GRAPHICS SENSACIONAL! MEXICAN STREET GRAPHICS
Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, until Sep 16 .00.
Given its huge urban sprawl and its extensive
underground train network, there is surprisingly little graffiti in Mexico City. But there are plenty of garisth painted shop fronts, stalls piled high with comics and the Technicolor spew of posters advertising country picking guitar legends. This city of 20 million has a debased form of democracy - nearly every block in its 1,500 sq km is identical and nearly everyone is on the breadline. Each block is like an urban village and to advertise you’ve got to adopt petit bourgeois standards of cleanlines; communicating to a frequently illiterate client base. So you can either get out the paint brush yourself or, if you are better off, call in the sign painter. This brilliant touring exhibition, so thoughtfully curated
and respectfully presented, is for the main part a
Munich series (Olympia)
homage to this craft, although it also features work produced by the huge number of comic book artists who produce the same combination of soft-porn and relationship advice as Deirdre’s Photo Casebook.
Individually the work is frequently banal - cockeyed dancing chickens and lumpy pigs willingly hurling themselves into the pot - but collected together with sensitivity as they are here, the impression you get is of a city that keeps itself going through vibrancy alone. In packaging the breadth of that vibrancy, without dulling its individual impact, the curators Juan Carlos Mena and Deborah Holtz have created a work of art in itself. The impression is of a street culture that doesn’t oppose the commercial imperative - like graffiti does - but is instead a product of it. As a result it lacks the I cool that mainstream graphic designers find so alluring about US street culture. Instead it has an innocence and a vitality you can only admire. (Tim Abrahams)
DRAWING AND COLLAGE MULTIPLCITY The Arches, Glasgow, until Wed 7 Sep 00
Despite labouring under a title whose non-standard capitalisation suggests some sort of self— consciously groovy multimedia project. Multr’P/iC/ty is a quiet. considered and subtle look at the urban built environment.
Jenny Stephens is drawn to tower blocks. multi- storey car parks and other structures so familiar as to be almost invisible. the sort of anonymous municipal architecture that doesn't quite earn a tag of Modernist or Brutalist. These buildings are then stripped down in Stephens' drawings and collages to the barest essentials — lines and shadows — with all context stripped away. leaving white space in
place of sky. adjacent properties and. perhaps most
Visual Art
PAINTING. PRINTS AND COLLAGE
i RYAN DOOLAN
AND MARC BAUER
’ Mary Mary, Glasgow, Sat 27 Aug-Fri 2 Sep
Free from the constraints of commercialism and the restraints fastened by curatorial bureaucrats in the gallery system, Mary Mary
? and emerging artists in an apartment ' in Glasgow's East End. Glasgow-based Ryan Doolan and Marc Bauer from Amsterdam show new sculpture and paintings. prints and collaged work. respectively. Both artists use appropriation as a methodology. drawing on visual and intellectual culture at large. Doolan's work develops themes first presented earlier this year at his Transmission show. manipulating literary sources in order to question the nature of artistic origins and intellectual property. He explores patriarchal relations; homosociality dominating history. Like Doolan. Bauer's collages
personal familial material as fodder to construct new and alternative histories. His prints also explore these themes and are diminutive examples of those shown at this year‘s Basel art fair. His line is confidently expressionistic. slick yet consciously naive. Bauer's work explores the relations and correspondences we create to generate personality and history. the little lies we tell ourselves to believe in ourselves.
(Alexander Kennedy)
Marc Bauer
importantly. people.
Some of these reductions fall flat. boiling all the concrete flesh off the edifice at hand to leave an unsatisfying wireframe suggestion, little more than a fine grid. Others. particularly those in the Mapping Multis series. take advantage of this tendency to take a reductive step too far by insinuating photographs of buildings into the drawings of them.
An explicatory text suggests Stephens is concerned with dissecting architectural trends. and the social aspect of housing provision. but there is little evidence in the work of her purported interests. leaving the suspicion that they've been tacked on after the fact to juice up, needlessly. a set of formally pleasing works that serve to remind us of the blocky beauty that surrounds us.
(Jack Mottram)
25 Aug—8 Sep 2005 THE LIST 61
continues to exhibit the work of young
examine patriarchy. but this time using