www.list.co.uk/visualart REVIEW GROUP SHOW GEORGE BARBER: THE LONG COMMUTE/JAYGO BLOOM: ARCADE Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Thu 14 Nov ●●●●●
Club culture is the ultimate creative hub. Beyond – but probably because of – its dazed and confused hedonism, the dance-floor and chill- out room are inspirational eye- and ear-openers. Both artists in these parallel shows are direct descendents of such creative speakeasies in what is itself a pan-generational mash-up. Barber came out of the 1980s scratch video scene, the visual cut’n’paste equivalent of hip hop, and here showcases a gloriously scattershot selection of retrospective films that manipulate disparate source materials to take a wryly oppositionist stance. The show’s title work recalls scalectrix by way of an endlessly hypnotic highway. A new piece, ‘India Shout Match’, is a pricelessly homespun gladiatorial spectacle that could yet make a gameshow. Bloom’s large-scale installations
reference first-generation video games in a dizzying immersive pinball of sound and vision that resembles the zing of a retro-styled son et lumiere sci-fi fun palace. It’s the insistently subliminal repetition, repetition, repetition of both artists’ works, however, that really makes its presence felt with an infectiously subversive humour designed to feed the hungry young minds of those attending the Discovery festival of film for young people elsewhere in the DCA. (Neil Cooper)
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REVIEW SCULPTURE & INSTALLATION SUBOTH GUPTA: TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES AND WASH YOUR HANDS Tramway, Glasgow, until Sun 12 Dec ●●●●●
Coinciding with the handover of the Commonwealth Games from Delhi to Glasgow, Tramway is showcasing a magpie collection of splendid shiny things by Indian art superstar Suboth Gupta. Take off your shoes and wash your hands consists of four works. Glittering on the long wall, a 27 metre-long sleek installation of kitchenware is neatly displayed on stainless steel shelves. Incubating under the light of a plush chandelier lie a cluster of large-scale eggs, each meticulously welded from stainless steel kitchen utensils. At the other end of the gallery stands a tall constellation of brass finials of various heights and spun together with a knotted mess of thin white rope. This extraneous material degrades the power of the
sacred-looking objects. In the far corner, like a portal to another dimension, stands a larger-than-life thali dish propped up to reflect a mirror image of the entire exhibition. The viewer’s own body stands firmly in the foreground. This is a numinous addition to an otherwise materialistic range of objects.
Gupta frequently uses everyday objects such as the paraphernalia of the Indian kitchen to allude to the changing cultural life of India. The grandiose statements of the work – dealing with complex subject matter such as cultural identity, globalisation, political and economic change – can overshadow the sheer beauty and pleasure of the sculptures themselves. Although sparsely placed around the space, each
serenely glittering piece becomes a monumental object that commands contemplation. Their collective potency fills the gallery with radiating metallic light. (Talitha Kotzé)
REVIEW GROUP SHOW TOMMY GRACE, GED QUINN AND TONY SWAIN: RESTORE US AND REGAIN Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, until Sat 6 Nov ●●●●●
Taking its title from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a warped and windswept romanticism pervades this triple bill of work. With four works apiece from Grace and Swain – both already established in these parts – and three from Quinn, each artist creates blueprints that aspire to some form of imaginary but far-from-perfect idyll made in their own image. If Tony Swain’s newsprint-based work gives weight to an otherwise transient medium by
recontextualising and immortalising the throwaway, Grace’s assortment has a deliciously arcane feel to it. From watercolors to pinhole photography, one imagines a cartographical voyage into the unknown and a resounding ornateness, especially on the twin double-sided lithographs that make up ‘Recto Verso’ – perched opposite each other but separated by the stairs in the Mackintosh gallery. It’s Ged Quinn’s large canvasses that light up the room, however, their deceptive swathes of
classicist landscapes inveigled upon by junk-shop tree-houses that suggest the rough and tumble of some boy’s own adventure in outer space crash-landed into a glossy surrealist poster world by way of a Woolworth’s closing down sale. As with Grace’s ‘Phantasmagoricide’ and Swain’s ‘Introduction to an Undisclosed Duration’, there’s a baroque heroism to Quinn’s titles. ‘The Height of the Vulgar Commonplace’, however, suggests a pervading farty smell among the lushness of a place where, somewhere between past, present and future, worlds really do collide. (Neil Cooper)
4–18 Nov 2010 THE LIST 89