctly identify the day just by its slightly vacant atmosphere and the seemingly oblique purpose of its hours.

At Brixton's Cabinet gallery, Sunday recently became the focus for a series of curations by Matthew Higgs in conjunction with the gallery's own Martin McGeown and Andrew Wheatley. Every Sunday for four weeks throughout February, pairs of artists shared the Cabinet's rooms. Each show lasted a week and began with a celebratory Sunday opening. The shows featured Tacita Dean and Peter Doig, Walter Robinson and Martin Creed, Gill Carnegie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and André Cadere and Ceal Floyer. The choice of works, the pairings and the hangings, all demonstrated a subtle, downbeat approach to art in which modesty made its mark by gradually revealing to the audience hidden depths beneath deceptively simple surfaces.

In the first show Dean and Doig brought a mysterious air to the gallery, an early Doig canvas featured the milky way sprayed across a night sky and reflected in a lake on which a tiny, lone canoe carried a dead or sleeping star-gazer. Meanwhile Dean's audio piece played through stereo speakers describing her attempts to re-discover anything that might remain of Robert Smithson's now sunken 'Spiral Jetty'. Some of her intriguing soundtrack was a recording of her actual trip to The Great Salt Lake and some of it was embellished by techniques Dean had picked up from her previous 'Foley Artist' piece. Placed together, the two works seemed to leave the audience prone to nature's awesome machinations, somewhere between the heavens and the deep blue sea.

Next we had a more romantic Sunday with Walter Robinson's charming paintings, one of a doe-eyed girl and one of a blue-collar 'punk' carefully hung so as to make it obvious that this Mr Wrong was being admired by his potential better-half. Robinson's simple head and shoulder MF
'Sunday' Cabinet Gallery Brixton Paul O'Kane
portraits and fresh, vibrant palette suggested his brief mid-1980s popularity may have been an influence on Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik. While this little romance took place, Martin Creed's amplified metronome ticked casually away through a speaker in the next room like a 'no rush' musical accompaniment to the unlikely affair between Robinson's fixated wallflowers.

Gill Carnegie and Wolfgang Tillmans banished this romance and toughened up the mood significantly on the third Sunday, Carnegie exhibiting her so-called 'bum paintings' for the first time and Tillmans showing a photograph of a stained white Tee-shirt. Between them the pair critiqued eroticism and its place within an all-too-human condition threatened by its relationship to super-materialist society. In the final show, Ceal Floyer confused the arriving audience by presenting an American garbage bag tied up and containing nothing but air. It took a while for any interpretative pennies to drop with regard to this subtle and minimal piece until we realised that what was being rubbished was essential to human survival and therefore beyond price. Sharing the show was one of André Cadere's wooden bars from the 1970s which he used to walk the streets with, give lectures about and most importantly, introduce uninvited into other people's shows. Here, history had brought the arch-outsider in from the cold.

It would prove unnecessarily claustrophobic to force the complexity of the whole 'Sunday' exercise into a homogenising interpretation, but one thread of commonality worth illuminating was a sense of art historical revisionism sewn through the shows via Doig's early painting, Dean's retracing of Smithson's land art, the reappraisal of Walter Robinson and the afterlife of the deceased Cadere's bar. Creed's metronome piece might have underscored these time bends by dictating an andante pace in anachronistic clockwork tempo throughout the month. By the end of the fourth Sunday not only had the congregation that had assembled religiously at the salon received a mini-education in art history and theory, but neo-conceptual art had been brought into a rare juxtaposition with the vogue for picture painting, and furthermore, faith in art had been reaffirmed by the challenging, multi-dimensional approach to this highly successful and entertaining experiment in curation. END 738 Words

'Sunday' Cabinet Gallery Brixton 8. 2. 98 Paul O'Kane - Tacita Dean and Peter Doig
Craig Owens described Robert Smithson's land art as a momento-mori for the 20th century, left to fade back into the landscape, only retained as photographs.

Tacita Dean has produced a coda to Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' by recording the sound of adventures she has following the original guidance notes to a point from which the jetty could once be observed.

Now, however, the jetty is submerged, invisible and Dean has trouble even getting to the old viewing point as roads and paths are no longer what they were in the relatively optimistic/ idealistic late 60s when Smithson worked.

This sound piece is broadcast from white speakers into a white space bringing home a kind of meta-de-materialisation of the lost art object as we follow by ear the search for what was once brave and futuristic to a whimsical but somehow touching denouement.

Sharing this, the first of four 'Sunday' shows at Cabinet curated by Matthew Higgs, is a painting by Peter Doig in which the milky way is sprayed across a deep blue night and reflected in a lake.

A horizon is carved from naively painted trees of various kinds and these too are graphically reflected in the inverting, repeating lake which accounts for the whole lower quarter of the painting.

A detail in the lake reveals a body prone in a canoe with one arm draped over the side. Is someone dead or are they just laying back star-gazing? One or two of the trees seem to contain the glowing spirits of some native American tribe.

The whole is like an evocation of the awe and magic which still awaits us in the great outdoors, when we are alone and far from the neuroses-inducing demands of urban sophistication.

These two seemingly disparate works eventually reveal imaginative space opened up by their meeting. We have two lakes, two dead figures, (Smithson died within a few years of the Jetty being completed) and hints of two mysterious belief systems.

Dean's piece informs us that the first generation of conceptual art, initially so anti-historic in intent, is proving to have, concealed within its slightness and its penchant for disappearances and Nothing, built-in cultural 'weight' which increases with age.

Spiral Jetty was based on a local myth of a whirlpool said to reside at the bottom of the Great Salt Lake, now the work has become a kind of palimpsest of that myth, our very own 'ancient' myth of modernity's demise.

Painting, which conceptual art so railed against, is again fashionable and capable of articulating our time and Peter Doig's example given here reveals some of the mysticism and multiculture which has successfully penetrated the West since Smithson's pioneering days.

Man's most heroic efforts are ultimately mere details, tiny interruptions on the surface of eternity which grinds on both above and beneath us.

End 499 words

'Sunday' Cabinet Gallery Brixton 15/2/98 Paul O'Kane - Martin Creed and Walter Robinson
Life could be so much better if it were a musical. In the hands of a composer time becomes malleable whereas for less gifted folk the clock, whether Victorian tick-tock or silent digital, exerts authority, even oppression over us

The second of the four 'Sunday' shows at Brixton's Cabinet gallery has a restrained, low-key feel. Again the two main rooms have been allocated to one painter and one conceptual artist. The latter on this occasion is Martin Creed.

Creed has gradually surfaced in recent years by demonstrating a desire to recapture the original spirit of conceptual art; (i.e. 'it's the thought that counts'). To this end he has boldly shown plenty of whiteness and works that are no more than sheets of paper with a few words on.

Here he presents a metronome, set between andante (moderately slow) and adagio (slow). This is plugged into an amplifier to assert itself above the volume of regular speech. The device's ticking, swaying performance continues until the clockwork metronome winds down, making demands on the gallerist to wind it up again.

"Its all in the tempo" was Miles Davis' advice to aspiring musical genii. Creed's piece similarly promotes this much-overlooked but crucial dimension, seemingly conducting the audience and positing time as not merely a mysterious, tragic economy but also something with qualities, such as rhythm, swing or haste.

Creative curating these days involves an element of revisionism and subjective archaeology, promoting not only the voices of today and tomorrow, but also what might be called the 'then of now'.

To achieve this, curators, like composers, bend and re-shape time to reveal previously invisible precedents and undercurrents of the present vogue. The Cabinet Gallery, with 'Sunday' curator, Matthew Higgs, are obviously ahead of the game on this and here bring Walter Robinson in from the cold as a kind of sorely missed elder brother of Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik.

Robinson's modest methods had some media profile in mid-1980s New York and he showed a variety of other styles (including op-art spin paintings) as well as the figurative work exampled here.

Two small (approx. 12''x12'') paintings by Robinson; one of a 'Punk', the other of a 'Girl', portray simply framed heads with not much shoulder. The young man or 'Punk' is slightly more roughly (boyishly?) painted than the creamy skinned 'Girl' who's doe-eyed, sideways stare is hung so as to admire her oblivious male counterpart. Both have rich rusty hair and well picked ground colours which set off their clothes; particularly the seductive blue of the Punk's collar.

Unlike the work of Kilimnik or Peyton, Robinson's 1981 portraits look slightly appropriated, as if the characters have been rescued from a commercial art realm and re-established in more urbane surroundings.

Having left the show you can't help thinking of the metronome ticking away in the white space while Robinson's 'Girl' stares up et her 'Punk'. Higgs, like Creed, seems to want to set a gentle pace for the viewer here and subtly advises that, on Sunday at least, we should synchronise and take life a little easier.

END 535 WORDS

'Sunday' Cabinet Gallery Brixton 22/2/98 Paul O'Kane - Gill Carnegie and Wolfgang Tillmans
"Freud more or less says that all of the questions randomly posed by children turn on and serve as relays for the one they do not pose, which is the question of the origin."
M. Blanchot

The overdue reciprocation of the commodifying gaze habitually directed at woman by lower life forms, (or life forms at low moments), increases intensity as Gill Carnegie reveals her so-called 'bum paintings'. Four small studies of the artist's naked and near-naked butt, are lovingly, if a little roughly rendered in a strange twist on narcissism. The result belligerently pushes the viewer into unfamiliar territory where we are simultaneously insulted and seduced.

Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, well known for his exoticisation of banality and his street-romantic rendition of youth culture's cherished, if least exceptional moments, shares the Cabinet space this week and shows a photograph of a crumpled, stained, white tee-shirt which all but fills the frame.

In light of the erotic suggestion of Carnegie's paintings, Tillmans' seedy-looking stains might seem to offer an obvious and base connection, but what is in fact on display here is a harsh critique of the erotic. Both artists make a complaint, a kind of 'dirty protest' inspired by sexualities stripped of illusion, and achieve a surprising level of objectivity against the odds.

Youth itself is proud of its beauty, its inventiveness and its freedom and sees age as a corrupting force which it refuses to accept as inevitable fate. Carnegie's cellulite-free self-portraits echo those works by Tillmans in which his naked friends seem to have been born as youth, tumbling naked onto the hard surfaces of the 'social fabric'.

Tillmans often fetishises clothes and the sacred adidas logo which marks out the territory of his urban sub-cult. This generation gained consciousness amidst the newly forged super-materialism and higher capitalism of the 1980s. They were cast into the non-stop radicalism won by their progressive forebears and breathed pure question from day one. Now, bemused by their own humanity, they examine their bodies with forensic intensity and seem to ask "Who designed me,? Where is my label attached?".

The body can only be excused its shortcomings while it still approximates plasticity. The paint (pure plastic) in one of Carnegie's paintings, is smeared fecally alongside the main image, contrasting a resentment of bodily processes with both the 'libidinal surface' of the skin and the superskin of underwear. Where is the erotic here? in the body itself or the fetishised clothing or even in the animal smears? All eroticism is today ultimately displaced and misguided, the whole world is wrapped and sealed in the eroticism of commodification.

Higher Capitalism grows fat on youth and youthfulness. We now live in the mass cult of endless youth, regularly encountering elderly joggers and teenage toddlers. The first generation to perceive nothing but youth is now maturing. Statistics say it wants to live alone, to stay 'single and thin', it rejects tradition and insists on a better-than-human condition with less emotion, less neuroses, less corruption of body and morals. Insistence gives a steel core to this eye-sparkling idealism, and, with capital's blessing, slowly makes the unrealistic become real.

Tillmans and Carnegie exemplify this generation and their concerns. Blanchot claims: "Freud more or less says that all of the questions randomly posed by children turn on and serve as relays for the one they do not pose, which is the question of the origin."

As Tillmans examines the (cum?) stained tee shirt and Carnegie tries to see herself non-sexually from behind, one can't help wondering if this 'questioning of the origin' is what is going on. A rupture has occurred in the credibility of all creation myths. These are the pre-deconstructed, the ready-demythologised personae, coming of age without illusions and therefore without orientation of any kind.

END 640 words

'Sunday' Cabinet Gallery Brixton 1/3/98 Paul O'Kane - Ceal Floyer and André Cadere
A 1978 Semiotexte interview with André Cadere concludes: " I don't claim to reveal anything, I only claim to show something which would not be shown otherwise." As the four 'Sunday' shows at Cabinet draw to a close, Cadere's statement seems apt to sum up the quiet success of the collaboration between the gallery and guest curator Matthew Higgs. As well as maintaining an air of a congenial salon, the shows have been both eye and mind openers characterised by a downbeat, modest approach to art. The final 'Sunday' is the most modest of all with Ceal Floyer contributing no more than an American 'garbage' bag full of air while, in a corner, leans one of André Cadere's 1970s wooden bars. Both works challenge the conventional prestige and spectacle we expect from the art object and both imply disruption of the curator's process.

As well as reminding us of the banal, practical activities taking place behind the scenes of any art show, Floyer's piece engages in brinkmanship with its own purpose, only it's feint Americana makes it worthy of the double-take required before questions can begin. This minimal exoticism is enough for one skilled in the manipulation of materials and contexts to make almost nothing into art. As in another Floyer work currently showing at Delfina in which she purchased only (conceptual art uniform) white items on a trip to Sainsburys, her garbage bag piece advocates an art and artist that never sleeps, for whom no act or material is too ordinary to escape problematisastion and subsequent re-signification. This omnipresent power of art has quasi-religious connotations proving that even when we kill our given Gods, what beliefs we retain are keen to fill the vacuum left by God's departure.

What is in the bag is after all not nothing, but air, something priceless, something we can't live without, something which should therefore be sacred, something as worthy, you might think, of worship as the sun. By treating air as rubbish Floyer paradoxically commodifies it, drawing attention to both it's quantitative and qualitative value. Can air be disposed of? What would 'thin-air' disappear
into? The piece is far from simple despite first impressions. By presenting far less than we expect of art Floyer draws our attention to more than we'd hoped.

Like a staff left by some magical shepherd, Cadere's colourful bar exudes a mysterious uniquity and seems to stand in for the deceased artist's presence. Cadere, who died in 1978, had an itinerant approach to showing his work. His output consisted of variations of these systematically coloured bars. Often he would infiltrate an existing exhibition and leave his bar behind as part of the show. As these uninvited interventions gained notoriety he even made miniature versions to carry into shows unseen after a full-size bar had been confiscated from him.

Ironically, now he is no longer here to intervene in shows himself, curators do Cadere's work for him. This 'outsider' art, though now invited politely in, is forever ingrained with Cadere's peculiarly obstinate outsider stance. He even stated, in the interview mentioned above, that the artist needs to consider other artists, particularly their jealousy and competitiveness, as part of the institution to be dealt with and negotiated through the work. For those who bought his work, each bar came with a written explanation of the particular colour system used in its making. The bar shown here was made up of yellow, white, red and black, roughly carved and painted wooden cylinders assembled in varying relationships to form its 182 cm length. There is also supposed to be a built-in flaw in the system of each bar, though both Cadere's system and its designed flaw remain esoteric.

It seemed significant that the two works occupied only one of the Cabinet's two main rooms for this show. Perhaps this was because these subtle pieces, so dependent on the audience's commitment to art, also needed each other's support to survive. Floyer's piece is particularly in danger of being overlooked or mistreated during a opening. Now that the 'Sunday' shows are over, one of their enduring effects will have been to test and strengthen the faith of the members of the congregation who assembled religiously every Sunday in Brixton for the past four weeks.

END 740 WORDS

Freaked Out Feb 26th 1998 Paul O'Kane
The Kitchen gallery's second show again presents the work of its core associates and introduces the work of Jack Pitsillides.

Simon Thompson has made a sculptural counterpart to the screaming example of gauche painting in the previous 'Honkeytonk' show. Again myriad maddeningly ill-suited colours writhe together and seem to run and sag over a strangely flaccid, tottering totemic pole. The pole, made up of carved rings and cog shapes is decorated with discoloured Dadd-like flowers, and rainbow stalagtites which look a little like Henry Darger's landscape come to life. All this is topped off by a large eye-disk decxorated in gypsy-chic. The matt black pupil looks capable of sucking in any aspirational or redemptive light in sight.

Barry Reigate shows another of his airbrushed fantasy paintings. Two androgynous androids kiss with heavily reddenened lips. One 'droid reveals vampirical teeth gleeaming against the chaotic void of the open mouth and the shared experience of their kiss is described by a ripped can effect which pretends to open the surface of the canvas revealing a sea of convincingly painted baked beans. Reigate is keen to promote the inherent sensuality of his technique througth his choice of subjects while bemusing the viewer with a perverse shock-humour all his own

Both Reigate and Thompson tip the scales of consensual cool in order to breach new ground devoid of academic hang-ups and inhibitions.

Reigate also shows a painting of what look like Gerbera blooms in a vase set on a cartoon wooden flloor against a dramatic reddening sky. The blooms ha\ve distinctly painted auras giving them a religous feel reminiscent of illustrations used in Krishna literature. This sensitive universalism is however challenged by a legion of ominous electrified clouds coloured like petrol stained water and a spray of star-shaped chrome studs which circle and frame the flowers. These two elements seem to militarise the space of the painting and throw the flowers into a new light. To attain a spiritual experience-the painting seeems to say- beliefs must be as hard as steel and lightning charged. Fragile natural beauty paradoxically can't survive without armour and the abilit to switch from promise to threat.

Gillian Carnegie shows three small, traditional-looking paintings. One is a winter playground scene where snow denys ed access to a set of unused swings. Cast in her characteristic North European light, this coldness and obliquely rendered absence of children suggest romantic lack . Another painting shows nothing more than a piile of manure. Can Carnegie succeed in bringing the disreputeable into the limelight of art for re-apprisal? or is she simply continuing a kind of 'dirty protest' initiated by her infamous 'bum paintings'. The third of carnegie's paintings here shows a young couple 'snogging' outside a municipal building with Hopperesque green doors. The girl wears a short skirt and notorious white stillettos. This painting could be a touching portrayal of an unsophisticated small town love affair unavailable to those with ambitions, and yet when we notice the brimming (or snow coivered) dustbin next to the couple, we wonder if Carnergie is making some moral or social judgement.

Alastair Mackinven's laboriosly executed ink drawing shows a prone figure, who's body is festering with numerous sores and pustulations and seems ready to split down the deeply ingrained spine line. Help is however on its way as a spinning white sun burns through the darkness like the source of the universe is launching various drug missiles which seem about to pierce his body with bullet force. Unlike bullets however, they promise relief and healing rather than death. The idea is fascinating, the execution admirable, only the composition seems to require more care. This visionary work might have taken a leaf out of William Blake'sa book, perhaps curving the figure into a more stylised and complimentary form. Note that visionaries have little need of realism and stylise at will in order to preach their lesson!

Jack Pitsillides intoduces himself via two video films made over two years ago plus a more recent piece of literature. The films, shown side-by-side on small monitors at eye level, both use a white-ish void into which the artist himself makes miunimal, though significant interventions. In one, self-conciousness induced by the video-monitor mirror is utilised as a motivation for specific actions. In one the artist repeatedly attempts (a represntation of?) a smile. But a sincere expression eludes him and the smile lacks meaning, merely drawing attention to the physical and animal movement of the mouth and revelation of gum shield-like teeth. In the second film, shown directly alongside on a head-heright stand so that we seem to be confronted by a glaring robot, Pitsillides comically appears at bottom right of the screen but only represented by the top of his hair. He seems reluctant to appear fully in the frame but makes his presecnce felt by manouvering his locks along the bottom edge of the screen like a low-budget, low-thrills re-make of Jaws.

The booklet that accompanies the films is a steam of scatalogical consciousness, mixing infantile language with sophisticted vocabulary from fashionable critical theorists. Joyce and Borroughs come to mind and yet once we lose thiese precedents (which merely serve to orientate us) we realise that this writitng is attempting to rescue the artist's identity from its dependence on pareents and childhood, perhaps even recue the self from love itself (the pain of love which is losing love). Constantly mixing up half-remembered nursery rhymes the words seem to be in a constant dribbling dialogue with both parental love and parental authority. Grammar, syntax and spelling are early casualties.

The three works together do appear like a quest for a simpliied answer to the question of the artist's origin. The white spaces seem to be the limits of life, the page upon which life is written and Pitsillides would like to connsciously consider each mark made their. Of course this is impossible as we only become fully conscious long after we lose contact with our innocence and the safety of our mother's arms and unequivocal parental love. Pittsillides reaches for the artist's ultimate desire, emotional autonomy, but still has to accept compromise.

'Freaked Out' The Kitchen 65 Clerkenwell Road London EC1 27 Feb. - March 26 1998 Open Fri-Sat-Sun 12-6pm Paul O'Kane
'Freaked Out' is the Kitchen's second show and continues to promote new work by its core associates. New Contemporary, Gill Carnegie shows small paintings, one of a pile of manure, one of a couple snogging outside the youth club and one of some playground swings abandoned in snow. All share a sombre winter light and an atmosphere of disillusionment.

Barry Reigate's infamous fantasy airbrush depicts flowers with religious auras against a chrome-studded sky and androgynous, vampiric androids kissing as their inner psyche rips open to reveal a sea of photo-realist baked beans.

In 'Nancy Boy Cocaine Slut Blues', a laboriously executed pen-and-ink drawing by Alastair Mackinven, a pustulating prone body is about to be rescued by drug missiles launched from a spinning white sun. Is this the latest in visionary art?

Simon Thompson's sculpture, looking like a withering totem for a poorly founded belief system, leans over worryingly as myriad clashing colours drip over its cogs, rings, fantasy flowers and hallucinatory stalactites. The folk-art-decorated top disk has an eye-pupil heart like a black sun sucking in hope.

Jack Pitsillides shows two videos in which the artist ponders his own reflection and tries in vain to raise a sincere representation of a smile. He also crouches almost out of sight of the camera and uses his hair to glide along the monitor's edge like a no-thrills Jaws re-make. The book that accompanies his work is a free-flowing return to infancy armed with an adult consciousness. Its vocabulary mixes scatology, nursery rhymes and critical theory.

The show as a whole is a giddy ride around emerging talent with super-subjective axes to grind.

END 290 WORDS

'Male Nurse' and 'Gilded Lil' Ormonds Night Club Jermyn St London SW1
26th Feb 1998 Paul O'Kane
Dysfunction flowed freely tonight at Ormonds night club when a double bill of 'Male Nurse' and
'Gilded Lil' ripped open the straitjacket of consensual manners.

The distorted bass guitar of Alastair Mackinven began pulsing and whining at about 2 a.m. while a crude synth sound was being stabbed and tuned. Male nurse had finally turned up several hours late. Drummer Lawrence fell in time with these preparatory noises and slowly turned the audience on to a gritty downbeat groove from nowhere.

Eventually vocalist Keith Farquhar arrived to chime in and begin the set proper. This turned out to be a flight through six or seven repetitious gems of grinding bass, synth and guitars allowing little room for subtlety or compromise. Farquhar's simple direct pleas and moans rang out loud and true diverting the assembled crowd away from commonplace aspirations towards kookier considerations.

Gilded Lil took over the equipment as soon as Male Nurse left the stage and upped the ante of bullshit-banishment even further. The bass player whirled intently while the singer screamed inhumanly.

As the floor in front of the group filled with spastic amphetamine dancers achieving reverse goose walks and mutant jives, a heckler tried to sabotage the performance and received a lightning kick to the crutch from the cat-suited singer. The heckler returned a drunken swipe but was quickly floored by a fan and then ejected.

Sadly this ended the proceedings but perfectly concluded the night's hard lesson in late 90s reality.

END 250 words

In fashionable EC1 a new belief system is being founded. Go to Freaked Out and you'll see the weird pole they dance around, the funny TV programmes they watch and the strange pictures they hang on their walls. There's a painting of a couple of vampires kissing but their minds seem to have ripped open revealing a lot of baked beans? Switch on the telly and some guy's pulling faces at himself all day or trying to keep out of sight of the camera. There's some other pictures hanging up too, one of them's got a bloke who's body's all sores and puss but the sun seems to be exploding and firing some potent looking drugs his way, so maybe he'll pull through. Gill Carnegie's little pictures are of a boy and girl snogging outside the youth club on a snowy day. another one is snowy too and it just shows some swings in the park with no-one on them. The other one of Gill's is a pile of manure, that's all, just a little painting of a pile of manure. Anyway like I said all this is going on around this big bent pole which is all covered in slimy colours and flowers and spots and on top it looks like an evil eye looking at you.

John Frankland, Ceal Floyer, Martin Creed. Delfina.
Bermondsey Street London SE1 Until March 8th 1998 Paul O'Kane
Although I've read the blurb on Frankland and seen his wall pieces at Saatchi's and at I.C.A, still I have to say Hmmmm! I understand what it's supposed to do; critique the institution of the gallery, confuse and disperse the space of art etc. but something ain't right and I think that something is to do with materials. You see, Frankland uses stretched plastics also employed by set builders, shop-fitters and the like to create a superficial, temporary effect. Ideal! you might think for a site-specific installationist like Frankland. My problem is that I can see the join. I have the same problem with Callum Innes and prefer to see great Franz Klein sweeps than someone aspiring to machine precision and not quite succeeding. The most successful aspect of Frankland's walls is their illusion but when I visit Delfina, not only can I make out the tucks and creases where the sections meet, but a disaster has occurred in which the base layer of plastic has fallen away from under its top coat. Perhaps its kicking a man when he's down to fault the work for this, but fine art has to stay true to its word and be fine in some respect, whatever the medium. More successful is his paint-filled fire bucket which reminds the audience to be vigilant , in the time honoured tradition of modern art, and to make sure that you understand what in the room is and is not to be viewed.

Ceal Floyer's butterfly video is faultless, though admittedly a lot more simple to make than Frankland's wall. The short loop of a passing butterfly repeats and repeats a reminder of frail ephemeral nature amidst post-industrial urban surroundings. But how do you come by a film like this, it's certainly not scripted. It seems the artist has selected the least intentional moment from a project, an out-take who's sweetness makes a mockery of the best-laid plans. What sounds like the sea, though it could be wind in trees, plays through the monitor's speakers and if you close your eyes you are transported far from Bermondsey. Butterflies live short lives but this one's pinned down by Floyer and forced to re-live the same little moment forever.

Of course this is how we know butterflies, as fleeting, poetic moments, then they're gone again and our hearts sink back down to the default of pressurised, urban survival instincts. Floyer seems to have tried to retain that elevated moment but, just as when we were children with nets, once caught, the object of our desire quickly loses its magic and begins to look forlorn. We're reminded of glorious wet pebbles brought home from the beach which turned humdrum as they dried out overnight.

Floyer has also gone to the trouble of doing the shopping but she obviously takes her work home with her because everything on her Sainsbury's receipt is minimal-art-white. I tried something similar myself once, only I tried to make everything on my bill rhyme. Sitting down that night to eat aubergines, baked beans and custard creams put me off my ambitions of creating a Homeric epic in a Tesco trolley.

