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The work collected here is a mostly unpublished portfolio of writing from 1994-'98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