Going to Aid and Abet to see Like a Monkey with a Miniature Cymbal.

The bus was rammed and sweltering. Young E.F.L students from China took up the central aisle. They were wearing high fashion and high tech. The seats were taken by heftier housewives and mothers weighed down by shopping, worries and in some cases, Wonga. Lithe limbs and bingo wings oozed sweat together. Wings swung in gentle unison. The bus stopped.    

I eased myself through the compression and out into the street.

A couple of minutes later I wandered into Cambridge's most influential arts space.

Part gallery, part studio, part experimental arts lab. Part sauna and in the winter, part walk-in freezer.

The show to see, Like a Monkey with a Miniature Cymbal, consisted of just under twenty artists, tightly and coherently curated by Mermaid and Monster. Some of the artists had been relatively newly minted, while the others were more experienced jungle fighters.

Anton Goldenstein's Harry and Harlow occupy a nicely lit space. On the left, a battery powered monkey. Hairy. Big ears. Plastic. On the right a similar creature denuded of fur. They are blandly familiar but sinister, like creatures looking for their own t.v show for tranquilised tower block kids.

The piece reminds me of a Japanese department store at Christmas time. Plastic battery powered beings on shelves, endlessly twisting to Rocking around the Christmas Tree by Peggy Lee or someone.
These guys are on t.v however, and essentially doing the same thing; they click and clack and make their insane toy noises. I say t.v deliberately, how many of us have not grown up with weird t.v puppets on our screens?
Harry and his mate offer up a bleak but compelling vision of a constrained narrative.



In a dark dark wood, there was a dark dark house. And in that dark dark house, there was a dark dark room. And in that dark dark room was a creaky old ladder leading to a dark dark attic. And in that dark dark attic was a bearded, youngish looking guy in his mid thirties. With a rotating battery powered monkey on his lap.
He sits inside an attic full of Hammer House of Horror memorabilia. The detritus of a supernatural amusement park as filtered through Scooby Doo. The piece is looped , the monitor smallish and retro looking. Who is this guy who sits before us amid all these reminders of horror movies and sci-fi ?
The piece is called Remote Objects. It was created by Darren Banks. Remote as in far away and hard to access? Remote as in "Where's the remote?" Or remote as in I remember Vincent Price on the telly when I was a kid?
Banks has succeeded in taking what are essentially memories of genre  and repositioned them as art . On a telly. In a gallery. Genre of this sort is his material. He uses it fluently and with elan. He knows about this stuff. He has the tools at his fingertips. Pleasingly, there is an image of J.F.K somewhere in the midst of the all the props. Cuban Missile Crisis House of Horror, anyone?



A projection piece, an animation. Black and white near vertical stripes slanting it appears, to the right.
It is Rhys Coren's  Smile. The word Smile exists within an animated environment like an early Bridget Riley crossed with an old black and white t.v advertisment for something zippy and modern.
Initially the piece could be a command, there is an exclamation mark after all. Sitting at this piece I wondered if it could be projected from Big Ben onto the clouds over London like a Batman signal.
And then I dipped into fantasy and imagined David Cameron and his wife Samantha sauntering into Aid and Abet. They come across Smile. They stand in front of it. They view it. They look at it. Smile is what they see. The word Smile. The Prime Minister turns away from the work to talk to his wife. Instantly, Fuck Off You Tory Bastard ! flashes up on the screen. Samantha is aghast. She yelps!
David Cameron looks back to see Smile...he blinks, Smile. Samantha turns to her husband, but all she can really see for a moment, due to the after image burning on her retina is Fuck Off You Tory Bastard !
Well, a guy can dream. Personally I am reminded of The Colgate Ring of Confidence. I wanted to buy tooth paste. Not many works of art can do that. Plus it was well produced. I am not particularly a technical person so I am often quite smitten by work which is digital and very well informed, both stylistically and conceptually.

