aaaaagh!!! (art): November 2013

Going to Aid and Abet, located in Station Road, Cambridge, is a nerve wracking process. It's the titles you see, like the one for Tom Dale's solo show. Zero is Immense. Maybe it is just a big hole in the gallery. Or perhaps the vast light year spanning mystery of the universe laid out before us.

I sat in a pub called The Flying Pig in order to ponder the problem of the name. Catchy, I thought, but maybe also a tad incorrect. Zero is infinite. Anyway, that is neither here nor there. Leaving the pub I attempted to cross the road. This was such a risky undertaking (and undertaking was on my mind at the time, believe me) that I thought that the pub should be renamed The Flying Corpse.

Anyway, I got to Aid and Abet pretty quickly, and having left the dog and my white cane outside, I ventured within. Luckily there was something to drink. And it was £2 a pop. Alcoholic drinks were also £2 a pop. This word "pop" is probably quite a useful one to keep in mind, just vaguely, not in capital letters or anything.

First up was a set of six colour photographs. Each one featured a suburban house, nicely positioned, nice sunny day, neat gardens and trees. Polish houses, 1970's Commie vernacular architecture. But on closer scrutiny, and scrutiny is what these images demand, we can see something a bit odd going on. The very familiarity of the image acts as the best camouflage. It traps us. We are not sure why. An uneasy feeling, that's for sure.

Living in these houses, the series is called Vision Machines by the way, would be problematic. Firstly, internal illumination would be inconsistent, certain windows wouldn't open, phoning out for pizza would be iffy and the internal structure would no doubt resemble an M.C Escher print of staircases. Not to mention that one wall is partially constructed from a tree. And not in a good way. You can see the sky through the branches. It would be draughty to say the least. In theory the building should collapse. It hasn't. Digital collage is a powerful medium.

Dale has in fact been playing games with us, our expectations of what an image should look like, and he's been enjoying his Photoshop. He has transposed the fronts of houses, the edges of houses, garage walls and so on. Keeping to the lines, the verticals and the horizontals of the architectural style, his dwellings are visually ambiguous. There is a lot of visual clutter which aids the authenticity of the pictures. Details often do. The clinchers of course are the verticals and horizontals.
The mind says "house",while the eyes are taking in contradictory information. A doctor may be reminded of people who present with mild schizophrenia. These are pretty darned tooting images in a deadpan kind of way.
I am not suggesting you take out your pen and circle the inconsistencies in these photographs, but if you were to do such a thing, I reckon you would be surprised. There are more than you think, and extra ones keep popping up when you least expect them. It would be a mistake to mention John Stezaker in this context.People tend to mention him because his very name has come to represent a certain type of image making and visual referencing. He may be to collage what the guillotine was to the French aristocracy. And I mean that in a good way.
Dale's images of houses are a lot more subtle. I for one will never look in an estate agent's window the same way again. And I will never buy a house in Poland; judging from the evidence on view, and given the state of my luck, I daresay the thing would fall down in a stiff breeze.

Tom Dale, middle.

There is something that looks a bit like a battered, giant gold dental filling when seen from afar. It rests on a white boxy wooden plinth. This object desperately needs your help. It is called icave and without you, yes you, it will not live up to its name.

Closer inspection reveals this form to be constructed from masks sourced from joke shops and fancy dress stores. Visually it is held together with expanded foam and I guess there is some kind of armature somewhere. It looks kind of fragile.

The masks draw you in. Then you see that they all face inwards to a certain degree. Inevitably you have to look through the eye holes. It is a basic human compunction. It has to be repeated from other angles, through other masks. It's like being a nosey parker. Or a neighbourhood snitch.

What you see of course, when peering through to the interior, are more images of masks staring right back at you, unblinking. It is you who blink and it is perhaps this simple action that makes you think about the title of the work. It is a classic "I get it" moment.

