Visual Art
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Review
PAINTING. SCULPTURE AND INSTALLATION
WALTER DA N
The Modern Institute. Glasgow, until Tuesday 20 December 000
In Walter Dahn’s tidy exhibition at the Modern Institute, Christ becomes Sabu the Elephant Boy, transubstantiated by a fantastical leap of mental channel hopping. A male Medusa-like portrait (or is it Vincent Gallo wearing a laurel crown, or a battered
John the Baptist?) becomes a decapitated ‘Faun’, 2004.
These fetishised objects appear to be generated out of a threatened masculinity; art becomes a slightly darker art. Flat logos, cultlike references and fllmic influences are spliced together to form articulate statements in tempra on linen, felt, bronze, wood and other sundry materials. The pretty installation of objects on the windowpane slightly weaken the overall impact of the show, but bring elements of the outside inside (dried flowers and grasses, etc), to let them look out the window from their handmade coffin-like box.
Dahn looks to Warhol for his print technique, leaving residues and abstract accidental forms as texture,
100m LIST 1-15 Dec 2005
3 INSTALLATION
RUTH EWAN - PSITTACIFORMES TRYING TO CHANGE THE WORLD
, The Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh,
; Exhibition ended 00
Psittaciformes Trying to Change the
7 World is a comedy routine with only
: one joke. though it is quite a good one. Ruth Ewan attempts to teach an
aviary of birds in the gallery to repeat
political slogans ‘parrot-fashion‘ —
' geddit? Taking the anti-G8 protests as
: her — and the parrots' — source
material. Ewan suggests that the rallying cries of these protests were empty and learned by rote.
' The exhibition spectacularises
: political failure. adding insult to injury. Two objections to this characterisation of the G8 protests must be made:
first. it is misleading to suggest that participants were unaware of the
' contradictions implicit in asking
" unaccountable bodies to respect
basic principles of human decency.
rather than the capitalist prerogatives
they were explicitly set up to defend.
f Secondly. it can be argued that ‘empty' political slogans have
strategic value. as unifying the different voices of varied sub-groups.
. Ewan's work participates in the very
; processes of simplification and banalisation it claims to critique —
1 reading the G8 protests. just as the mainstream media did. in terms of
Geldof’s proclamations. The
g accompanying essay suggests that her ‘highly objective and cynical social commentary' works against the logic
' of post-everything political complacency — in fact their cynicism is
i perfectly matched. (Dominic Paterson)
April 4th 1968 (dust in Memphis) by Walter Dahn
adding further formal interest to the surface of his idiosyncratic and extensive cache of popular glyphs. The work neatens and domesticates Joseph Beuys’ shamanistic bent, if that is possible (Dahn studied under Beuys at the Kunstakademie Diisseldorf from 1971 to 1977), bringing bastardised tantric, alchemical and hallucinogenic references into the pristine cube (see ‘John the Paptist in India’, 2003, and the print of a mushroom ‘Count the Stars’, 2003).
We are told in the gallery text that the artist binds ‘punk, dada, conceptual art and expressionism’, which may be overarching and over-egged, but small fibres of these traditions do run and vibrate through the work, without a safety-pin or angry red zig-zag in sight.
The installation is littered with totemic figures, little organically formed objects cast in pockmarked bronze. Charms hang above the door (‘Mushroom 1’), behind the door (‘Mushroom 6’) and are placed in the middle of the floor (‘Mushroom 7’), catching the viewer in an imaginary ray of significance, a symbolic web of correspondences. Symbols are opened out and spun, throwing out various quasi-mystical associations. Meaning and rationality are thwarted and put in process, but are pulled back together by Dahn’s eye for 1 good design. (Alexander Kennedy) '
SCULPTURE INSTALLATION NICK EVANS - SOME NEWER FORMALISMS Sorcha Dallas Gallery. Glasgow, Sat 21 Jan
In the past. Nick Evans“ work has drawn on specific historical or social references. never explicit. but open to decoding. His latest pieces — small. broken terracotta sculptures. glazed in secondary colours. to be shown alongside larger-scale resin- coated polystyrene forms — are. in part. all about themselves.
“I've been trying to engage much more closely with the material aspects of the practice by trying to set up situations which create a sort of living matrix. so that there is a feedback between myself and the material aspect of the work. one which leads to an exchange between my acting upon something. and that action then requiring a certain response.‘ Evans explains. ‘The meaning is contained in the mechanics. rather than something which exists outwith the work.’
Evans has not quite left behind his referential slant, however. explicitly alluding to formalist practice: ‘The work is fairly indexical of familiar aspects of the art- historical canon.‘ he says. ‘whether in terms of gestural mark-making or a post- minimalist approach to form. gravity and physicality.‘
In titling his show Some Newer Formal/sms. Evans signals a distrust of work that apes a formalist aesthetic without engaging with it. But will the gallery-goer mistake his work for that which it critiques? ‘There‘s always that danger.’ Evans admits, “and I'm flirting with that. but you have to work to the highest common denominator. not the lowest.’ (Jack Mottram)