Zanne Andrea's print of an astronaut in an orange pressure suit and a classic white bone dome, has been crisply folded and partially inserted into a plinth like structure. The spaceman has a touch of the Gagarins or the Armstrongs about him. Atop the plinth are what look like space rocks. Real space rocks. Funny little glittery things. John Carpenter's Dark Star (bombed out in space with a spaced out bomb) type of space rocks.
The piece is reminiscent of the scrapbooks that boys following the Space Race would assemble back in the 60's. So this is memory of others' memories. Generational communication.
The print itself looks as if it has been sourced from an old issue of National Geographic. The colours are garish but in a good way. The orange of the suit is probably called Hi-Visibility Orange, in the same way that military aircraft are painted in Lo-Visibility Gray. The work's title is somewhat at odds with the humble materials of its construction. The piece is entitled  He Raises His Telescope to the Stars and Delivers Himself to the Rock. It is the longest title in the show. The artist has said that the work is, among other concerns, about memory. In this case The Cold War and The Space Race. This I understand. As a child I hid under the kitchen table during The Cuban Missile Crisis. My Dad stayed home from work for a couple of days on the off chance that it was "frying tonight."
There is a degree of nostalgia about this piece that provides an entry point into a certain type of collective memory. The work also stands alone as a comment on past days. It takes its place in a newish tradition of Cold War inflected art.

A student's wooden study seat. The type found in seminar rooms and classrooms. The type with a little desk attached to the right hand side. The type of little desk that would suddenly shoot up and scatter your books and pencils all over the floor if you plonked your elbow down in the wrong place. A desk to treat with caution...This is S.Mark Gubbs'  Class of 1986. A study seat with a treat in store. With some technical expertise the desk has been engraved. Scratched. Drawn into. With something sharp.
A horned god like goat-man combo appears to be sitting on a kind of throne. He stretches out his left arm. There are various disembodied heads, a cowled figure,(a slave of Death for sure,) and my favourite, a bishop or pope type figure. Unfortunately I couldn't see closely enough to see if he was smoking a joint. They often do in comix and zines. Possibly there was a head on a spike.
These are fully realised drawings, derived from a heavy metal, black magic, H.P Lovecraft graphic universe. I think you could make a monoprint from the surface of the desk.
Gubb has, whether by design or default, created an unknown sitter for this desk. Some lanky kid. Plugged into Metal. A gift for drawing which he takes for granted although, he prefers practicing his guitar in his bedroom. The kid is a bit of a loner but reasonably pleasant when you get to know him. His hair is a bit lank, though.
Somewhere out there Gubb's character stirs. Is he going to form that band? Or, is he going to finish his studies first?

 Martyn Cross' work has moved away from the collages of mutant figures as shown recently at Kettle's Yard earlier. One of the works shown here is particularly raw. I am rather hoping it is called Purple Cloud. Or Untitled.
A grubby piece of sawn off bamboo acts as a kind of shelf. A similarly scruffy rectangle of plywood rests upon it. Affixed to this, somewhat carelessly it appears, is a small blue crayon drawing of a bearded figure looking off to his left. The paper is slightly off colour, a bit tatty. The drawing itself looks a bit 6th formy. Well drawn but dreamy. Like a doodle by a Social Realist unable to get off the phone in a New York City phone booth.
Hanging off the bamboo, on the right, is a blue plastic bag, its form indicating its possible contents. It looks weighty. The artist himself has kind of indicated that in an ideal world, the contents would quite possibly contain dog shit. The required miasma of flies was missing, despite the heat.
Materials sourced seemingly by a gutter scouring skip diver comprise this particular work, reminding us that Cross is much more than the sum of his collaged parts.

Marion Piper was showing some paintings that looked like signiature pieces. But then I had a snoop around and figured that they were her more recent pieces. Painters develop quickly if their minds are drawn to the linear. I imagine she gets through a lot of masking tape.
A diptych. Taller than it is wide. Grey and white vertical stripes. Broad on the outside edges, getting narrower towards the centre. Black and white t.v greys intersected by two diagonal red lines. Too cold for newspaper black and white. The object on the wall is cool and studied although not bulky. The surface is smooth though not glossy. Alan Charlton springs to mind through the greys. Fresh and buzzy.
It is the sort of work that possibly you might have to tune in to get a good signal. I am guessing that the work might be glazed for added depth and ever so slightly softening the edges.
My feeling is that the work on show is a stepping stone to something even more sophisticated, both in terms of technique and visual complexity. The work illustrated is called March of the Bobcats.

