ESSAY: Double Vision (2012)

Text to accompany the Leeds United, L Foundation, MOMA exhibition BRINK, at

The Institute of Jamais Vu, London

INSTITUTIONS

People react in extreme ways when contained and restrained by forces outside of their own control. Agitated captives throw themselves hard against the walls. Political prisoners effect demeaning dirty protests. Ingenious inmates burrow with rusty cutlery, a soiled spoon becoming an agent of freedom. All want a way out, to be past the walls, past the containment, through to some other life. To paraphrase and pervert Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punishment, the purpose of prison is “the isolation of the subject from the external world, from everything that motivated the offence, from the complicities that facilitated it.” He goes on, “Lastly, and perhaps above all, the isolation of the subjects guarantees that it is possible to exercise over them, with maximum intensity, a power that will not be overthrown by any other influence; solitude is the condition of total submission.” Let’s allow ‘subject’ to define both the artwork and the viewer, and by some abstraction the artist too. All three are in some way present between the gallery walls, all move inside then out, outside then in, the idea of all three fluctuates, flutters, and flitters from seeing to sightless, unseen to seen. The walls fight to contain such motion, control it and put it in position; “the condition of total submission.” Foucault’s ‘submission’ comes alive here, in this context, realizing the word’s multitude of meanings: surrender and compliance, but also to present and propose, to suggest and make argument. Gallery walls are not prison walls, but the things they contain do lack some control. Walls figure in much of what LU have done and continue to do: they’ve sanded and drilled them (during more conventional moments) revealing the history of hangings hidden beneath blankets of paint; they’ve cut and hacked into them, a structural disturbance both physical and metaphorical; they’ve pissed on them, quoting art history and re-interpreting institutional critique; and they’ve carried one around with them, the ‘MOMA window’ (Delay, 2001) being a wall-substitute, see-through, but a partition all the same. The gallery walls symbolize the confines of the art world, a microcosmic world, separate yet entirely within. To use the walls so often is to draw attention to such blatant artifice. To attack them is to wish the whole enterprise tumble down; that world of assimilation, which blots up one’s woes and puts them back out on display.

RECENT ACQUISITIONS

Art can offer the viewer a re-framing of the world. Images and objects can become art by being re-framed through art, within an art context. Art, to quote Charles Avery, “is a qualitative attribute, assigned to particular objects and actions at a particular moment in time.” Not every painting is art; some are merely paintings, reduced to their objective objecthood. Some things lose their art status, vigour decayed via time. Other things are rehabilitated through the same processes, reincarnated as objects of authority and import. What makes one thing not the other, what makes the other thing not the one, is the idea of art. It’s an area of high dispute, where perception is key and whatever adds influence over perception – namely context, be it physical, social, ideological, or financial – can bear as much strength as the thing itself being perceived. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA) is one of the largest of the contemporary influences over perception; its power is colossal in all four of the aforementioned contextual categories. Recent Acquisitions (2001–present) pushes MoMA’s immense strength into metaphor: power-absolute becoming absolution-through-power. Seen through the glass, everyday views are reclaimed, preserved, made art, made sacred; LU’s two men Crusading out in the world, righteous behavior sans religious sanction. Is a child’s playground art? Sure, ask Carsten Höller. And those plants? Those too, right Broodthaers. That agricultural pasture? Richard Long. And on it goes. Each picture in Recent Acquisitions recalls another artwork, possibly more than just one, possibly some that don’t yet exist. Even the installation evokes other works, diagrammatic photo-studies and meticulous conceptualist stratagems. Sol Lewitt’s On the Walls of the Lower East Side (1979), itself a study of art and authority, comes to mind. Lewitt took hundreds of photographs documenting the nascent graffiti appearing in Manhattan’s LES. Graffiti was about staking a claim, rising above political, social, and financial disenfranchisement to assert one’s right to art and expression, property and prominence. City walls become prison walls become gallery walls, while all the time staying all things at all times. LU’s is guerrilla cultural action, both protest and parade.

Look what art does!

