No need to shout...

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie: Class Hegemony in Contemporary Art currently running at the Arnolfini at Bristol’s dockside, is the latest installment of a project that has already shown in London, Stockholm and Cairo. The basic premise of the exhibition is to question and reveal the exploitative nature of the artworld and the ways that it is still dominated by a certain social strata based on economic prosperity and I suppose, cultural education.

Many of the works are performative in nature using actors to play out a given role. In Neil Cummings’ version of the TV show ‘Faking It’, for example, a café waiter is set the challenge of trying to fool the panel of experts, an art critic, a curator and an artist, into believing he is a real practicing artist. Hassan Khan’s photographic and textual documentation in Decoy works on a similar level. Four actors were used to infiltrate, ‘fake it’, at an exclusive Stockholm private view. Excerpts of dialogue that takes place between the actors and the ‘genuine’ private view attendees are reproduced in texts. They are meant, it seems, to expose art world pretense and artificiality as when, the curator of a new East London Gallery, is caught declaring outright to one of the actors that he wants to seek out artists to show in his gallery early in their careers ‘before they have established themselves, then they’re much easier to shape’. Such notions of curators, critics, buyers and gallerists ‘making’ artists and the power game that that entails is clearly riling for artists yet the vitriol with which Khan expresses this annoyance seems slightly at odds with the fact that he is after all still here, still working as an artist as part of a curated mainstream touring exhibition.

Natasha Sadr Haghighian’s I Can’t Work Like This, is for me, one of the more successful and complete pieces both conceptually and aesthetically. Indeed where other works have shied away from clearly aesthetic concerns, no doubt because of its assumed alliance with traditional conservative and right wing sensibilities, Haghighian creates a work that is both thought provoking and equivocal. Nails have been hammered into the walls of the gallery, they are all bent this way and that by the imprecise force of their driving blows. They form a dense grey cloud on the wall of the gallery (made all the more interesting by the various shadows that are cast by the overhead spot lighting) in the middle of which clearings of exposed white wall form the words I CAN’T WORK LIKE THIS in crisp block capital letters. On the floor underneath two hammers lie strewn along with a scattering of un-bent nails and their now empty container. But what are we to make of all this? Unlike the more vocal components of the exhibition this piece welcomes a little more thinking and looking on the part of the viewer, a little more deciphering. For me the nails resemble a swarm of people seen from above, surrounding and quite literally describing the stenciled letters. They are bent over, as if crippled by the force of the blows which they have undergone, and yet they remain just about standing, a humble yet vital part of the artwork.

San Keller’s photographs of how parents display their offspring’s work also manages to get further than mere shouting about the injustices of the art system. The interesting idiosyncrasies and sometimes incongruities of artworks displayed in domestic contexts opens up a variety of questions about what art means in a world wider in scope than elitist art circles. Art becomes more human, less imperialist and demanding outside of the gallery space. The images are devoid of human presence except for their multi-layered traces, their semi-private accumulations and arrangements of stuff, their personal histories. Curiously at once banal, witty and loaded, artworks sit alongside every day objects perhaps offering some kind of insight into where the artist came from, if that matters, if you’re interested. When the domestic world is then introduced into the gallery in the form of photographic representation the issues become even more entangled. In a show about what and who ‘makes’ or can make an artist the introduction of parentage is telling indeed. Are links being drawn between parent and curator with the implication that at some point you need to ‘go your separate ways’ for personal growth? What I like about this and Haghighian’s piece is that they are thoughtful, quietly unassuming and lasting. They are works that suggest ways in which they might be read without forcing themselves into a single and unequivocal self-reflexive dead-end.

The issue of spectatorship also slips into this exhibition. There is a feeling of uneasiness as the viewer, especially in the role of art critic, becomes complicit in the morally questionable economic system by which the art world is organised and the hierarchies of power that play out behind the scenes. Our mere presence in the gallery space means that we implicitly accept the terms by which art is made and displayed. Art as a physical commodity is not only sought by buyers both private and public but it also provides its own intellectual and cultural currency, its own kudos for the culturally aspirational. To be a ‘gallery-goer’ means inclusion and acceptance. The art world has always thrived on exclusivity either in terms of those who can afford, to buy or make art or volunteer in galleries or subsist on the mostly low wages of art institutions or write about art for a living. With so many jostling nonetheless to be a part of this club, founded on such laughably archaic modes of conduct, no wonder its effects are so far reaching. Still set upon an imaginary plinth, teasing us with the possibility of national and personal cultural betterment, art it seems has the power to affect far and wide.

Nevertheless this exhibition as a whole feels slightly mechanical. It is a bombardment, an unabashed rant at the art-world to which all of these artists, showing in mainstream public art galleries are of course indebted. This irony is not lost on the artists I am sure but the sense of disgruntlement is so potent, the political, social and cultural message so unsubtle I am inclined to remind myself of Irit Rogoff’s thought that ‘art does not have to be overtly political in its subject matter in order to produce a political effect, thus constituting a politics rather than reflecting one’.1 I am left feeling unsatisfied by, ironically given a recurring theme of the exhibition, a sense of over-curation in this group show, it all feels over-determined. The fact that art is still to a high degree the reserve of the economically prosperous is, of course, shameful. But the exhibition’s rallying thematic, with the thumbs down to the bourgeoisie, risks suffocating the more nuanced works, such as Haghighian’s or Keller’s, by its single minded intent. It is as if the message came first and the art, an auxillary second, a means of demonstration.