Brendan Lancaster is a painter of some flair. His modestly sized, rather obsessive looking, well crafted images make for compelling viewing. He has mentioned that he works between abstraction and figuration. Abstraction/Figuration? Figuration/Abstraction? Alarm bells ring when I come across such phrases. An artist should nail his colours to the mast (or some other suitable support.) No shilly shallying about. In fact what we are faced with is a diary of alterations and painterly decisions. Animated of surface, clever over painting. Restricted in colour but not without lyricism.
Artists often say that they are afraid of a white canvas or white sheet of paper. I wonder how Lancaster starts a painting. What is in his notebooks? What type of photos does he take? Once again a painter shows work which seems to indicate that changes may be afoot. The painting below seems to be called "Untitled".

Yelena Popova's intelligently realised work in this show is similar in tone to Piper's. Popova's paintings in the show are initially tasteful, a dirty word where I come from. But then I became captivated by the evident process that produced the works on show.
Curves, arcs, circles, semi-circles. A not quite symmetrical design. Odd little pieces of  MDF atop the painting provide further clues to , I assume, the manufacture of the work. The paintings are not I feel mainly about pale blues, greens and greys but rather transparencies and superimpositions. Each layer working with another, testing tonalities. There is a vague lava lamp feel to the work. A light show touch, as if the shapes might start drifting around, although the edges of the design are crisp. This is painting under control. Tight and knowingly composed. So, not so tasteful after all. And I mean that in a good way.

The painting Bedsit with Planets repays thoughtful viewing. It is a move sideways from other work .
It looks like something thrown together at the end of a couple of very long days in a studio. When exhaustion takes over. Like when a boxer takes his final punch. When painterly decisions come from somewhere else. When stuff lying about the place takes on an enhanced materiality. Yet, on the other hand all painting is about decision and choice, why else would the image be so in your face? Why would the lying figure be so economically and effectively performed? The painting has a take it or leave it quality. Artists do that. Especially when they can play around a bit and still remain themselves. Even more when they can actually paint, particularly so if they know it. Neal Jones is the man.

Lloyd Durling's images here are black, white and grey. What look like printed images turn out to be brushy, squished looking paintings on paper. Condensed somehow. Oil paint looking like it could animate itself. In fact the paintings, again rather modestly sized, are horizontally arranged and so there is a filmic quality to them. They are like individually presented cells from an experimental animated movie, or the bits of 35mm celluloid that top and tail a traditionally produced film and which pass through the projector, letting you know somehow that this is an art house movie.  Oil paint has a different look to it when applied to paper rather than canvas. The choice of support seems crucial to the look of the surface. The images themselves are a mixture of blocky forms, white over black. Others look like X-Rays of an alien anatomy. I imagine a whole wall of these things would cause a powerful hit. This is spectacle waiting to happen. The piece below is called Blockhead.

Normally, one can't pick up artworks and just walk out of a gallery. Not without having arranged
payment, insurance and art handlers and so on. Not to mention dealing with all the fluttery, fluting
gallery interns. However, Laura Reeves' work fits easily into the pocket. This is because it is a booklet, printed on green paper with a couple of what look like half-tone photographs taken in a domestic setting. Family images. The images partially illustrate a tale of an obsessive couple.
The work is called The Greenhouse. It could equally have been called The Darkroom. Our couple
are an obsessive tomato grower and an amateur photographer. There is a degree of ambiguity about the work. Are the photos found or self generated? Is the text found or adapted from the artist's own sources? Is it totally autobiographical or a constructed narrative? It makes a good read, good enough to wonder about the protagonists at any rate. Some years ago, before punk fanzines came along, poets and writers used to sell mimeographed copies of their work in pubs and on cold Saturday mornings in markets. This has the same feeling, although of course I forgot to ask if I should pay anyone. I'd stuffed a couple in my back pocket before I left. I am rather hoping someone will cough up some dosh so she can make and publish a really punchy artist's book.


Next to the work of Cross, and rather neatly communicating their shared graphic sensibilities, are horizontally arranged,the collages of Tracey Eastham. They are smallish, circular, framed. They are packed with data. Culled from art historical and philosophical sources, they are able to be read in several ways. The artist, on her website has said that she seeks to comprehend aspects of the world through reproductions of the parts of the world which interest her. This is a self aware strategy and a compelling one. Easy for artists to understand. Trickier for others unless they are on task. Quite rewarding as works in themselves. They are rather small and would benefit from a production budget of some kind. It's not what Eastham had in mind I'm sure, but in other presentational contexts larger, printed versions of these originals would go down a storm. They look pretty articulate in this setting however. A collage sensibility can be a difficult thing to manage. Tumblr is full of the stuff. How much crap can American teenagers produce?  Eastham, as a lecturer in I think, Cultural Studies, is probably secure in her audience and feeder fields. The result is confident imagery. She looks like someone on the move, someone searching for even more sophisticated solutions.