Look what art can do

WORLD OF WORK

‘There’s a piece of work in that’ – a phrase familiar to many art makers in our everything-as-art, art-as-everything time period; scrawled onto napkins in cafés and restaurants; blotted onto beermats in pubs, clubs, and drinking dens; ink leaking through the weave of whichever material is close enough to hand. A spreading of ink, but a fixing of inspiration; semi-permeable paper-substitute better than the untrustworthy transience of ideas in sodden synapses; spit-and-sawdust dreamcatchers for clasping at abstractions. Here, in the work Through and Through (2012), the words themselves are given gravitas, cut in-to and out-of the gallery’s typically white wooden walls. The wall, which like blank paper to the pen’s play of language, acts to host art and artistic gesture. Ostensibly neutral and allegedly free of association, the walls are mute scaffold, not really seen and certainly not heard, an absence, present only by necessity, keeping one world away from the other, an architectural prophylactic guarding against adulteration. The work hacks away at both forms of fabrication: this established pretense scored and splintered, thrown out with the shavings of wood. Geographically, the Institute of Jamais Vu makes this demystification even more abrupt; the gallery having been built in what is essentially a communal living space, looking through (and through) the holes in the wall one instantly sees not art, but life, domestic life, everyday life, ‘real life’ (whatever that may mean). As with Recent Acquisitions, Angle of Incidence (1997), and Trite and Vulgar (1998), the artists claim the work is not the object, or the excavated object in this case, but what can be seen through it and seen within it. Angle of Incidence is a mirror installed in a Leeds pub, engraved with the legend, “Lifelike”, then underneath “100% proof.” Also a mirror, Trite and Vulgar is engraved eponymously, in elegant swirling serif typeface. If the work isn’t these objects – the mirrors, the windows, the punctures in the wall – but what can be seen in them, then what, exactly, is the work? What are we seeing. Who can be seen. Where is this place that exists within and beyond these limits. These concentric mental movements are all part of the work, chasing an image, an image chasing you; intricate helices built into its physically metaphysical structure. Through and Through: thoroughly tiring, tirelessly thorough.

UNSTEADY SIGHTS

LU works have appeared, smuggled in with cunning chicanery and the misuse of relative financial excess, in the international art press. With Review (1998), the artists took out a full page of advertising space in Art Monthly magazine, using it as a means to display and distribute their work far and wide. Less an intervention, more an insertion, Review didn’t intend to obstruct or disrupt the accommodating periodical, but exist within it, as part of it, inoperable shrapnel still irritant to the host’s body. ‘Insertions’ comes from the artist Cildo Miereles, whose Insertions into Ideological Circuits saw him inscribing political messages onto banknotes and recycled Coke-a-Cola bottles, which would then be washed, re-filled, and put back into the commercial system, this new disfigurement well disguised. Review presents itself as both a review of a work and as the work also, operating in constant oscillation between the two. Dualisms are diluted within one-another and a complex critical concoction poured forth. Here, the disfigurement is the disguise, and the disguise the disfigurement; one thing is disguised as another thing disguised as the original thing, and so on; the disfigurement is mutual, the movement unending. Perpetually circular and judiciously disobedient, the piece generates such a haze of hypotheses that, against LU’s wishes, the editors of Art Monthly were compelled to provided the viewer with an anchor of blatant reference: the word ADVERTISEMENT, alone and emboldened, capitalized in the bottom left corner of the page.

SITE UNSEEN

LU works have not appeared in Frieze magazine, some insertions didn’t make it to print. Mid-Atlantic (1999) is an ad for a fictional exhibition at the exact geographical point between New York City and Leeds. It depicts three significant New York art dealers – Marian Goodman, Barbara Gladstone, and Mary Boone – who are involved with the show. Only it’s not that Goodman, Gladstone, and Boone, but their apparent namesakes: three Northern broads, each throwing a get-together in their home, each awaiting guests, well-stocked with glasses of red wine. You can imagine the parley, in the studio one overcast day –

Barbara Gladstone. That’s a nice Northern name.

Don’t she live cross road?

Nah mate, that’s Mary.

Mary?

Aye, y’know, Mary Boone.

[cue laughter]

‘Mary’ and her baggy polo shirt, her too-tungstenized kitchen; ‘Marian’ and the upcoming loft-conversion, Velux already fitted, halfway there; salutary ‘Barbara’ with kid’s toys strewn askew and her homely redbrick frontage; so unglamorous, so not New York, so sodding British. So-sodding-something in fact, that Frieze didn’t run the ad, finding it too bellicose or risqué, and instead censoring it at the last minute. LU have responded with Adrift, an exact replica of that issue of Frieze, with everything save their original ad censored out. The white pages flicker by and by, full of nothing, a heavy nothing; it’s strange. The paper feels right, each sheet between the fingers; strange and uncanny. Then the shipwreck lurches out of the depths one’s daze, and Mid-Atlantic appears, at last, a forgotten image suddenly the only thing in sight. It’s there, in front of you. Three faces and three places, or six of both if you really think about it (they are what they’re not, and also what they are). Disguise becomes demystification, creating an anti-mythology of mimicry, resemblance, and dissemblance. Then it’s gone again, the ad that is, and all we’re left with is the white between our fingers, ever bright inside our eyes.

