First up was CJ Mahony's immersive sculpture. It is called The Trouble with Time. You have to enter her sculpture. Through a doorway. Into a twisty, constricted, tight fitting, unpredictable corridor. From beginning to end it is too narrow for the large of girth. It is a sideways experience and Heaven help you if you meet someone you have not been previously introduced to coming the other way. She says, in her artist's notes for the show, that she is undermining our expectation of a comfortable distance between our bodies and the walls of the gallery. She is right. I was being cuddled by gallery walls. I certainly couldn't consider taking a step back. I spend my entire life in galleries taking steps back. But here I couldn't. I couldn't take a step forwards either.
Mahony, with this piece at least, seems full of the joys of Spring and obviously a dab hand with power saws, drills, nuts and bolts, brackets, exact measurements, precise angles, design drawings and sheets of wood taller than a basketball player at full stretch. Not to mention Health and Safety regulations persuant to the Construction of Sculptural Objects in a Space to which the Public have Access.
Once I was lodged inside, the walls loomed and unexpected angles of passage presented themselves. It was like a whitewashed Expressionist film set. Dr. Caligari meets 1970's Dr. Who. It's a tight, angular squeeze and you are not sure where you are going. It will not suit the claustrophobe that's for sure. It is however a purely horizontal journey. I felt a bit of slope and incline would have augmented the experience. But that's not a criticism, I'm just one of those irritating people who yell out, "Hey, you missed a spot!" It is also not the point for it dawned on me that I was the sculpture's sole moving part. I was in its thrall. After a minute or two I was peristaltically eased out and found myself in the car park. Quickly dismissing the thought that the car park and the surrounding area could be considered part of the artwork, which had after all just consumed me and ejected me into this place, I had a realisation. For one brief moment I had an idea of what it must have been like to be Bruce McLean back in the day. Even my hair felt a little pointier.
But, this piece is by CJ Mahony . And it is her day now.
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The Trouble with Time, (details) |
Alice Walton's work in the show is an altogether different experience. It is less kinaesthetic for a start. Any moving around is peripheral.
A table, constructed from a lightweight building material dominates a space. The space has been separated out from the show. Cosseted away.
Resting on the table are a variety of geometrical or architectural units. They are aligned with horizontally placed colour photocopies of art images. It has the feel of a Blake's Seven studio set, seemingly inexpensive and silvery.
The work is rewardingly tricky to look at. Not because of what it is, but because of what it could be.
You have to be really careful looking at this. You have to be Clint Eastwood in a Fistful of Dollars. Narrow of eye. Cheroot.
Then there are all the intrusive thoughts to banish. Mike Kelly, early Star Trek, Space 1999, Miss Haversam's wedding breakfast. But what is being associated is not what is being looked at.
Most of the units on the table could well have been sourced from Rymans. Silver card sellotaped together. They could have photocopied the art illustrations too.
My guess is that there is a kind of argument going on about the primacy of object over image or image being superior to the adjacent forms. This argument is irrelevant. The real interest in the piece is the trapping, warping and morphing of reflected imagery. And what happens in this interface is essentially magic. Or at least too technically complex to waste time on. And yet it is the cheap and ephemeral which achieves this.
When your shoe hits the puddle and the neon reflection shatters and reforms.It is this experience that has been suspended in time through the simplest of materials.
What is fascinating about the piece is that it was quite challenging for my mental viewfinder to grasp.The trapping of an image within a surface. Mirror like, you are caught and beguiled. And like my own over familiar reflection in a plate glass window there is a sense of delusional wonder. "My God. Is that you? Not bad for an out of shape, badly dressed middle aged guy going to the pub. Watch out babes!"
So what I took away with me from this piece was not an overall impression of form or the role of the imagery. The images in fact could have been harder but then it would have been a different piece. The piece doesn't repay the viewer by thinking, "Yeah, a table with objects on it." It repays by scrutiny from as many different angles as possible. The focus is on the reflected imagery rather than the materials causing it.
Walton's achievement is that of creating a setting for which the the insubstantial exists equally with the constructed. I expect for Christmas she'd like a chandelier and a close-up lens. And a photocopy machine. The piece, I believe is called Table.
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Untitled (Table) details. |
" Do they cover it with a big plastic bag at night?" I thought to myself. On a large white wooden plinth rests what is known as an informally assembled plastic matrix. Or Big Lump of Clay. This object remains enigmatic. However, it is not too far away from the projection room and there we can find the answer to the riddle of the B.L.C.
Jorge Rivera's film, In the Skin of the Bull is a rich, visually sensual feast with an entwined multistrand narrative firmly anchored within a set of precise cultural references.
The viewing chamber is worryingly dark. I sit on a bench. There is sand underfoot, about half an inch I reckon. Must take a bit of sweeping up. The film lasts for over thirty minutes. Not a big ask really. Nevertheless I have come prepared with sandwiches and a beer. With my feet firmly planted in an immediate reference to the blood stained surfaces found in bullrings, I settle down to watch.
My main problem with the film was not that it was a beautifully structured and authored work of art. It was. The problem was not of Rivera's making. The problem was of David Lynch's making. Particularly Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. Pace, editing, close-ups, some floaty images, some clunky dissolves. Oppressive industrial sound track. Heavy breathing. But this is unfair. These are essential elements, although I can give or take the clunky dissolves.
Rivera however, is the first person as far as I know,to make the lost wax casting method sexy.