Martin Creed; that neo-Conceptualist with a capital 'C', has been messing around with the gallery doors again. There's a mischievous strain to Creed's work which distances it from the first generation of straight-faced conceptualists. This time the door opens and shuts of its own accord, squeaking and banging as it does. Beyond the door lies a cupboard where all the paints and tools that keep the gallery holy-looking are stored but Creed won't let the institution sweep this under the carpet. In fact he's also installed a switching device that makes the fluorescent light in the cupboard begin to splutter into life just as the door is closing, just, that is, as you want it to turn off. The piece is an externalised embodiment of frustration

Delfina is a superb space, partly top-lit with daylight and with plenty of room. This show was sparse and minimal. When I visited, the cafe outside was packed but I was the only soul in the gallery and seemingly the only one in the building without a forkful of Gateau. Perhaps it was this that embittered my perception of John Frankland's pink wall, but if it doesn't work here where can it?

END 745 Words
Paul O'Kane

Elizabeth Peyton @ Sadie Coles HQ Heddon St London W1 24 Feb to 9 April 98
Am I imagining it or are a lot of people around me turning extra pale and thin, redeemed only by a reddening of the cheeks and lips? If so, this vampire-chic (which photographer Jeff Wall warned us against some years ago) might well be caused by the current popularity of Elizabeth Peyton's neat little paintings.

Not that I'd blame anyone for auditioning for inclusion in her pantheon, after all, Peytonworld is better than yours or mine, there you're either a celebrity or -equally rare and precious- a friend. She's repeatedly painted, and therefore adorned herself with, only fame and pals and this Epicurean philosophy could soon make her a lifestyle role model. She's also found an effortless way to revitalise that tried, tested, and yet recently neglected genre, society portraiture. It's not difficult to imagine her soon inundated like Warhol with requests for likenesses of the great and the good. Like a lot of really big names that emerge, she's achieved something most up-and-comings could kick themselves for not doing, something so simple it hurts, awarding herself a rewarding project for life that takes her exactly where she wants to go. Not since David Hockney painted LA. swimming pools has an artist made such a clear, life-affirmative statement of private desires in their work.

Featuring stars and royalty seems at first a strange game to play, one wonders if Peyton is complicit with notions of divine rights and sun kings. There's something less modernist and more contemporary about such interpretations of the elite. With the old suppressed magics now let out of their boxes, why shouldn't gods, demigods and fairy tale princes and princesses re-emerge along with the rest of a rapidly re-mythologising society?

Still it worries me that, though Peyton's characters might trace their ancestry all the way back to the sun or may have had special powers sprinkled on them by fairies in their cots, none of them look like they come out to play until long after dusk, nor do they seem to have been eating up their ambrosia. A doctor of art history whom I consulted on this matter suggested Peyton portrayed a 'fin-de-siècle wan dandyism', but that hasty diagnosis seemed too pat to be true. Anyway, whatever it is that's causing the ailment in her subjects it's contagious and everywhere you look at current openings you'll see Peyton-esque sunken cheeks and blue-white skins.

Anaemia aside, this girl (31 years) paints with pure panache. She has that rare ability to perform a simple-looking task with an unmistakable trademark, achieving much with apparently limited means. The way her thick grounds are rudely wiped across the base board so that they hang over the edge like paint quiffs, seduces the audience as much as her famously flamboyant palette. That palette, along with its sheen finish makes the paintings highly buy-able. There's no aspect of her practise which isn't resolved or carried off in style and yet nothing is weighed down by its own accomplishment.

The mysterious choice of stars and royalty as subject matter will no doubt entertain theorists and historians for years, but beyond this debate Peyton simply has a natural ability to paint with remarkably rare conviction while leaving a little mystery in our mind, a mystery to which we suspect we have an answer and yet never confidently put into words. This is best demonstrated by a work entitled 'Tokyo (Craig)' 1997' in which an unrecognisable figure is silhouetted against a (hotel room?) window. Here you can see everything Peyton does so well without the usual content question rearing its head. Rendered almost entirely in regal purple, the image seems to have used for photographic reference a 'wrong' exposure that didn't take back-light into account, thus obscuring the figure who becomes simultaneously an intimate and a stranger..

The enduring puzzle is however, that several of the portraits on show at Sadie Coles HQ distort the appearance of their subject to bring us repeats of the same pallid, androgynous face. Who could this be I wonder? Peyton's blue-eyed fantasy? of herself perhaps? Or is it the cloned destiny in store for all of us once her international charm offensive is complete.

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Janette Parris APRIL 98 Paul O'Kane
Watch out for artist Janette Parris, presently attracting attention for her tragi-comic video films and drawings. With upcoming shows in Rome and Vienna and a Parris-penned musical to be staged at London's I.C.A, 1998 looks promising for her.

The London-born, Goldsmiths-trained ex-painter has been transforming galleries into comfortable interiors where visitors can relax and watch her fun-sized soap operas. Each of these 5 to 10 minute episodes pairs an actor with a doll in a one-way conversation taken from their secret affair, divorce or first date. Both funny and ridiculous they also imply a 'me' society where self-indulgence has spoiled communication.

'Bite Yer Tongue' is a hand-written record of incidents in which the artist's polite, tactful replies to disappointments and humiliations contrast with the cutting remarks she thinks but doesn't say. Each tale of bottled-up anger ends with junk food eaten to make up for missed satisfaction.

Parris also draws cartoons of 'Plank', a piece of wood in search of a personality. 'Plank' turns up as a misfit in various everyday scenes and could describe the feeling of being an outsider.

This timely storyteller with her family of dysfunctional characters will amuse and provoke wherever she shows.

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209 words

Janette Parris @ City Racing
Vauxhall Street Oval London March 1 to 29 1998 Open Fri-Mon
Come, let us go down there and confuse their speech, so that they will not understand what they say to one another'. So the Lord dispersed them from there all over the earth, and they left off building the city. That is why it is called Babel (that is Babylon), because the Lord there made a babble of the language of all the world Genesis 11.2-9 (New English Bible)

(Here, unfortunately for the incomplete city, human speech is turned against itself and as a result is turned against fulfilling the dreams of the inanimate world. Today however, now that humans have banished their own God, the inanimate world returns intent to make us finish what we started.)

Demographics claim that the number of people living alone is increasing exponentially. This is expected to profoundly alter social planning by 2030 as well as multiply demand for housing and essential domestic commodities. Such a Babylonian, super-subjective, post-society, burgeoning beyond tarnished ideals of homogeneity will at least have its own soap-opera to stare at thanks to Janette Parris. Her tragi-comic films of alienated thirty-somethings addressing neurotic dialogue to dolls are presented in gallery spaces which have been transformed by the artist into comfortably stylish interiors. Sofas, rugs, tables and chairs demand our presence in order to satisfy their own desire for expression while looped videos flicker on the monitor/hearth revealing a sad legacy of the century's psychoanalytic plague in the form of people convinced that all speech is ultimately directed to self.

On snappily coloured walls hang framed cartoon drawings featuring a character called Plank who is no more than an anthropomorphosised length of wood with wise knotty eyes. Plank, meandering through everyday life, 'being there' but with apparently scant reason, doesn't even have the feint traces of stance, style and personality enjoyed by the humans in these drawings. Yet somehow our empathy favours Plank and we are convinced that this demonstration of utter vacancy is more true-to-self than personas adopted by better-adjusted characters. In a culture advertising mostly discredited roles, Plank suggests a credible 'alterity' option, taking the form of a boiled-to-the bone, anti-charismatic austerity likely to reflect what is most disillusioned and therefore most ascendant in the viewer.

The legendary ripostes of history's great wits are so admired because they effortlessly return an assailant's own ammunition, but when life pierces our armour with insults, misrepresentations and disappointments, we're rarely ready with an adequate verbal response. Janette Parris illuminates this familiar turmoil in a hand-written record of ignominious experiences entitled 'Bite Yer Tongue'. Whether it's passion-killing sexual partners or drive-by bus drivers, her world is full of careless people failing to achieve her standard. On suffering each unsolicited dent in her paint work, an uncompromising, cutting response flashes through Parris' mind, but tact, politeness and an in-built social imperative to keep the peace make her actual replies so ineffective that they become complicit with the surrounding inadequacy. Struck dumb by human conscience she turns to unite with dumb objects, eating junk-food for solace at the end of each episode. This paradoxically compounds the hurt and adds self-injury to insult.

Parris' strength is as a storyteller of contemporary internal narratives. Having restricted herself to mining a seam of banality she's discovered a space between the typical and the profound which, in her films, is reminiscent of Thomas Ruuf's debates with objectivity. In the worlds she unveils, people gag themselves. That which they need to say in order to defend themselves from identity-fracturing blows is self-censored and this repressed language reappears in tortured eruptions which then turn back on them with a sting. Words and phrases that amount to little more than quotes from cyclical neuroses fail to break the deeper silence and ultimately inform no-one.

We are disappointed with what is human in ourselves, not least our language which should be the MF
Janette Parris Paul O'Kane 3
triumph of our sophistication but which either seems beyond us or falls into crisis. (Perhaps this is what has motivated Parris to write a musical, hoping song might give wings to strangled words). The intimidating superiority of the inanimate divides and rules the human and puts it in its place. Cakes, dolls or their equivalents are turned to for help not because we are 'scraping the barrel' of possible redeemers but because we increasingly elevate the inanimate to the level of saviour. Plank could yet become our role model, even a millennial hero, the mute messiah of post-human chic.

END 700 Words

A to Z July 98 Paul O'Kane
A to Z Curated by Matthew Higgs @ The Approach 1st Floor, 47 Approach Road. London E2 9LY
April 2nd -May 3rd Thursday-Fri 1-7pm & Sat-Sun 12- 6pm
From an early age, texts are placed between us and the world, perhaps thereby prohibiting a more immanent encounter with life. But we can never actually know a more intense, pre-textual reality because 'knowing' itself only dawns long after words contaminate experience. Texts represent authority throughout our lives while vocabulary grows to influence both thought and perception. Perhaps this is why the 50 artists and nearly sixty works in this show find new ways to play on words and demonstrate how to re-negotiate the text matrix.

Laura Emsley's papier-maché 'Cave', made from an art and philosophy student's pulped book collection is a sacrificial gesture we might consider making at times when once-inspiring volumes seem like space-invasive baggage. What was once a mental gymnasium is transformed into a pragmatic shelter appropriate to the post-graduate experience.

Stepping into Emsley's cave dampens the sound of Simon Patterson's CD which continuously plays a familiar male voice reading football results. Patterson has doctored the script so that team names are scrambled with lists of Pantone colours. The resulting juxtapositions cause even the professional announcer to snigger as his looped performance ends then starts again. The relentless mantra only wanes when our attention is absorbed by other works.

In A to Z you discover ploys whereby the styling of a single word transforms its reading, as in Lily van der Stokker's bubbly, baby-blue 'Experimental'. Peter Fillingham's lettering looks like a Las Vegas light-bulb layout making it hard to believe it spells 'Elvs' and not Elvis, and Gavin Brown's 'Marvin' written with a flourish on a back-lit transparency above a doorway, recalls the premature exit of the famous soul singer. Other words are simply savaged like Nicholas Usansky's 'The Word "Perhaps" but without the letters e, r, h, a and s' which leaves only two lonely Ps on his page.

When we play with words the disruption of meaning is inevitably comic and levity subtly pervades this show. Colin Lowe's stretcher bars apparently failed to become paintings and now lean forlornly against walls inscribed with correspondence between the artist and his parents. 'Mum is it too late to let me back in' cries one. "Colin did you go to college just to learn how to swear" quotes another. Bob and Roberta Smith proclaim a quasi-religious belief in Donald Judd and tell an amusing anecdote about Elvis Presley going AWOL. These are both painted in garish drop-shadow type. Emma Kay, demonstrating that nothing is sacred to today's accelerating lifestyles, has summarised the Bible from memory to fit conveniently onto one page. Meanwhile Martin Creed's equation: 'The whole world + the work = the whole world' posits a finite universe where what goes around comes around.

But there's grim voices here too, like Amikam Toren's slogans cut into the surface of homely paintings and the gothic-rendered swaggering statements informing Alastair Mackinven's stark pen drawings. Elsewhere, accompanying text seems almost superfluous. 'Inventory' show a photograph of a factory chimney dressed with the word 'Comply' in an incongruously friendly font. The hyperbolic diatribe printed alongside becomes dispensable once we notice that a storm-cloud backdrop provides a sufficiently Nietzschean presence. Stewart Home shows a framed photocopy of a Vermeer portrait with eyes obliterated by singeing red paint but this effective piece seems unnecessarily supported by a plaint about taste and the cost of preserving the past, furthermore the 'taste' argument defeats itself by describing contemporary society as 'ugly'.

A to Z is less wordy than you might expect. Udomsak Krisanamis' collage of newspaper cuttings is drowned in black ink leaving only Os and zeros showing. These are linked together into ominous chains by emotionally-charged marks. Liam Gillick provides a Plexiglas corner-piece which draws sunny orange light into a thus privileged space and George Shaw's spidery handiwork describes scenes from literary love affairs in which young men fall asleep with open books or a fairy-tale 'beauty' reads James Joyce to a clothed ape.

Overall, this is a complex and fascinating show which rewards attention. A broad interpretation of 'text' summons together evocative conceptualism by Tacita Dean, droll cartoons by James Pyman and heady, diagrammatic drawings by Stephen Willats and Christopher Warmington. Though very few of the works fail to intrigue or enlighten there is insufficient space to describe every piece. It may be fanciful to imagine we could become progressively less delimited by words, but if that should occur then many 20th Century visual artists and shows like A to Z will have played a significant part in putting words in their place.

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I've highlighted works which were most striking to me but this rich and rewarding show requires time and attention which is a good argument for it to tour regionally.

There's a splash of history here and there. Richard Hamilton's original collage for Swingeing London (1967), Martin McGeown's 1980? Pierre Klossowski poster and a John Williams drawing from the late seventies which shows the artist musing on morality and proposals for art works. In the drawing a marble tome has been robbed from a grave stone while in the corner a budget of £45 is allocated to spend on a prostitute. Two of the three pieces shown by Ian Breakwell are from the 60s and 70s.

Hurvin Anderson April 98 Paul O'Kane
The paintings of Hurvin Anderson have an intimate feel, reminiscent of flicking through a family photograph album. They are infused either with nostalgia, a sense of travelling or both. Some are monochromes which emphasise the artist's crisp, dynamic draughtsmanship while simultaneously alluding, like old black and white photos, to an irretrievable past. His larger, colour paintings reveal greater physical demands made upon the artist's line, and their palette, while influenced by monochrome foundations, is simultaneously earthy and warm. His most recent works venture further into brighter, purer colours.

Anderson has produced paintings of airports in which figures, posing by stairs ascending into aeroplanes, are rendered almost as ghosts. Their skeletal outlines are contrasted against corpulent fuselages and engines. This hesitant human presence appears regularly in Anderson's work and, not only are his scenes or grounds shifting and ill-defined like memories, but his figures are also often faceless or half-formed. Techniques, methods, a questioning of the necessity for detail, all of these concerns tussle unconcealed in the work while specific cultural issues vie with more broadly human questions. How to fuse all this; elevating content to share the realm of form and allowing form to be influenced by the emotive forces from which content springs, is Anderson's current challenge.

A recent painting shows bright orange plastic diner seats hurriedly painted in swiping strokes. These seem to float against the rest of the canvas as if it were a huge plate-glass window. Beyond, against the vague horizon of a deep and wintry sky, glow pearly, ornate lights, a Christmas tree and an illuminated fountain, all rendered with a slightly swollen glare as if filmed out of focus. There are no figures in this painting and much of it appears half-formed, and yet to bring detail, orientation and specificity to bear on this image would rob it of its evocation of a universal experience. We, the audience gaze, recalling similar half-remembered, apparently insignificant and yet privately profound moments. The cheerfully-coloured, hard-surfaced environment of current consumerism, which reaches its apotheosis in the fast-flowing functionalism of the motorway service station, gives on to the enchantment of distant lights which lead us half-intoxicated through childhood and youth. Detail here would only divert us and over-emphasise particular aspects of the painting. The watery-eyed result of Anderson's need to maintain his canvas everywhere balanced with lively techniques, negates the necessity for figures and this very absence invites our own gaze to share in the artist's collected memories.

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Hurvin Anderson JULY Paul O'Kane
Hurvin Anderson, who has just completed his masters degree at the Royal College of Art, paints emotive scenes from an exiled memory. Born in Birmingham, Hurvin progressed through foundation at his local polytechnic then completed a B.A at Wimbledon School of Art before winning a place at the Royal College.

His work shifts from addressing emigration and transient identity to a self-assured love of painting in which experiment with gesture emphasises form. Anderson has produced scenes which haunt like déjà vu and figures which are faceless or unformed. Yet these retain an intimate feel, infused with the nostalgia of a family photo album. The artist's technical experiments remain unconcealed in his work while specific cultural issues rub shoulders with more broadly human questions.

Some of his paintings are black and white, emphasising crisp drawing skills while simultaneously alluding, like old photos, to an irretrievable past. His larger paintings reveal a fondness for warm, earthy colours. Confronted by Anderson's work, the viewer may recall similar half-remembered, privately profound moments: a sister and niece against a wintry landscape, the platform of a local railway station, relatives posing before ascending stairs into waiting jets or the enchantment of distant lights. Look out for future Anderson shows.

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Bisi Silva JULY Paul O'Kane
Freelance curator and art critic Bisi Silva set up Fourth Dial in March 97 as an organisation under which to create diverse cultural programmes. Its current touring show takes the work of artist Faisal Abdu'Allah to London, Hertfodshire, Bradford and Middlesborough.

Born in Nigeria, Bisi attended schools in England before studying languages and art history in France. After a number of paid and voluntary jobs involving languages, business and arts administration she attended the Visual Arts Administration course at the Royal College of Art. There she studied all aspects of curation and travelled to New York on a placement in an African-American museum..

She has recently returned from an Arts Council funded trip to Cuba where she researched the potential for a future show of Cuban photography. The next confirmed Fourth Dial project, titled 'Hair Daze' will consist of films, events and discussions relating to black hair and its cultural significance. The event will be shared between the Lux Centre London and Arnolfini in Bristol.

Bisi is amazed and slightly depressed that she is still one of the only black woman curators in the mainstream of British art though she admits it demands deep commitment and a passion for arts.

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'Heads Of State' work by Faisal Abdu'Allah appears at Middlesborough Art Gallery from 6 June to 8th August 1998. 'Hair Daze' will take place in October 1998 at The Lux Centre London and Anolfini Bristol.

Aubrey Williams July Paul O'Kane
This summer London's Whitechapel gallery hosts a major retrospective of Guyanese painter Aubrey Williams, who died in 1990. Williams, famous for his bold, vivid and sometimes explosive works, drew on influences as diverse as orchestral music, abstract expressionism and pre-Columbian Mexican civilisations for inspiration.

Well versed in a wide range of subjects, his work bridged disparate cultures and religions. His intellectual powers were internationally acknowledged and he lectured at Oxford, Durham and Kent universities as well as colleges in the US and West Indies.

Some critics feel his contribution as a British based artist has been overlooked and, although respected as a key figure of Caribbean art, this show is an opportunity to reassess his position within British cultural heritage.

Williams said he discovered what art was really all about while working as an agricultural officer and spending time with the indigenous Warrau tribe of the remote Guyanese hinterland. He was banished there after encouraging small farmers to claim rights against British-owned sugar plantations. Concern for the impact of technology on ecology later informed his work.

This show should be a visually stunning tribute to "a man who constantly pursued the expression of freedom in a changing and developing world" and who's legacy continues to inspire.

200 words

Aubrey Williams at the Whitechapel Art Gallery Whitechapel High Street London E1.
12th June to 16th August 1998. Open Tue-Sun 11 am - 5 pm (Wed until 8pm) Admission free.

 

Steve Dowson April 98 Paul O'Kane
Post-Sensation 'picture making' amidst accusations of amateurism.

Stephen Dowson chooses to paint lowly things. But what today, through art's supposedly deconstructing, non-hierarchical eyes is lowly? Even prior to an enlightened comprehension of the arbitrary order of things, from Cubist collage, to Schwitters to Manzoni, the lowly has long been elevated by art to share a more urbane world. Nevertheless, Dowson seeks out the lowly and when he finds it, he paints it, but why?

Jim Shaw has recently promoted a re-evaluation of 'thrift-store' paintings and art journals have become excited by the 'outsider' arts of Henry Darger, Adolf Wolfli etc. These events reveal that art, though just as keen as capital to embrace-all, continues to find certain forms of art: non-western art, unskilled art, uninformed art, rejected and discarded art, the art of the 'mad' and the 'amateur', all other to itself and therefore, by implication, beneath itself or lowly. Dowson rescues and re-presents failed drawings by other artists, paints cheap fake flowers rather than real ones, and uses discarded, broken objects as supports to paint upon, but his technique is itself far from throwaway, in fact 'fine' is an apt word to describe his art, characterised as it is by a slender realism, a detailed, translucence and a slightly elongated vision of things, all rendered with painstaking care.

The painting of so-called trash disrupts established value systems. When Dowson expends the highly prized time of art decorating a broken office chair-back it is a belligerent gesture, but when the subject of his decoration is Ronald Macdonald proffering huge breasts like a bountiful Eastern goddess, the message becomes both an indictment of burgeoning super-capitalism and simultaneously asks where true power resides today. Those who currently hope to find alternatives to exploitation within various millennial mysticisms may be forced to acknowledge the ultimately mystic roots of capital itself, while those who thrive on rampant consumerism prey upon an audience eager to redeem itself by bingeing on irrationality-chic.

Art must maintain some alternative despite the fact that many artists have grown complicit with "no alternative" rhetoric. Even fashionable theory today comes superficially commodified and dressed in the hyperbole of the past as if afraid to challenge the contemporary world on its own terms. If the real Bataille, Baudelaire or Benjamin were writing today they would not be imitating their grandfather's speech patterns but prowling the mall and 'shopping city' challenging their skills to keep pace with lightning tongued media propaganda and destabilising the value system espoused by weekend supplements.

At this time, which future histories of British art could well label 'post-Sensational', when a previous generation of artists have been taxidermaly museified by the Royal Academy, the description 'amateurish' applied to a painter's output should remain pejorative only to those who remain ignorant of important shifts taking place within painting. Given that this last generation were supposedly made ready and equipped with an unprecedentedly 'professional' attitude to art production so as to tackle the hysterical consumerism of the late 1980s and, not only survive it but win, then current artists may be forgiven for promoting a compensatory sincerity and humility in their work, even if only to be easily identified as 'post-Sensational'.

The rush-to-power of the Sensation generation temporarily banished the sight of artists publicly struggling to master their art and gain the upper hand over a medium, yet no-one today working in this manner can be accused of backsliding into a less sophisticated past, nor of faux naiveté. The fact is that the overt strategies of the late 80s and early 90s now arrive with transparent and predictable motivations while a more oblique, unpredictable trajectory lies within a return to authorship speaking through an idiom arising from the discipline of a medium.

This shift, which has been partly sign-posted by opposing 'picture making' to 'painting' is exampled by the work of Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik and the perverse traditionalism of John Currin. Currin's initial expositions involved taking on the oppression of the cliché and the challenge to create a new against the all-ironicising post-modern milieu. His success has been explained as the result of confronting and persisting with clichés of painting and not turning toward conceptual art for support as many Sensation generation painters did. The result is Currin's small, precarious, perverse, fence-sitting work which opens up far more critical space with it's skilled execution, surprising subject matter and irreverent use of traditional genres than Hirst, Martin, Hume, Harvey or Davenport ever achieved with their fame-sized gestures. But perhaps the emerging painter today enjoys a luxury those above couldn't afford, i.e we have adjusted our body-clocks and acclimatised to a radically new environment which we are now ready to engage with, whereas they did their best to deal with a violently breaking wave, ultimately creating only a defensive space through an arriere-garde action.

While a return to the process of carefully evolving a picture-maker's craft, hand-in-hand with a functioning political and philosophical position may produce accusations of 'amateurism', the bad-tasting legacies left by the stars of Sensation, e.g an increased scepticism of market motives and machinations, has resulted in a yearning for an art which can support the artist whole-heartedly, fundamentally, sincerely and substantially over a long term. Of course the 'amateur' is of interest today, as is the crafts person and all who take part in that broader 'general' economy which capitalism doesn't reach; that realm of moral and libidinal exchanges, of gifts, sharing, peer group sanctions and rewards all taking place at a social level unaccounted for by business or state, taking place at what could indeed be called an 'amateur' level where time is, not money but priceless.

Like the works of Michael Krebber, Dowson's paintings are imbued with a dichotomy between verticality and abjection, his line's emphasis, though vertical, seems ready to run downward like rain on windows. The contradiction he sets before us is of an artist intent on mastering a resilient craft against an impoverished backdrop. The baseness of his found supports asks the images painted on them to rescue them from their plight, but who will rescue who? Dowson seems to present a re-reading of Marx, critiqueing the object in terms of a non-adversarial universalism more akin to Whitman. Perhaps saluting Raymond Pettibon's honestly modest offerings he sympathises rather than empathises with objects while attempting to distance painting from capital and reconnect it to a world beyond in which all things also live.

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Chris Ofili @ Southampton City Art Gallery 9th April 31st May& Serpentine Gallery London 30th September to 1st November 1998& Turner Priize shortlist show Tate Gallery November -December 1998
" African sculptures ... aimed to influence not the human beholder but the spiritual powers themselves. They are channels through which the life force may enter this world and influence it."
Juginda Lamba
Here in Southampton, myriad sequin-like paint-drops form images on layered translucent planes to manifest the psychedelic visions of an artist apparently so drenched in his own 'culture' as to raise suspicions about the motivations of 'culture' itself. 'Afro-ness' seems soaked into every pore of Ofili's art as if, like the American painter John Currin, he has been forced by oppressive irony and suffocating political correction, to plough through clichés and presumptions, embracing stereotypes and caricatures in search of a plateau from which the artist might simply be seen as artist, minus divisive cultural or sub-cultural provisos.

Although some pink/white skin appears in the raised hands adoring Ofili's superhero 'Captain Shit' and also, curiously, in the breasts of 'Foxy Roxy'- an otherwise dark-skinned seductress- its difficult to think of another artist using specific cultural signification to this near-religious degree of excess. Even when Ofili represents the notorious 'void' it is defined by a frame of pencilled afros. Similarly, a copse of hob-knobbing phalluses entitled 'Afrophilia' are seen, on close inspection, to be outlined by tiny afro-headed faces. The artist's infamous elephant-shit trademark is everywhere, but all this is more a celebration than a complaint, more a festival than a dirty protest.

