Stephen Hepworth

Pace, London, 2024

Kiki Kogelnik:The Dance, the first solo presentation of the pioneering artist’s work in London.

This exhibition, whose title draws inspiration from the allegorical Danse Macabre, or the Dance with Death, will include works across various mediums that are emblematic of Kogelnik’s profound exploration of the future possibilities—and perils—of outer space, and her relationship to the altered and abstracted twentieth-century body. Incorporating work spanning three decades of production, The Dance showcases Kogelnik’s unique, futuristic visual language as a means in which to communicate the universal fragility of terrestrial life.

Kogelnik's singular visual language of weightless bodies, geometric repetition, and vibrant, neon colours defies categorisation. Born in Austria in 1935, she relocated to New York in the early 196Os, where she was introduced to artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann. Charged by the city's artistic vitality-set against the pervasive background of the Cold War and Space Race-Kogelnik's practice surged into a prolific phase of creative development. Alongside her distinctive 'Kiki' style of painting, her assemblages proposed mechanical augmentation of the body as a means of survival, using novel materials such as sheet vinyl, plastics, and fibreglass. A shift in Kogelnik's work throughout the course of the 197Os and 8Os saw her treatment of the female body become more pronounced, concurrent with her growing dissatisfaction of the artistic scene's 'boys club'. With dynamic fluidity across paintings, works on paper, and ceramics, her explicit commentaries on the representations of women in modern society are imbued with an irony, critique, and pessimism that diverge ideologically from the canonical Pop art of her counterparts.

Pace's upcoming exhibition in London will include a suite of chromatic paintings that speak to Kogelnik's fascination with space travel and her desire to be free. Bomb for Alfonso (1962), last seen at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, Brutal in Outer Space (c. 1962-63), and Untitled (Skull) (1960-63), encapsulate Kogelnik's mixed sentiments to the burgeoning technologies of the 1960s. In these paintings, silhouetted figures and disembodied limbs hover amongst falling bombs, pink skulls, and flattened silver spheres. Any sense of morbidity suggested by their composition is offset by their gleefully psychedelic palette of teals, tangerines, crimsons, and mauves.

From 1964, Kogelnik began incorporating objects onto the surface of her canvases as three-dimensional augmentation to the bodies they depicted. Artificial Man and Artificial Woman (both 1965), two paintings not seen since the artist's solo exhibition in 1965 at the Austrian Institute, New York, have recently been reassembled and will also be on view. A long, twisting hose hangs from the chest of the orange male form, who, additionally, sports four arms and a disconnected limb suggestive of a 'spare part'. In lieu of an internal organ, a clear, plastic love heart is affixed to the green wire that is encased in the piping. A similar length of tube extends from the torso of the entirely deconstructed female figure, as she floats amidst her three arms and four legs. 

To create these life-size forms that populate her paintings, Kogelnik traced around bodies-sometimes her own, and sometimes those of her acquaintances-in a process akin to photography that she described as 'taking'. Enhancing their mechanistic quality, the tape Kogelnik used to secure her cutouts remains delineated, suggesting that the figures and their extra limbs resemble both garments for paper dolls and integral components of a larger machine.

In a large-scale sculpture included in the exhibition, titled Seventh Ave. People (1986), flat, outlined bodies produced on sheet vinyl drape on hangers that suspend from a clothing rail, perhaps suggesting that identity is something that can be slipped on or off at will. Kogelnik's first studio in New York was not far from the Garment District on 7th Avenue, whose rush of clothing racks, tailors, and designers was a dynamic source of inspiration for the artist. Uncoupled from distinctions of sex, gender, or race, these vibrantly coloured cutouts offer the joy of Kogelnik's world and sixties-era utopianism. Yet, the threat of death in this-and Kogelnik's other hanging works-cannot be escaped. Like flayed skins, these depleted bodies portend a post-atomic world that is subject at any moment to weapons of mass destruction. By fusing the imagery of memento mori with symbolically optimistic materials, like vinyl, Kogelnik's works manifest life and death on the edge of destruction.

Photographs © Robert Glowacki.