THE MODERNIST FAMILY

Men in disguise, two men, disguised as more men, disguised as an institution, disguised as parents and progenitors, mummy and daddy dressed up in drag. A counter-cultural art movement and corporate art institution re-interpreted as down-and-dirty prison tattoos, marks of manhood, identity as injury; keep it in the family, even if you’ve long been disowned. Family Values (2003); I’m reminded of an old playground chant, less a song, more an invocation of juvenescent trauma – “Yer dad’s yer mum. Yer mum’s yer dad.” Repeated without end, until tears, teacher, or the appearance of said parents. Dada (the movement) and MoMA (the museum), limbs of the same unknowable body (art), extremities punched out of darkness. Art witticisms played out as prison tat’. Fists are for brawling and bruising, making marks on other human beings; Art is for . . . (don’t go there), and making marks on other human beings. Art and fists; form and force; ideas and the body: tumorous thoughts that need removing, handling, taking away to be looked at. There’s a brawl in the brig, big boys causing a ruckus.

ESSAY: Moiré (strange bedfellows) (2011)

Text to accompany Josh Whitaker’s exhibition Moiré (Stages/Taxed) at +44 141 Gallery, Glasgow

07/05/2011 – 28/05/2011

Art and politics make, to borrow a neat phrase from political commentary, strange bedfellows. There is certainly a version of politics – emphatically with a lowercase ‘p’ – at work in all art: the manipulation of material and concept; the management of visual presentation with audience perception; and, perhaps most importantly, the conflict of results against intention, of the limitations of production against the desire for an ideal. But overtly political art, that is, by my own indistinct definition, art actively attempting to deal with political issues rather than merely expose or display them, often suffers from a severe case of academic anaemia, becoming studious, dry, bureaucratic, and civil; becoming, in other words, too much like politics and not enough like art. Josh Whitaker draws from political source material but does not make overtly political art. The apparent subjects of his work operate on a different level to the means and material by which they are presented. Out of dead imagery and dead ideologies he has built an architecture alive with immediacy. Vibrant and curious, the works co-exist without co-dependence, they add colour to one another, and nudge and prompt like actors on a stage.

William Morris, the 19th Century socialist, poet, author, editor, painter, translator, textile designer, and sometime architect, is a key player on Whitaker’s conceptual stage. Useful Work vs. Useless Toil (banner for the exterior of an institution) takes the unbracketed part of its title, as well as its immediate message, from a speech Morris gave to a group of London workers; the phrase later becoming the header for one of his many agrarian left-leaning political essays. He was, by all accounts, an engaging and eloquent public speaker and was known to give impromptu lectures on street corners and toured working men’s clubs across the country, pamphlets and a soapbox as his only marketing tools. Whitaker freely quotes the makeshift aesthetics of civil disobedience and industrial action, of the strike and the sit-in. His constructions – the sawdust, the scaffold, the cheap carpet tiles, the banners, the found segments of peeling billboard – seem well suited to such fugitive agitprop ventures. One imagines them quickly disassembled and thrown into hiding should they garner unwanted attention from the law. As a gesture of protest – especially a distanced, adopted stance of protest – the works generate a feedback loop of sorts, questioning their own questions, their own right to question.