First, a slapping sound and next a B.L.C hoves into view, I have seen it before somewhere I am sure. The process begins. The clay is caressed, stroked, teased, poked, reamed out and urged into being. Seductive looking liquids are dripped and poured over smooth, damp, rotund forms. Every nook and cranny is anointed. The camera pulls out slightly and we see the form is recognisably bull like. This is not just any old sequence in the sculptural process, this is a Mark's and Spencer's sequence in the sculptural process. I gazed and thought about my dear wife wreathed in aromatic oils. I thought of soft music and low lights. And then I remembered it was Friday. Friday is her full-contact Karate night.
Snapping back into reality and with tauromachia in the back of my mind, what seems to be a nuclear power station's emergency melt down team are pouring incandescent molten bronze into a sprue-antlered mould.
There are hints of a bull's final fate. Shots from the bull pens. Gates to the ring.
A man's back, lingered over like a landscape, twitches and flexes. A blade travels along the vertebrae indicating the best place to strike a bull dead. Or indeed a man. Toned muscles obligingly jerk in anticipation of the threat made good. Rivera mentions in his exhibition statement that it is skin as a perceptive organ which connects external stimuli to the inner world. Our world, of feelings and memories. The notion is as crucial to the production design as it is central to Rivera's intention.
The most successful sequences and edits remain within the realm of the studio, foundry and finally the bullring. We are given the eyes of the bull. We charge out into the arena. The film fades to white.
The film scores well on its attempt to enrich meaning through a thoughtful and precise articulation of process and narratives. Rivera is an artist's artist. This film is highly instructional as a result. Art students should lap this kind of stuff up. It has everything a student needs to take serious notice of. If I were 17, this would be a mindfuck. If I were 21 and newly graduated I would apply for a job on his team.
In fact... where's the phone? To hell with the 21 year olds.
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Remains/Clay and background There,After. |
Aid and Abet is a bit tatty. Paint peels from the walls. Girders are exposed. Obviously they have misplaced the absolute gallons of white emulsion they otherwise get through. Somewhere though, out there, is a little brother to this scruffpot. You can see it in Sophie Clements', There,After. You can see it featured in the three video loops that make up the work. It is her film set. And what's more it is rotating clockwise.
Three big boxy T.V monitors. Rather spiffy matt black Sonys with stereo sound. Within each rotates Clements' film set. Ridiculously 3D, the illusion looks real enough to put your hand in and grope around.
Anything that rotates needs an axis. In these three pieces the camera moves at regularly spaced intervals in an anticlockwise direction. Motion references the space.
The left hand monitor. Pyrotechnics crackle, pop, burst, buzz, spark , zip and zap. Smoke forms and reforms, it clouds and reclouds. Our viewpoint is controlled. The set rotates around its axis of lively explosions. Edited together we only see a non stop variable geometry column of digitally manipulated pyrotechnic activity - stretched and controlled. Timed and held.
The middle monitor. Same set. Same rotation. Different axis. The technique of digital water management.
Water drops, pours, splashes and drips. Its natural dynamic is trapped, curtailed and given a good old fashioned sorting out. Bits of what look like exploding balloons, yellow, blue perhaps indicate a constructional hint. I would not like this happening in my shower. If it did I would seriously have to reconsider the possibility of the supernatural.
Painters know how to render water in its many forms, transparencies and moods. So do stills photographers and film makers, so its pleasantly unsettling to see water being transformed it to something that looks as if it could be solid. Or under the mental control of a Marvel superhero.
I don't want to suggest she has created a kind of anti-water, for that way madness lies.
And so, cackling and dribbling I hobble over to the third and final panel of the triptych. This one looks a bit more straightforward. I'm glad I don't have to think of the techniques that give the illusion of water trapped by the direct application of real space and real timing. For a start I nearly had a heart attack thinking about the work needed and the software packages involved. And let me tell you, whenever I think of software packages my mind drifts towards thoughts of erectile dysfunction. William Kentridge this isn't.
It is in fact, a whole bunch of lengths of 2 by 4.
More basic looking that the others but by no means less complex to produce, just drier and less smoky, the lengths of wood of perform a kind of horizontal floor based timber hoe down. They leap up into the air and perform an unlikely aerial ballet only to crash down to the floor with satisfying clunks. I am reminded of Tatlin's Tower on amphetamines. Or a lumber yard at a disco.
Clements' website gives a few valuable clues. What you see is a variety of casually dressed youngish people hanging from girders or sheltering behind protective screens with their fingers in their ears. Rather like Scooby and Shaggy and their pals; Velma, Daphne and Fred. And if it wasn't for Clements and her meddling teenagers I wouldn't have to mention that the notes to this piece include her interest in the pesky fundamental forces that act upon the world. Invisible bonds that bring us and the universe together yet equally are capable of rendering us separate and divisible. This is her impetus behind the piece. She has, it seems, at least digitally, created three separate fractures in the space/time continuum. Rumour has it she is working on a black hole.
So, four big hitters in the space. Two for real and two by digital default. Rivera's and Clements' video works were the the more sheltered experiences, Aid and Abet providing windows into other settings where work is made.
Mahony and Walton provided evidence of a much more physically focused experience, especially in the case of Mahony. By contrast Walton made the insubstantial visible through the slightest of means.
Hunt all this work down. It won't be seen in Cambridge again, that's for sure.
www.cjmahony.com The Trouble with Time. Immersive sculpture. 2013
www.alicewaltononline.co.uk Untitled (Table) 2012
www.sophieclements.com There,After. Video. 2011
www.rca.ac.uk/ In the Skin of the Bull. H.D Video. 2009
Remains/Clay. Thrown clay. 2013
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