Ofili could easily be the one-man avant-garde for a consolidation of Black-British identity through visual art, however, his obsessive crush on painting diffuses politics amidst uncompromisingly decorative, jazzy gestures rendered in a lavish palette of glitter, glaze and gloss. Furthermore he distances himself from the hindrance of a collective will by shooting from the lip with the ambitious/ambiguous rhetoric of a rising international art star. "I don't want to be seen as just part of a black thing, a young thing or a British thing" he says.

So, if the Southampton City Art Gallery show isn't black, young or British, what can it be? Cultureless, timeless and global perhaps? (Aubrey Williams, the late Guyanese painter of cosmic abstraction could be a historical precedent).

Ofili's decoration appears oblivious to modernist heights of restraint and ideal. His unrelenting complexity, seen both in multiple layers of translucent sub-surface and in fractally spiralling repetition, anticipates a Bosch-like 21st Century quasi-madness to which the rich-West seems to be acclimatising. This same complexity is evoked in different forms by prominent contemporaries like Peter Doig and Lari Pitman and is discernible in recently reappraised outsiders like Adolf Wolfli and Henry Darger. But confronting the audience with its fractured reflection so over-dressed in Afrocana is what makes this show unprecedented and gives it the potential to be marked as a point of rupture highlighting an irrevocably fragmenting milieu in which the very idea of 'culture' bows to superior knowledge of increasing heterogeneity.

Ofili's work at 'Sensation' distanced itself from the surrounding atmosphere of taxidermy by promising painting a future while the exhausted YBA ark wilfully grounded itself on the lofty cultural peak that is the Royal Academy. The saddest art is that in which young minds play cynical and ironic endgames as if prematurely banished to the pastures of various 'death of's. But what is the future Chris Ofili promises and what influence will he have on those just beginning to evolve a painter's vocabulary?

As an MTV, Nike, Pepsi and Microsoft cocktail lowers our "small planet's" resistance to cultural flux, time is running out both for geographically-bound canons and for British art's nationalist facade. Black or
white, British or not, young painters today can take inspiration from Ofili's hard-won breaks with canonical history and theory and enjoy his re-affirmation of the "beautiful" which frees us to see
paintings as dazzling, resilient, autonomous play-grounds in which to concieve, nurture and defend subjective interpretations.

Ultimately 'culture' is a confining consensus; a fear-induced rampart defining the limits of a thought-village who's art merely acts as a rallying cry or shield. Ofili's paintings do not wait passively to be seen and judged as representative of something greater than themselves but instead broadcast the revelation that artists can expose and even scandalise the very 'culture' which is supposedly sustaining their art, thereby releasing both artist and audience into a timeless, global, 'cultureless' bliss of head-spinning question and spectacular invention.

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Che Lovelace & José Luis Lopéz-Reus @ Gasworks Vauxhall Street London SE11
May 1 -10 1998 Paul O'Kane
From February to April, Gasworks in collaboration with UNESCO-ASCHBERG and The Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA) hosted the latest in a series of residencies encouraging international dialogue between artists. On this occasion Trinidadian Che Lovelace and Venezuelan José Luis Lopéz-Reus were chosen to represent the West Indies and Latin America respectively. The end of their residency was marked by a show held in the Gasworks gallery which ran from the first to the tenth of May.

In a world of increasing migration, mixed parentage, social displacement and flux, many of us may today be uncertain exactly what our 'culture' is or should be. Trinidadian artist Che Lovelace's work suggests the answer may be found by sitting on 'cultural' fences with intent to collapse them under the weight of his humour-spiced critique. The three pieces he has made for this show, all structurally identical, provide a brightly coloured spectacle while posing a variety of questions regarding 'culture' and identity. Three painted canvases have been stretched in reverse so that the stretchers also operate as frames. These are held at 45 degrees to the wall by an adjustable chain and hinged onto a shelf from which hangs' both a cloth collaged with objects and images, and a blind or curtain which can be adjusted to conceal or reveal the lower section.

One painting, entitled 'Measure' appropriates a Led Zeppelin record-cover in which moon-skinned, yellow-haired young girls crawl and climb up a magical mountain towards the sun, but Lovelace has inserted himself as a small black child into the painting to liberate this scenario from racial exclusivity. The attached collage, mounted on a reversed African cloth, shows surf-shop catalogue pages framing a photograph of the artist surfing. This is partly obscured by a curtain of brightly coloured tape measures.

Circles of hair-curls with plastic combs and toy make-up mirrors hang beneath another painting called 'Here, hear, hair' which takes a tortuous rendezvous from the Kama Sutra and replaces the male Indian figure with an African man thus exposing the link between sexual territorialisation and racial divides.

The third piece enlarges the cover of a travel brochure in which a yacht is moored off a tropical island where rich-Westerners sit gingerly on the beach, their backs turned to the darker, leafy interior. The brochure's word-playing title is 'Escape Routes' and its accompanying collage combines toy cowboys and Indians with fake tropical flowers and advertisements in which Trinidadian holiday homes are referred to as 'Sanctuary'.

The repeated, almost sculptural form of Lovelace's three pieces simultaneously suggests both overbearing advertising methods and protective shelters. Using curtains and blinds to hide or show the collages leaves us wondering whether we can or should hide from our 'true' selves and whether we ever can 'escape roots'. His use of toys and recontextualised objects draws on parallel traditions of Western readymades and surreptitious art forms of appropriation which evolved among the African diaspora as a result of subjugation and a prohibition on traditional crafting. His recurrent theme of reversal reminds us to always look at both sides of messages and signs we receive. When approaching Lovelace's art the audience should restrain itself from applying habitual modernist, reductive thinking to this abundant work in which the artist opens up a future of rich possibilities by articulating a collision of disparate influences.

At the opposite end of the space an entropic universe is pointed out to us by a chromed steel arrow which; hung from a roof beam, plummets earthward. Held with its tip an inch from the ground, if disturbed it sways before returning to a stillness attuned to planetary forces. This piece by Venezuelan Lopéz-Reus, entitled 'Dick, head and roses', considers the fundamental powers of love and sex and concludes that our universe is fuelled not so much by aspiration as by loss.

His arrow's shaft supports two glass sheets, the upper of which is drilled with holes. Through each hole hangs a head-down rose. The lower shelf has been acid-frosted leaving only a silhouette of a phallus in clear glass and the arrow's trajectory runs right through the silhouetted scrotum. One or two flowers have dropped petals onto this 'sacrificial' plane but the majority have held on to their blooms. Romantic Love and sex are here metonymically described in terms of loss economies, or 'negative expenditures'. Such 'spaces of freedom' initially promise relief from the dominant economy of capitalism however, the realisation that capitalism's exchanges may themselves derive from archetypal 'libidinal' economies falls upon the viewer of this piece, just as we fall, despite ourselves, in love, death, and sometimes art, paradoxically only gaining via loss.

END 750 words

'Concealed Visions-Veiled Sisters' Sabera Bham @ 198 Gallery Brixton London 22 April - 30th May '98 Paul O'Kane
Enter the '198' gallery and you immediately feel you've violated something. You are responsible for the swathe of sunlight which momentarily illuminates the darkened space as the door opens. Within the blacked-out room a fan plays on a hanging sheet of colourless cloth onto which an arresting image of a Muslim woman in a blue silk veil is projected. Taped Arabic music invites you to delve deeper into this mysterious world and in a room beyond, several similar projections display a variety of veils framing an array of eyes.

Western media's view of all-things-Muslim, tainted as it is by the Rushdie affair, Saddam etc. repeats a negative stereotype of veiled Muslim women as unanimously disempowered and subjugated. However, here Sabera Bham suggests that 'Girl Power' isn't only accessed through unrestrained attitudes and unleashed suppression but can even burn brightly when contained by extreme modesty. By showing some of the many Muslim women who choose to be veiled, Bham attempts to balance habitual interpretations and show how such women retain and project immense pride, power and dignity while simultaneously broadcasting a clear demand for tolerance and respect. This demand, which initially seems to be a gender or cultural issue, is also a human message applicable to all.

Covering the body in this extreme manner eliminates the visual references via which we make instant judgements of others and provides an opportunity to give deeper consideration to a person described by little more than a formidable, yet gracious autonomy. Only "the windows to the soul" are visible and even these are sometimes covered by thin, transparent material making us aware of the sacred quality of eye-contact.

Eyes transmit the muted, internal power of our private sense of self-worth and when eye contact is made, a rarely visited nerve is struck by the momentary acknowledgement of another human being's true value, (i.e. their intimate value to themselves and to those closest to them). But this shared insight is also charged with responsibility causing us to reserve eye-contact only for privileged moments or a chosen few.

During an interview Bham explained that, surprisingly, the veil originated in non-Islamic societies and was adopted by Christians of the Eastern Roman Empire before the Prophet Mohammed requested that his wives be so covered. She also points out that the key reference to the veil in the Quraan is more ambiguous than expected; asking women to "...cast down their eyes...reveal not their adornment... and...cast veils over their bosoms." However, Bham's women do not cast down their eyes but, at her request, stare straight at the camera, disrupting expectations.

Bham originally produced these photographs for her degree show in 1996 and was inspired both by her Indian Muslim family background and by Andres Serrano's portraits. The professionalism of her photographs has created a strange blend of austerity and glamour but unlike Serrano she avoided framed and glazed, wall-hung prints and used slides projected onto cloth to evoke a sense of life and freedom. The soundtrack was a later addition for this, her first London show, and the fans which subtly animate the cotton screens and the images on them, and which now seem an intrinsic part of the piece, were initially only incorporated to cool the gallery.

Walking around the gently waving images, seduced by the soundtrack and caught in the crossfire of gazes, I was reminded of a comparison made between a veil and a flag, in that both are merely a
piece of cloth and yet both are exalted, held aloft, beyond criticism, as a sacred rallying point for an idea. But where does the power of the veil or flag lie, in the idea or in the cloth itself, in the concept or in the object?

Look for solutions behind the hangings or attempt to look back through the projected image as if through Muslim woman's point-of-view and you find yourself being stared at by the same projected eyes passing on through the thin cotton. Furthermore, you also suffer from the projector's focused light burning into your own vision. Thus the installation becomes a metaphor for morality and we learn the hard way how, within Islam's 'moral economy' of consequences, a covetous or disrespectful gaze can also return to burn. Sabera Bham's deceptively simple show has abstracted and translated some of the complex facets of an issue which is ironically often subjected to narrow vision. It deserves to be seen more widely.

END 750 Words

Lari Pittman @ Spacex Exeter 4 April to 9 May '98
& Cornerhouse Manchester 16 May to 5 July '98
& ICA London 15 July to 6 Sept '98
& Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva 22 October 1998 to 10 Jan 1999
Paul O'Kane
Apparently it's a cocktail of Queer and Latino culture laced with a "luxurious recklessness" inspired by a near-death experience that fuels Lari Pittman's festival of complexity. In the presence of his work you're initially bowled-over by a repertoire of techniques and his inexhaustible desire to communicate the diversity of LA's "hyper-capitalism" and American "Hybridity". Sexual imagery occasionally comes on strong as phalluses bust out of glittering gold liederhosen to cum in arcs across compositions with a fusion of eroticism and decoration Aubrey Beardsley would have admired. Then there's enormous credit cards, prompting requests for a 'capitalism-critical' interpretation, but Pittman throws no light here and insists the VISA and Mastercards in his work are no more than "formal devices", a reading which even he admits is hard to swallow. However, one VISA card, draped in painted pink lace seems to proffer credit as a soft, virtual alternative to the hard cash a macho society traditionally fights for.

The colours Pittman uses initially seem bright and celebratory, and yet, once our eyes adjust to the glitter, pizzazz and special effects, they discern a slightly subdued, faintly faded quality which describes the romantic sense of loss the artist refers to as the 'Bittersweet'. The 'Bittersweet' he explains, derives from a Latin, Catholic femininity like that of his grandmother. It's the ability to simultaneously experience beauty and tragedy within life's most ordinary moments, a sensation which, despite instant familiarity, is surprisingly rarely portrayed in art.

Pittman's work describes the fragmentary nature of experience and evokes stories which read as though found in a yellowing archive. These sudden asides into diverse times romanticised by distance are drawn into Pittman's world to receive the common patina of his handiwork. But just what time is it in Lari-ville?

Among Pittman's repeated motifs there's stencilled 'Barnum & Bailey' lettering paraded amidst abundant light bulbs and marching pylons which evoke early waves of mass technological uniformity. Here's a sense of 60's wallpaper, there's some 1930's illustration, but it's not all 20thC, there's old-fashioned acrobats, stylised leaves, trees and roses, all hailing from the temporal equivalent of no-man's land, and there's something uncanny out there too. Puritanical pilgrim's hats, strange shoes redolent of Salem witch-trials and more than a hint of Rip-Van-Winkle and Pinnochio. These revive America's European folk past from before its 'folk' turned into 'folks'; a past shunned by accelerating modernism and relentless capitalism but revisited by artists like Pittman who snoop around the nation's attic turning up embarrassing memorabilia.

On yet another plane of Pittman's multi-layered invention you discover the macabre, in black-silhouetted subs and warships waiting ominously off the coast while similarly rendered helicopters, not only hover over cityscapes infecting them with paranoia, but swing menacing black, be-jewelled hooks among the balloon-face inhabitants, catching some by the lip like state-of-the-art grim reapers.

These works are hermetic worlds, cultures unto themselves and, much as Pittman likes to unburden them by claiming they merely portray "the cultural landscape around me" that landscape never truly existed and nor did its strange time. It's a stencilled, painted, sprayed and dripped mindscape emerging directly out of hard-won techniques. There's no rapidly recorded emotion here, Pittman wouldn't represent or be represented by anything he hadn't thoroughly tamed and mastered.

Exerting this criteria delimits his imagery to provide the spectacle of a highly finished, lyrical taxonomy which, while bound to grow increasingly complex, insists on doing so with a high degree of consideration.

Is he superstitious? "No". The reply is frank and certain, so why can't I refrain from digging for the darkness, hunting for the oily generator humming beneath Lari's intoxicating fairground? Well, there's the spooky, labyrinthine sanitary systems decorated in cod-Victoriana and the ever-present pattern and folk-art references (so threatening to Modernist-reared nerve-endings). But ultimately Pittman is correct to divert my supernatural enquiries back to the objects, the paints, the supports, the things.

Furthermore the context of contemporary art has recently been populated by far more ephemeral gestures, expressive of an ironic, future-less, value-less Post-Modernism (which Pittman claims is guilty of developing an 'International Style' of its own) Therefore it's both the physical and cultural 'weight' of Pittman's "objects" that makes them seem strangers in their time while remaining influential enough to describe, not only some bygone eerie era but possibly a vision of the shape of things to come.

END 750 words

When words are applied to art, vocabulary is stretched and styled by the attempt to describe it until the two share characteristics. Subjectivity is the engine of both art and its interpretation and rhetoric is a 'sin' resulting from enthusiasm for our subjectivity. However, guilt-stifled artists and writers can take heart from Pittman's methods which license decorative speech, encourage hyperbole and acknowledge form and content in equal measure. After all, both artist and writer seek a convincing, fulfilling hypothesis, not objectivity. Pittman's rhetoric lies in his overstatement, his layered excess which initially unsettles but ultimately convinces by its inescapable materiality. This art makes no apologies for existing, "this rhetoric" as Williams says "is real."

Kate Smith Windows Gallery St Martins College London 18th May - 5th June
Paul O'Kane
Sawn-off logs stand in as plynths for green glass vases and bottles which present arrangements of shrub cuttings.

Little branches have been broken and tacked to hold up the precarious ...

In a blue background

A fan made of madly exotic scarlet and turquoise feathers attached to wooden strips and steel lengths sharpeened.

Bound with orange cotton and glued with gold sparkle.

An exercise bike, stranded off the ground, its pedals seized by cuts in logs.

Windows compete with windows.

Rousseau.

Water drops.

Accessible site.

Kate Smith @ Windows Gallery St Martins College
Charing Cross Road London 18th May - 5th June '98
Paul O'Kane
If in late May '98 you find yourself far from paradise, dragging your decadent body along London's Charing Cross Road, trying to ignore displays of guitars you'll never play and books you'll never read, you could be forced to stop and contemplate St Martin's College windows because here Kate Smith has crafted two tableaux to critique your over-familiar reflection.

This accessible site, so democratic (as democratic as shopping) allows access to its art 24 hours a day without placing the demands of a gallery on the viewer. But there are drawbacks. Onto my shoulders, as I scrutinise the art, water drips from the high eaves of the building and I wonder if this could be part of the work; a booby trapped 'ex-tallation' tipping God's watering-can over anyone intrigued enough to linger.

The two window bays have been painted a warm, pale, ethereal blue, and in one an exercise bike is stranded off the ground by foot-high logs which seize its pedals in tight fitting grooves cut into the wood. Similar logs stand in as plinths (for these post-plinthian times) and support a green glass vase and a bottle, both of which display arrangements of foliage. Little twigs have been manipulated and pinned to grip the glassware onto the obliquely chopped surfaces of the logs.

In the other window, again accompanied by glass and greenery, is a folding fan made of madly exotic scarlet and turquoise feathers attached by gold-sparkling glue to wooden strips bound with orange thread. This is shown high up on the wall, perhaps to increase its already considerable desirability. But stretch your neck to look more closely and you'll see that this accessory to-die-for is in fact potentially lethal. Three or four of the strips forming its framework are made of fiercely sharpened steel.

As well as keeping us cool, fans like this can be used to transmit a discreet and esoteric sign language across social spaces, but this example seems to belong to a resourceful ninjette who shares a lush environment with birds of paradise. The sophisticated sexual lures of the human 'animal within' inform this unnerving piece, prompting comparison with Smith's earlier work in which dress hats were decorated with fishing flies and a ludicrously oversized chaise longue floated above the floor. Those pieces, like the fan, were initially perceived as both 'feminine' and utilitarian until secondary, disturbing implications subverted their decorative, leisurely invitation.

Perhaps Smith is pointing out that if an established moral matrix has been theoretically deconstructed thereby releasing us into a 'jungle' devoid of reliable-yet-restrictive signs, then repressed and marginalised powers of instinct may now re-group to fill the resulting central vacuum. It follows that those best practised in the arts of resistance and subterfuge, i.e. those subjugated by the previously dominant matrix, are most likely to thrive in such a wild new milieu.

In the past Smith has hung-drawn-and quartered a motorbike and exhibited a grass running track in a psychiatric hospital The exercise-bike piece elaborates on these evocations of painful incarceration and frustrated excess energy. However, previously utilised vitrines and curatorial references have now been dismissed and here only the window itself arrests the moment of her objects. The carefully accommodated plant-life seems an optimistic sign that a relentlessly stressful world-view has been alleviated and Smith's troubled, troubling objects now at least inhabit a better-oxygenated realm.

Whereas earlier stand-ins for the human condition were alienated, sequestered from the world, stuffed, decapitated and museified, these works have a kinship with something beyond themselves and that thing appears to be a relatively benign Nature, a Nature which displays humour and guile- characteristics usually obscured by more predictable 'awesome' or 'picturesque' public faces.

But ultimately the Man-Nature relationship portrayed here is by no means straightforward, the log-jammed pedals of the exercise bike tell elderly joggers and homebound health seekers that they'll never escape the ominously revolving Earth Mother by riding Sunday-supplement-advertised simulators. Meanwhile the deadly fan warns of potential deception latent within every flirtation, including our current apologetic reunion with the much-maligned sublime or tentative negotiations with our sublimated interior darkness.

END 700 Words

Johannes Phokela @ Rack Gallery London SE1 May -July '98 Paul O'Kane
Post Modern thought supposedly liberates us from dominant white Western male perceptions and from the myths of a one-sided, linear history. Since the 'Enlightenment Project' began, the West made observations through a 'grid' of rationalism and, while subjugating other cultures, imposed this matrix over indigenous belief systems.

Now, in a neat inversion, the West observes that same grid or matrix (the stigmatised Modernism) through the 'Chaos' it currently embraces as the shapeless shape of truth.

Furthermore those cultures subjugated by the West, including the West's own subcultures, now apply their own matrix of beliefs onto a view of the dominant culture. Therefore, all that was marginalised may now enjoy its own myth of centrality while marginalising that which was previously central.

Johannes Phokela's current show at Lorraine Kordecki's fledgling 'Rack' gallery neatly illustrates. such theories while using them as a foundation for a more personal mission.

Phokela is a black South African working in London. He makes highly skilled oil paintings which appropriate from European Art history, particularly Rubens. This sounds like a familiar strategy, reminiscent of Achille Bonito Oliva's 1980s trans-avant garde-iists who sought to "escape the burden of art history by using it as a resource base for their elaborations of myth..." But if Phokela's strategy appears similar it is primarily to dispel the enduring ghetto-isation of black art as an exotic or patronisingly tolerated primitivism.

It has been said that flesh was the reason oil paint was invented, but Phokela's craft brings home the unpalatable fact that the entire great tradition of nudes in oils was a 'white thing'. Two obvious points which distinguish his work from previous history appropriators are his insertion of black figures into white-only scenarios and his strange use of a painted grid to overlay the final image.

Phokela's grid attracts many questions and interpretations. Why, having taken pains to render a large canvas in the style of Rubens, should an artist then subject it to this fragmenting screen of white lines? It could be that this super-self-conscious reference to composition paradoxically negates any formal reading of the painting, thus forcing us into a political or philosophical reading.

As was said above, a grid is indicative of Western attempts to master the world but when Phokela applies it over a painting called 'Fete Champetre' containing revelling 16th-17thC North European villagers (drawn from Bruegel and Rubens), it confirms the theory that we now live on the other side of a paradigm shift in our relationship with history.

Phokela points out that Rubens' revellers may be typical of the first settlers to colonise and exploit South Africa; they are in the right place, time and social bracket to qualify and it is just such ethical considerations (on grounds of both race and gender) that motivate thorough revisionism of the Enlightenment's lofty ideals and questionable achievements.

Hence we no longer share the same 'age' as the 17th Century but live at the start of a wholly new age which, in order to be born has to rip up the old rule book, including the rules of a processional history. Phokela's grid sequesters us from a past, draws an emphatic line between then and now. Time is manifested as space so as to manipulate it in service of a new picture of an old world..

The first work in the show is titled 'Candle Bathing" and re-interprets Rubens' 'Samson and Delilah' with Samson as Black, Delilah as naked and the servant who trims Samson as bald. Phokela's title, although suggested by the old servant-woman's candle, refers to the way white people sunbathe to darken their skins while implying black skin needs very little light to beautify it.

'Composition 1' shows two figures, one male, one female, chosen from far apart in art history (Corinth and Rubens) because of the coincidental similarity of their poses. They are set on either side of a tree branch from which a monkey proffers bananas. Both lean backwards and hide their hands as if afraid to be tempted by this alternative 'serpent' and its forbidden fruit.

'Humid Basement' re--presents Rubens' "Cimon and Pero" (Roman Charity) which depicts St Peter imprisoned and suckling from the breast of a young Roman woman sympathiser during the persecution of early Christians by Nero's Romans. In Phokela's version the woman has been undressed and given eroticising red shoes. Meanwhile St Peter has been African-ised, (or perhaps de-European-ised, as biblical characters were after all Middle Eastern). The resulting pair attract interpretations based on Africa's enforced charitable dependence upon Europe since colonialisation.

'Exaltation Allegory 66-33' is a diptych based on Bassano, Rubens and Van Dyck showing that, although we may be assisted by 'Good Samaritans' up the stairs of success, we are just as likely to be helped back down in later years. Phokela has given the job of assisting the old man's descent from grace to the only black character.

'Percussion Piece On Mount Serious' is a superbly amplified detail from Rubens' "The Worship Of Venus". Six dancing figures are gracefully arranged beneath Phokela's grid and twist and turn their luminous, almost translucent bodies to the sound of a tambourine held aloft.

The final work is 'Fete Champetre' -descrbed earlier- in which characters from Rubens and Bruegel have been fused together into a scene of festive villagers.

All of Phokela's works are extremely highly finished and completed with a uniformly matt surface giving them a classic, seductively dry quality. While using Art history for political/philosophical ends his work also educates us in the functions of histories like art history and simultaneously informs us on the techniques of a painter like Rubens. The work's physical resilience and mastery of technique can satisfy the most traditional markets yet it also baits Post Modern interpretations to feed the alternative trade in more avant-garde cultural capital.

END 980 Words

Master Organisers Summer 1998 Paul O'Kane
"...what other sign is there that two things are linked to one another unless it is that they have a mutual attraction for each other, as do the sun and the sunflower...that there is an affinity and, as it were, a sympathy between them? "

Michel Foucault. 'The Prose Of The World'

Synchronicity, when first encountered seems magical. Sharing characteristics with processes of both love and paranoia it lures us along paths between unlikely yet unarguable connections within an alternative, irrational narrative running parallel to common sense. Unlike books with their delimiting covers, synchronicity offers up the unbound contiguity of all things in a mysterious episteme and while reading this potentially overwhelming 'prose of the world' artists need a form in which to catch and contain their fractally multiplying thoughts.

'Master Organisers' is a collaboration between Laura Emsley and Sheila Grandison who gave themselves carte-blanche and three months to come up with a 'piece' using synchronicity as their methodology. They occupied a disused shipping office near Brick Lane in London and began by looking for a neat idea in an office-supplies catalogue called 'Neat Ideas'. There they encountered the original 'Master Organiser' which was a moulded plastic shelf-unit designed for "mastering daily paper flow". Amused by its promised authority they each ordered one and began their investigation, celebrating and marking each turning-point of their search with a bought souvenir or objet-trouvé.

But where does such an unfettered process lead? Hopefully to the revelation of something sincerely felt but thus-far hidden by more utilitarian mental processes. Both collaborators have South African connections and the phrase 'Master Organisers' rang ironic bells implying oppression and colonialism. This added impetus to the idea-exchange which soon arrived at consideration of The Kimberley Hole; South Africa's original diamond mine.

Now emptied of it's wealth, this, the biggest hand-dug hole in the world remains as a deep, dark scar on the African landscape, an ugly indictment of the crude intervention of capitalism on the continent. 'The Hole', providing as it did the foundation of South African wealth, can now be read as an opening paragraph in the story of that country's ills.
Master Organisers exhibited their diverse findings between the gloomy hours of 8 pm and 9.30 pm. Visitors were initially disconcerted by a lack of 'gallerific' white walls to recontextualise the collected objects which were instead placed as subtle interventions in the largely unaltered, 'warts-and-all' office. In the centre stood the paper-flow organisers, their flawless new-ness and dull grey colouring provided a negative, ghostly presence illustrating that the order they represent is threatened with extinction by liberative minds.