The feedback becomes most evident in the titles, particularly: Hotel D-D-D-Diagram versions (1…) to (1…2…3…4); and Stage, Re-Stage, Stage (Evo) and (Yukio). The brackets, prevalent in all the titles, show these works as indefinite articles, parts of an on-going series, where other versions, could, should, and do exist, with more, perhaps, still on the way. With Stage, Re-Stage… the feedback is an echo – an action absorbed into the surrounding landscape, but one losing quality each time it is repeated. Evo Morales and Yukio Hatoyama – respectively the President of Bolivia and the Prime Minister of Japan – are at the forefront of an unforeseen extension of meritocratic democracy. These World Leaders, fully absorbed into the celebrity media apparatus, have moved significant places in political polls thanks to their dress-sense, or lack-of. Neither statesman follows the current International Style – smart designer suits in black, blue, or charcoal. But, whereas Morales’ casual threads – his jumpers in particular – have won him support at home in Bolivia, Hatoyama became an object of great derision in Japan, due, in no small part, to his penchant for loud and somewhat effeminate shirts. Whitaker, channelling Morris the textile designer this time, has made faux-fabric wallpaper from these items of accidental political potency, turning fashion into décor, and individual style into mass-market availability; a melodrama of dress is swapped for an apathetic ambience, a message for a mood. Their clothing has come to symbolise their strengths and weaknesses as leaders. Evo is seen as a man of the people, not a distant aristocrat who bought his way into office. Yukio, on the other hand, is seen to be losing it, lacking the strength of character that Japan so needs. I’m reminded of a Max Ernst collage from 1920, a jaunty number that has morphed into prophecy over time, its title: The Hat Makes The Man.

In A Strange Place I Know So Well (portable document format), the flight of time’s arrow has, this time, caused the death of a prophecy. One sees that the symbols of past-political and military power have become details of design – a curved wooden shelter for picnicers looking to avoid the rain or the sun or who just like to sit and eat at a table. And even that – that quasi-poetic use of symbol as shelter – even that has been killed, becoming aestheticized so an image is all that remains. Computer files in Portable Document Format – PDFs – have been ‘flattened’ and ‘fixed’ so that their content cannot be easily altered. The format was designed for the easy exchange of documents over the internet. PDFs are
usually complete documents – finished, so in some ways already obsolete. Whitaker cloaks a stark, powerful image – the Soviet Hammer and Sickle – in nostalgia and humorous flippancy. The work offers the viewer a sweet idyll, a place away from one’s present concerns. But this, like much present in the show, could only ever be a backdrop, a prop, a temporary solution, and, at best, a faint fading dream.

In closing, I offer a partial cast for Whitaker’s stage, a scrambled script, and an almost-narrative:

SETH PRICE. Something new, and something else, and something something. Here come a lot different varieties of strategies and arrangements, all interesting, all interlocking, mutatis mutandis.

GUY DEBORD. First of all we think the world must be changed. We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that this change is possible through appropriate actions.

ED RUSHCA. The idea of Hollywood has lots of meanings, and one – to me – is this image of something fake up here being held up with sticks. That, to me, had more in meaning with the term ‘Hollywood’ than any other usual associations. I looked outside my window and saw the sign ‘Hollywood’ and it became the subject matter for me. It only lasted for a while so the actual remnants of the sign are not not even important to me. I don’t even think it should stay; it doesn’t even mean ‘landmark’ to me. It might as well fall down. That’s more Hollywood – to have it fall down or be removed. But in the end it’s Hollywood to put it back up, see?

DON DELILLO. He saw billboards of Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers we dousing in their ashtrays – all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some selfrefering relationship that a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality.

ALISON LANDSBERG. Memory is not commonly imagined as a site of possibility for progressive politics. More often, memory, particularly in the form of nostalgia, is condemned for it solipsistic nature, for its tendency to draw people into the past instead of the present. Private memory is an obstacle to collective politics.

MARGARET ATWOOD. We wish to be as the careless gods, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having sex and being entertained by the anguish of others. And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough. Thanks to our uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions.

ASGER JORN. All the elements of the cultural past must be ‘reinvested’ or disappear.

PHILIP DRAKE. What we call the past is accessible only through private and publicly articulated memories, narrated through the perspective of the present. David Lowenthal has termed this memorial knowledge, knowledge of the past based upon selective and strategic remembering in the present, and suggests that this is made up of a mixture of personal memory and public memories that over time become fused and indistinguishable.

GERTRUDE STEIN. The trouble with looking was that in regard to human beings looking inevitably carried in its train realizing movements and expression and as such forced me into recognizing resemblances, and so forced remembering and in forcing remembering caused confusion of present with past and future time!

ROLAND BARTHES. All of a sudden it didn’t bother me not being modern.

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ. The world has need of many things, bar more information.

PIERO MANZONI. There is no question of forming, articulating; one cannot have recourse to complicated, parascientific solutions, to graphic compositions, to ethnographic fantasies, etc. Each discipline possesses in itself elements of solution. Expression, imagination, abstraction, are they not in themselves empty inventions? There is nothing to explain: just be, and live.