It is a cartoony type of work. Good cartoony, not Mickey Mouse, he's a bit of a busted flush in the appropriation stakes. I recognised a couple of Star Wars storm trooper masks. This lightness of touch culturally makes the piece function as a witty one liner. Imagine if you had to look through the eyes of Pol Pot, Stalin or Hitler and see other mass murdering psychopaths looking back at you? Of course if you were a deranged ultra rich oligarch you would probably ask Dale to make a copy of icave using masks of only your own face and out of real gold. But that way Deep Kitsch can be seen lurking on the horizon.This work is thankfully, not Deep Kitsch. Oligarchs hoover up Deep Kitsch like it was yesterday's cocaine, or tomorrow's weaknesses.

Dale's icave looks cheap and expensive all at the same time, I guess it's the fact that plastic masks are thin and plasticky and yet gold is a powerful attracter, so there is a degee of tension. However, the illusionistic hollowness of the object is the main point, it does not totally come into its own unless you look into its interior. There is a mirror within. The masks are of course joke masks, and that is what you see peering inside the sculpture. Just don't look too closely in the bathroom mirror the next day. You just might not like what you see anymore.

Confronting a sculpture called Divining Rods is a weird mental echo-ey type of experience. It has a magic type of name. Magic with a "k". Magick. A weird, creepy fruit loop, ley line loving latterday druid sort of bonkers name.
What you see, placed upon a white wooden shelf are a variety of basic geometrical shapes. They are, from left to right: a sphere, a cone, a cube and a pyramid. They are made from concrete and can be easily lifted with two hands. Above each object, resting on a white bracket is the type of wooden cross that puppeteers use to manipulate their mannequins. Four, semi taut lenghts of black twine connect each form to its controlling mechanism. So far, so symbolic. Real puppets need more strings. Don't we all.

A non-sculptor would be nonplussed.

Of course, if you had been paying even the slightest attention to matters sculptural over the past ten years, you would have got it in a flash. "Ah ha! Of course. This is a Platonically inflected satire commenting on the fact that recent sculpture, in some circles at least, is considered contingent upon meaning being dependent on social relations." A bold approach I thought. And not unlike walking past your local Next clothing store.

I didn't get it at first but Dale was kind enough to bravely ride to the rescue of my ignorance in the form of a very helpful email. I had to read it twice.

So what we are faced with essentially is a quiet and subtle but nevertheless ticking time bomb of a certain kind of cultural attitude and meaning. The object withholds its information to all but a few but carries within it evidence of hard fought arguments. And food for thought. We often consider artists to be loners, but they are learners too.This piece reveals Dale to be a thoughtful producer.

Desperate to give Divining Rods my own slant I resorted to a more basic scenario. This piece needs to settle down somewhere nice. Perhaps in Jim Ede's gaff up on the hill. With a nice tidy Hepworth. Side by side, they could bicker for ages, just like a married couple. The bliss of wedded context. Mind you, I wouldn't let my kids anywhere near theirs. Terrible family. The man is a bit sarcastic and the woman thinks she is better than everyone else.

The projection room was making a terrible racket, so in I went to have a dekko at a piece called Rubble Carousel. I have to say that had I been between 80 and 90 years of age, and had lived through the Blitz of 1940, I may well have felt tearful. Or plain scared. The soundtrack was tragic in its intensity. There are several things going on in this piece. It is montaged and seems heavily edited. It could also only be made in the age of the Internet. Years ago it would have been harder and far less convenient to source Dale's images of collapsing buildings. Atomic Cafe comes to mind, a film directed by Loader, Rafferty and Rafferty back in 1982.

Dale's film lasts for just over three minutes or so. We see massive U.S buildings being demolished by explosives in order to further monitise the next tranche of newly available real estate. Superimposed upon this is a nocturnal circuit around the East End of London. And yes, we see the East End but, but maybe it is not as apparent to a foreign audience. Most cities do have an East End of some kind, some place where bombs rained down. My Granddad was a fireman in the Blitz. He said people had been turned into lard. Charred bones and lard. I think Dale's references are probably less specific than my associations.

My feeling is that Dale has mentioned the real estate thing too often. It is an aside which detracts from the visual impact. It is a point of interest in the construction of something which is much larger and more important in terms of a certain strand of social history. This is absolutely not a criticism. He is, as the maker of the piece, naturally concerned with its sources and techniques of construction. I was interested too in how it was made and Dale was kind enough to provide a few technical details. The film provides us with the type of rolling imagery that seems to reference those montages of mental turmoil that we see in made for t.v movies. An American detective, usually an ex-marine, is tossing and turning in bed, beaded with sweat. He wakes with a start. "What is it honey?" says his wife. "Same old dream, hon," comes the reply.