Visitors themselves became investigators, inspecting the room and its contents with forensic intensity, looking for clues, piecing together a story while consulting the attendant artists. Several objects: postcards of the Kimberley hole, a miniature cannon, a small figure of a Roman soldier, paint caught in a mould during an art-therapy class, a projected slide, an underground map, a handycam film etc. were placed around the room.

These disparate 'events' marked off co-ordinates on a journey through the collaborator's shared mindscape and created obscure relationships antithetical to the singular order presumed by the redundant paper-flow organisers which had ultimately functioned merely like grit in oyster shells, irritating the artists to bring forth their own idea of order.

The exercise advocated a thoroughly de-constructed practise in which none of the glamour of gallery or studio was allowed to flatter the bared mechanism at work and where the intimate social events of the 'showings' became an integral, ongoing critique.

During one of the many conversations generated by the work, a model of artists collaborating as a 'Bureau' arose, (precedented by the 'Bureau' provided by Surrealists to record the dreams of passing bourgeois commuters).

While 'art in the community' and 'local art practise' have recently re-emerged as imminent issues, this model (arising from and expanding the investigative and synchronistic qualities inherent within more familiar site-specific processes) now seems worthwhile. Perhaps every locale could benefit from an artist-run agency like Master Organisers, charged to discover and display obscure connections thrown up by synchronistic events while promoting alternative forms of order.

END 650 Words
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Blane de St. Croix Summer 1998 Paul O'Kane

Blane de St. Croix 'SOIL' @ Gasworks Oval London. 7-16th August 1998
When dissident surrealist Georges Bataille advocated a philosophy of "base materialism" he implied a life without ideals of spiritual transcendence yet somehow enlightened by swallowing the unpalatable truth of our physical make-up 'Don't look up for salvation', he seemed to preach, look down; admit the corporeality we share with beasts, plants, even the dirt. Thus dis-illusioned, we might relish our presence anew.

Blane de St. Croix; well known in his US homeland for ecology-conscious art works, visited the UK recently as a resident artist at Gasworks studios. This was part of a continuing programme arranged by the Institute of International Visual Arts and UNESCO to encourage international dialogue between artists. His show, which marked the end of the residency, was titled 'SOIL' and it was indeed local earth which formed the base material of the works St. Croix produced.

Three major pieces were carefully arranged in the gallery; one mixed dirt-drawing and installation, another framed earth in painting-like wall hangings while the third was a bed of hay upon which a mould had begun to grow and in which a deep, dark depression suggested a Rip Van Winkle-like character had recently arisen from a sleep of many years.

The first piece to confront the viewer was the drawing made of smeared wet soil on 8'x4' (2.4 x1.2m) single-ply wooden sheets. This represented a fearsome forest of trees and dank undergrowth. Strangely, the apparently impoverished medium succeeded in an almost trompe l'oeil effect in the hands of the artist, although the illusion was assisted by the presence of real branches leaning against the image where they mysteriously lent their reality to the representation rather than reveal any of its shortcomings by their proximity.

This work's brown monochrome, reminiscent of sepia-tinted photographs or Samuel Palmer's watery inked foliage, had a nostalgic, even traditional quality evocative of North European mythology or a scene set for an archaic fairy tale.

The three large framed squares of soil which faced the audience along the opposite wall raised the material up into the didactic plane in order to teach us something we had never considered in all our years of trampling over the stuff or disguising it with pleasing flowers and comfy grass. A thin, slightly ghostly mould had begun to spread across the surface of the framed earth and here and there little white dots of fungus punctuated the otherwise impenetrable material prompting the viewer's imagination to stretch enough to visualise stars arrayed against infinity and to therefore reassess the much-maligned dirt in line with non-hierarchical principles.

The bed of hay, with its blackened figurative indent looked ignominious, its plight saved only by being exhibited beneath the gallery's skylight as if the sad creature who had lain there undergoing some profound metamorphosis, had at least been availed of the sight of the passing heavens throughout the ordeal.

A few other small works were hung discreetly at the rear of the gallery and in these St. Croix had again experimented with dirt-drawing while also making fascinating dirt casts of small twigs and branches.

The show as a whole had a uniform, dense, monochrome look which was striking in the airy, whitened space. Blane de St. Croix had succeeded in challenging the vigilance of our claims to non-hierarchical perception by elevating this supposedly least of materials to the level of art while simultaneously reminding us of our ultimately chthonic fate despite lofty humanist aspirations. Georges Bataille might have enjoyed this show, as did the Gasworks audience.
END 600 Words

DEAL @ 198 Gallery Brixton 30/6 -15/8 1998 Paul O'Kane

Mayling To & Susan Pui San Lok
'Deal' at Brixton's 198 gallery was facilitated by artist Godfried Donkor who invited Mayling To and Susan Pui San Lok - British born artists with parents from Hong Kong - to organise a show beginning on the first anniversary of the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China.

Hong Kong is an exception to the post-colonial rule, the reins to its future having been handed, not to its own proudly inter-national people but back to what is now another external power, a nation who's handling of the 1989 pro-democracy student protests in Tiananmen Square shocked the world. China's official reassurances about the future are cushioned in diplomatic phrases like 'one country two systems' and describe Hong Kong as a 'Special Administrative Region' promised a 'high degree of autonomy' but history ensures that mistrust remains. Furthermore the handover sets up a 21st Century challenge in which Communism and Capitalism are juxtaposed in a new, uncertain chemistry. Meanwhile artists like Mayling To & Susan Pui San Lok reflect this atmosphere of apprehension in their search for appropriate cultural, national and ethnic identities while attempting to describe Hong Kong's own view of its unique post-colonial condition.

On a low plinth in the window of the 198 Gallery Mayling To presented a hand-made 'Hong Kong Phooey' doll lying outstretched, pinned from head to foot with a spray of fearsome acupuncture needles. This piece, titled 'A Cute Puncture' invited a reading of the 1970s TV cartoon star as Hong Kong itself. Here he looked dead or generally anaesthetised by the ancient medicine but whether the therapy had been prescribed to sadistically disable him or to provide a galvanising injection of tradition was unclear. Such ambivalence was a theme of To's work which repeatedly played out real-life culture-wars beneath initially comic appearances.

In 'Pandemonium', rain-grey suburban driveway bricks formed a low plinth through which imitation moss and weeds grew as if refusing repression by the ordering weight of the modern world. This heavy base provided a stomping ground for a hand-modelled, snarling panda, dressed, posed and ready for martial arts action. The panda character, who possibly represented China as an aggressive combatant, also appeared as a rabid Sensei proclaiming 'Learn How to Be A Hard Mutha' on posters recruiting for an imaginary dojo. These posters caused angry protest and stirred a dispute over cultural territory when To pasted them over a mural on the 198 gallery's external wall.

'Death of Hong Kong', a tableau designed to bring out the detective in the audience, drew comparisons between 150 years of Anglo-Chinese 'Deals' and sleazy private transactions involving violence and betrayal. A 1970s domestic interior, scaled down to Phooey-size (about two feet tall) was arranged as the scene of a crime in which a Phooey doll lay prone on a gaudy carpet with hands tied behind his back and eyes rolled upwards facing a cut-glass decanter and a spilled drink. A case full of 'heaven bank notes' - the kind traditionally burned at Chinese funerals - lay wide open and souvenir snaps of a special day were scattered on the shag-pile rug. Meanwhile, two clues; a black and white portable TV transmitting meaningless grey flecks and white-noise, and the wasteful glow of a small table lamp, conspired to suggest that this could be the early hours of the morning, perhaps the morning of the handover on July 1st 1997.

Susan Pui San Lok followed the angular architecture of the 198 gallery's back room to create an installation called 'Witness' in which hundreds of till receipt rolls hung from ceiling to floor forming a dense paper forest. The simple, throwaway material, once treated as something precious provided a spectacular trigger for memories of archetypal narratives involving journeys, woodlands and the passing day. Visitors, though tempted to push the paper aside and enter directly into its dense, light-dappled interior, tempered the impulse and followed a path around the perimeter of the room before gaining access to the centre.

Here, having solved the simple maze they were rewarded with the spectacle of the sun's rays being sucked down the lengths of paper through a skylight, a phenomenon which, by directing attention to the cosmic journey overhead referred to Hong Kong's East/West schism. However, any desire to linger here relishing a cloistered, contemplative moment was continuously subverted by speakers emitting an amplified mix of harsh street noise and soft whispers. This soundtrack, which Lok recorded on her return to Hong Kong during handover served to balance the work's beguiling form with elements of realism.

Finally, a laser-copy of a photographed walking stick collaged to the gallery wall acted as a tribute to the artist's grandmother who, during Lok's Hong Kong visit, provided a haven of intimate knowledge amidst a blizzard of handover hype by sharing some of her lifetime's stories. The image of the walking stick, which initially seemed extraneous to the central piece, contributed a sense of veneration and operated as an uncanny, ancestral presence endorsing the comprehensively transformed space like a signature.

'Deal' pointed out that a territory's true owners are those who regard it with affection and who depend on it to support their livelihood or sanction their identity, but the territory of Hong Kong is set to continue being used profitably by distant powers without prioritising its people's wishes. Its aspiring skyline describes how, during the 150 years since being ceded to the British it has become a very different place to most of China and a statistic revealing an average life expectancy 10 years longer than China's is equally telling.

Hong Kong has inadvertently evolved into a territory unto itself deserving self-determination and the right to choose its future, yet its people are forced to 'wait and see' how another external power will utilise it. Perhaps the 'deal' is that Hong Kong is destined to provide a welcome mat for the West to transform China's communism, or alternatively it may be used by China to proliferate an alternative to Western ideology. Either way it seems likely to continue as a utility for others as opposed to enjoying its own unique sense of nationality and culture. Its residents and descendants reflect this state of affairs in a confused and anxious search for their place in the world.

END 1000 Words

Personal Effects (Sculpture and Belongings)
@ Spacex Exeter 5th September to Oct 98
& Angel Row Nottinghgam17th April to June 99
Paul O'Kane
Personal Effects -subtitled Sculpture and Belongings- is Spacex exhibitions director Alex Farquharson's latest curation offering a tour through a denatured and distorted domesticity.

On a dour, thrift-shop dining table Jordan Baseman presents a precise, hand-built working model of a gallows in 1/12th scale. It's a replica of the apparatus used to execute the killers featured in Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood'. Utilising the obsessive drive of a weekend hobbyist Baseman here confronts us with a tangible example of the mechanics of justice contained within a macabre redneck trophy.

Nearby, a dark soul hovers over this morbid device; Ed Lipski has hung a black, inflated plastic figure on a thick steel chain. Its body sharply tapers into wispy limbs but the head is massively enlarged. Six inches of flaccid pipe serves as a nose but looks more likely to drip away the creature's sustaining oxygen than to enable it to breathe.

On a wall of this seriously dysfunctional home, hangs Yinka Shonibare's self-portrait dressed as an 18thC Aristocrat. He looks smugly out at the viewer, challenging us to interpret the scene. His large globe is turned to Africa highlighting this Afro-Aristo collision and shunting the age of reason's genocidal foundations to the fore.

Lying prone in front of this ostentatious image is Ed Lipski's 'Tattoo', a fibre-glass torso covered in pig skin, make-up and myriad 19thC tattoo designs. On a shelf across the hall Dorothy Cross has stretched a cow's udder over an archaic ironing implement, the nipple stands erect like a rhino horn and the hide has been scalded with a neat iron shape.

Skin features yet again in Nina Saunders' buttoned white leather sofa which bulges with a huge tumourous growth evoking dis-ease rather than relaxation and making it impossible to sit upon. A Shonibare foot-stool placed close-by also discourages use with its covering of pseudo-African material and collaged illustrations of African footballers in European team strips.

In a corner stands a pitch-fork provided by Jordan Baseman, it's redolent of Grant Wood's famously maverick painting American Gothic of 1930 but the decapitated head of a stuffed guinea-pig has been mounted at the top of its handle. Again the artist seems to dig at the mid-western underbelly of Americana, simultaneously arriving at an unforgettable sculpture. Rubber bands draped around the handle where it joins the fork add to the fetishistic feel and surreal implications.

The final room of the show features another Saunders seat, this time it's a chrome dining chair with a black vinyl covering melting into a pool on the floor. Any viewer tempted to sit on this disturbing object could gain a good view of Tracey Emin's contribution which consists of several monoprints of the female body in intimate and abject poses accompanied by scrawled utterances from an internal dialogue, In front of these is an 'Emin blue' stand supporting a vitrine which displays a cardboard dream-home.

The artist assembled this from materials found in an Istanbul hotel room and the result looks like a touching re-take on Langlands and Bell's revelations of architectural power. This fragile fantasy seems to extend Emin's well- known lyric museology into a brighter future but having completed the tour of Farquharson's unnerving household we're left haunted by an awareness of unpleasant forces latent in familiar objects and are henceforth less likely to feel at home anywhere ever again.

END

Spacex is a strikingly well converted industrial building tucked away on one of Exeter's charmingly tilted side streets. For several years now, exhibitions director Alex Farquharson has ably manned this under-appreciated South Western outpost of contemporary culture and here he once again serves up a sensory menu of intrigue and delight.

Calling a bunch of London-based artists down to this West Country outpost
The multi-leveled glossy black floor

Personal efects is subtitled 'Sculpture and Belongings' possibly implying several different kinds of belonging. We do become attached to odd things for very personal reasons, sometimes attracted by the very fact that something has obviously been parted from a previous appreciative owner, but this transfer reveals the object's autonomy and proclaims that it ultimately belongs only to itself.

This show brings together some private passions manifested in a strange domesticity, There's a settee and a foot-stooll, a kitchen table and a dining chair and a nice big framed portrait hanging on the wall, but the atmosphere, caused by the strange-ness of some of the objects or what has been done to them, is less than homely.

Ed Lipsky, well known for his subtly macabre syntax is already the author of many near-born mutant creatures usually blended from the human and animal realms and the perverse world of his imagination. Here a will-o-the-wisp figure is denied its childhood fantasy innocence by arriving jet black and with a massively enlarged, aspparently over-inflated head. A typically Lipskian Oxymoronic device is the flaccid pipe which hangs out of the inflated head like a nose destined to run for ever. the paradox lies in its apparent function as an outlet. Hung by a chain from the ceilingf it hovers over another hanging device, Jordan Baseman's 11/12' a perfect scaled down replica of the gallows used to hang the protagonists of Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood'

Illustration Letter in catalogue.

Skin

Susan Derges @ Newlyn Art Gallery Cornwall 19th Sep to 24th Oct '98& 'Surfacing' @ I.C.A. London 18th Sep to 1st Nov '98 Paul O'Kane
On a windblown, rainy, Cornish morning, little long-legged birds, oblivious to the weather, peck among the debris-strewn rocks of the bay curving gloriously from Penzance to Newlyn. There, in the welcome shelter of Newlyn Art Gallery's stylish, century-old architecture, Susan Derges has filled the walls with magnetically attractive photograms.

In an era when many painters either work from photographs or use some form of photo-mechanical reproduction as an aid, Derges, a Slade-trained painter, not only moved wholeheartedly into the photographic arena but dismissed using lenses to return to an early method of drawing directly with light. To produce her near abstract images - which would look equally comfortable in a gallery or corporation headquarters - she is called upon to enter into an un-mediated relationship with the landscape.

Derges uses specially built light-tight boxes in which to submerge Cibachrome (colour paper for printing transparencies) beneath the surface of rivers or coastlines at night while exposing them to ambient and flash light. The result when processed is a dazzling, direct colour imprint of a magic moment in the night life of nature.

The extreme sharpness of the photograms is a result of allowing the paper to register light passing through a running stream or ebbing tide without the interruption of a lens. In effect the water and any debris or life it may contain becomes the transparency to be printed. The resulting precision invites scrutiny of minute details which is in turn rewarded with a sense of heightened realism.

On the ground floor of the gallery, an early series using this process narrates the development of frog spawn into frogs by photographically freezing their shadows into William Morris-esque patterns against the earth-coloured ground of murky pond water. Elsewhere Derges has captured the dramatic geometry of fractured ice in minty greens and blues.

Upstairs, much larger works from 1997-8 are split into diptychs and triptychs to bring us gently vibrating pinks and lilacs and translucent electric blues and greens radiating through superb descriptions of rivers or coastlines in motion.

Photography is celebrated as the medium which enables us either to witness distant events we could not otherwise see or to capture fleeting moments only cameras make visible, but at the end of a century saturated in photographic images we may be in danger of forgetting how to touch and see the world as itself while growing to know all experience as merely quasi-photographic or filmic.

When Derges gets her hands and feet wet to produce these works she reminds us of all we've been missing while gazing through screens and cameras and reveals some of the sensual thrills in store for those willing to follow her return to the real.

Back in the city at London's I.C.A. a celebration of hands-on drawing is served up in 'Surfacing', an entertaining exhibition co-curated by Emma Dexter and Katya Garcia-Ant who seem inspired by innovative 1998 shows like 'A-Z' at The Approach and 'Lovecraft' at The South London Gallery.

Here drawing comes in many guises: abject-comical (David Shrigley), monstrously abject (Paul Noble), modest and delightful (Lily Van Der Stocker), funny and smart (Christopher Warmington, Nicholas Usansky), spellbindingly painstaking (Chad McCail, Ewan Gibbs), alarmingly charming (Peter Pommerer), lovingly rendered (Alessandro Roho), ironically traditional (Thomas Helbig) and traditional with a cutting edge (Gillian Carnegie).

The work of forty artists is spread high and low around the gallery in a way reminiscent of pre-Modern salons. Much is un-mounted paper simply pinned up and some is framed, but whatever form the drawings take and however they are presented they invariably provide direct evidence of the hand communicating the artist's persona more clearly and sincerely than more complex media.

Almost anything is deemed drawing in this show; little areas of shading which illustrate the difference between 'B' and 'H' pencils (Mark Dickenson) or a long division sum scratched down on paper (Usansky). Keith Farquhar shows two of his dry-wipe-board drawings which reference out-dated educational text-book covers and Paul Morrisson has painted one of his now familiar graphic landscapes direct onto the wall. Julian Opie has distilled a giant face down to a simple iconic description on a pasted-up poster and Richard Reynolds has used coloured pencil to draw a massive head covering the gallery's entrance door and surrounding walls.

This eclectic approach blurs dividing lines between value systems while promoting all kinds of mark-making to share the elevated context of the institute. The result is liberating, warm and witty while providing a microcosm of significant changes brought about in the past London art year; e.g. busy, internationalist group shows usurping the more individualist Brit-art scene while modest craft replaced the relative monumentality of the Sensation-alists.

This show is evidence of a desire to re-engage with innate human frailty through the metaphor of fragile pencil and charcoal. Like Susan Derges' work, 'Surfacing' reclaims a labour intensive Lo-Tech medium for art from an over-mediated, de-humanising, Hi-Tech-driven society and in the process makes us more comfortable in what should after all feel like our environment.

END 800 Words

Peter Doig & Udomsak Krisanamis @ Arnolfini Bristol England
29th August to 18th October 1998 Paul O'Kane 1
On crowded morning trains, rush-hour commuters hold newspapers high to obliterate first-hand experience while immersing themselves in a shared, off-the-peg reality knitted together by editors and media barons. Life now falls upon us in a shower of mediated events, none more or less profound than another as wars and cereal ads occupy equal column inches and interpretation is entrusted to the custody of journalistic synopsis.

Enduring this information blizzard, existence passes in a stream of gossip and rumour (much of which is none of our business) and identity fragments into multiple gullible heads eager to believe disparate messages. Eventually the once-sovereign subject capitulates and abandons the fickle, libidinal body, leaving little more than a translucent consumer eager to be duped.

But though humans en mass may coagulate in faceless uniformity, like snowflakes, closer inspection reveals no two to be alike and today an artist might be tempted to act as a solvent to such homogenising tendencies and even restore a model of free, unique selfhood to a society thoroughly cloned by media's demand for a predictable audience.

Udomsak Krisanamis and Peter Doig rise to this challenge in almost opposite ways; one directly applies himself to media's product with obsessive deconstructive labour, the other paints glimpses of alternative lifestyles only to find each escape-route tainted by unexpected vacuity.

Krisanamis catches harmful flakes of media fallout and transforms them into reflections of sold souls and corrupted hearts. Cutting text from newspapers and other printed matter he deletes, using tar-like paint, everything except elliptical white spaces at the centre of 'O's and zeros, thereby preserving only innocent blank space shining at the heart of dark textual meaning. His extreme censorship implies that the rejected words are either incorrect or superfluous to a search for higher language.

These strips and scraps are assembled by the thousand onto stretched gauze and worked into something resembling paintings. The results have a surprisingly hi-tech feel. Viewed from a distance, one large work creates moiré patterns as hundreds of tiny circlets oscillate in contingency. Smaller works bring to mind circuit boards - not printed with legible messages but encrusted with pure power-conducting material- and others, in which cellophane is shredded into translucent noodles cutting vertical lines through oily black grounds, look as though cat-scratched by something desperate to escape an over-mediated life.

Peter Doig shares the walls and rooms at Arnolfini and answers Krisanamis' anxious hail storms with several blizzards of his own. Snowfalls are a common sight in Doigland as are lone, faceless figures who go night fishing or hang-out existentially in a wilderness most urbanites know only through travel ads.

A varied selection of Doig's paintings ranging from 1990 to '98 is shown here and some of the early works have a noticeably easier, more open-minded feel. In 'Hitch-Hiker' (1990) a shiny red truck (reminiscent of fuel pumps in Edward Hopper's 'Gas') stretches its long load across a wide-angle landscape of plain green field and tumbling, sea-like sky. The painting's title provides a trigger which, like the figures leaving a rock concert in Doig's later 'Buffalo Station' (1997-8) (not shown here) evokes the closure of 60s and 70s idealism; a time when highways changed from freedom roads into cluttered death-traps patrolled by psychopaths and when hippies became indistinguishable from their long-haired exploiters.

Doig's paintings increasingly articulate such a post-revolutionary moment, describing an indifferent, shoulder-shrugging state-of-mind encountered at the end of rainbows. His is neither a utopian nor dystopian vision but more a Zen-enhanced view of non-events taking place in nowhere lands.

Another example is 'Milky Way', (1989-90) in which sticky white stars, sprayed across an indigo sky are mirrored in a lake around which grow spooky, phosphorescent trees. A lone canoeist drifts idly on the surface and this typical Doig motive of solitude amidst symmetry-in-reflection is also exampled here in Camp Forestia (Caretaker) (1996) where another languishing figure seems to acquiesce to the broken promise of comprehensible pattern in the universe.

However, for many, any guidance the heavens have to offer is obscured by a haze of sulphurous street lamps and salvation from urban ruts is just a dream. The resulting repressed desire and denied hope is compensated for by inflamed gestalt perception which, desperately imposing pattern on unrelated events, manifests itself as epidemic paranoia and cults of synchronicity. Meanwhile vampiric media continue to suck the meaningful dry, hi-jacking the once-redemptive constellations to be commodified as astrology pages in magazines. But such crass mechanics only add fuel to the fire of Doig's and Krisanamis' respective endeavours to rescue a little of the romance of being human from the voracious appetite of the inanimate world.

END 800 Words

jheglejland @ DECIMA GALLERY London SE1
20th October-8th November 1998 Paul O'Kane 1
'jheglejland' was discovered by seven Brighton-based artists pooling their resources to bring their work to a London audience. The show's strange title suggests a remote Arctic territory but is in fact a composite of the artist's names. Nevertheless it serves the purpose of temporarily cutting off the Decima Gallery from the known art world and intriguing visitors to come and view the exotica on display.

The show's overall appearance is relaxed and playful, featuring much interaction between the artists e.g. where Emma Drye hangs a neat row of steel paintings which feature less-than-fine 18th Century porcelain figures, Jenny Round has taken a gun of sealing compound and drawn a map outline which drifts up the wall, around Drye's work and out onto the gallery floor.

Nearby, Hannah Brian's scratchy line drawings, which look like reportage photography's 'decisive moments' isolated from their context, are placed far apart on the wall, but the resulting gaps have been invaded by the other artists' eagerness to fill vacant space with an eclectic variety of seemingly 'unimportant' pictures. These are described as a family tree.

The centre of the room is dominated by a Louise Colbourne and Joanne Alderson collaboration in which a gimmicky, wildly-angled chrome-and-glass shelf unit is crowned with an abundant, scruffy wig made from hole-punched computer-paper edge strips. These drape out across the room and hang lazily over one of the building's architectural A-frames.

Beyond this, on a ceiling-mounted monitor, Colbourne shows a video shot entirely
on location in her bathroom. It's reminiscent of nature documentaries about lands of spectacular geysers and ice floes but here in the 'jheglejland' equivalent, washing up liquid bottles erupt and soap suds slide slowly down tiled walls seeming to appeal for an awed response despite their extreme banality.

Decima's rear wall is painted a toy-box red emphasising the scout-hut-like building's generic 'house-shape' and at its foot Elaine Robertson -obviously homesick for the coast- has leaned her black and white photographs of sand castles. The ephemeral constructions look strategically personalised to avoid obvious pathos such objects might evoke.

The whole right-hand wall is used by Gisel Carriconde Azevedo -who appeared in this year's New Contemporaries- to show paintings made on stretched silver plastic. These also feature generic forms and colours in the shape of ducks, dogs, and houses in bright red or blue set above white-painted Op-art patterns. The generic shapes -evocative of the nursery- are taken from pastry cutters and also appear in the form of cut-out sponges glued to plastic balls which sit in a row on the floor looking like impossible to use ink-and-print devices.

On a wall by the door Jenny Round shows a 'painting' made by photographing her local BMX track and manipulating it by computer in such a way as to refer to traditions of landscape painting. To emphasise this pseudo-historical play the piece appears in an ostentatious gold frame.

'jheglejland' doesn't have a particular homogenising theme, though an air of mischievous deterritorialisation and recurring infantilisation implies that sea air keeps an artist young-at-heart. The show is an illustration of enormous reservoirs of marginalised talent latent beyond the capital and perfectly examples a way to transfer regional practise into London to educate city-bound aesthetes in fresh languages from not-too-distant lands.

END 570 Words

jheglejland website is found on: www 3. mistral.co.uk/wigwam.

Rita Keegan @ 198 Gallery October 14th - November 17th 1998
Paul O'Kane
Brixton's 198 gallery has for many years been devoted to the promotion of multicultural activities with a particular emphasis on Afro-Carribean and Afro-American artists. During September and October 1998, Rita Keegan, an American artist based in Britain and specialising in relationships between, art, new-media and historical processes undertook a residency at the gallery. The result was a show called 'Family Histories: Eating with our memory, Sleeping with our ancestors'.

In the centre of the 198 gallery's main, daylight-filled space Rita Keegan has set out a chair and tables. This provides an invitation to visitors to rest, wait, think and talk. The artist knows of course that the kitchen and its table are traditionally the most hospitable part of a home and consequently its real communications centre despite telephones, T.Vs and computers proliferating in other rooms.