– – – – – – – – – –

Download the orginal poster

NOTE: A passage from this text was republished by South London Gallery as part of their events series ‘The Conch: A Froum For Critical Discussion’

ESSAY: EX as CROSS as X as TIMES (2010)

Text to accompany the group exhibition ex at Leeds College of Art, Spetember 2010

A turtle on its back, legs wagging in the air. Trapped by nature and further trapped by technology, the turtle lives upside down in a world of slow-motion. I’m never sure where to begin, but slowly is a start.

This is the first time all of these works have been seen together. Most were made with the intention of being seen in some kind of isolation. Or at least they were created in some kind of isolation and without thought to any of the specific works they are now accompanied by. None were made for this show in particular, though their presentation may have been adapted. ex is an exhibition without a linear conceptual programme. This essay, therefore, must follow such a lead, winding with the turns so as to ride the thing out. I have clumsily divided the works into three vague sections: SURFACE, INTERIOR, and, most clumsily vague of all, ETHER. There are no claims to truth here, nothing is properly correct. I aim only to nab a needle from the patchwork and thread a narrative through the exhibition as a whole.

SURFACE

The turtle video, The Tortoise is on its Back, is by Arron Sands. And depending on your constitution, it is either funny, sad, agonising, or annoying. The point, I think, is to try generate all four, leaving the viewer dazed, perplexed and perhaps even angry. As he says on his website, “What is going on here? My practice is one of plastic ideology . . . The drawings, sculptures, videos, poems etc. hold a straightforwardly backwards mirror to the world, proclaiming ‘What the fuck’ in an attempt to situate myself among the domestic abominations that taunt me . . . Through dysfunctional family ensembles of intentionally confrontational one-liners, I hope to create work that creates an abiding sentiment, be it a sore head in the morning, a physical revolt on my person or a dialogue through which sub rosa can be excavated. ” If you couldn’t already tell, Sands writes also, and with wild temperament too. His Bad Poetry reads like a dissected dictionary. I hear the acid victim photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, emphatically played by the late Dennis Hopper. I hear Roberto Benigni caffeined to the extreme (as if he needed it) in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes.  Puddle Fuck recalls a blasé Kerouac, or a drug-addled Dr. Seuss (as if he needed it.) Weihnachten Baum (Christmas Tree) is Dan Graham’s Scheme reimagined in viral form; systematic, but apparently nonsensical, thoroughness driven by whimsy. The words fall from elsewhere, a multitude of voices proliferate. The text feels snatched and stolen, then resold on the cheap.

Josh Whitaker‘s Useful Work vs. Useless Toil (Banner For The Outside Of An Institution) takes its title and immediate message from the 19^th Century socialist William Morris. Morris used the phrase in a speech to some London workers, and then again, later, as the title of an essay. It sits somewhat uncomfortably within an art context. ‘Useful’ is an obsolete word in art. Usefulness is never questioned, never expected or anticipated. As a condition it is irrelevant. But ‘Useless Toil’ fits the other hand like a glove. In The Unknown Masterpiece Balzac has the lead character Frenhofer – a painter, the greatest of his time, now old and seemingly of little output – toil for ten years in the production of a single portrait. When the portrait is revealed to his young protégées, they recoil at seeing “nothing but colours piled one upon another in confusion, and held in restraint by a multitude of curious lines which form a wall of a painting.” They presume his madness and taunt him, laughing as they leave while he weeps and threatens them. The morning after, feeling somewhat anxious, they return to Frenhofer’s studio only to find he has “died during the night after burning his pictures.” Picasso claimed to have been haunted by Frenhofer’s fate, and in order to wrestle that particular demon, moved his own studio to the same Paris street where much of the story takes place. More recently, on the BBC’s The Culture Show, Martin Creed joyously declared his entire practice as a “collection of failures”. In da Vinci’s words, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Morris was himself an artist, a craftsman working with textiles and also a painter and poet. Where he saw art in “Useful Work” remains unclear, though he lists “works of art – the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful” amongst things “which serve the pleasures of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted”, things which he sees as important and good. But those words and sentiments have long since drifted into obscurity. Much contemporary art rejoices in corruption. And beauty is as redundant a concept as usefulness. Whitaker is more than aware of this redundancy, stating his interest in “what could be viewed as failed or historicised ideologies.” The key gesture of the work is its banner form, the disguise which reinserts the Morris phrase into modern life via, in Whitaker’s words, ” the aesthetics of the Situationists in Paris 1968 and industrial action of the 1970s and 80s” and even, I should say, of today. He continues, “The piece is intended to go on the outside of buildings where people meet . . . galleries, schools etc.” and he even specifies as much in the title of the work. Attached to an “institution”, the ambiguity of the phrase remains, but the subjects it is ambiguous toward have shifted. Who decides for us what is useful and what is not? And who decides on who decides? Whitaker seizes on these conjectures and sends them out to do battle in public space; to battle, in fact, over public space.