The piece is called Rubble Carousel, and somewhere out there is a painting called Merry Go Round by Mark Gertler. I hope they inhabit the same room one day. The film ends with a heads down shot of some front garden vegetation. The shot shakes a bit. Bomb conccussions. From history.

I have had uncomfortable dealings with several Ministries of Interiors, so I was naturally drawn to the title of this work, called worryingly, Ministry of the Interior. Also it looked like a piece of work that would attract attention. And indeed it has.

A life-sized bouncy castle, stalwart plaything of soft play areas and village green fun days, fills up the space. Its pneumatic spires and turrets just touch the ceiling. They tremble slightly. The air compressor adds its own drone. By default it becomes part of the work, its artificial sign of life. No child yells in joy. No parent calls out an admonition to take care.

There is one more thing about this particular bouncy castle; it is made from black leatherette. It has a particularly malevolent sheen. In the Aid and Abet space it has been cloistered away from the other exhibits. It exists in its own discomfort zone. It is though, a bouncy castle in almost every other respect. I walked all around it to make sure. It is an ominous object.

Dale was careful to mention that bouncing as such, was a no go area. I wondered aloud whether my kids could bounce upon this leatherlike citadel if they were similarly clad in black leatherette. "You dress your kids in leather?" Dale moved away to talk to a weighty woman in chunky wooden jewellery and her daughter, who was straight out of a Currin painting.

Quite rightly this piece has garnered a lot of interest. It is the most iconic piece in this show, although not necessarily the most powerful or interesting in my view. You could put it in one of those prefabricated concrete art bunkers that have spawned all over Europe since the 60's.
It could hunker down next to a Sylvie Fleury pink plastic V2 type missile.They could bask in their own mutual sense of contradictory visual purpose. Viewers could try out their wry smiles.

And yet, given the theatricality of this piece, a bland exhibition space is not sufficient. It needs its own barn somewhere on a deserted and wind swept moor. A place where the grass grows long and the weeds poke up through the wheel spokes of the two rusting kids' bikes casually dumped years ago.

More kids arrive. Best friends. Two 10 year olds. Are they trespassing by going into the barn? One thing is for sure, their bottles of Lucozade won't help them much as they clamber aboard.

For they have discovered, "THE BOUNCY CASTLE OF DOOM."

The most significant piece in the show is a piece called High Noon. It is also the most intelligent piece in the show, although not for reasons that everyone will agree on. So, I am going to tread extremely carefully.

What we see is a fairly large, rectangular, red carpet, sourced from a place in the Holloway Road. It is the type of carpet you find in government offices and N.A.T.O military headquarters. Perhaps it came from Allied Carpets. Too big for a domestic setting it lays there before us. No furniture is present.
In the centre, clearly impressed upon the pile, is a disc shape. Quite crisply done. Equispaced, at 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock positions are other discs , slightly different in design. The designs have a sharpness. Clearly something heavy has caused these formal elements.

People have been muttering " missile launcher" for a while now. In fact a four ton missile launcher. This piece of military equipment was rested upon the carpet for a whole day. I'd like to see the photographs, quite an unexpected pairing I should imagine.

Dale's interest is with absence. The trace remains. Unfortunately we may be constrained to use this word. I don't think it is strictly necessary. Trace is too delicate a word. C.S.I Miami this is not. It is not a strand of hair. The piece is about decisions made in smokey rooms fraught with dread, sweat and fear. In theory you might think of Dr. Strangelove and the scene in the War Room, if you were feeling frisky and innocently carefree that is.You would be wrong to do so. Your imaginative eavesdropping should target Bush and Blair. The Chuckle Brothers of mass destruction.

In reality the piece references decisions that result in faraway death, chaos and breakdown of infrastructure. Perhaps Basra Road death from the air destruction. Or perhaps Predator drone strikes on targets whittled down to a high probability of an accurate kill through the power of computing, otherwise known as death through data. And Hellfire missiles. There is of course a massive sense of absence in this context, as drone pilots are often based in Nevada.