On one wall, several uncannily high-quality colour computer scans of kitchen aprons (originally sewn by a Grandma Keegan) are framed and glazed and hung in a rigorous grid. Similar works hang on another wall and on the table lie aprons which the artist has made and illustrated with family portraits. Facing the framed apron scans on the opposite wall is a regimented array of glass containers standing on shelves and filled with spices and condiments from around the world. Small draw units on plinths also conceal powders, herbs and pulses.

'Apron strings' are used as a metaphor for prolonged maternal dependency and the brightly coloured designs shown here do seem likely to at least create a formative memory when regularly confronted by a knee-high child. Furthermore, such an impression would only be deepened by the homely aroma of these objects in use.

Convenience cooking means that domestic aprons are used less often today but they maintain their status as uniforms which, like any other, signify serious work in progress. There's something ancient about them too; in fact the artist suggests they may be the very first garment, pointing out the way that they protect the vulnerable and precious area of the body from the waist to the knee during food preparation - though certain examples in Keegan's collection which she chose not to exhibit are dys-functionally diaphanous like night-gowns and apparently designed to serve a more sensuous or symbolic function.

The display of such a variety and number of these garments can also be read as a class signifier stating that the artist's grandmother had time and money enough to decorate the bare facts of life with a little style. Thus, though apparently banal, these simple household objects are capable of leading us into consideration of several diverse cultural and historical matters.

Pass beyond this room through a black-out curtain into a darkened space and there, silently, on a white-sheeted double bed, the artist, in the form of a video projection, is tossing and turning through an endless, restless night. This piece produces instant reverence in the viewer and respect for the figure who, despite being close -albeit only virtually present- is helplessly distanced by sleep. The piece initially provokes childhood memories of observing parents before waking them or of sad times later in life spent at the side of sick-beds. But when we notice other ghostly images begin to overlay the sleeper and these become recognisable as old family photographs, the film and its artful projection reveals itself to be a moving representation of the analogous relationship between dream and ancestry. .
In living our fast-moving lives we work hard to be of our times while adjusting to our milieu yet still the past embraces us stifling a drive to be free. Here Keegan seems to suggest that the past also operates like dreams, making itself visible when necessity demands, subtly guiding us when we stumble or waking us before we fall, reminding us of mislaid self-knowledge and tempering our progress with the wisdom of generations.

The invention of photography democratised and proliferated the ability to retain an ancestor's likeness and now video and digital technology enable a past that is more real to be more accessible to more people so that loved-ones who are no longer physically present can be easily invoked to assist our passage through troubled times. Keegan's installation seems to suggest that by accessing and gradually mastering the virtual realm we can make inroads into or even gain control of the spirit world.

In the same room, a folding screen of the kind one might change clothes behind is illustrated with illuminated translucent panels featuring more images of Keegan's family history. This object implies that while we can transform our appearance, changing identity is a far more difficult question. However complex the post-modern interpretation of identity becomes, identity can't escape its relationship to time and thus could only be fundamentally changed by going behind the scenes of history to tamper with our ancestry.

Rita Keegan has produced a deceptively simple-looking show as a result of her intention to domesticate the gallery space. She first confronts the viewer with an environment which seems almost too familiar to be thought of as art. However, once viewed in its entirety and considered in depth, the show is seen to critique the gallery by feminising its neutered space and provide food-for-thought about issues of ancestry and identity while spectacularly evoking mysterious realms of experience. Furthermore it hints at the way in which hyperreal, computer-manipulated images may revolutionise our relationship to memories thus-far delimited by the aesthetic of traditional, chemical photography.

END 950 words

Fischli and Weiss 23 Oct to 21 Nov '98 White Cube
Paul O'Kane
Once, on an expensive whim, I bought kaleidoscopes for all my family; the best one I gave to my mother. There's many times when you get such an urge to share a private experience with others but the significance of this memory to writing a review of the Fischli and Weiss show at White Cube is that not only does their work operate in many ways like a kaleidoscope, slowly shifting from one surprising, multicoloured juxtaposition to the next, but it's also the kind of show my mother would enjoy because its central motive is the unarguable beauty of flowers.

Blooms of many kinds pass before our eyes courtesy of two slide projectors focused precisely on the same space so as to overlap and dissolve different images. Ice blue skies and the occasional de-ironicised sunset add fuel to the already explosive palette while gorgeously ripe fruit or the graphic leaf pattern of a vegetable are occasionally called into service to promote an Eden-like atmosphere of both splendour and abundance.

Sick of the overloaded urban environment where we're kept under constant surveillance its no wonder that artists like Paul Morrisson or Fischli and Weiss are re-activating the rural aesthetic; we need to at least remember that an alternative exists in order to survive the urban life. Furthermore it might be useful to be able to recognise some flora and fauna should we suddenly choose to go back to the land, and thereby avoid yet another form of alienation.

This work also coincides well with a neo-abstract resurgence in the air in shows which include Daniel Sturgis or Jane Harris because the flowers, once broken down by morphing overlays, seem to similarly promote form as the new content in current art.

Its very important that the images do overlap and appear in constant motion because the still photograph of a perfect flower, far from doing it justice, tends to promote a sense of death rather than life and emphasises photography's archival stillness -as the great fashion photographer Irving Penn found when he took on the challenge of photographing the ultimate super models late in his career.

Fischli and Weiss's piece perfectly compliments the intimate White Cube space and their work provides a therapeutic haven from the car-strangled Piccadilly streets outside. The experience of watching this show pass before our eyes is faintly reminiscent of the euthanasia scene in the classic Edward G. Robinson/ Charlton Heston future-cop movie 'Soylent Green' (1973) but here there's no tear-jerking light classical music, only the regular clunk of slides falling into place and carousels shuffling around. Furthermore it's a work which provides all seasonally affective disorderlies who's mind state takes a nose-dive as days grow short, cold, and dark, with a much-needed bouquet of optimism and a recharge of the beauty batteries to get us through 'til spring.

END 480 Words

The Neighbouring Shore
A Show of young Latin American Artists hosted by the Embassy of Venezuela Bolivar Hall, Grafton Way London W1P 5LB
10th Nov to 21st Nov '98 Paul O'Kane
On first appearance there's something light and aspirational pervading this curation of six "young Latin American artists". The unusual venue of a national Embassy building has been subtly infiltrated and transformed by varied strategies and media to unsettle the institution's authority and aerate its sense of power and permanence.

The first work to confront the visitor is a strip of medical plaster tape stretched across a stairwell, carefully placed at a height which obliterates the sight-line of a bust of Bolivar (the legendary 'liberator' of South America). If followed, this tape is seen to continue in a line which wraps around the architecture like a gag and eventually leads to a claustrophobic projection room in which Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre- the Uruguayan artist responsible- has installed a video piece showing herself as a bust.

Lopez de la Torre's monitor is sited directly behind Bolivar on the other side of a wall and mirrors him in more ways than one. In the film the artist repeatedly masticates on red paper folded into aeroplane shapes thereby not only providing a female alternative to the historical, male authority figure but also replacing the spouting of loaded speeches with the consumption of blank pages served in the form of flight and the livery of blood and revolution.

Another artist who consciously subverts the Bolivar hall's architecture is Paola Junqueira from Brazil. One of her video works consists of two monitors placed side-by-side, both featuring action recorded in a utility room normally hidden behind the scenes of the main space. On one monitor, a haircut is in progress (pieces of cut hair are available to visitors as souvenirs). The adjacent monitor displays the activities of waiters on the show's opening night as they use the room to wash collected glasses and load trays with drinks. Hence the haircut and the waiters' role are equated as involving surreptitious preparations for display which are then subjected to surveillance and exposed for all to see. In this way Junqueira examples the artist's continuing role as dis-illusionist and myth-buster while emulating the omnipresent eye of authority.

In the spacious gallery, visitors become aware of surprising sounds and glimpses of music broadcast at thoughtful five-minute intervals. These are Mario Verandi's 'sound postcards' representing aspects of life in his Argentinean homeland. The recordings fall from speakers set in the high ceiling and contribute sounds of riverbanks and falling rain to the atmosphere.

This delicate soundtrack compliments photographs taken by Mauricio Lupini from Venezuela which abstract contrived simulations of natural environments found in science museums to leave us guessing what a sea-blue carpet or a wall painted as woodland might contextualise. The large unframed images simultaneously refer to exoticisation and stereotyping in inter-human relations and remind us that we are all in some way subjected to a prescribed habitat in which we are presumed to belong.

Jaime Gili -also from Venezuela- reaches for the sky with two very long, narrow paintings each consisting of a red triangular flash dividing an elegantly dimensioned white ground diagonally in half. One leans to a point on the wall above head height
where a purpose-built, plinth-like shelf supports the base of the second painting which in turn continues a journey to the ceiling, emphasising the dynamic design's reference to speed and escape.

Isabel Caleya brings the show a little closer to earth with large, square photographs of broken or outmoded furniture discarded on a London housing estate. Caleya uses a Hasselblad's high-quality lens to flatter and catalogue these ignominious juxtapositions thus creating confusion over whether to read the work as the product of a privileged, anthropological eye or as an exposé of 'first world' excess. However, accompanying drawings which carefully trace the outlines of the assemblages with designer-like precision divert interpretation to the question of how accidental these apparently chance encounters really are.

Another film by Paola Junqueira shows an interior with an entrance to the right of the monitor screen and stairs which serve as an exit at the rear. The artist enters and mixes soapy water in a bucket using a food mixer to achieve maximum froth. She then transfers the liquid to a larger vessel, strips and seems about to bathe, but having coated herself in suds, immediately exits via the stairs only to re-enter soon after, clothed again, from the right. The ritual is repeated in a tape-loop.

This film, which initially seems to be an allegory of birth, redemption, death and rebirth takes on the form of a tribute when the artist acknowledges the inspiration of Brazilian poet Ana Christina Cesar who tragically threw herself to her death while similarly soaped. Junqueira suggests that "the soap made her slide quicker through the air!"

Although repeated references to transcendence, aspiration and purification might tempt the homogenising interpretation that a characteristic of work by "young Latin American artists" is a desire to quasi-religiously purge themselves of the legacy of political turmoil haunting their homelands, a more objective, non-nationalist perspective simply admires this art's ability to subtly disperse into an unusual, establishment context where it displays an ability to speak obliquely of critical, political and philosophical matters while translating deeply-rooted personal motivations into a clearly articulated universal tongue.

END 860 WORDS

The Origin Of Parties Greengrassi December 1998
Paul O'Kane
Greengrassi's converted apartment in Fitzroy Street has floor to high-ceiling windows which grace the space with London light, but the objects assembled here seem oblivious to such flattery; in fact, far from relishing this attention the art appears reticent, muted, even sulky.

Gareth Jones and Steve Dowson are both fond of found ephemera and, looking at their work you can imagine them fighting over un-sellable objects left at the close of a flea market. Dowson proudly props his finely executed parlour-size painting of vased flowers and homely still-life on a ragamuffin pedestal consisting of a paint-spattered kick-stool, a cardboard box and a floral-pattern tablecloth. This -intentionally- does little to elevate the status of the art object.

Dowson is obviously serious about painting but equally committed to undermining the value-system within which it circulates, hence his supports are often 'worthless' urban flotsam at odds with gallery chic. Meanwhile the variations on vanitas he represents involve lowly objects which almost obscure his expertise and simultaneously ensure the paintings won't be read as celebrations of the excessive culture from which they arise.

Tomma Abts' small, non-figurative paintings are evenly dispersed around the walls between the work of Jones and Dowson and yet provide little contrast, thereby confirming that this show sits together almost too comfortably.

The Abts paintings make use of a kind of knock-kneed geometry (occasionally utilised by Peter Davies) falling between two stools of Modern abstraction and a fashionable reappraisal of the retinal in art (Dan Sturgis, Sybille Berger). Not that 'between stools' is the wrong place to be, far from it; either that or fence-sitting has long been the trajectory-surrogate of artists denied the straight, avant-garde-paved road of Modernism. It's precisely these 'non-positions', previously underrated activities and rediscovered 'un-modern' realms that today become positivised and ripe for exploration. Thus it's difficult to resist christening as 'Abtsraction' (sic) these sullen, consciously awkward paintings which refuse to stun or dazzle despite angles and circles that aspire to optical drama.

Gareth Jones certainly shares this liking for discomforting modesty; a hastily made 'no-go' bar of red and white banded wood is hinged low down on a wall to rest its opposite end on a sheet of broken glass. This presses and frames what appears to be a collage of photocopied male stars, and yet the faces are not all familiar and the piece possessively seals itself in whimsical esoteria.

Across the room, two small, mustard-painted boards stand hinged on the floor with white cotton gloves pinned to the back like sadly inadequate wings for an unlikely Icarus. An equally glum spectacle is created by grimy basketball boots assembled into a symmetrical starfish pattern connected by spider-web-woven laces. The result is like a 'Rart and Sete' send-up of Cathy De Monchaux's orgasmic/organic engineering.

But Dowson trumps these ignominious manoeuvres with two pieces of his own. In one, a discarded wooden chair-seat hangs by a theatrical hook-and-chain from centre ceiling. On its surface is rendered a plastic Pegasus and a Ronald McDonald
freebie toy. In a corner of the gallery a disowned notebook-cover faces a mirror which reveals it's spreadeagled innards to be adorned with a thinly painted self-examination of ambiguous genitalia.

Jones responds with further oddities including a poor man's Op-art pattern made of red, gold and green tape and pins as well as a column of slide mounts laughably glued into cubes and stuffed with cream wool. But Dowson rallies to provide an anatomical chalk-drawn portrait revealing the unpalatable truth of human internal make-up. Typically this is rendered on a discarded early-learning blackboard complete with generic nursery images of 'Duck', 'House', 'Tree' etc. plus the inevitable clock-face with moveable hands. All this contradicts the morbid portrait by promising that simple, primary-coloured life we lose sight of as we grow to come face-to-face with complexity and mortality.

The pastel modesty and semi-melancholy of the work in 'The Origin Of Parties' decorates Greengrassi with the kind of rainy-day blues which perhaps inspired the show's title. The fin-de-siecle art world is a formless eruption of heterogeneous invention gently guided by increasingly visible curators assembling temporary theses. The juxtaposition here of Abts, Dowson and Jones asserts the satirisation of achievement and argues for the charm of modest offerings while subtly turning our heads away from glitz to acknowledge the emergence of some sophisticated critical visions.

END 780 WORDS

'INTERIOR INTERIOR' @ DANIELLE ARNAUD PAUL O'KANE - 4 FEB - 6 MARCH '99 OPEN FRI-SAT-SUN
123 KENNINGTON ROAD LONDON SE11
The whitened, public gallery space has long flattered all kinds of objects into dreaming they might be artworks, however, at Danielle Arnaud's elegant Kennington home/salon, art, competing with tastefully coloured walls and well-chosen furniture, truly works for its status.

David Bate's colour photographs depict restaurant meals at various stages of consumption but paradoxically clash with Arnaud's downstairs dining area. The food is rendered unpalatable by cold flash light producing hard-to-digest images which seem to sneer at our rarely ruffled aesthetic milieu.

But if the dining room puts you off dinner then Marc Hulson's paintings dash hopes of peaceful sleep. In colours mixed down to misery-grey, monstrous stories unfold across a sequence of small squares. The result evokes the terror-vision of waking from nightmares to a formless self in a dimly recognisable room. Here, disdaining painting's love affair with light, the brush squeezes out a tale of -aptly enough- a tail, a rotten, ratty thing, here attached to a human back, there disappearing behind furnishings or dangling from an open mouth.

Upstairs, Susan Morris shows two video works each displayed on two monitors. 'Everything stays the same' replays the view from the gallery window with half of its doubled image flipped into symmetry. The scene is not spectacular, just low-rise apartment windows and trees. Even when something does happen it isn't much; a man walks by, a bus passes or pigeons take off, but these non-events are further negated by their simultaneous reflection which denies escape from monotony and kills time stone-dead by mirroring each promise of plot.

Symmetry occurs again in Marc Hulson's larger works. Two, near-monochrome canvases of a similar humourless hue face each other across the width of the house creating a melancholy crossfire. Close-up, their charcoal tones offer little description but within the gloom a strong sense of the sublime emanates through dark drapery.

Meanwhile David Bate's Iris prints reduce snaps of family strolls to silhouettes which, like the whited-out Omagh bomb figures, invite us to project possible relationships onto faceless forms. A couple with a pram take a sidelong glance at a lurking third party while countryside ramblers are brought close to tragedy by a sheer drop computer-carved into their landscape.

Susan Morris's second video, titled 'Witness' screen-scrolls transcribed observations made by two people looking simultaneously from different floors of the same building. This references Jewish Talmudic law in which 'objective' proof is only achieved by the testimony of witnesses unfamiliar to each other. Morris' work seems to employ various forms of doubling in search of less 'human' alternatives to the Cartesian, cyclopean 'I'.

Fortunately for Arnaud, the hospitable atmosphere of her family home can withstand such affronts to comfort and complacency because 'Interior Interior' succeeds in creating unease in the human subject; rubbing our face in what we eat, manifesting mental malaise and fragmenting the security of a single-minded view.

END 500 WORDS

'ROUTES' @ Brunei Gallery S.O.A.S
22nd January to 26th March 1999 Paul O'Kane
The purpose-built Brunei Gallery, adjacent to SOAS on the ULU campus is an opulent setting which demands that the work of the five 'Routes' artists 'hold its own' in what-could-be a daunting environment.

Godfried Donkor's 'From Slave To Champ' paintings show black boxers set against slave-ship-builder's plans, Hogarthian crowd scenes and bright colour grounds. Mohammed Ali is here, proudly posed against scarlet, along with 18th and 19th Century pugilists like Tom Molineaux and Bill Richmond. The work conjures mental narratives of the long-haul from slavery to entertainer while reframing the ropes of boxing-rings as cage-bars for displaying types of 'other'.

Here on the lower floor of the split-level gallery, Donkor's canvasses rub shoulders with paintings by Johannes Phokela and drawings by Hew Locke. Phokela re-paints old masters while interjecting critical twists to subvert and re-write European art history. Here he shows 'Trustafarian', a re-worked detail from Rubens' 'The Head Of Medusa'. The severed head of the serpent-haired mythological figure has, in Phokela's version, a smoking spliff in hand and a cocaine-loaded credit card close-by. It's the artist's swipe at hedonistic rich-kids who appropriate Rasta style while living on trusts and inheritance. Phokela also shows a Jordaens feast re-worked to include a dancing, fleshy nude and an African's head presented in a cage which, in the original painting, contained a songbird.

Pathological rage seems to drive Hew Locke's hand as he turns the tables on the 'othering' eye to look through the horrified perception of history's colonised. His drawings, on bone-coloured paper, are unnervingly original, inviting scrutiny and
engaging viewers despite macabre, grotesque and carnivalesque content. Skull-patterns decorate the clothes of 18th and 19th Century European figures who's skin sometimes appears like scaly armour. Are these flamenco-dancing, rifle-toting colonialists actually cold-blooded reptiles dressed to kill or are these images merely fear-induced hallucinations?

Nearby, Locke's impossible-to-miss sculpture/installation of a magnificently shambolic ship is created from plain, packing-box cardboard profusely decorated in roughly cut-out, Alhambra-like, openwork patterns. But Locke's vessel seems more abandoned house-boat than sea-worthy craft, its baggy hull twists and splits, its superstructure sags and the whole thing appears to have clumsily shunted itself into the gallery wall. Look closer and you notice bar-codes and the word 'EXPORT' repeatedly cut amidst the pattern and then you realise that - like a late-90s reading of Eric Williams' classic 'Capitalism And Slavery' - what lies before you is an unsalvageable heap of ill-founded, guilt-scuppered Enlightenment trade in exotica, past its sell-by-date and ready to rot.

Upstairs, Juginder Lamba and Frances Richardson's work welcomes visitors to the ground-floor galleries. Richardson fuses natural wood carving, conceptual art and a dash of Art Povera to bring us a small log inverted and acrobatically elevated by its branches which are de-natured by a thick coat of cream paint. Grainy bark is juxtaposed with a simulation of smooth, stripped branch providing a kind of overstatement of surface. Elsewhere, more substantial logs have had their extremities sliced into abrupt planes echoing and engaging with the architecture. These are hollowed in variously ways and either dressed in super-surface materials or strategically stripped. One contains a mirror, creating the illusion of an infinite tunnel, perhaps leading to our latest (or lost) fantasy of the natural world.

Richardson also shows drawings of myriad, pencilled zeros, ones and pluses. These form concentric, undulating rings like sections through a tree. In the centre, systematic pattern gives way to blank base paper in the shape of a leaf. Do nature's forms arise from numbers or vice versa? The human viewer is left juggling macro- and micro-cosmic perspectives.

Juginder Lamba also hand-carves natural wood but any would-be conceptual element is here engulfed in a less cryptic language of sensuous metaphor and symbol. Far from 'Povera', Lamba's superbly crafted work elicits admiring, tactile responses from a broad audience and appears commodified and decorative when set against the work of his fellow 'Routes' artists.

Johannes Phokela intervenes in the Lamba-dominated entrance space with his re-painting of 'The Execution of Emperor Maximillian' by Manet. It's strongly reminiscent of the original except that the figure behind the firing-squad contemplating his weapon is holding a far-too-modern Kalashnikov. Phokela seals the image beneath his trademark white-lined grid which, not only highlights composition but, like the anachronistic gun, sequesters us from Manet's time by materialising the matrices of history.

'Routes' successfully homogenises some politically-charged, hungry-looking work with easier-on-the-eye metaphysical propositions by way of considered curation and the influential context of the gallery. However, this flattering showcase inadvertently inspires a desire to see some of the work energised by less institutional surroundings or juxtaposed in more extreme contrasts.

END 800WORDS

Mutant @ Gallery II University of Bradford
Feb-March '99 by Paul O'Kane
"In the future there'll be two kinds of people, those working behind the screen and those watching it - make sure you're behind it" someone once advised me. Today we're swamped by 'young media professionals' exponentially expanding the image machine while a generation armed by media-studies deconstruct whatever it serves up. The 'Mutant' artists, curated here by Kate Smith, explore various spin-offs from this exchange including mediated relationships and the way prescribed roles pull and distort identities.

Chloe Piene's 'Little David' video stars a boy of about ten modelling white Y-Fronts and strutting his puff-chested stuff acting a role as protective hard man. His voice is synthesised into gravelly, adult tones reminiscent of the possessed 'Exorcist' girl. "Come and get it" he grunts, taunting the darkness surrounding a patch of light in which he shadow-boxes seemingly at the edge of the inhabitable world. "I'm a barbarian me!" This un-credible hulk (sic) waves slow-motioning arms growling "Hey cutie come over here, don't be scared, forget those boys, I'll squash 'em, I'll squash 'em 'til there's nothing left" Is this Piene's ideal hybrid of boy and man, accessible only via convenient video technology?

Meanwhile from behind a screen of Texas prison bars another beau corresponds with the artist. Whether the inmate knows their amorous exchanges become artworks is unclear but they're all here, bound and titled 'Lovelady, Texas' making compelling, if voyeuristic reading. Amidst mutual small-talk and flirtation the prisoner reveals resentment towards affirmative-action and non-white America in general and discusses his German grandfather's support for Hitler -further questioning the ethics of the piece. But having today theoretically eroded the necessity for both 'true-romance' and the novel perhaps this is a sincere and excusable attempt to substitute for such life-enhancing narratives.

Virginia Nimarkoh's 'Happy Valley' video candidly relates the kind of chalet-camp English holiday Martin Parr might photograph but Nimarkoh paints a warmer picture in which an elderly, white, working-class couple get on fine with her young black family while sharing lo-budget, out-of-season accommodation capable of testing the best relationships.

A cast-plaster pit-bull terrier glimpsed by the camera serves both as a chalet door-stop and as symbol of working-class British hostility with which generations of immigrants have rubbed shoulders and which middle-class liberals keep at a safe distance. But this preconception-challenging film refutes this stereotype while providing a day-by-day document of an elderly couple's world gently fading like old postcards.

We see chalets through rainy windows, fish and chips, a black baby kissed and hugged by the white-haired pair and orderly privet hedges surrounding the regimented camp. Radio and T.V. interject with news of Mandela and Tutu and an England v Germany football match. These date the film and example the media diet of its characters. Nimarkoh's camera sucks all this banality in to produce critically tinted 'snaps' by which to remember a moment when one burgeoning culture recorded the sunset years of another. But 'Mutant' moves beyond culture-critique and identity politics to explore the lure of forms to which we aspire and places where we 'wanna' fit-in. In Barry Reigate's glossy, lipstick thick, colour-saturated paintings of himself and model girlfriend Rose, the artist grins at the audience through carefully airbrushed teeth. A vitrine full of magazine clippings describes attempts to crack the media ceiling and gain exposure as painter, model, dancer and specialist make-up artist while revealing an obsession with image, surface and vampiric media's promise of lifeblood.

Virginia Nimarkoh's portraits of herself are made in sepia chalk and charcoal by Leicester Square's tourist-trapper artists. Some are awkward but contain moments of inspiration, others are more consistent yet appear over-ornamental. This 'Nubian Queen' acts as if needing to understand how she is perceived by the so-called 'post-colonial city'' while apparently requesting endorsement of her appearance.

Meanwhile Reigate's video replays a catwalk show in which the eyes of models flick around the audience looking wiser than any to the image game. They've been made-up and made-over so many times, bathed so often in flattering light that their gaze disdains the audience's hopes for redemption through style. Their short careers as unreachable ideals perhaps paradoxically make them more realistic than either those who offer them for consumption or those who gape, thus image and reality grow increasingly confused calling forth hybrid terminologies and 'mutant' language to accurately describe our world. END 750 WORDS

GILLIAN CARNEGIE @ CABINET LONDON ECI Paul O'Kane - 28th MAY-26th JUNE 1999
While an influential school of British painting has long promoted a form of ultra-modern, super-superficiality which reduces representation to a mere outline of experience and renders meaning tissue-thin, Gillian Carnegie appears to have taken the opposite path. She re-approaches traditional genres like landscape, still-life and the nude through established illusions available to oil painting. Yet she defies expectations of a reactionary art by wielding tradition like a weapon, inverting it's role as the establishment against which progress kicks. Possibilities arising from this maverick stance presently seem attractively potent compared with endgames and brinkmanship which portray our sensual environment as over-familiar and fatally impoverished, thereby choosing to ignore its richness, mystery and complexity.