Some years ago, before there was something called Interdisciplinary Graphic Fine Art in our Art Schools; it would have been hard to select  something like Ian Watson's work for a survey show of this kind. In fact at least half of the artists would not have been selected. More. I grew up as an illustrator so I can detect a kind of a drawing itch in my fingers when I look at this work. Now, the last guy I saw in a picture in an art gallery who was holding a spear with a skull on top was a surprise, but this guy is a bit of a shocker. He appears to be a zombie. Which means dead. But not totally. Dead-ish.
He may well read old copies of the Big Issue. There is a bottle at his waist. Fuel for a cold day. Or a Molotov Cocktail. Or both. The Nike store has long been looted. The image is called Duty and it is a print from a drawing. It's a pretty good drawing. And it has printed out well on that type of paper that master printers tell you will last for seventy odd years. I wonder, where in Watson's imagination, is this guy located in the hierarchy of post apocalypse vigilantism? He is kind of scary. It is no surprise to discover that Watson also produces t-shirts and zines. I think there may be a band that he is in. I think he is the guy who used to sit in Gubbs' seat. When I was a kid, stuff like this would be slightly less culturally specific and would be found in magazines from America for example, Mother's Oats. I have a couple of masks which I use to photograph people in. They sort of resemble the face depicted in Duty.

Pat Flynn's animation had me fooled. Completely. I spent ages looking at a couple of actual melons. I wondered if anything was going to happen. Nothing seemed to. So I walked off. Then I returned. I hung around a bit, checking my watch. And then something did occur. In classic early Star Trek style. A purple cloud was ejaculated from one fruit to the other. In a rather saucy, reproductive sort of way.
Years ago as a kid, allergy exiled to my bedroom, I read a science fiction novel. It had illustrations called "plates". They were separately glued in, onto actual pages. Like little works of art. In this tale brave British chaps had landed on Venus. In costumes that looked rather too much like deep sea divers in their working equipment. They fought scary man eating plants. Flynn's work is weird in the same way.
Other Fatherland, Flynn was kind enough to tell me, was totally constructed from the same software packages that, should you have the expertise to sort it all out, would get you a job with Peter Jackson's C.G.I team. I am glad he told me, for such is my innocence in these matters that I had imagined Flynn experimenting with explosives in a fruit splattered studio. As matters stand however it is evident that Flynn is representative of a group of artists who are imaginative and skillful, culturally and contextually clued in. Flynn has mentioned his influences. But for me, this work also references Dutch still life, in terms of looking at a hermetically sealed off piece of iconography. I hope he finds time to teach and pass on his technical skills. I honestly can't even figure out Photoshop.




Anthony Shapland showed part of his recent project The Life of R.C Cook. Two paperback books have been placed on a nondescript desk shelf. They have been expertly positioned. Perfectly aligned. Both books were entitled, The Life of R.C Cook. I wanted to pick them up and read them. But this was a gallery setting so I allowed them to remain. The piece therefore retained its enigmatic quality The book covers had that lovely dated look, stemming from the 60's I would guess. The design and colours rather similar in tone and feel to 70's television movies credits. Split screen. Saturated colour. I would buy these retro looking objects if I saw them in bookshop. Above the books was an attractive looking print of some kind. A heavy chain looms out of the darkness. I am rather warming to Shapland's work, although, you might not notice these works in a well appointed living room. They would have blended in.

The title of Gordon Dalton's painting, Does Anyone Ever Get This Right ? seems to refer to the act of painting itself, a frustrated cry of despair. The title feels a bit too knowing and unnecessary considering the construction and competent handling of the image. The surface is nice and crunchy looking, it is bright and full of intriguing design details and painterly marks. The usual suspects. Darkish, cartoonish lines, like comic strip conventions for billowing smoke or clouds are marked out over pink, above, and blue below. Something dreamlike. In a reversal of the object field relationship pale grey shapes, hiding shyly behind the stronger marks turn out to be bottles and containers. Objects arranged. On two shelves. Like Morandi. On acid. The marks themselves look slightly hesitant and a bit scrubby looking, quite a bit of underpainting coming through. It is not over painted. It is well balanced and somehow animated looking. The answer to the question seems to be "Yeah sometimes, but let's push on and see where it goes."

