Visual Art
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REVIEW INSTALLATION MARTIN BOYCE: NO REFLECTIONS Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sat 14 Feb ●●●●●
As with most aspects of Martin Boyce’s reimagining of his 2009 contribution to the Venice Biennale, the autumn leaves that dust about the floor’s edges in the DCA aren’t quite what they seem. Made of paraffin- coated crepe paper and nestling alongside a discreet floor-level network of brass ventilation grills, they provide some kind of framing to what resembles a showroom of customised home and garden apparel. Steel bins – one silver, one red – are angled so everything looks top-heavy. A wooden birdhouse is carved similarly lob-sided. Two upturned park benches become an Oriental screen. An industrial-looking workbench is dotted with holes and looks like a rusted mortuary slab. A bed-frame with a rolled-up wire-mesh mattress offers little comfort.
In the next room, a series of stepping stones lead nowhere, while the lettering on the wall that spells out ‘Petrified Songs’ is hung at half-mast. Overhead hangs a sleekly flamboyant array of lamps. Together these objects recall 1970s retro (sub)urban chic and crazy
paving patios, like some interior approximation of Eden once the decorators have moved in. This is Boyce getting back to the garden and back to nature by way of a manufactured appropriation that can never fully live up to the running-wild, running-free years of climbing frames and after-dark experience, and so produces the most melancholy form of nostalgia. There’s an essence here that relates to the sense- memory ennui of Bill Nelson’s brooding 1980 instrumental paean to a Wakefield park, ‘The Shadow Garden’, only recast with more classical splendour. As adventure playgrounds go, the DCA’s clinically lab- like interior will never match the crumbling 15th century Venetian Palazzo that first housed the show. But then, by rubbing Boyce’s manufactured relics up against an equally constructed container of the modern world, the juxtaposition lends an even more solitary poignancy to proceedings. It’s as if the gardens where we once felt secure, full of menace as they were, had been left out in the European rain too long after everyone had gone back indoors, playtime over, the party moved on elsewhere. All there is to do now is preserve what’s left behind. (Neil Cooper)
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REVIEW GROUP SHOW LOVE Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, until Fri 19 Feb ●●●●●
Love showcases the work of three artistic partnerships. The first section contains pieces by married but independent artists Rita Donagh and Richard Hamilton, linked in concept by their response to Northern Ireland’s Troubles, and visually in the way they alter a photographic prototype through collage.
In the other room are recently married ‘living sculptures’ Gilbert and George’s video pieces from 1972, ‘A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men’ and ‘In the Bush’. Two screens, two certificates, two men dressed in their uniformed suits – standing together staring into space, George smoking a cigarette, moving ever so slightly over the duration of 16 minutes.
It is the sculptural pieces by
Glasgow-based duo Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan that join the rooms together. Two solid pieces of plywood in the form of the letter ‘O’ are titled ‘This has reached the limit conditions of its own rhetoric’. One is dated 2005, the other ‘updated’ in 2008 by adding totemic-like geometric elements in their signature pyramid-style with pink and black painted patterned motifs. We are invited to walk around these monumental totem poles to view the other works in the show. Two artists working together with a common concern, multiplied by two others, and again by two more. The result is an amplified web of meaning and visual effectiveness, pulsating with a bit of love. (Talitha Kotzé)
REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY MODERNISTA: GAUDI AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES IN MODERN DAY BARCELONA The Lighthouse, Glasgow, until Sun 28 Feb ●●●●●
At the turn of the 20th century, Catalonia’s architectural response to European art nouveau was manifested in buildings such as the Park Güell, Casa Milà and the Sagrada Família, characterised by highly stylised organic motifs and curvilinear forms. A century later, these buildings stand juxtaposed with the blocks of flats, cranes and scaffolding of a modern city buzzing with life and expanding urbanisation. Glasgow School of Art graduate and Scottish photographer, Michael Thomas Jones, has captured the
legacy that modernism has bequeathed to the city and the way this is integrated into the everyday. The works form a photographic essay in which the iconic buildings are presented in their modern day guise. Traffic signs, air-conditioning units against the old buildings and refuse bags sketch out a cityscape shaping itself as life goes on. Jones also shows portraits of the inhabitants photographed in the building’s interiors, moving through the streets and contemplating the architecture.
Well presented in the gallery, one is impressed by their classical painterly aesthetic, but we care less
about the Mexican Consul General photographed in his office, and become more intrigued by the table in a working artist studio which was once used for dissecting cadavers. A strange lobster-like piece of flesh is suspended above a cluttered studio. Succinctly framed, this scene invites the viewer to unravel the chaos. The content of the textual captions seem a bit redundant as the works themselves speak volumes of
the ghosts of Gaudí and his contemporaries in a city haunted by their idiosyncratic designs in contemporary Barcelona. (Talitha Kotzé)
90 THE LIST 21 Jan–4 Feb 2010