A judgmental air of crime and punishment, good and evil metaphorically manifests itself in the strong chiaroscuro pervading this, Carnegie's first solo show held at the Cabinet gallery's crisp new EC1 space. All-but-concealed quasi-chameleon figures and confused exhibitionists appear here looking both hyper-self-conscious and painfully aware that their conscience originates at the skin. In 'Big Bear II' an almost indistinguishable man wearing only swimming trunks skulks among deep-blue moonlit bushes as if carrying out a covert raid on shame and this image is emblematic of the artist's themes of darkness, conscience, and self-consciousness which are scrutinised as if by someone anxiously clarifying idiosyncratic views.

A brand of hard realism, perhaps indebted to Courbet and Zola, underpins both the choice of Carnegie's subjects and the style of their execution as her paintings peer into the unseeable to discover crime-scene-like locations redolent of unspeakable events.

The medium's long-term relationship with light and its aspirational metaphors is sidelined to enable exploration of a parallel universe in which darkness is the default to which all things return. In fact much of this work betrays symptoms of photophobia. A small 'Untitled' canvas detains us within a shady forest's edge unable or unauthorised to participate in a sun-drenched day gleaming beyond while 'Long Night' places us in an unlit corridor facing a dilapidated fire-escape bathed in a grim tungsten glow. Such an unpromising way forward makes the surrounding shadows seem relatively hospitable.

But 'hospitable' rarely describes the environments Carnegie portrays. ''River's Edge' presents shining water buckled like bruised chrome into white, featureless zigs and dark zags cupping fractured reflections of trees. The painting's down-turned-head's-eye-view shuns the horizon to focus contemplation on a scrambled, inverted waterworld where, paradoxically, light erases and shadows reveal. The success of the painter's method looms large here when, having admired the work's photo-real illusion from a distance, closer inspection dissolves its reassuring reality into a murky psychedelia of visceral brushwork.

'Sugar shack' and 'Dusk' are examples from an extensive series of nudes celebrating the artist's very own rear-end variously posed as if supplanting the head as primary locus of narcissism and identity. Here, as in Courbet's dispassionate treatment of a woman's openly displayed crotch ('The Origin Of The World' 1866) what initially seems intended as erotic, falls instead beneath an objectifying eye, shrugging off taboo and questioning the moral code which divides bodies into parts and labels orifices sacred or profane. Furthermore, with the artist literally 'selling her self' in this way the series simultaneously makes an uncompromising appraisal of art as a profession and the artwork as a shameless commodity.

Other works here imbue objects rarely considered erotic with a libidinal geist -the presence of which is sometimes heralded by mysterious lights. A leafless 'Rotten Tree' leaning at a pessimistic angle near a garden fence has its night-clad anonymity interrupted by an intrusive, torch-light-assisted human gaze exposing its fleshy, muscular trunk. Meanwhile on 'Back Lane' kids chasing in-car kicks seem to have discovered an eerie new view of nature as headlights beam across farmland only to be swallowed by a black horizon at the edge of the suburban night.

Such re-evaluations of landscape tradition are another recurrent feature of Carnegie's work in which rural scenes are often subjected to a similar penetrating night-vision or other means of defamiliarisation. In 'Mountain Moon' a standard view of panoramic blue skies, billowing clouds, trees and fields is supplanted by a shy glimpse of starless night peering down through densely dabbed foliage at a matted black surface of tar-like paint whipped on to the canvas to evoke leg-lashing grass.

Ultimately Carnegie's eerie scenes with their discomforting attitude to the body rouse our moral faculty while confirming that, despite post-modern drives to 'dumb-down' painting or 'lighten-up' its historical remit to articulate depths of human experience, the medium remains capable of illustrating complexities of a human consciousness still severely and undeniably arbitrated by a mysterious conscience. Furthermore, Carnegie's work shows how tradition, habitually considered anathema to innovation, can be employed to examine obscure and elusive aspects of a contemporary milieu which, having been seriously and severely over-simplified by media, consequently demands a far more profound explication from art than mere ironic complicity with a flat-screen world-view.

END 850 WORDS

John Hansard Gallery Southampton 29-6 to 7-8 '99
Sublime. The Darkness and the Light. Touring exhibition. Paul O'Kane
The most engaging works in 'Sublime'-a touring exhibition of works from the Arts Council collection- are videos by Lucia Nogueira, Jayne Parker and Willie Doherty. Nogueira's film is part of 'Binocular', a deeply moving installation documenting her 1996 'Berwick Ramparts' project during which black umbrellas and black kites were made available for use by visitors. Stepladders and a black flag were also raised against the landscape and the film immortalises days of finely-crafted sadness on which sombre forms invaded the air and wide, empty benches gazed at the horizon.

Willie Doherty's 'At The End Of The Day' 1994 sits us in a car which repeatedly drives up to huge, hope-denying concrete blocks representing Northern Ireland's border. It's an all-too-material problem looming like giant's teeth and making mincemeat of the 'sound-bite' political rhetoric which serves as Doherty's soundtrack. Meanwhile Jayne Parker's 'Crystal Aquarium' 1995 assembles disparate strands of narrative, all starring women in black. One plays drums, another performs aqua-ballet while the artist herself eats and drinks underwater or lies on a burning bed as liquid drips from a cake-stand onto oyster shells.

But much of the work here disturbs, not because of the mysterious power of the sublime but because an air of anachronism and redundancy pervades the show. A search through an extensive collection for a theme like the sublime is bound to result in a juxtaposition of modes but too often in 'Sublime' we find ourselves studying the disparaging effects of time upon the very aura that initially prompted an Arts Council purchase.
MF

Sublime. The Darkness and the Light. Paul O'Kane 2
For example Leon Kossoff's 'York Way Railway Bridge...' deep-set within its 'modern' dark wood frame, makes us wonder how its ashtray tones and frustrated gestures could have lit any fires in 1967, while many other works, both old and new, refuse to shine in the context of this solemn show.

Hamish Fulton's framed, glazed, panoramic photograph records an arduous walk under Iceland's more traditionally sublime clouds 'n' mountains, lit as if by God with strong chiaroscuro. Hannah Collins' large B+W photograph turns stomachs with its recipe of tongues on silver salvers on tables with walnuts. We shudder to think what inspired this, but as we shudder the piece succeeds.

Meanwhile Joan Key's sunny-coloured 'Boo' (II) painting (1994) doesn't frighten us much at all and ultimately it falls to Gustave Metzger to confront us with a truly unfathomable sense of loss and inadequacy via a huge floor-mounted image of soon-to-be-executed Jewish people photographed while forced to scrub clean the Vienna streets in 1938. The artist shrouds the image like a corpse with an eerie green drape which we're invited to crawl beneath. To do so is to increase empathy with the humiliation experienced by those in the photograph and also to face the misery of history in dark, shameful privacy.

'Sublime' is an intentionally uncomfortable show, pulling on nerve-endings in line with the brief, but further discomfort is caused by our 90s taste for slick 'lite'-ness clashing against blunted relics from the once-cutting edge. Perhaps what is most awesome here is evidence of aesthetic values changing at a vertiginous pace, making even recent works appear exhausted and suggesting that if it was once the vastness of space that simultaneously intimidated and inspired man, here is proof that all-consuming time now induces terror in the short-lived, late-20th-Century art object.

END 575 WORDS

 

Bridget Riley. Paintings from the 1960s and 70s.
Serpentine Gallery 18th June - 30th August 1999. Paul O'Kane
I hadn't noticed the sound of the Serpentine's air conditioning prior to this visit to the Bridget Riley show. An attendant I quizzed hadn't either and I probably ruined her day, perhaps even her job, by making her aware of it. The sound is deep and regular like the drone of an airliner, only much softer, steadier, as you might imagine a beautifully-engineered private Jet to sound to its few privileged passengers. Though surprised that recent, highly successful renovations should overlook this intrusion into the gallery's purified space I also suspected that some peculiarity of Riley's paintings had fine-tuned my senses to the sound which fortunately served as an appropriate backdrop for her show.

Luxurious cool air and travel are good metaphors to keep in mind while viewing Riley's early black and whites. 1961's 'Horizontal Vibration' achieves much despite modest size and simple design. Its panorama, created from varying widths of horizontal bands induces the effect of a flexing, invented distance, as intriguing as a far-away heat-haze.

It's worth noting the way Riley's eye-boggling designs lose nothing in reproduction, as if produced with one eye on mass dispersion -a possible historical precedent for waves of super-superficial Goldsmiths painters. However, Riley manages to entertain late 90s senses precisely by denying the commonplace of a fixed, stated surface, and with the security of surface dissolved, eyes lose the confidence to wander unsupervised and glue themselves to the mind like antennae. The oscillation of an elusive plane vying for the attentions of mind and eye then massages mental nerves, soothing faculties bruised by the unyielding face of our man-made environment.

This curation lionizes Riley in a way still rarely seen for a woman painter and bares comparison with a Franz Kline retrospective at the Whitechapel some years ago. There the hanging greatly assisted in convincing us of the success of Kline's black and white canvasses. Riley's show is equally successful but whereas Kline's best work reached for the sky to transcend vertically / spiritually, Riley's are content to cruise at low altitude, warping and distorting horizontal space and depth.

Through the later '60s and early '70s, colour creeps into Riley's work tentatively as if afraid to fix something far-from-broke. 'Arrest 2' of 1965 introduces only a few blue-greys whereas, gathered guiltily together in one room we find three over-decorative and near-twee paintings from '78-'80. But '67-'68's 'Late Morning' and '68-'70's 'Rise 1' both display mastery over colour effects, sending us pacing back and forth enjoying bonus colours which appear to appear (sic) at various viewing distances.

Crowning the Serpentine's central space is a large upstanding black and white painting titled 'Breathe' from '66. (Maybe this is where the low drone is coming from?) It's giant, shrieking dog-tooth pattern proves that Riley needs neither colour nor complexity to defy the predictable availability of painting's surface; something which 1961's simplistic 'Kiss' corroborates.

This show, lightly flavoured with a little 'Brit' and some 'Pop', should give confidence to newly emergent abstract painters while reminding us to undermine the established authority of both sight and surface. What we are repeatedly made to see here is ourselves failing to see, and this, like a playground spin which disorientates the senses and renders our physical apparatus helpless, simultaneously thrills, humbles and unsettles fixed, complacent vision.

END 560 WORDS ( Illustrate with Pause 1964 ?)

ultimately operating on our senses like a fresh, 'lite' contemporary brand of the sublime.* And why not, mountain tops might have awed the 18th and 19th centuries but when we cut across the sky at 35,000 feet we're just as likely to be bored.

Your Gorgeous Body Polly Staple @ Henry Peacock Gallery 26-6 to 8-7 '99 Paul O'Kane
On a warm summer evening just off London's Tottenham Court Road in a small first floor gallery, private-view punters are crammed into Polly Staple's show. Some attempt to swig beer without getting splashed by the effect of constantly surging bodies. Others lick on Pistachio ice-creams specially prepared for the evening by the artist and friends.

In the main space stands official arm-wrestling apparatus with competitive red and blue corners and corresponding pads which determine where and how to grip and at what point an opponent is defeated. This is overseen by two smart, well-built officials in black suits who look wholly alien to the surrounding sea of trendiness but who nevertheless attend with a quiet, formal efficiency reminiscent of TV snooker referees. These two turn out to be Chaz Brooke and Paul Hurley - serious American-style arm wrestlers here to demonstrate the far-from gentle art.

Occasionally a pair from the crowd take places on the apparatus and the referees move in to guide and adjudicate their light-hearted battle. Above all this, on a high, wall-mounted monitor a continuously playing video shows a cheer-leader troupe performing cheer routines for camera.

Around the walls, large, framed and glazed photographs document flowery arrangements of ribbon and 'pom-pom' materials, but these are outshone by a finely-crafted, voluminous arrangement of real flowers. All of this has also been prepared by the artist.

Meanwhile, in a small adjacent room -the gallery's office- a second video system broadcasts action-replays of the arm wrestling bouts taking place next-door.

We live increasingly mediated lives, and, while welcoming the convenient distancing and control we have over simulacra, we remain nostalgic for a supplanted reality of experience which grows in our estimation the rarer it is encountered. Here, the sex and violence implicit within both cheer-leaders' routines and arm wrestling plus the giant bouquet's allusions to love and death lace readings of the show with a subtext of similarly supplanted and sublimated passions.

The works are arranged so that the teenage cheerleaders with their semi-sexy wiggles and thrusts look down on the battling below as if encouraging violence with the implicit promise of sexual pleasure. But in art world circles there's unlikely to be any serious man-to-man bouts and here many competitions take place between a boy and a girl who giggle ironically as they mock-compete.

Staple, herself an experienced art writer and co-editor of an art journal, may here have created a metaphorical microcosm of the art world itself, discreetly referring to the agression and competitiveness paddling furiously away beneath its cool, faultless facade. Having considered this the work then opens out onto a more general critique of the sublimated sex and violence behind all competitive pursuits as well as the habitual oppression and bullying which pervades society from the playground to the workplace but which is nonetheless laughed off by those who dish it out as 'fair game' or mere 'sport'.

The show as a whole, haunted by the discomforting presence of the huge floral tribute thus becomes a strange battlefield, a metaphor of any professional arena -including that of the art world - in which ambition's cut and thrust may be disguised behind a witty attitude, an expediently forked tongue and a duplicitous smile. Given such a reading the cheerleaders come to represent fans and sideliners (including critics and journos) implicated in the rises and falls of would-be stars.

Like the professional critic's sensual reward of a skilful word-massage given to the artist, these cheer-leaders' devoted encouragements and implied promises can appear somewhat sublimated into a well-rehearsed, synchronised choreography of dubious sincerity but further distanced and flattened by the all-banalising glass of a media screen.

Meanwhile, the slo-mo replay service in the gallery's office evokes the empowering two-way-mirrored office of a casino and emphasises the room's function as seat of a discreet authority, monitoring, organising and professionalising the activities of artists and consequently making the role of artist almost inaccessible to those unfamiliar with the lingo and manners which best oil the wheels of business-like achievement. Thus what we think of and describe as 'the' art world, might comment liberally on our milieu but does so only through the eyes and language of a narrow, far-from-representative seam sequestered from a much larger, 'general', multiculture.

Staple has created a self-aware show very much as an event or 'happening' which, though apparently designed to attract exposition of the respectively arch-male and arch-female activities of arm-wrestling and cheer-leading, in fact reveals how her privileged, expositor's eye-view of the art world, once translated into the role of artist, engenders critical manipulation of every aspect of a show resulting in a kind of meta-show where everything from the presence of the private-view crowd to the role of the gallery's administration and even the choice and design of refreshments is considered, rendered questionable and worked up into an ingredient of a mini-drama. There seems much to learn here about the potential to consider the ritual quality of the 'showing' of art and its subsequent exposition.

END 850 Words

 

The show is a short one, up for only two weks and this gives added emphasis to the opening night itself as a crafted event which itself comes under scrutiny as another piece of the processes by which art ideas and objects are dispersed.

Disowning any remaining shreds of a role as an alternative arena to the mainstream motivations of contemporary society, what was henceforth most important for every artist was not a morally influenced mission to transform contemporaryu aesthetics but something much more like the brief of every bank clerk or estate agent. i.e. achieving reliable and visible degree of success by any means in order to maintain a foothold within an system no longer seen to be in need of radical
renewal or replacement.

But at the heart of even modest achievements invariably lies a degree of brutality and every winner is wholly dependant upon those who lose. E.M. Cioran once wrote "only a man who strives to fail deserves our trust" and perhaps this sentiment could guide a radical re-think required by society before anything but lip-service can be paid to inequality by those in the priveleged position of having the power to do something about it with their education and talents. Whereas certain strata of society are cushioned enough to laugh off what is seen as a competitive system's inherent brutality as mere sport, (as do foxhunters and their like) for the majority, lacking health plans, opportunities for stress-relieving pursuits or adequate acknowldegment of their value and qualities, ambiton's exclusivity and careless disregard for others can becomes a matter of life and death, far from a game.

Art schools now include within tightly defined course outlines programmes of "Professional Development".

Artists who feel faced with an impasse and forced to play out endgames or fiddle with brinkmanship should take heart that this criminal state-of-affairs offers a vast creative space for radical critique and renewal of this self-serving, small-world of similars which needs to be recognised as only one art world (albeit by-far the most powerful) complacently assuming that it represents what is in fact a far broader, heterogenous multiculture.

Staples' professional experience affords her an insight into how the art game is currently played; who's interest it serves and the institutionalised seperatism it perpetuates. Her show seems to subtly touch upon the truly bloodthirsty and brutal effects of the self-interested, class-specific expansionism which revels in a 'cool Brittania' image while assuming little of importance exists beyond its blinkered perspective.

Increasingly flippant, playful contemporary art is indicative of the vigour which is quickly lost along with a rapidly vanishing moral perspective.

Meanwhile, extensive non-white, non middle-class communities, many employed invisibly servicing the weekend-supplement fantasy lifestyles of the bourgeoise, struggle to survive and create worthwhile lives while forced to all-but-foresake leisure due to carefully crafted systems of hourly rates and strategically priced outgoings which maintain the prisons of servitude. Yet these are wholly unrepresented by the narrow cliques which make up what blindly refers to itself as the art world.

Staples has incited an interpretation which scratches the surface of an enormous, and urgent need for change.
Artists, open your eyes, who do you share your studio, gallery, masters course with?

Feature at Cabinet
At Cabinet gallery we find a show of small, modestly-executed works all of which reveal traces of introspective intensity, maverick individualism and a lack of assertion. The style is familiar to those who know Cabinet curators Martin McGeown and Andrew Wheatley's portfolio. The artists they represent and their influential 'Popoccultural' and 'Lovecraft' touring shows have stamped a recognisable taste on an all-too- taste-ful London scene.

The current show -titled 'Would have had' - isn't exactly a Cabinet show but a group of artists represented by New York gallery 'Feature Inc' . Both 'Feature' - run by a man known simply as 'Hudson' - and Cabinet have been mutual admirers for some years and this show is just one of several exchanges between the two.

But exactly what is the connection, the taste or the aesthetic that Cabinet and 'Feature' share and promote? Typical Feature/Cabinet work looks as though made by somewhat alienated, quasi-outsiders who reject the homogenising effects of a media-deluged, no-alternative society to nurture subjectivity and private obsessions to the point of a modest mysticism. Its pedigree would need to be pieced and patched together from the 'lunatic' fringes of fine art -people like Samuel Palmer, William Blake or more recent eccentric outsiders like Henry Darger or Joseph E. Yoakum. It could also be interwoven with precedents and influences from the decorative and applied arts, crafts and illustration - areas traditionally disparaged by aspiring fine-artists.

At a recent art-writer's conference a questioner asked about the significance of the London's influential 'Time Out' magazine art listing changed its classification for innovative new galleries from 'Alternative' to 'Up and Coming'. The question implied that this shift dates a moment at which extensive post-1980 gentricides and pervasive yuppie-dom had eventually swept a capitulating and complicitous art world along in its wake. In doing so, that art world has all-but relinquished its position as an 'alternative' space capable of observing and critiquing mainstream views and instead become increasingly monopolised by a young-professional class with a seriously 'wannabe' attitude.

Post cold-war Western wealth, swelled by technologisation and the virtual death of opposition to free-market economics noticeably manifests itself in luxurious excesses like new art museums, publications, galleries and commissions thereby making visual art an increasingly reliable career aim. Meanwhile art schools with their newly state-influenced curriculum include within course outlines modules for "professional development". Such shifts have been pervasive enough to inspire artists like Tim Noble and Sue Webster or Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson to satirise the artist's obsession with success and exposure in their work.

But is it necessary or desirable for art to follow the preconceived model of a profession? and what are the consequences of questioning this model? The artists represented by Cabinet and Feature carve a space beyond self-conscious professionalism to offer us the tenuous results of sincere but seemingly wayward investigations motivated by obscure personal ambitions.

The stripped floor and white-walled 'loft' look of the artist's studio and gallery has become the model of the ideal 90s home for a high-earning 'suit' thus providing an example of the way standard artist's practice serves the most direct manifestation of capitalism by providing a model for real estate or capital itself. Meanwhile in the organic growth of a rich modern city, under-developed and under-appreciated areas are often populated by young artists with a vision of that area's potential and a need for its low rents or peculiarities of its buildings. However, As these artists anxiously toil, attempting to pull power and ideas out of the very air on a near-zero budget and calling upon alternative economies like chance, belief and sincerity to fund their lean, make-or-break years, it's tempting to think of their brief residencies providing a kind of exorcism service for capitalists waiting to exploit and inhabit these buildings. The result is that such initially creative migrations invariably herald the re-birth of a playground for property development and pricey adaptation of redundant buildings into some of the chic-est apartments in town. In temporarily utilising these spaces artists not only reveal their potential but both through processes of creation and the community spirit which generates numerous parties they might spiritually cleanse the buildings of their grubby, guilty past as workhouses, factories and sweatshops and supply a more recent, cooler past as little bohemias thus easing their transformation into purified 'pads' and respectable offices.

Similarly, it could be argued that whenever a painter makes a stretcher before painting they are involved in commodification and the production of a marketable object resilient enough to pass from hand to hand over time and thereby providing a toy for both the market and historians. But visitors to 'Popoccultural', 'Lovecraft' or here at 'Would have had' rarely come across a resilient stretcher or in fact anything very substantial at all. It's almost a defining criteria of this work that it rarely looks as though produced in a professional studio. Thus we witness crafty, doodly, fragile activities which have more in common with the excessive imaginative energies of bored teenagers or obsessive, socially inadequate hobbyists than with smart, ambitious artists who do the right thing in the right place at the right time.

Sometimes the work is scratched out in ball-point (Russell Crotty) or made with ink-flooded foolscap (David Moreno) like the product of a back-row, adolescent intrigued far more by the view out of the classroom window and the riddles forming in a wandering mind than by the prescribed knowledge presented by a teacher.

Sometimes the work consists of an eccentric assemblage of the everyday materials most of us discard like the rubber-band-covered forms created by Jeff Lock in 'Lovecraft' or George Ives' collection of newspaper cuttings featuring 'deviant' activities which made small column inches around the turn of the century. In such cases objects become fetishised in an inspired moment of altered vision then transformed and elevated to a higher value while remaining eccentric as if meant for the eyes of their maker only. In 'Would have had' B. Wurtz has taken this approach to present us with the image of improvised haute couture using only the pathetic materials of a carrier bag, wire string and wood to form what looks like a dainty dress waiting to be bought on its hanger.

'The pathetic' was a concept brought to bare by Ralph Rugoff when explaining Mike Kelley's influential work in the essay 'Mike Kelley and the power of the pathetic.' Kelley's work seems obviously connected to the work discussed here, opening space as it did for a cross-gender rethink of the artist's role as; not proud and heroic achiever but (perhaps a more common experience) as one who contributes to a culture of winners only by openly displaying weakness, inadequacy and dependence. However, Kelley's work is so broadly influential that to attempt a clearer definition of the Cabinet/Feature alliance it's worth looking more closely at other influences.

Hudson was one of the first gallerists to show Raymond Pettibon's ink-brushed, captioned illustrations on paper as well as an early champion of Jim Shaw's extensive pencilled dream record. What is most recognisable about Pettibon's captioned ink wash drawings is their indebtedness to book and journal illustrators like Daumier or even Britain's Edward Ardizzone as opposed to the far grander history of painters. As well as being an art form well acclimatised to the mass reproductions of industrialised society in the way approved of by Baudelaire, the work of the illustrator, unlike that of the fine artist enters our childhood intimately, modestly, devoid of the institutional mythology which surrounds 'serious' or 'important' contributors to art history. The images of Edward Ardizzone for example once provided a service to a generation of novice, child readers in the form of welcome relief from demanding text -an oasis of pleasure amidst the introduction to the 'work' of reading. This encourages a child to think in pictures and to continue doing so even once the illustrated page has been turned thus establishing a model art as pleasure opposed to the relative 'work' of reading.

*(It's worth noting here that Cabinet's curators been known to oppose the term 'picture-making' to 'painting' in a linguistic demystification which could describe artists as diverse as Walter Robinson, John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton all of whom succed in re-ingratiating figuration into the contemporary scene.)

Pettibon's appeal partly lies in similarly rescuing us from the surrounding authority and grandeur of the historicised art world and reminding us of these magical, private introductions to subjectivity, moments in which our privacy and uniquity are first discovered and claimed for the awakening self, away from parents, teachers, parents or peers who already demand complicity with homogenising tastes and opinions. Pettibon rekindles the love of that art which we discovered in our own homes, in our own rooms, our own time in private and passionate ways, the art we first thought of as our own, our own discovery much in the way we might begin to select records from the radio as our personal favourites despite the influential 'taste' of those around us to which there is a demand to comply. This is the birth of that very subjectivity we are pleased to recognise and empathise with in Proust's recollections of childhood, a treasured self which we desire to retain and which we regret to lose sight of as we suffer from pressures to conform to 'adult' social roles and expectations.

If we were to risk naming -and perhaps thereby shaming- this 'kind' of work, what might it be called? Some hastily group it under the old banner of 'Slacker' art, -another legacy of Kelley and Paul McCarthy- but the self-proclaimed king of slack was Sean Landers who made a highly successful career out of a loser attitude which wined candidly and entertainingly on about the impasse of irony facing any wannabe post-modern artist while however smoothly ascending his career ladder to become one of the best-known artists of his ('X') generation. Thus 'Slacker' art is really a very sophisticated stance albeit spoken in a contrived 'dumb' tongue.

A search through notes, CVs and press-cuttings for 'Would have had' reveals an interview with contributing artist Sam Gordon in which he uses the word 'homespun'. Here we are talking about (as the dictionary confirms) 'simplicity, a lack of sophistication' or, as Hudson interprets the word when I pitch it "a homeliness about something made with means rather than ends in mind, usually made at home, primarily for the love or need of doing it"

Home is simultaneously the focus of capitalist accumulation, ownership and debt while also the place which the attempts to come to terms with capitalism paradoxically keep us away from by driving us 'out' to work. Many family's are alienated from the home by the jobs they need to do to maintain a homelife which is consequently enjoyed only in glimpses during allocated leisure time. But technology, e.g. in the form of the Internet goldrush, allied to a desperate need to relieve commuter traffic, is fast bringing work home again, at least for the class who have the necessary skills and perspective to exploit this revolution. This means that not only isolated artists and crafty obsessives now 'homespin' their way of life but all kinds of businesses and professions are joining in the pleasures of working from home or 'Telecommuting' as it is now called.

Thus the future begins to look a little nerdy, a slightly hippy-ish society of home-bound obsessives losing themselves in long navel-gazing sessions of subjectivity which nonetheless provide a new form of productivity previously known best to the unemployed's attempts to relieve themselves of homebound shame and difference. This new, home-based workforce need no longer be estranged from home and family life to be harvested under the workplace roof and dressed up in the costume of company livery but is instead dispersed, re-iindividua;ised, de-homogenised.