Eleanor Hutchinson‘s sculptures also confront the public through a stance of disguise; though here the veil is slipping and the terrain, at first, appears more familiar. Initially, Back-to-back chair for two people looks like two separate chairs welded together, but Hutchinson designed the work herself and used a variety of technical methods in its construction. As she explains, “Lengths of ash wood were steam bended to create the armrests. The frame was made by cutting, bending and welding metal piping to the shape I wanted. It was then sanded, polished, cleaned and sprayed with a clear varnish. The seats are a wooden base, foam, and then material, cut and sewn into the right shape and stretched over each base.” This thoroughness in regards to material and design are what make Back-to-back… such an intriguing sight. It looks legitimate, like a design prototype or a showroom model. And it looks fun too, like a party game or perverted speed-dating prop; and with two people sat upon it, like a feat of domestic engineering, spurning gravity, social convention, and easy artistic classification. “The planning and execution of my work draws on methods used in design, yet it firmly remains as a dialogue with it,” she asserts. “I feel the ‘designed’ appearance of some of my work can give the viewer a route into it, yet its form and context as artwork stops it directly mimicking everyday products.” The gallery environment is essential then, in defining this object as art. “I made it as a piece of art, not a piece of design, and want it to be seen in that context, yet I’m also aware that it will be seen as other things as well. ” In that context, as art, Back-to-back… continues interventionist lines of inquiry, with interest on subversive anthropological, rather than outright political, issues. “I am interested in how the arrangement and manipulation of different components within space can influence behaviour . . . The encounter between the two people that sit on it is crucial. Their forced physical contact and the exclusion of eye contact is an important part of the work.” For Hutchinson the mutation of design results in the mutation of experience. The mutation is what signifies the art, and only art could offer such a beast sweet asylum.

All the works in Rachel Westerman‘s Replacement series, as well as a table is a table is a table, are too in search of such asylum, but outside of art, out in the everyday. Westerman’s sculptures are created to be identical in appearance to pre-existing objects; they are clones rather than mutants. Disguised as such, she intends her works to, in her words, “induce in the viewer a reflexive moment of realisation and, ultimately, reconsideration . . . to alter the viewer’s perception of the object in question.” This is most successfully achieved in a table is a table is a table, where Westerman matches not only the dimensions and materials of an apparently average table, but also the marks of misuse and decay, which are local to just one table in particular. “What makes this table a table?” she writes on her website, “Is it the method of production that is undertaken in the name of art and its label as a sculpture of a table as opposed to a real table? Or is it merely its ability to carry out the same functions as a ‘real’ table, which it is undoubtedly able to do.” We are almost one hundred years post-Duchamp and his first readymade. So it is almost without question that the original table, the table on which Westerman’s sculptural table is based, could, through various processes of acquisition and redeployment, attain some kind of art status. What Westerman wants to know is, can this transformation go in the other direction, can an art object ever be emptied of whatever makes it art, and exist only as the object it most resembles? This operation does happen, and it happens remarkably often. Think of the paintings found in secondhand shops around the country, few of these could or would be classified as art, despite their resemblance to it. These objects have lost their art status over time; although some, it must be said, have always been without it. Now, leant against the wall or piled high amongst bric-a-brac, they seem so removed from what we think art is, what art should be, that they are transformed back into paintings as paintings only: “A picture or design executed with paint” as the dictionary has it. Westerman explains that “the work is predominantly site specific and I choose to replicate and repeat objects within a given space . . . [then place the objects] back within the original environment.” This method of creation and deployment – unfortunately unrealisable for ex – allows her cloned objects to become indeterminable from their authentic predecessors, providing an easier route for her works as they seek to defect from their art state.

