PAINTING, SCULPTURE AND DRAWING JANE TOPPING - CUCKOO REVIEW
BILLY TEASDALE - AFTER THE DELUGE
Glasgow School of Art, Mackintosh Building, until Fri 15 Sep «so The Emergent Artist's programme at Glasgow School of Art has opened With a successful exhibition of sculptures, paintings and drawungs by two graduates and Glasgow-based artists. Billy Teasdale and Jane Topping. Both artists have presented a paired-down exhibition that IS confident yet not ‘showy', filling the large studio space (Studio 40) off the main GSA Mackintosh Gallery but leaving enough room for thought.
In her 'Cuckoo Review' on the mezzanine, Topping has sourced her images from pop culture. creating large collaged drawings and small paintings that use the visages of members of the Smiths. Paris Hilton, and David Bowie as ciphers. Haircuts. noses and mouths are freed from describing anything other than themselves; celebrity and subjectivity are shown to be without initial cause. cohesion or meaning.
Teasdale‘s “After the Deluge' in the main gallery space acts like a mandala. with an anti-heroic figure sitting in the midst of a spiraling array of part objects. The central figure adopts the usual narcissistic pose of an ephebe. displaying none of the come-hither coquettishness that usually allows the viewer in. Elsewhere a figure with an oval mirror for a torso hopes for self-awareness but looks out into nothingness. (Alexander Kennedy)
SCULPTURE MICK PETER
Transmission, Glasgow, until Sat 30 Sep
SCULPTURE ALEX POLLARD - TORCH SCULPTURES Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, RUN ENDED 00000
Alex Pollard’s work is about bending the rules, literally and metaphorically. At first sight, his sculpture ‘Cat Monkey’ looks as if it has been fashioned from a series of joiners’ folding rulers, made from wood and jointed in brass. This strange animal’s head and the tip of its tail appear to be made from torn corrugated cardboard. But, in the absence of touch, we learn from the work’s label that the materials are, in fact, oil paint and enamel on bronze.
What is going on? What is Pollard up to? Why not simply use the objects themselves? On a practical level these questions can be answered simply: the various implied materials cannot themselves be formed into some of the impossible shapes and sizes
In the 1960 film The Rebel, frustrated artist Tony Hancock creates his sculptural tribute to beautiful women, ‘Aphrodite at the Waterhole'. This monumentally ugly, sub-cubist figure causes havoc. crashing through floors to the horrified screams of all who see it. Yet. however misdirected. Hancock's enthusiasm drives the film and ensnares our sympathy. This is the type of energy Mick Peter examines in his new
work.
He has been inspired by Flaubert's comic nobodies, the clerks Bouvard and Pecuchet, who retire to the country and attempt to explore new interests and projects by using manuals. They try archaeological digs. as so many late-Victorian bourgeois did. but their funds are worth nothing. When they attempt gardening, they do it exactly by the book, but they lack the proper skills, and the results are comic disasters. The reader laughs at their self-delusion and stupidity, but revels in their daring. Peter‘s sculptures are monumental, unavoidable, but slapdash in execution. ugly in form, and although made of cement, not very sturdy. Their actuality undercuts any pomposity; they are awe-inspiring. not because of how they finish up. but the grandiosity of the failed attempts they depict.
Some contemporary artists use teams of craftsmen to ensure perfection. like Hirst's rather too slick, bronze 50ft high pregnant dancer. Even when the hand of the artist is upon the work. it can be sculless, like Mueck's hyper-realistic people. Peter's monumental work forces us to look at the energy and enjoyment of making. whatever the outcome. (Ailsa Boyd)
Visual Art
which Pollard’s work demands. His ‘pencils’ are sometimes several feet long and impossibly curved and contorted. His ‘rulers' could not be bent and twisted into such forms if they were the real thing. The ‘cardboard’ could not perform the function it fulfils in articulating and joining the other elements in his sculpture.
Pollard’s artistic games have a long history in art. ‘Landscape from a nonsense poem’, for example, refers directly to the history of trompe-l’oeil, where the eye is tricked into believing it is seeing one thing when the reality is different. The ‘pencil’ line which appears to frame this work (created as an in situ mural for the exhibition) is actually oil paint, and the ‘pencils’ are simulacra. Pollard’s work is both self-referential and self-consciously part of a tradition in which it assumes its rightful place. (Giles Sutherland)
7-21 Sep 2006 THE LIST 93