However, what the repercussions might be of allowing the workplace and the means of production to penetrate the home so deeply and pervasively remains to be seen. Is this not just a further achievement of rampant capitalism at the expense of humane values to be welcomed into what has always been our refuge from profiteering and productivity? The hearth, at which Mike Kelley's soft, thrift-shop toys (beanie-baby forebears) were once fashioned, is being appropriated, not only by the passive consumer activity of TV but now by an ever-present responsibility to produce, to work and to deny domesticity in favour of effectively contributing to the larger economy.

As mentioned above, 'homespun' work draws on a craft aesthetic which erodes masculine bias. In 'Lovecraft' Jim Iserman's huge floor-standing pom-poms were a surprising contribution from a male artist and scratched at discomforting cross-gender identities as well as unearthing the embarrassing hippie aesthetic which, though radical and revolutionary in its time and a powerful influence on future generations, became, after further cultural revolutions like punk or hip-hop, something shamefully obsolete. But Lily van der Stocker's wall drawings seem pleased to evoke a doodling mysticism curling from her brushes and pens like smoke from a hookah.

It's worth noting that recent shows like the Berlin gallery exchange at Sadie Coles HQ have consolidated and echoed some of the themes discussed here, including a painting by Peter Doig which seems to glorify 60s memorabilia and artists apparently influenced more by record-cover art than by gallery paintings. As Hudson points out, Pettibon first attracted attention through his illustrations for the covers of Indie records and the 'homespun' retains a similar style and relation to the mainstream art world as the Indie music scene has to the established music buisness.

The promotion of a homebound. alienated individual to the heroic figure of our age has also been encouraged by crises in sexual relationships arising from uncompromising gender critique and the shadow of aids. Chris Hammerlein' Twelve Untitled drawings in Ink and Crayon on paper -each only 7" x 10" -document a series of disastrous moments in a doomed domestic love affair. Some figures are emasculated or carrying difficult burdens while others are set on pedestals or take part in a suicide pact. A clown with an erection seems to sum it all up.

If the personal is political then the home is political and in recent years London has seen the increasing popularity of at-home salons, galleries and studios like Interim Arts, Jibby Beane's or Danielle Arnaud's. In fact Cabinet along with White Cube was one the earliest examples of this trend demonstrating a kind of DIY 'Indie' attitude reclaiming art from the organising and aggrandising structures of established galleries, museums and the marketplace to re-situated it alongside craft-like activities done for the pleasure of doing.

Obviously these artists are inclined to success and become increasingly marketable as taste turns in their favour but the point is that art of recent years which evidences significant social and economic change discerned by those who would make art and who sense and inhabit the periphery of the established art world choose this style, this aesthetic, these means, these particular means to both interest themselves and to capture an audience. These works are designed to stand out against the background of what is established and comfortable, both in the art world and the larger realm of image production. 'Homespun' art is significant and important because in it we can see something which - despite a society abundant with services and commodities- is not being provided for by other means i.e. a sense of modesty, intimacy, privacy and some very personal ideas of what is valuable and what should be treasured in ourselves and our art.

END

The emblematic art of a time illustrates the culture of those favoured enough by history to command, direct and shape it but do those who currently dominate what we refer to as 'the' art world, really represent the shifts taken place at the cultural
wellspring?

The sheer immensity of possibilities and choices available through technologised mass-production eradicates values and confuses taste to the degree where crass consumerism and

profound belief can be combined in commodities like a glossy 'Feng Shui' monthly magazine. Its unsurprising then to find belief systems evolving on an almost DIY basis by consumers used to picking, choosing and cooking up personal statements of taste - all of which operates within the context of a carefully decorated home. (recently in America a Bronx-born postman showed me the Buddhist shrine he had created in the marital bedroom. An example of Homespun religion.

Post-Modernism (the kind seen in Thomas Pynchon's early work) is an era in which capitalism eludes it's opposers and alternatives to provide a totalising context against which all is rendered commodity. Thus people empathise with things and, their beliefs sidelined by this railroading philosophy, comply by behaving like commodities. Institutional art and the market are readily absorbed into the new regime

but some artists seek refuge, a 'space of freedom' in small, homebound practises producing fragile work unatractive to the collector or museum.

Can the home provide these creative, political and spiritual needs without us merely sinking into complicity with capitalism's requirements? The response to this must lie within the Marxist shadow which overlaid more questing. In fact the oppositional model of individual or collectiove towartd the state has been seen to dissolve during the last twenty years.
Initially this appeared to be the result of oppression and suppression of a right-wing political swing, however, we can also read it as a way to think above and beyond the political realm and consider our relationships in a bigger picture, under the clearer light of spiritual goals. In this case the state and its opposers are both reduced to modesty and share the same inadequacy in the face of profound questions while forced to see their antagonism as mutually belittling.

Ultimately universalist considerations must supplant seperatist thought and, paradoxically it might be the very success of higher capitalism rather than its revolutionary overthrow which leads us to this universal appreciation of what overrides difference. The big picture can be seen in little things and this is why the home can be the source of connecting real-life with high ideals and ensuring that the model of spiritual or creative activities is sequestered into the arms of a power greater than that of the initiator of the work is reversed.

Homespun arty recewives the endosement of a feminising domesrticity as the homer is a masternal, sheltering presence long eroded by the absence of the father, or indeed bopth parents.

Values, and re-evaluations are of course a crucial aspect, not only of the alchemy and metamorphosis of materials which takes place in the making of art but of the power of the artist and the art world in general to shift the register of valuations by which we hierarchically judge the world and its objects.

Warhol-illustrator, collective unconsciousness of comic-book illustrations.

Work itself, domesticity, gender-roles and religiosity are all implicated as space is cultivated between 'fine' art and its applied countertparts.
Mystics and outsiders ike Blake and Palmer.Schizophrenics.

11 Duke Strteet for Pettibone images??

Now that philosophy succeeds best, not when most comprehensive, confident and therefore 'successfull' bu6t when most capable of increasing / arousing scepticism) and therefore most self-consciously failing. And, furthermore, now that beliefs in Gods have passed way beyond the daet-of stage into a confused and unnamed re-appraisal of a kind of pantheism according to which God might just as likely be found in a cerael packet as in the sky, artists, no longer suppliers of deities to temples now turn to art itself and not what it represents for fait and re-assurance.

"A winning anmd a losing in everything (The winningh and losing -seen as fundamental models to psychological development resulting in neurosis, slienation and domination in adulthood.

If we risk looking away from shop windows to look above head-height we can deiscern that city streets, now relentlessly lined with shopfronts are in fact conversions to 19th Century houses-once unsullied by crass manipulations of commerce.

The medium of David Moreno's two untitled srawings from '95 and '98 is described as 'Ink on paper but perhaps it could have said a lot of ink on papr. Both are scruffy sheets of foolscap almost died blue in what looks like a rorscharch test that proliferated out of control.

B.Wurtz has achieved an object of desire from the extremely limited means of a subtly twisted wire, some wood, string and a blue carrier bag printed with a black fleur-de lis pattern. But the result looks like a haute couture mini dress design to tug purse strings.

Lorenzo De Los Angeles provides wayward doodling of a softl intensity describing strange juxtapositions of beads, buindles and a dressing table aesthetic of pink puffs and florals.

In Kinke Kool's photograph 'Sweethearts' posing children are surround by acrylic painted religous auras.

The home eventually becomes the focus and destination of all our energies. It becomes worshipped and adorned by all our creativity and love. In return we pray it will sustain and protect us Real estate or Capital is a svenerable as any aspect of the 'natural' world.

DISORGANISED RELIGION
For example our record collections, wardrobes and most personal memorobilia tell the story of our 'Inner Experience' and yet any of these provides only a fracrtion of what we most truly are and what we most treasure about our lives dies with us in silence, unrecordable -beyond salvation or representation.

The same must be said for our darkest moments which, try as we neurotically might -it is equally impossible to accurately or adequately convey to anyone outside ourselves.

ERach of us undergoes/executes a kind of Derive of constant diversions caused by the bullying demands of capitalists over and against our ideals of planning and realising a clearly defined ambition.

And each of us is simultaneously forced to invent an autonomous, private faith, patched together and propped up by randomly acquired texts, beliefs and proofs and justifications of our orientation and trajectory.

the closest model (and perhaps the cause) of this is the art student's small white studio from which each aspiring artist is required to call forth from thin-air a belief, a craft and indeed a future.

The exponential proliferation of reflective surfaces in our archetural and design environment encourages an upsurge of narcicistic, alienate individuals trapped withio the limits of their body-image while consequentl blinded to more collective interpretations of being which are only available to those capable of closing their eyes to rtheir physicalitty and thus stimulating imagination.

For an artist whjo uses or needs chance to play a part in the ir wqork in order fir it to contain some property of the surprising or extra-ordinary to ligft it away from the world of ordinary, existant things and thereby cath the eye or make an audience think twice, the inherent and essentyial unpredictability of this power demands increasing faith, and indeed faith in faith from the artist. In this way artists may encounter and be forced to nurture quasi-religous ideas.

Not every art student becomes an artist and yet the experience of a fine art degree is or should be profound ib that it demandsd a scrutinisation of beliefs and powers not required by any other educational means. Thus thiose who subsequently enter society, whether as artistys or not should carry with them at leads the seeds of a discovered self capable of contributing insights into human nature to their milieu even if those contributions do not take the form of crafgted artworks but instyead comprise attitudes ... or vocabulary.

The homespun artist nurtures and retains these qualities ..

The instant appreciated for itself and not its contingency on the known 'before' and the predicted 'after' is a rarely visited land. To dwell there is to alienate oneself from the surrounding meaning which is founded on narrative -not grand or guiding naratives but narrative as such, teleology perhaps.

That is to say the instant is appreciated for its untimelyness despite the fact that it is not a space ooposable to time by the habitual opposition. However the more we consider the instant sequestered from time the more it attracts consideration as aplace if not comfortable iclothged as space. So what then is place? can place be detached from time and regarded as primarily spatial. The opposition Time & Space breaks down but only now that we offer up the consideration of the instant.

On a more banal, practical level abd as a way of returning to the point of the piece we are consideriong means and not ends.

Homogenising tendencies ask us to think teleologically about collective and common ends just as untrained eyes see many different varieties of tree as similar whereas a more enlightened eye becomes fascinated, increasingly beguiled by the infinte complexity and variety in things and comes to appreciate uniquity and its pricelessness.

To homogenise is to price, to evaluate, to class, to allocate, to gain power over, to dominate, to remove from ourselves at a safe distance.

Whereas to heterogenise is to concede all the above and lose self amidst, not only the myriad complexity of things-as-they-are but also things as both their becoming and their history -two infinite tr]
ajectories.

Jane and Louise Wilson @ Serpentine Gallery
Now I know how it might feel to be a freemason's proctologist. Jane and Louise Wilson have succeeded in producing an exposé of all we despise about masculine power mechanisms. These are manifesed here in three examples: The Houses of Parliament, Greenham Common disused missile base and the in... They're all places where the sun don't shine and all are carpeted and cosseted away from the societies which they -in various ways- haunt, intimidate, limit or threaten. To witness the Wilson's eye-view is like having your face rubbed in the contents of your father's ashtray. Two of the locations are observed as abandoned relics now symbolic only of progress made at their expense while the houses of parliament seem to be offered up for comparison as if the Wilsons were looking forward to a similar fate of redundancy and demise for the home of parliaments.

Though still photographs and a complex of actual doors initially greet you on entering the gallery these ultimately seem peripheral and only neccesary as a popularist device catering for the Serpentine's broad audience. Deeper within, the Serpentine gallery's dainty tea-house architecture has been defamiliarised, darkened and interrupted by severely angled temporary walls creating a harsh underworld in which to view the far more crucial films. These are projected in pairs into sharp corners where they mirror or play off one another.

As camera views float around the wrecked rooms of the ...building we pick up on pathos and pains impregnating fallen shards of peeling paint in a disused sick bay and highlighted morose, disused carpet slippers. Abandoned by man, man's inventions soon appear forlorn and all this is given even greater atmosphere by the artist's use of coloured lighing. Instead of compensating for local tungsten and flourescent cast 'problems' they have exaggerated these for effect.

The few figures who do appear within these foresaken interiors turn out to be the Wilsons themselves dressed in uniforms appropriate to the sites. In a protective anti-radiation suit, a military two-piece or a secret police track suit they make brief ghostly visitations but only to affirm their alienation from these surroundings.

Enough generations of post-war youth culture have passed through now for a generation to arrive devoid of any respect for the kinds of institutions represented here. For many politics is no longer a question of right or left but a questioning of power itself, what is it, how is it accumulated, who wnts it and why? The Wilsons, whether in font of or behind the camera maintain a status as representatives of an alternative power, perhaps a 'powerless power' like that posited by Maurice Blanchot. Critcally armed, and handycams at the ready the Wilsons and rtheir peers see through almost any institution's facade while passing assured judgements on the basis of style and design and able to sense the guilt of oppressive purposes.

The televison age and the runaway 'success' of commodity culture has also eroded various forms of established authority. Politicians are now increasingly at the mercy of media which exerts its own political might. The Wilsons, using their own video equipment here execute an alternative televisual critique using camera movements, a slow, ominous pace, carefully considered projections and unnerving lighting to disrupt passive acceptance of these organistations and leave us keen to found new ways of running things more in tune with contemporary values and aesthetics. William Morris once suggeted the houses be used to store masnure and this writer, carried away by the waves of enthusism and hope that greeted the New Labour election victory wrote a letyter adressed to Tony Blsir requesting thay he urgently had the cpommons rioof converted to a huge, PM design skylight sio thast decisions could be made in awe of rthe sky, the sunsione and stars and moon as well as share in inclement weatger with the people the houdses serve.

An eerie scene in which a silvery safety-suited figure mounts a concrtete missile silo aginst an overcoloured dusk sky, myriad microhones hang downward electrifying the surrounding air -but this is noit the HQ of the secret police but a committee room of the Houses of Parliament. A figure in a track suit who could represent a sports-styled generation free-floats refusing to even emulate the surrounding structure by positioning itself. 'I am not a place' it seems to proclaim as the surrounding architecture decays with the passing of its fixed purpose.

Banks of filing systems, rows of coloured lights, corridoors with a hundred doors all grid and grill these worlds so that even examples of modernism appear to continue that Victorian factualism parodied once by Dickens. Studded leather and seats, plumped and polished like ideal apples, carved oak and mirrors in which to don grand robes. Rotting of bygone power but where has it gone, surely not away but to more secretive places better disguised. We've seen the blatant image creation implemented by the Labour party to gain power who were strangely able to fool the people while telling the people exactly how they were being fooled. It's important now to watch the ways in which Conservatives pull the sane stunt as Portillo is groomed for power by beginning with confessions of past homosexuality!

From this side of their camera these institutions appear as follies despite the sometimes monumental consequences of acts and decisions carried out within them. But we look through better eyes at what we no longer need or want, hoping another form of power, something more humane and universal, something less grandiose, theatrical and presumptious might guide us in the future instead of these exhausted patriarchal edifices. Artists like Langlands and Bell or Cornelia Parker brought Foucalddian eyes to bear on the hardware and materiality of human institutions and discened power's foundation in this inanimate dimension, the Wilsons however find little remaining once humans have departed and the buildings themselves, their furnishings, dated wallpaper or ornate wood panneling seem absurd and innocuous. Yet this does little to allay our fears as we wonder where that power has gone, how it has been translated since the indtitution has been erased. There is little left to be revealed once the shroud of deceptive messages, the self-consciously deceptive and unreliable human babble is silenced.

Ben Judd @ The Trade Apartment. Brixton London 11/11/99 -11/12/99
by Paul O'Kane
Ever since Duchamp confronted us with the profound influence that context exerts on our judgement artists have sought to emulate the interpretive discomfort induced by R. Mutt's infamous 'Fountain'. Ben Judd's work involves a contemporary strategy of re-contextualisation by importing practises from an underworld image-machine to challenge our moral and aesthetic responses.

Judd uses amateur photographic studios which, for a price, supply a 'glamour' model plus a choice of sets and lighting. The usual customers are 40-60 year-old men and the fee legitimises them to play the pro' photographer while commanding complicit women in the creation of erotic tableaux. Viewfinders and focal-lengths establish distance crucial to maintaining fantasy and taboo in these strange theatres of captive desire.

The artist has 'boldly gone' on our behalf to bring back a critical take on an industry which, though well-known is rarely confronted. Judd of course shoulders the risk of 'going native' but it's the narrowness of the line he walks between artist and just-another-dubious-voyeur that supplies the ambiguous frisson needed to arouse esoteric art-world taste-buds.

On their passage from one world to another, small, soft-porn portraits, preserved in trophy-like triptychs are scrutinised by eyes educated in the objectivity of Thomas Ruff and Rineke Dijkstra. The body-for-hire here appears de-eroticised and de-humanised by its crude commodification, but contrived facial expressions repel any sympathy in our gaze and empathy is only inadvertently betrayed by small scars and unconvincing poses.

Judd's methods suggest a quasi-anthropology but it's unclear who or what is being analysed here: -the models and their profession? the art-world's taste? or Judd's own motives?

Three larger, individual prints -one of which approaches the grandeur of an Andreas Serrano, Jeff Wall or late Cindy Sherman- are named after poorly-simulated scenarios created by their backdrops and props e.g. 'The Dungeon', 'The Schoolroom' or 'The Barn'. But Judd's lens exposes the edges of these ludicrously kitsch sets thereby breaking the intended spell of illusion and provoking a clash of realities. Large-format photography adds a gloss of flattering hyper-realism to this series and so the inescapable sadness of these off-the-peg dreams is raised at least to the level of pathos by the artist's meta-take on a hackneyed, mechanical procedure.

A video piece, 'I Remember 2' adds further dimensions to Judd's first solo London show and allows us to witness a modelling session involving one girl and several hungry snappers. The video's view-point is fixed, slightly oblique and altogether ignored by the model who gradually strips while an off-screen gang demand pose after pose from her repertoire. Their response to every change of expression or position is a volley of applauding flash.

Judd has also added a monologue soundtrack to this film in which he nostalgically reminisces over the model's every move, but his memories are cleverly mis-timed and aligned to anticipate her poses. Thus the words operate like ghostly orders or an inner-voice to which the model complies.

This video, by siting the artist a little closer to the role of outsider, curiously assures the art audience that here they don't belong, and yet this exception underlines the success with which Judd's broader project disorientates art's dialogue with pornography and eroticism, taste and class.

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Abstract Art Delfina Paul O'Kane
"To risk meaning nothing is to start to play."
Derrida

Curator David Gilmour's title for this show is perhaps more playful than the work itself, baiting as it does a mixed reception regarding the rights, wrongs and possibilities of abstraction as a genre. It could have included a question mark but might have risked sounding like a dreary conference. So the title just hangs like a transparent flag, all-but devoid of referent.

Abstraction now rarely or barely represents transcendent, intrepid, pioneering aspirations, and that's because the context into which it is now delivered -however innocently-is a more finite, more material world where little escapes the increased gravity of godless meaning.

So I arrive forewarned that this show will neither proudly proffer the undiscovered, nor revive ideals of pure form, but might, at best, till the soil* of a pre-territorialised 'space of freedom' (Blanchot). Nevertheless I'm surprised to find 'Abstract Art' to be far less abstract than expected.

Gary Webb's sculptural cocktail mixes slinky gold chains, oversized wooden alum keys and a long slither of canoe-shaped, wood-look Formica perched across something large, pink and reminiscent of an old-fashioned telephone mouthpiece. The concoction invades Delfina like the coning tower of some cooky submarine.

Simon Bill's wall-mounted parade of oval boards vaguely recall not-quite generic forms languishing regrettably in memory like Fabergé eggs or curly-framed Boucher paintings Although Bill seems certain of his serialised ground he searches wildly across eleven identical supports for an appropriate figure. Seeds and corn are strewn star-like amidst gooey dark varnish and paint (nodding to both Chris Ofili and Udomsak Krisanamis), holes are drilled in concentric rings, and the famous 'duck-or-rabbit' perception-puzzle appears, first in spattered paint, then cheap filler-foam, then something-like regurgitated cardboard. Some are simple patterns or mere obsessive scribbles but accompanying referential 'noise' precludes the sophisticated self-referencing I'd secretly hoped to discover in a show called 'Abstract Art'.

Ian Dawson comes closer with 'Blue 196'; the aftermath of a creative conflagration in which he's taken the blow torch to anything matching the criteria 'blue and plastic'. But this lunar-module-like chaotic informe subtly betrays the worldly origins of its almost immolated materials thus alluding to our continuing need to unmake, deconstruct and subvert whatever the rogue fantasy-factory of hi-technologised production serves-up to fulfill our imagined needs.

I like the look of Keith Farquhar's 'Re-Education Through Labour; Design for a Spoken Word LP. Cover', particularly its tainted plastic sleeve -obviously swiped from a real classic to flatter what would otherwise be a 'too-slick' graphic simulation. I look forward to hearing the record but am told it's as-yet unmade.

Farquhar is quite 'out there' on a thin limb of originality, cultivating a rich oeuvre from his seed-bed synthesis of anachronistic abstraction and shop-soiled sociology. Now, shaped canvases and frames, computer-assisted 'Charisma Poems' and even a glimpse of weak-kneed landscape supplement his more familiar, sketchily-coloured mind-zones.

Eric Bainbridge is another fan of fake-wood-Formica, but unlike father-figure Richard Artschwager's famously smooth rescue of the classic bad-taste signifier, here it's inadequately pieced and pinned and glued together with scraps of chipboard and Melamine into a screwball Constructivism. Cotton and nails add to the naff-ness while 'thumbing-up' threadbare painter Michael Raedecker. One of Bainbridge's Tatlin-rejects is suspended directly above a -therefore superfluous-rose-coloured plinth and it's just this superfluity and ravishingly purposeless paintwork that most impress me in my vain quest for autonomous colour and puff-chested form.

D.J. Simpson's drawing spans almost the entire width of the substantial Delfina space and yet again succumbs to the magnetic attraction of veneer thereby certifying this as a pervasive metaphor for a time in which the hierarchy opposing 'authentic' to 'phoney' has crumbled. Large, pseudo-mirror-faced boards have been expressively scored with a router tool demonstrating a repertoire of arty marks and doodles. The result looks like Fiona Rae just vandalised a pristine John Frankland installation.

Ultimately I'm a little disappointed by this (all-male?) show at the admirably philanthropic institution which is Delfina, but that's not because of what the show is so much as what I'd fantasised a Y2K abstract art show would be i.e. an exuberant and exemplary display of unashamed attempts to relish and relive artistic liberties while both augmenting and adhering to definitive criteria of abstraction.
But analysing our own dissatisfaction can be rewarding and in this case helps to interpret Gilmour's aim and choice of title. I conclude that abstract art is presently neither a vital reality nor a burning question, however it is a repressed cultural desire enduring as nostalgia for a long-denied jouissance. At Delfina in January 2000, ironic pomo pastiche needs ironing while latent neo-modernism, draped in the trope of 'abstract art' is being gently teased from its closet.

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* Arch neo-conceptual artist Martin Creed provides a similar service for his own historical genre, and this arriere-garde strategy, while thinly-disguising nostalgia for a relinquished dynamic, echoes characters in Truffaut's 1966 sci-fi movie 'Fahrenheit 451 who, in a future state where books are banned and burned by 'fire brigades', each memorise an entire classic tome and thus keep alive, albeit in 'virtual', oral form, knowledge endangered paradoxically by the very (Guttenbergian) process designed to surpass oral dissemination and the need for feats of memory by manifesting the word as a popular physical object.

because of what I had hoped a Y2K abstract art show would be i.e. a charged dialogue between the present and abstract art as a historcal particularity. Thus, my disappointment could well be precisely the curator's point. Abstract art is neither a reality nor a question today, its just a wish.

END

'Juicy' @ Project Space - Goldsmiths College
21st - 29th January 2000 Paul O'Kane
The world is brimming with snapshots, many of them duds, unwanted, un-loved, unfocused. Even those which interest us tend to capture extraneous, incidental things we don't really care for which muscle into the frame. The good news is that someone has put this photographic flotsam to good use, Sarah Emerson's 'Untitled' 1999 (showing here in Goldsmiths College project space in a curation called 'Juicy') is patterned here and there by little flower-coloured snippets of snaps cut in petal-forms which provide just one of several layers of interest and intrigue.

Yukinori Yamada has also gone all-flowery but his blooms are anemone-like, cyber-spacey affairs in electric hues. Each stands proudly from the wall at various heights. Close-up we discover who inspired the show's tit;e as they are actually carefully cut and feathered fruit juice cartons.

Erupting from a floor nearby is Matthew Franks' 'Easy Shot No 1, 'Climax' and 'Buster Jangles'. The names are exuberant but represent 3 plain white polystyrene carvings forming thigh-high mushroom clouds.

There's a tenuous relation between these and Yamada's flowers something concerning fractals and chaos theory which have bent science toward 'the natural' and queered mathematical form in the direction of the organic. Late modernism's tough-talking cubes 'n' grids look fascistic now as curly bits and vegetal aesthetics supplant humanist perspectival fantasies.

Craig Fisher plays his part in this evolution, renovating natural history according to some private revelation. Here he's (quite unforgettably) made a black quilted body-warmer to snug-fit a young dinosaur. 'George' 1999 is quite unnerving and yet cute enough to make you come over all-parental Aaaaaaah! The floor around the wall-hung dino-fleece is littered with small plastic stalagmites which look so faecal they might be the droppings of the shy creature we've just frightened out of its skin.

Sharing the floorspace a sensible distance away is one of Tomoaki Suzuki's charming wooden figures. This one is 'Yasuyo' 1999. It's a knee-high realistic-objectivist-style portrait of a fashionable young Japanese girl. With zero body-language she stares ahead, blank-faced, hands and legs straight. Works by Stephan Bolkenhof and early Daniel Oates come to mind. This pig-tailed, sneaker-shod, jean-clad 'ordinary' girl is a modest monument to our moment. She speaks the lingua-franca of everyday people and defines her identity more by her clothes than by gender or race. Even her bag is significant enough for Susuki to have carved it as an autonomous little sculpture sitting comfortably within reach.

David Lock's painting 'Superhero 2000 sets up a pristine petrol-blue ground only to scratch out a black marker-pen drawing of Christopher Reeve. Roughly drawn it's nevertheless a familiar news image of the one-time world-saver's smile framed by the now ever-present head rest of his wheelchair. But Lock has generously returned movie-star's superman status, drawing hands which pull open Reeve's shirt to reveal a huge yellow and red 'S'
on his chest. Thus superman lives on in a strange hinterland of media-culture existing between several layers of mythology: comic-book hero, Nietzschean hyperbole, Hollywood gossip-society and teeth-gritting champion of optimism.