1. Irit Rogoff, ‘Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture’ in Gavin Butt, After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 121–122

Suspension at the Phoenix Gallery, Exeter

‘Suspension’, the current exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery, Exeter, sees a maturing of work by the duo Simon Haddock and Stuart Chubb. An explosive formation lures us in, part temple, part labyrinth, part magic portal. Seemingly precarious in its configuration, like a three-dimensional Russian modernist montage, Viewer consists of thin wooden walls upon which stand further sheets of wood that overlap, hang and balance horizontally, then grow vertically up in a wooden landscape construction site, barely visible from the gallery floor. Wood juts and looms, creating a space that is at once confusing and arresting it its disarray. It is interactive, but gives no clear sense of where we should begin our explorations. At every turn our impression is framed by windows teasingly opening out at every level. Teasingly, because our experience of the piece separates the physical and the visual, our physical entrance is at once invited and blocked, our visual involvement authorized and restricted. Our engagement is playful. We crouch, peek, tip-toe, look through, crane. It is fragmented, denied a sweeping view except perhaps at the gateway on the other side of the ‘portal’ (access to which is frustratingly denied). Here we happen upon the suggestion of a reconstruction of the artists’ studio where further ‘discarded’ wood and images lie scattered. Is it the studio or is it a mental picture of the process of art making, where disjointed elements and experiences are appropriated, rejected and then rearranged into some kind of narrative?

Viewer

The wall text informs us that the artists are working predominantly with the debris of ‘false walls’ from temporary exhibitions, amassed and reconfigured. These discarded supports, within which art has previously been hung, projected or framed, define the spatial structure of our viewing experience within a gallery. Haddock and Chubb deconstruct and reconstruct, subvert and embellish such physical demarcations. And yet the narrative they present is hardly complete: just in case we have not noticed, they leave the G-clamps for all to see. Is it in the process of making or dismantling? (If postmodernism has taught us anything, it is to question such ‘false’ distinctions). This is surely the point. The reincarnation of fragments from now unidentifiable exhibitions can never be complete, as more shows go up and others are replaced. Ghosts of art that these sheets of wood previously housed haunt the current work, distant memories of art now evolving into something other. Haddock and Chubb’s rendering is pared down by their palette, limited to MDF laid bare, punctuated by black and white emulsion paint, slapped on. Colour is sparse, with an isolated slab of red or grey leaning here and there. It is an element of the piece which is left unexplored and seems at odds with its more lighthearted tackling of space.

Seeding (left wall) and Cadence

By contrast colour, in Haddock’s solo paintings, is activated, threatening to erupt from the surface in an explosion of trails, clouds, smudges and shadows. His work sways between a bewildering, almost violent bombardment of form and colour, and a more open landscape of looser touch and restricted palette. In Cadence, lurid painted bars clash and expand across and out from the surface in ultra- and anti-perspective, as scaffolding around which scatterings of textured marks jostle. However, on a backdrop of diaphanous yellow wash there emerges a dissonance between the romantic and the mechanical, the spectral and the sci-fi, a kind of dream-like/nightmarish construction. In another guise, Haddock’s approach is less urgent, more spacious, overtly suggestive of natural forms and rhythms. Meandering in its trajectory, Seeding builds up texture through layers of overlapping, almost translucent masked washes, exposing previous layers of drawn black scribbles. Haddock’s process is tantalizingly revealed in painterly form (as in its sculptural sister across the hall). Where he has built up pigment, the viewer is invited mentally to unmake, scrape back, an archaeology of spectatorship. The cloud of dust, birds or whatever else it might be, hovers suggestively above the scene as neither one thing nor another or both. You decide.

The painting and sculptural installation work closely together (despite the disruptive division of the gallery hallway). Structural forms are echoed, the constructive process made manifest, their connection, intimate. Beginning our viewing journey with the paintings, as we move into Haddock and Chubb’s collaborative work, we have the sense of moving into alluringly unauthorized territory. We zoom into a painting, beyond the finished product on display, and into a work in progress. It is revealing, laid bare, its ludic serendipity celebrated. Its dependence on a trail of artistic precedence is honest without a claustrophobic sense of knowingness. I am left wondering how constructive a more overt stylistic breach between their two approaches might be, and how much a loosening of the currently unified aesthetic, by pushing the very nature of the collaborative, might lead to even richer realms.

What's all this about?

By way of introduction this blog is, broadly stated, about art and visual culture. More specifically it’s about very personal and present engagements with art and spectatorship rather than a strongly historical account of works discussed. I will not be focussing on a particular period of art production or a particular genre of work but on what happens when an artwork, any artwork meets an eye, a body, a mind. I am intrigued by the difficult to articulate moment in which two entities, the viewer and the work, two sets of cultural baggage, two modes of communication meet. My accounts are deeply and unapologetically subjective informed by my personal reception of works viewed now and in the past. It’s easy to go to art exhibitions and stare and then leave again but to then attempt to put that experience into words, to describe one’s reactions, what one’s thought processes were makes that engagement far more demanding, thoughtful and lasting.

Wenceslaus Hollar: Civis Coloniensis Uxor (1643)

But why ‘The Substance of Shadows’? In the first instance it is the name of my first solo curated show for the History of Art Department at Bristol University soon to open (June 20th 2009). This exhibition displays a selection of the department’s print archive that I have been working on over the past nine months (more of this soon). But secondly it expresses the ways in which our experiences of art, literature and culture stay with us as memories, they inform everything that we subsequently do and see. They colour our interpretations of the present and future by their link to something past. I see these connections as resembling a metaphorical shadow, they have a specific source (in the form of an artwork) and yet their shaded reflection goes through something of a metamorphosis as it is transcribed from source to shadow, from artwork to the mind of the spectator. That reflected double is by no means inferior to the original, it is rather deeply effected by whatever mental reconfigurations it inevitably passes through. My own writings represent in themselves further shadows of the art I have seen and thought about, they are necessarily imperfect proliferations of their original.