“I’m interested in the value of materials and how they can bestow value onto the worthless, or lose their value if they are disguised as something worthless.” Not Westerman’s words, but those of Tom Cookson. Cookson sculpts, what he terms, “throwaway objects” out of traditionally high-value materials, like gold or silver. These are often then positioned in a space to resemble the debris they descend from. So a sterling silver staple is forced into a wall – as in Staple Practice – and a 9ct gold match is left casually askew upon a plinth – as in Reclining Alchemist. Cookson sees the latter work anthropomorphically, “as a portrait of an alchemist burnt out in the pursuit of gold.” The gold match, denied its function as a match, brought to life already in a state of death, is a memorial to that human pursuit and endeavour, where science could lead to riches, but came with a potentially high price. Cookson’s minute monument burns only in the mind, and therefore forever. Cookson continues, “Giving value to a throwaway object questions why we put value on materials at all, especially when they have no function . . . Also, by carving away at the gold and silver, it is diminishing their weight and therefore their material worth. Yet,” and here the paradox is laid bare, “another value is being invested through making.” Cookson attempts to question which value is the most important, the most true, if such a thing can be said – Use value? Material value? Labour? History? – reigniting the disorientation at the heart of much political thought.

INTERIOR

“An unfocused gaze takes in a passing landscape, unfolding in a slow impression of land, sea and sky. Greys and blues are punctuated by intense, jewel like, kaleidoscopic greens and yellows. A low drone accompanies these images, placing the viewer within the private space of the car.” That description, by Alice Brook, of her own work, passengering, is as good as any I would want to write. Brook’s notion of ‘passengering’ has come from her reading of Feminist writers such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. As she says, “A passenger is submissive and has little or no control over their own destiny, which appeared to resonate with the perceptions of women that Irigaray and Cixous were keen to counter.” Indeed, the viewer, who sees with eyes from behind the camera, has no control over their destiny and is forced through the images that appear on screen; beautiful images, “kaleidoscopic” the ideal word. But the engine drone creates menace, as most drones do. It recalls the work of Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch’s go-to composer. Badalamenti has become known for his use of harmonic suspension, whereby a series of unfinished cadences are used to create musical tension, the listener left searching for resolution. In passengering, the drone is both expectant and claustrophobic, a reminder that one is being driven, that the destination is another’s will. As viewers we must adhere to someone else’s idea of freedom, follow their desires, with the lights and colours out of reach, though only a mere window’s width away. We long for freedom but also enjoy the ride, aware of the pressures that come with being a driver. Often in fiction, the pressure of freedom leads to oblivion. Or perhaps freedom, the freedom to drive, to pursue one’s desires, arrives only when “destiny” has become pure oblivion. Through coercion and perversion, the lead in David Peace’s novel 1974, Eddie Dunford, is led into a torrid and terrible conspiracy. When all is lost and almost everyone is dead, Dunford is finally in the driving seat, the police not far behind. The book ends with the single line, “Ninety miles an hour.” Going back to David Lynch, the film Lost Highway sees Bill Pullman as a passenger in his own life. Constantly submitting to the needs of others, his fears consume him, driving him into darkness. He kills his own wife and is then put on death row. Only after killing the darkness inside him can he sit in the driver’s seat. Only when death can be his sole destination, his sole destiny, is he allowed to take the wheel and tear out into the night. The fate of the passenger in Brook’s video may not be so grand, or so undeniably male, it remains in the unknown. Watching the water droplets on the window makes me think of fresh falling rains, cleansing waters straight from the skies.

From there to here – And as Ruth Campbell‘s wonderfully Gothic title tells us, Filthy water can’t be washed. “I wanted to highlight qualities such as flatness of plane, flatness of colour, the geometric layout of objects, and scale,” she says about her photographs. Taken with a medium format camera, edited, and then printed onto high grain matte paper, the resulting images, of the London Regent’s Canal, are painterly and rich. The water seems to stretch out much further than it should, more like a celestial sky than the muddied inland waterway that stretches across North London. The colours swill and change, the water seems alive. The occasional floating debris brings one back down, makes one aware of the water’s surface, aware that there is a top, and, therefore, a below. For the artist too, the water is almost alive, “Our society throws and dumps anything into the waters, and assumes our rubbish, troubles, and sins, will disappear or wash away. However the water will retain these stories forever.” Campbell reimagines these public waterways as a holding place for shared memories, a landfill for bad thoughts and unwanted dreams. The water holds them in abstract and replays them as a projection onto its surface. To return to David Lynch for the last time, and again to Lost Highway, the writer Greil Marcus has said that, “The key to Lost Highway is not to look beneath its surface for any kind of secret, but to find its surface, which is almost impossible to do.” A photograph can grab at a surface, seeming to provide everything that we need. Then the more one looks, the surface going in and out of focus, disappearing then reappearing in perpetual tide, the less familiar it all begins to seem.