Dale used a film props company to get hold of a launcher to suit his conceptual and formal design concerns.
This piece of equipment was used to support a Thunderbird anti-aircraft missile. These missiles were big in the 1960's, defending airfields against Russian interlopers. Or nuclear bombers as we used to call them.

So, still treading extremely carefully, and approaching this work with my own bunch of insecurities, I sort of question the use of a blatantly Cold War piece of hardware. I remember hiding under the kitchen table as a kid during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dale's High Noon disturbs me in a way that other, younger people will not have experienced, and therefore feels displaced but also of my time. Formally, as an artwork it is spot on. Perhaps it is enough to know the design was impressed into the red pile and know it was just red. Not Red as in Red Menace, Reds under the Bed or Red Army.

My dumb feeling is that, well, a cruise missile reference may have been more effective, if we are going to put our pedant's hat on when it comes to weapons systems and the age we are living through. Imprints of anti-aircraft missile launchers from the Cold War era do not necessarily represent the absent traces made by folks bent on faraway holocaust. But I am just a guy who saw the first Gulf War start. On the T.V. In a 5 star hotel. In the penthouse suite. In an Arabic state. Just how picky can I be? Ridiculous! On the other hand you have to realise I am a guy who likes to be locked away with paper and notebooks. I am not a guy who rings up a film prop company enquiring about missile systems. Can you imagine the conversation? "Hello? Is that the company that does all the missiles and stuff for the films? It is? Good, well I was in the Holloway Road the other day and..." Dale does this sort of thing all the time. I on the other hand, sharpen pencils.

Colin Self is a big hero of mine. He sure knows how to sharpen pencils. In an ideal world Dales's High Noon would be in one of the Imperial War Museums somewhere. Quite nearby, on a wall rather than a floor, would be Guard Dog on a Missile Base No.1 by Colin Self. A man's life time separates these two works and yet they articulate a similar sense of unease. Dale's piece is the more understated. These days I don't expect to vapourised by an H-Bomb.

As far as I know Dale prevents people from walking on High Noon. Who does the hoovering then?
No wonder I have been treading so carefully.

Certainly there is a lot to think about in this show. Mooching about is important in order to take it all in, there's a lot to consider.

Aid and Abet have provided an outstanding space and support services for a polished solo show. The space possesses a kind of ex-G.P.O warehouse boho chic which sets off artworks to an advantage.There is a lot of space to play with and two of Dale's pieces are quite large.

I think the thing with Dale is that he is a problem solver. He is a designer as well as an artist. All the works in this show are separated by look, intention, technique and material. There are other artists who work at widening and refining an existing vocabulary. Dale's one offs constitute an evolving resource of meaning.

Nevertheless the work looks like it could have been produced by a design collective, possibly because a bit of outsourcing has been going on. Yet enough of a quirky vibe exists to indicate that Donald Judd, like Elvis, has left the building.

So, what are we left with as we trudge away from the venue? What meanings and flavours have been squeezed out ? What is going to keep us company during the Winter nights?

Well, gold is seductive but ultimately the attraction becomes meaningless and empty. Just like us.

The Blitz was really noisy. Architecture proved to be a throw away medium.

The debates around sculpture were more vicious than I could ever have imagined.

Terry Pratchett, the author of the fantasy Discworld novels, should buy Ministry of the Interior. Or the work should be given its own T.V show. It could be called "The Bouncy Castle's Haunted Half Hour."

Polish plumbers are great. Builders of houses less so.

High Noon, a piece that had a meaning literally impressed upon itself and reciprocally impressed upon us.

This was the final show of Aid and Abet's 2013 programme. They will be moving soon. Their building is going to be torn down to make way for swanky emporia or a car park for city drones. Something useless anyway.

Slaves of Google can find Tom Dale in Conversation with Gabriel Coxhead, an art critic and writer.

In theory, Tom Dale is represented by Poppy Sebire. But I do not honestly know any more and it seems churlish to ask. There is a link below. Finally I would like to say thanks to Tom Dale who actually was quite happy to chat and send emails.

www.daletom.com

www.aidandabet.co.uk