Let's return to Emerson's painting which I skipped through quickly to make progress through the show. This is one impressive painter creating a tracery of inventive layers which tread lightly through a woodland of collective memory. Marker-pen drawings outline something-like girl-guide-annual narratives while Polke-like dots pitter-patter friendly, pastel colours. These interplay with: snapshot flowers, a layer of selective varnishing and a yet deeper, originary pale coloured-pencil drawing. Jochen Klein is evoked but this peculiar daintiness is threatened by a huge black cloud of what? rain? abjection, ink? we're uncertain but it threatens to obliterate the entire scene. In one place it even seems to rain blood. We're left with impressions of life's weave of conflicting moralities and degrees of innocence.

Yamada's juice-carton flowers are also not as innocuous as they look, positing a supermarket-as-pleasure-garden thesis. Their lip-smackin' colours are of course carefully chosen by professional designers dreaming of fresh-fruit, sunshine and profit. They're expected to turn us on enough to reach for the reddies. Yamada's smart enough to appropriate this knowledge for art's more critical purposes. Could this be a consumer revolution in which we go shopping to admire and not 'pick' the commodities. Shops might soon become galleries within which we simply stare, Global capitalism watch-out, Yamada is assaulting your big tree with his little axe!

Michael Stubbs has pulled together a warmly seductive, clean-cut show of student artists which conceals, like an apple's pip, a small amount of poison for those looking for a little more bite.
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Claire Barclay 'Take To The Ground' @ The Showroom
29 to 7 May 2000 Paul O'Kane
If you've ever tried to place a writhing cat inside a box or watched a nervous dog travel by train you might appreciate the discomforting overlaps evoked here between notions of the human, the animal and the environment. Claire Barclay's human is becoming-animal while her nature comes raw, clothed, or cloned in resilient materials.

A certain contemporary aesthetic to which Barclay is attuned ('technomadism' perhaps) has evolved out of urban/rural culture clashes. Village people fleeing rural boredom annually migrate cityward to bolster a relentlessly burgeoning bourgeoisie keen to gentrify previously demonised inner-city quatiers. Meanwhile, laptops, mobile phones, the web and Deleuze & Guattari all contribute to a conflation of technology and nomadism who's CV features late-'80s hiker-sneaker styles and a 4x4 all-terrain culture common to both LA gangs and England's landed gentry.

'Take To The Ground' illuminates the thinly-veiled unconscious of a social strata who's luxuriant level of social security and ascendant optimism makes transgression -exampled in downshifting dialects or mid-summer's festival mudbaths- crucial to the vitality of its culture.

The artist spent several weeks preparing in The Showroom and perhaps inevitably created a strong sense of territory. The gallery's back room is transformed into a semi-animal den but to reach it you first negotiate a series of omens, traps and warnings installed in the front space.

Near the entrance, a wispy branch leans against a wall like a sentinel. Its unusual blackness demands closer attention revealing it to be sheathed in dark, skin-tight leatherette which frills-out in places to add an element of expression to an otherwise suffocating dress.

An almost incongruous but ultimately crucial contribution is provided by six issues of lifestyle mag 'Wallpaper' rammed to the wall with a screwed aluminium spine and obsessively hole-punched until only frail, riddled fragments remain to offer mere pastel reminders of seductively coloured features and spreads.

A pony hide, bereft of its former inhabiting spirit and spread ignominiously flat on the gloss-grey floor contextualises a hi-tech 'log' of pristine machined steel reclining on similarly machined 'branches'. This smooth contraption is reminiscent of a Hollywoodian nuclear device but radiates the benign aura of a modest folly.

Meanwhile, an attractive tangerine glow beckons in the back space, but one final obstacle detains us from reaching it. A thicket of aluminium rods with sharpened, javelin-esque tips are bowed and pressurised between ceiling and floor, threatening to spring loose and stab would-be intruders.

Though the urban may be the prime site of style wars, dialect wars gang, race, sexuality, gender, class and even age wars, the rural retains immense status as an almost unnoticeable backdrop of rarely disputed territorial wealth. In The Showroom's rear space, nomadic and conserving habitats are juxtaposed and land appears in disturbing close-up in the form of mud, metonymically representing an entire societal battleground.

'Rip-stop nylon', -used in the manufacture of sails and trekking gear- has been cut, shaped, sewn and even rouched before being stretched and hung at a steep slope to neatly fit and echo the room's oddly angled architecture. This orange/pink, translucent shelter colours sunlight falling from above but despite this inviting effect the material's severely sloping installation impedes progress into the further reaches of the space forcing us to bend, crouch and eventually crawl to reach the room's end.

A large, brown-gingham cushion has been smeared with damp earth by apparently human hands conjuring reminiscence of the tactile therapy sculptor Lygia Clark. Photographs of zoo enclosure walls painted as savannah or trees are presesnted. Such illusions might fool captive animals into believing they are home but are more likely to reassure voyeuristic humans that the exotica in their midst belong far away.

Across the floor, more mud has been pawed into a shape which seems unarguably similar to Africa -a similarity which, I am assured, is unintentional. But playing-down this reading is understandable as the centre of the miniaturised continent is heaped into an ambiguous form, something like a boot-scraper and a palace, thereby provoking potentially volatile interpretations.

Whether served in the form of planet earth, a fashionable anorak or Churchill's turf coxcomb, 'the ground' (as trope) provides a softer landing for outcry than the hard truths of the urban fabric. The idea of noble re-negotiations with nature, the earth, the soil, may even indicate a diverted social responsibility overwhelmed by the ever-widening disparities produced by gentrification, class injustice, violent racism and homelessness -all of which are obscured by the spectacle of self-congratulatory colour-supplement culture-fever.

Claire Barclay here provides a series of signs by which to negotiate this earthy aspect of a rapidly transforming society who's catch-all, homogenising tendency means too few external voices criticise it's rapid progress. Obviously the common earth's well-being is a fundamental issue for all life dependant upon it but it's also significant that this concern is most central to those least-threatened by extinction of their culture, economy or territory.

END 800 Words

Living in cities it's easy to forget the immense wealth and power residing in rural areas, though a quick flick through 'Country Life' proves the existence of landed gentry who, like LA gangsters, drive 4x4s (complete with gun cases) and proudly announce strategic marriages of 'deb' daughters to maintain thoroughbred blood-lines and property.

Meanwhile, less aristocratic '

uch developments are often announced by a spearhead influx of art and artists who, not only provide capital with its very own avant-garde wherever it is due to make a killing but also act as a bohemian kudos-additive to swell prices.

If there is an unconscious, (a father Christmas), neatly sequestered from the 'conscious' like the yoke from the egg...
Clean-hand jobs

Carl von Weiler 'Lullaby' @ Matt's Gallery
19th April - 25th June 2000 Paul O'Kane
The morning radio announces plans for a Cockney museum, thus endorsing a roots-inspired, shoulder-chip vision of the rapid territorialisation and gradual embourgeoisement of East London. The place where my mother was born, a place where, she tells me, most lampposts once leaned ludicrously, bent by shoe-less children relentlessly mis-using them as improvised swings.

In the area around Matt's Gallery -an isolated oasis still far from concentrations of cutting-edge culture- today much is being built, re-built, transformed and renovated. Elements of the area's past are cherished for their charm and difference, but the indigenous tribes, already museified by TV's caricaturing 'Eastenders' seem less-highly regarded, although their 'esturine' vowels are appropriated as a revitalising 'barbarity' in the mouths of downshifting, urbanised dialects.

Inside the gallery the atmosphere is immediately serious, quiet and contemplative. I'm directed towards the art of Carl von Weiler.

In one room - nothing, just beautiful bare space and new, neatly pinned, off-white plaster boards -then - sound - sound of a musical box, distinct yet untraceable - even the speaker can't be discovered (later I learn it's bricked and plastered into the wall and unlikely to see light again).

Slowly the tune becomes familiar, recognisable. It's a slow, expressive rendition of what I call 'Tiny Tears' due to its appropriation by advertising when I was a child (musicologists might identify it as the product of some 18th Century North European maestro).

The effect of the lazily turning bells upon the sepulchral room is saddening, making me turn to Matt's window looking out over the canal and across to the gasworks beyond. For a while I contemplate mental pains, economic frustrations and social discomforts.

A second room - this time supplemented with a thick, plastered slab of wall hung as a projection screen. Again the room seems wrapped in bandage tones of pale melancholia as the carefully angled screen disallows most (but not all) of the light attempting to enter the window.

Projected onto this Goliath-screen is a film of a bed, inverted and fixed at ceiling height, and into which a man (the artist) is tied by sling-like straps. The image is reminiscent of Angelica Festa's 'Untitled Dance (with fish and others)' 1987 (see Peggy Phelan's 'Unmarked-the politics of performance.)

After a few minutes of pondering whether the man can be described as 'on' the bed or not and whether the bed can be described as 'upside-down' without pandering to an imposed, ordinary order of things,

I notice he is doing something with his hands, and then, that this something is the winding of the very musical-box apparatus encountered (and still audible) in the first room.

Only now do the two adjacent rooms become true neighbours; not like adjacent homes or dorms but less-rigorously separated like hospital wards (note the walls are not gallery-white but a more ghostly or asylum-white).

The music, irretrievably sequestered from its visible cause seems now sadly distanced while the artist appears deprived, denied and disconnected from his own modest production. The bed-contraption is rendered absurd and overwhelmingly metaphorical so that a crazy Icarus and clumsy angels ripple through my mind as the artist's plight becomes purgatorial.

I'm slightly deflated by this unexpected discovery of a narrative connection between rooms I'd initially read as separate, minimal and autonomous works connected only by form. However, looking back, I enjoy the invisible threads of filigree sound shaping and shaped-by the spaces. Now the artist seems to have been calling me from the first room into the second, and then vice-versa, perhaps to save him, to get him out of another fine mess he's gotten himself into.

I'll do my best.

The way his hand keeps winding around that little apparatus, Carl von
Weiler might well be fishing. The bells like trickling water from a beautiful stream that only he, from his privileged, elevated, inverted view-point, can see.

I'm told this lullaby was sung to the artist as a child. Perhaps he discovered the little song-box by chance in some junk store, turned the handle and brought back floods of mummy. A good enough reason to immediately confine yourself to bed I think. But in case she (or her memory) should leave (see Proust on this) even if she's only going to the next room, make it impossible to fall asleep (like waiting for Santa Claus), keep her near, keep a light on, play music, put your pillow at the 'wrong' end of the bed or lie upside-down. Having her there is far-better than dreams which compensate for her leaving.

The East London air is thick with recently evicted ghosts as the rapidly changing city mirrors Matt's Gallery's protean ability to transform its architecture and accommodate successive waves of occupation. Meanwhile von Weiler provides an untimely haven in which to ponder a liminal conundrum concerning space, sound, and vision. Work which beguiles the mind and plucks heart strings.

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A further paradox is that art, supposedly still a bastion of liberalism and a site of critical engagement, inadvertently provides an avant-garde service to property developers seeking their next area for expansion and gentrification.

Where people actually go once a "quatier" is transformed has always been a mystery to me (witness the 'Docklands' phenomenon of the 1980s while considering conspiracy theories and paranoias a la sci-fi thriller 'Soylent Green).

and even makes alliances with furniture stores in return for flattering spaces in which to display works who's aesthetic is nothing less than complimentary to the products in store. How far we have travelled since DADA days?

Coincidentally, arriving at Matt's in Mile End, I notice for the first time 'The Ragged Museum' next door, which, via a quick glance inside I glean to be a conserved Victorian school, today alive with the excited chatter of visiting schoolchildren on Easter vacation.

Takahashi's installation plays with materials stripped from other units but also from rubbish left by Tate Modern's feverish last minute opening preparations. Her piece is thus a literal salon des refusé in relation to the vasst icon of acceptable modernism downstream.

BEAUTIFUL @ The OXO Tower 26 May to 16th July 2000 Paul O'Kane
Just along the river from the new Tate, a more modest ex-industrial building - 'The OXO Tower' - is hosting a sprawling group-show simply titled 'Beautiful' .

Several un-let retail units on various floors of the tower have been borrowed for the show creating a rabbit-warren of art to explore. Chris Ofili and Mark Wallinger have contributed their kudos while Chantal Joffe, Tomoko Takahashi, Daniel Coombs and Ian Dawson produce some instant buzz for what is generally a showcase of up-and-comings in a purposefully purposeless eclectic mix.

Painting dominates, even infecting Turner-Prize-nominee Tomoko Takahashi's installation of tightly re-composed detritus -including materials from the Tate Modern's dustbin. Strategically-placed coloured boards and expressively daubed black-marker dots draw the eye in and around discarded timbers given new life by re-contextualisation. But most intriguing are saws and tape measures as-it-were arrested in mid-use as if we observed a flash of frozen time. Jessica Stockholder, Kurt Schwitters and Jeff Wall's carefully 'Destroyed Room' come to mind as we admire the unique energy of a practise baring on profound issues of order and value.

Hew Locke debuts a new direction with a voodoo-like deity doll assembled from various gaudy bric-a-brash (sic) found amidst the minor exchanges of London's street markets.

'Red Menace'- as the figure is titled, towers over us elevated on a tall cardboard plinth. Streaming scarlet hair all-but hides a tiny tattooed face as the creature touts a toy machine gun labelled 'Made in England'. This references recent Sierra Leone headlines but also alerts xenophobes to fantasy fears of otherness and loyalties to imagined-nation (sic). The whole erupts with explosively coloured plastic flowers, writhing limbs and ferocious fabrics bottomed out with magnificently multicoloured high-heels which add gender-disruption to an already disturbing spectacle.

Daniel Coombs presents child seats liberated from shopping trolleys and translated as display devices. On each shelf there's a toytown tableau in which Macdonalds give-aways and thrift-shop finds combine to tell obscure, often disastrous post-modern fables.

James Hyde's geometric pattern paintings have metamorphosed into large vinyl pillow-covers inviting a more laid-back approach to art while Rob Wright haunts painting history with a sublime evocation in translucent layered blacks of a rocky outcrop against uncertainly coloured sky framed anachronistically as if to seal in some scent of the
past. Padraig Timoney shows a daubey abstract and Peter Lynch's tangibly textured, Flintstone-hued bricks-and-mortar grid paintings tempt us to touch as well as look.

Ian Dawson has put down his flame thrower and gone berserk with 'Spirograph' over a large white surface. Close-up it appears to display patience rather than dexterity but step back and we're surprised by a far-more graceful, floral feel than expected. Mark Cannon continues his mission to commemorate Formica's glory days and here composes some juicy skip-finds as tangerine slices through dark, chocolatey (sic) woodgrain in a celebration of super-surface simulation.

Johannes Phokela comments on divisive excesses of Western culture by re-painting with a bitter twist quotes from Breugel or Bosch. A female fountain figure distributes breast-milk (symbolic of cocaine) to some sprawling fat bourgeoisie in a 'bread-and circuses' indictment of contemporary decadence. Chantal Joffe offers a little painting of a young girl perhaps riding in a limo to be a bridesmaid or attend some religious inauguration. It contains the un-erasable pathos of any family-album snap.

Mark Foulds' canvas strikes everyone as an assertive object of note. Its vivacious, widely-spaced splodges against a white glossy surface look as though Matisse's 'Snail' had sniffed glue and gone haywire. Nearby Niall Persaud -one of 'Beautiful's curators- shows a grid of black velvet stretchers and blue/white scrape canvases here and there broken by the now-fashionable motif of toothpaste-like paint squeezed straight from its tube. Danny Rolph also strives to make a painting breakthrough, puncturing a large hole in a blue-paint-smeared translucent poly-carbon sheet, then leaning it against the gallery wall l and stuffing the hole with garish pink taffeta. Guy Harvey sets out a slick attention-grabber with a frieze of photographed paint-pots (apparently involved in producing Damien Hirst's 'Spin Paintings'). The insides of the pots are photographed from above against black resulting in a meta-work of swirling, planet-like circles. Smart art with built in gossip.

Co-curator Mark Holmes shows one of infinite configurations of some lemon-painted square steel rods, here set in a V-formation, and Richard Woods uses a kind of antipathy-process involving white enamel paint on black paper to produce an editioned, wordy print-painting. Mo Rana demonstrates obsessive graphite abuse in thickly caked metallic grids while Neil Rummings' crude anatomical rendition of a human head amusingly fills its brain department with colourful birds.

Fashion designer Sheila Maloney interjects finely-made clothes modelled by a hand-standing mannequin who's two-toned body supports itself in a pool of salt while kicking-up to show off a graceful skirt and fancy yellow pants and the shows only video -by James Gaywood- presents the bow-wave of a boat confusing the square form of a projection screen by surging relentlessly at a diagonal across the surface, seeming to move in one direction while actually travelling in another.

'Beautiful' is alive with diversity, invention and a 'Just Do It' spirit, but ultimately it's a tribute to the work that it survives the unflattering
context of small-business retail units redolent of the enterprising 1980s ethos which spawned them. Nevertheless the show thoroughly serves its professional purpose as a well-located, well-timed check-list of potential curate-ables.

END 900 Words

GIFT @ MILCH June 2nd to July 8th 2000 Paul O'Kane
Up the Thames from Tate Modern, past the huge 'London Eye',and after passing through through crowds of tourists and hot-dog smoke you eventually come to Vauxhall where Milch is hosting Berlin-based artists in the second half of a show called 'Gift'.

'Gift' in German can translate as 'poison' and the show -who's first half took place in Berlin featuring British artists- loosely plays off this double meaning. Gallery windows have been roughly painted in translucent white by Remy Markowitz and the atmosphere is mildly oppressive but it's hard to pin down which of the artworks is primarily responsible or whether the show does truly communicate the treacherous contradiction concealed within the title's translation.

Stefan Beck and Patrick Huber have installed several aspidistra-like house-plants on MDF plynths topped with morbid green marble to evoke some sense of domesticity and the waverings of taste. These stand like memorials against a complex backdrop made from hundreds of disowned snaps rescued from a film-processing factory (always a miserable material). The piece is callled 'Nobody Anywhere' and reeks of a painful ordinariness.

Ute Lindner has re-used machine-plan drawings from her studio in a disused East Berlin engineering factory. She isolates a small section then enlarges it enormously in 3mm rubber sheet which is then cut out and pinned to the wall. What was once a strict guidline for manufacture becomes a slightly sagging visual conundrum vaguely hinting at something other than mazey abstraction but never coalescing into clear recognition. Claes Oldenberg's soft sculpture and Simon Periton's doily-mania come to mind.

Anton Henning spreads a broad green canvas across Milch's back wall. On it is painted a grey wash rendition of an East German townscape - 'Neuroppin'. The style is illustrative and reminiscent of government information leaflets or architect's impressions. Similar techniques are applied to a smaller crimson portrait of a glamorous girl. To aid our viewing of the show Henning has also supplied little white box seats, underlit and topped with chemistry-filled plastic pillows which turn cold if not exposed to light.

Remy Markowitz shows a large multiple-exposure colour print of superimposed bonsai trees. Overlapping images form grotesque hybrids and a kind of broccoli nightmare into which we might stare to contemplate our own multi-layered and elusive 'nature'.

Accompanying this on the floor is a fat black box in which a wide-screened video monitor shows films of Chinese butchers offering good cuts of meat. Any connection between the two works (other than being Asian) is obscure enough to make me resign investigations.

Maya Roos provides a huge inflatable eyeball in silver plastic with pink iris. This is combined with a computer-generated animation film featuring a similar eye bouncing into a tube which proclaims "Beauty All Around, Terror Inside" in flashing words. The eyeball enters then blasts off into space. Alongside hangs a large, thickly-glossed black canvas featuring only the word 'Beauty' in relief-thick freestyle handwritng.

Gift is a crisply laid-out curation, colourfully animating the Milch space. The title and accompanying essays only loosely guide us in understanding quite why and how these artists and their objects came to be here together but still this show provides a rewarding glimpse of current Berlin-ese concerns and techniques.

END 550 words

 

'Executive Outcomes' @ Platform 02-06-00 to 25-06-00 - Paul O'Kane
Playing children run by Platform's Wilkes Street window just as they might have always done in this once arche working-class area. Recent generations have lived through cold war, terrorism and a war which "did not take place" but where do battles take place once we hide, deflect and deny them?

This concise but diverse selection by Platform curators Sheila Lawson and Simon Josebury provides a visual essay on art, masculinity, violence and warfare, but the carefully chosen juxtapositions ensure the argument never settles for long nor draws fixed conclusions.

A William Burroughs 'shotgun painting' coloured with efflorescent reds and shredded by a ballistic blast is seriously over-managed and protected by thick perspex -ironically not unlike that protecting the Mona Lisa from potential gun attacks.

The purpose here was to stop worshipful fans taking shreds away like holy relics and now the piece appears to enshrine a moment of extreme agression. Knowing Burroughs shot his wife establishes this practise as a kind of denouement to a male expressionist tradition long-justified by trading creativity against mythic 'primitivisms' and various losses of control.

Through Burroughs' holed surface and large-perspex we can see Polly Staple's wall-mounted Judd echo in clean angled steel surmounted by a decadently detailed and perhaps poisonously exotic flower arrangement. The one appears to grow out of the other in a reciprocal parasitism like one epoch from another or one value-system from another.

The wider context of the show conjures the image of a megalomaniac, territorialist Judd who towered over peers like Dan Flavin who's work was about as frail as Judd's was robust and yet provided necessary light for those working in the maester's expansive shadow.

Flowers, as Georges Bataille wrote, speak their own 'language'. Here they variously declare and sulk in sombre but intoxicating colours while seemong to underwrite the show with an elegiac tone. Of course neither violence nor war are likely to die themselves but merely morph into religious sacrifice, the bull-ring, the athletics stadium, the aggression of the stock-exchange, the cruel exploitation of the labour market or the xenophobic hostility concealed in every carelessly announced value-judgement.

Furthermore it's too simplistic to corral violence within any essentialist notion of gender; our swim-or-sink culture is violent at heart from playground to board-room and violence is ever-present in speech as well as in actions; everytime in fact that we follow a base instinct to territorialise, maintain or gain power. Even Ghandi's exemplary non-violent protest didn't take effect until -as Herbert Marcuse pointed out- it grew to proportions whereby it approximated violence.

'When are artists soldiers? who's side are you on? what are we fighting for? and what, in the age of over-mediation and simulacra described in Baudrillard's famous 'Gulf War' essay, might now be described as 'The Art of War'? These are all questions which come to mind whilst admiring Pietro Matteoli's photographs of 'great' European male 20th Century artists snapped during their years in military service. Max Ernst is badly wounded, Joseph Beuys proudly smiling and Lucio Fontana resplendent in Italian military garb complete with medals. All are beautifully presented as gritty little black and white prints well-drilled in crisp window mounts.

The Platform space is constantly rumbled by the sound of Fiona Banner's deep voice on cassette reading aloud her 'The Nam' text, in which she described as much as is humanly possible of a Vietnam war movie.

'Trance' -the name given to 'The Nam's sonic manifestation- sets up a yet further layer of mediation between us and the realities of war, and it's these very layers which partly inspire the show's title. Militarist vocabulary like "collateral damage" acts today as front-line propaganda mystifying, not any particular offensive but the reasoning behind war itself and 'Executive Outcomes' was the euphemistic name masking the mercenary organisation involved in the 'Sandline' scandal of recent years.

Layers of mediation have also been employed by John Timberlake who's large colour photograph records a tableau in which diminutive 3D figures gaze through binoculars at an amateurishly painted backdrop of sky over wooded hills. The object of their interest is an emphatically rendered atomic mushroom cloud. The effect is a complex diorama of anachronisms, seeing through a lens of today to genres of yesteryear, provoking re-consideration of a historical event as though witnessing it through the imaginative minds of the children of its time.

The more that Capitalism, guided by a Darwinian bible, piles on the pressure to survive; relentlessly gentrifying, judging and bullying while elevating a petit-bourgeoise notion of 'business' into a justifiable reason behind all kinds of inhumanity, then the more aggressive its survivors and winners must inevitably become.

Thus the future promises only a depressing one-way street heading towards widespread violence taking increasingly insidious forms, unless perhaps an ethos of relinquishment is encouraged to balance that of blatant greed. Maybe we should champion models like Walter Benjamin or Franz Kafka who, along with their immense foresight, understood the subversive beauty of failure and the grace of capitulation during eras in which to succeed is to be actively complicit with outrageous injustice.

END 850 Words

 

Michael Raedecker. @ The Approach May 6th to June 25 - Paul O'Kane
On entering the Approach space a broad canvas titled 'Ins and Outs' catches the eye and draws us in to examine an illusion. The illusion is that of light, carefully created by coloured threads and here seeming to glow from within a chic woodland house. Threads also form a gridded driveway onto which light from the building's wide picture-window falls in thread-made pools.

Raedecker seems bigger and bolder this year and has consolidated and expanded his repertoire of threading and painting techniques. 'Ins and Outs' also features matted bundles of cotton tree-tops while little sprits of wool here and there denote creepers and grass. All this is swallowed up in deep steel-blue paint.

Perspective is constantly played upon in this show. It's as if a student painter became obsessed with the cotton grid provided as an aid to accuracy and began fiddling with and painting directly on this tool instead of on the canvas.

The best of this selection balances crisp clarity of thin taught threads with the more bohemian rumbunctiousness of rough wool amidst colours which seem to rescue their own vivacity from the precipice of dour monochrome.

At times the work wanders dangerously close to a folksy expressionism evoking 80s East European animation particularly in 'Pitch' where comic trees stomp over a humpy hill toward a swirling black sky. 'Web' however marches more optimistically horizon-ward with a Guston-esque clumsiness while here and there little pink worms of paint of varying size establish perspectival distance. These however can't help but conjure-up chewing gum insults liberally applied by schoolchildren to advertising posters on the underground. Could this be a future field of technical exploration for Raedecker?

'Beam' survives its woody terrain as thick paint is demonstratively trammelled to form reaching tree-trunks while layers of intricate threadwork add light-effects and illusions to an otherwise murky realm.

The repertoire of Western painting's representational skills is continuously subverted to throw Raedecker himself off-balance, off-track and drive him to offering roads out of painting's dead-ends. Nevertheless the works sometimes teeter between invention and anachronism and the clearest vision of a way forward is provided by 'Radiate' where no woodland is to be seen, only the interior behind the very same picture-window featured in 'Ins and Outs'.

Here we just get a broad plane of thickly painted milk-white framed by crisp thread curtains pulled wide to inadvertently conjure the ghosts of Hockney's famous double portrait of Ozzie Clark and his wife. The floor is yet another perspectival grid but this time humorously textured by pulls and twists of cream wool which are adjusted for size to produce a crude sense of illusory diminution and distance. The opacity of the window implies a kind of burn-out or longed-for blindness to that woody world repeatedly depicted in the other works. It's as if here Raedecker finally succumbed to agoraphobia and began contemplating an alternative future and some new challenges.

END 500 Words

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