What's Nicholas Carrick playing at? What's his Game exactly? Well, it's a smallish painting of bathers chucking a ball about in a nice blue sea, that's what it is about. But mainly it is about pared down painting, an intelligent economy of painterly means. The two pale blue figures are horizontally slashed, one at the waist, the nearer one at the neck. They look cut out. As if they had been stuck on rather than painted around. The design is bereft of detail. The painting then appears not to be about bathers per-se but seems to act as a stand in. It is a painting that is somehow about all the other paintings of seaside frolicking; a long and noble tradition. The brush strokes of the water are liquidy enough to prevent the image freezing into immobility. Under different circumstances this would make a great logo for a holiday company, or a wonderful book cover illustration for a volume about, you've guessed it, artists and the seaside. But it isn't. It is a quietly articulate painting, quietly reminding us of paintings we have all seen and experiences we have all had.  If it is fine tomorrow, I'll take the kids to Cromer. Game is illustrated below.

Have a good look at Thomas Goddard's  Road to Venice Biennale Glory. There's a bit of a who's who thing going on. It's a witty design too. I like the whole footie thing and the emblems and the pull out and keep feel. Spot on. Does it come inside today's sizzling soaraway Sun ? The commemorative coins were a nice touch too. Although not exactly biting satire the piece does present a point of view. Is the the Venice Biennale really necessary? All this nonsense about who's got whose pavillion, the endless parade of the self important. And yet, oddly enough the work exhibited in Venice often seems to diminish according to the perception of the grandeur of the event. Or it's the same old people knocking about. Like a walking hologram of Art Forum. Goddard's piece nicely illustrates the journey to represent your country's sporting achievements. I mean art stars. Pick up your copy, today!

Aid and Abet have been in existence for a few years now and on a purely local level it is giving Kettle's Yard a bit of a run for its money, although their remits are different. The show, Like a Monkey with a Miniature Cymbal, had this survey feel to it with most of the artists being associated with various art groups and spaces up and down the country. Quite how a space like Aid and Abet remains in existence is anyone's guess what with all the cuts and the deaths of Commissions East and The Institute of Visual Culture, to name just two, again due to cuts.  And in fact, their space, a large airy warehouse is due to be torn down at some future time as part of the overall gentrification, or urban pacification as they say in Robocop, of  the area. It's all change at the railway station.

The show itself, tightly curated by Mermaid and Monster provides a salami slice of current activity up and down the country. London was refreshingly under-represented. Not all the works came off well. Several works were a bit swamped by the space. They could have been herded a little closer together. They were well lit but a bit annonymous, not much in the way of labels.

It was a treat to see art which had a feeling of authenticity about it, of flux, of artists pushing at their own particular self imposed boundaries.I felt that some of the artists were struggling against a particular type of frustration. For one or two others it seemed, to me, like another day at the office. I am beginning to wonder where some of them will go next.

I was unable to illustrate Banks'  Remote Objects and Flynn's  Other Fatherland, so apologies to them. Check out their websites. I do actually have some standouts in the show in mind. I think there are at least five really strong works, although that is not to denigrate the other works on show. It was the best exhibition I have seen for a while.

www.antongoldstein.com
www.mermaidandmonster.wordpress.com/
www.aidandabet.co.uk/
www.zanneandrea.com/
www.darrenbanks.co.uk/
www.marionpiper.com/
www.rhyscoren.co.uk/
laurareeves.tumblr.com/
www.brendanlancaster.com/
www.smarkgubb.com/
www.uhohwatson.com/
yateheads.blogspot.com/
www.ohmygodtom.com/
www.traceyeastam.co.uk/
www.gordondalton.co.uk/
www.nealjones.co.uk
www.yelenapopova.co.uk/
www.saatchionline.com/nickcarrick
www.anthonyshapland.com
lloyddurling.blogspot.com
www.patflynn.co.uk