“The advertising images of hotels and resorts that we see in holiday brochures propagate an aesthetically heightened image of the ideal leisure time experience. The space that the hotel inhabits in cinema, however, more often than not projects a less innocent side to the fantasy of release in escape. It is the scene of the crime; of sex and drugs and death,” writes Eleanor Purseglove. Purseglove’s Hotel paintings – (Hotel) At the Door, (Hotel) Windows and Swimmers – are doused in cinematic deja-vu. They evoke memories that feel close but are never quite within reach, scenes from films that might never have actually been made. They match the images inside one’s head – the ones lacking full form, lacking a geography or a history – the images that flicker, agitate, and ultimately haunt; not because they are now dead, but because they were never alive to begin with. “Film is death, because it is a shadow, and a mock version-of the truth of light,” as one character says in Richard Foreman’s 1987 play Film is Evil: Radio is Good. Shadows play tricks with the eye, presenting shapes that morph and move and become other things and of other times. And intense light can play much the same tricks. Purseglove’s starched-Earth policy with Swimmers has left tangible reality beyond repair. It is, in the artist’s term, “aesthetically heightened” to the point where Foreman’s “a mock version-of the truth of light” has been literalised, smothering the canvas in a realness of paint and presence that does not allow the scene to form with any fullness. The landscape depicted in Swimmers is a dead weight dipped into the ether, then tossed into the sun to burn.

ETHER

Lucy Crouch and Katherine Payne grab that sun and let it burn and burn and burn. It Is Always Now, Somewhere sees them stretch, as they call it, “a period of becoming” until becoming is all that is there. To see the work as a whole one must stand back and between and for hours, letting the work happen around us. The sun sets and rises perpetually, but imperceptibly, in front of our eyes; time’s arrow having been harnessed and slowed through technology. “We are interested in marking moments in space and time, with a wish to embody distance and duration,” say Crouch and Payne. “Through simple gestures we look to explore the potential of the in-between moment, to exist within and make visible this liminal interface . . . We utilize film, photography and other means, to deal with such distance and proximity.” In his book The Eyes of the Skin, architect and writer Juhani Pallasma states, “Architecture is our primary tool in relating us with space and time . . . It domesticates limitless space and endless time to be tolerated, inhabited and understood by humankind.” Film and video, I would say, can do much the same. Crouch and Payne have physicalised time’s awesome circulatory movement by presenting a video that is simultaneously of somewhere, a particular place – look at that boat in the distance! – and of everywhere also. It flits from local to national to international and then cosmic. One goes up, the other comes down, the movement repeated so as to never remain still. The action is similar to the Graham Gussin video Beginning and Ending at the Same Time (Horizontal Movie). But where the push and pull of that work relates to the act of looking and the reflexes which accompany it, It Is Always Now, Somewhere lingers on a more conceptual plane, exploring the passage of time as an idea over an event.

Timothy Pulleyn performs momentary events that are discarded and thrown out into time; as in Unit 12 – 43m. He gathers his material, short wooden beams of various size, all painted red, into a self-made hod, and then walks from his studio to a predetermined location, with the hod on his back. Upon arrival, he uses the wood to make a sculptural form, which again, was predetermined prior to the event. After a time, the work is then removed. As he says, “The work only exists for the one or two hours I set myself as a limit. Once the two hours are up the wood is put back in the hod and taken back to my studio.” He continues, “I am interested in the strict, the continuous, and the improvised developments of rhythm. My work derives from music in its simplest and most primitive form.” Visually, the sculptures are true to this musical interest. The wooden beams are often set in repetitive linear patterns, denoting forms of time and measure, rhythm and beat. The process of the making mirrors that of a musical performance also: take your equipment to the venue, set-up, perform, and then leave. All that physically remains of Pulleyn’s sculptures are photographs, which are typically posted on his blog, like a travelogue or diary. But the work really exists in the mind of those few who, by chance, saw him strolling through the city – Glasgow usually, but now Leeds for the first time – hod on back, red wood protruding. Those people were ‘there’, as audience and as witnesses of the work. The sculptures allow Pulleyn the means to perform, but it is the performance, the activity, that lies at the heart of his practice. The work is the working, all else is else.

When asked by Willoughby Sharp, “What is your art for?” the American artist Bruce Nauman replied simply, “To keep me busy.” That has been, and always will be, plenty reason enough.