Kunstforum Wien, Vienna, Austria, 2023

Kunstmuseum Brandts, Odense, Denmark, 2023-24

Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, 2024

The survey exhibition Kiki Kogelnik: Now Is the Time, curated by Dr Lisa Ortner-Kreil, curator Kunstform Wien, examines the work of Kogelnik through the prism of seven chapters: The Exhibition at Galerie St. Stephan: The Viennese Debut; New York: Pop and New Realities; Space Art, Robots, and the Hybrid Body; Masquerades: Representations of the Self; Being and Pretending: Portraits of Women from the 1970s; Big City Freedoms: Ceramics and Animal Motifs; and Into Space, through Time: Art, Death, and Life. The exhibition includes 140 works in all media representing four decades of her production plus archive material.

The Kunstmuseum Brandts was the second venue of the survey exhibition Kiki Kogelnik: Now Is the Time. It was organized by Ellen Egemose for the Kunstmuseum Brandts and Stephen Hepworth of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation and with the exhibition designer Anne Schnettler. Photography © David Stjernholm

Kunsthaus Zürich was the third venue for the touring survey exhibition. It features over 130 works from four decades of Kogelnik's art production. Organized by Cathérine Hug for the Kunsthaus Zürich, and retitled Kiki Kogelnik: Retrospective, in an exhibition reimagined for the galleries of the recently opened David Chipperfield designed building. Photography © Franca Candria.

Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, 2022

Kiki Kogelnik’s relationship to, and depiction of, women is founded in personal narrative. At the age of 21, she was engaged to the artist Arnulf Rainer, only to find in the house they were going to share his formal studio occupied a floor, while she was only given the attic to paint in. This established the conflicting pattern of dependency and self-determination that would shape her life. Marilyn Monroe appeared to Kogelnik an exemplar of a woman who had achieved this balance and she painted three paintings with the title Marilyn as homages to her idol. One of these three works, Marilyn (1962) in the present exhibition features the actress’ abstracted torso and legs. The figure’s voluminous proportions recall timeless symbols of fertility such as the Venus of Willendorf, while the green lingerie reinforces the body as an object of desire.

Following the unexpected death of Monroe she wrote in a letter to her mother in Austria on August 15, 1962: “I am really very sad about Marilyn – she died not far away from here – and on this night at about 1 till 4, I could not sleep and was very depressed. When I told this to Sam [Francis] the next day, he told me Marilyn killed herself. […] Well, poor Marilyn – I collect all the papers – and I have to paint to her glory.”

The sudden awareness of the fragility of the human body becomes one of the key tenets of her work in the 1960s as she explored ideas of the fragmented body and its augmentation. From 1966 to 1967, she made a series of drawings entitled Robots that utilized anatomical rubber stamps employed by doctors to make reports of diagnoses. Some show a form of utopian freedom as they blasted off into space while others depict vulnerability, trauma and pain. Coinciding with her own pregnancy she wrote in her diary: “Maybe there will come a time where the female bodies won’t be [necessary] for that process anymore and life could be created aside. I would not mind.”

Drawing on the images found within the pages of fashion magazines, in the 1970s she embarked on a series of paintings that showed their subjects as both empowered and absurd as they performed their assigned roles. Stripped of the context of a photoshoot, dressed in fiercely patterned dresses and bathing suits, augmented by the occasional prop, their dynamic poses contrast with their painted faces, and eyes that no longer appear to harbor any emotion. Echoing her interest in the idea of the cyborg from the previous decade, they are in her own words: “beautiful, rich, worldly, superficial, bored, neither happy nor unhappy, no deep thoughts, no sentiment, no feelings.”

In the series It Hurts, 1974-76, Kogelnik depicted a succession of women dressed in black who appear to be the subject of physical abuse conducted with a range of items found in the home. The women themselves appear impervious to the pain that is being inflicted on them as if they have no choice but to stoically ignore the flowers that are being offered as an apology. By the 1980s she employs simplified representations of the female face which become mask-like in a series of fixed expressions that evolve to become a motif that reoccurs throughout her late work and across a range of media. She said towards the end of her life: “For me, the mask is nothing that takes place in front of the face but it is the face. It doesn’t conceal anything. It is it.”

Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles, 2021

Kayne Griffin is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Austrian born artist Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997) titled “Falling.” This presentation will mark Kogelnik’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, California, displaying a selection of never before shown early 1960s works.

The exhibition title, Falling, is inspired by a painting, Falling in Love Again, created in 1962. Falling draws from Kogelnik’s free and monumental spirit—an evolutionary narrative of the artist and person. These paintings are exceptional examples of Kogelnik’s use of color and form that brings together the language of figuration and abstraction. Her use of broad gestural brush strokes to produce a variety of angular shapes and curved arcs, circles, and semi-circles is evident in these works, both reminiscent of, and a departure from, a form of European abstraction.

Falling marks a period of Kogelnik’s life that involved a series of travels and moves. While the artist eventually relocated to New York in 1962, Kogelnik’s American travels included landing her to the West Coast, initially in Santa Barbara, before moving for a short period to Billy Brice’s Neutra-designed Plywood House in Los Angeles. Beginning a relationship with the artist Sam Francis in Venice, Italy during the Biennale of 1960 led to Kogelnik spontaneously introducing the color pink to her existing paintings, as seen in California Man (1960). In an unsent letter dated November 1964, she acknowledges his influence on her life:“You really made the whole world pink for me – now I know.” Kogelnik’s work from this period gains a painterly urgency as her color palette expands and its application gains a new fluidity.

Departing stylistically from her gestural paintings, Marilyn (1961) is heralded by a series of oils on paper that are studies of groups of figures, both standing and reclining, each brushstroke defining a limb or curve. Female (1962) replaces the Matisse-like background of Marilyn for the aggressive striped glare of the lights of Broadway. It conveys the rush of speed, both exhilarating and dangerous, three black bombs aim downwards while time is marked by the different phases of four floating moons. This painting marks the first appearance of many of the signature motifs that would come to populate her paintings of the 60s. Kogelnik’s reaction to the death and autopsy of Marilyn Monroe allows an acknowledgement of the corporality of the body whereas previously she had focused on its form and its sexual potency. This work contains the suggestion of mechanical augmentation and the creation of the artificial human, ideas that would obsess her throughout her career. Untitled (1962) is similarly about establishing new forms and ideas. This two-panel work was begun on the West Coast, before she traveled cross-country by train to settle in New York.

It is not clear that in titling the painting Falling in Love Again (1962) if Kogelnik is referring to her relationship with Francis, but it is an indication of a degree of personal biography that she would sometimes include in her paintings. Despite their subject matter, Kogelnik’s work remains resolutely bright, colorful, and optimistic—her imagined worlds playful in their understanding and imagery, as seen in Untitled (Still Life with Globe) (c. 1963), Untitled (Still Life with Hand) (c. 1963) and Hands in the Moon (1964). Outer Space (1964) looks forward to a world without commodities, consequences, regrets or bombs, a place (for a moment) of escape from the realities of life. A place just to be free.

Kiki Kogelnik is widely considered to be one of the most important Austrian born artists. She is associated with the pop art movement—the connection with its American form she contested during her lifetime. In establishing herself amongst her contemporaries, including artists Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wessleman and Andy Warhol, she had the distinct advantage of being a recently arrived European amidst all the Americana of the time—bringing forth a more jaundiced eye to the mechanization of culture.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a digital catalogue with an essay by Stephen Hepworth, Director of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.

Photography: Flying Studio, Los Angeles.

Mostyn, LLandudno, UK, 2019

Riot of Objects is the first institutional presentation in the UK to focus solely on Kiki Kogelnik’s ceramic works.

Considered one of the key figures of the post-war avant-garde, Kogelnik’s multidisciplinary oeuvre spans five decades. Her multifaceted artistic style evolved from painterly abstraction to Pop Art and the representation of the (female) body.

Consumer culture, technology and feminism were recurring themes throughout her work. Her unique aesthetic is marked with playfulness and humour yet imbued with a stark sense of criticality. In resisting and contesting the lure of post-war capitalist culture in her work, she demarcated herself from her contemporary peers.

Her first ceramics were made in 1974, and soon became a key activity in her artistic practice. Her ceramic works were hand-built and cut from slabs using stencils and are reminiscent of her earlier paintings in their boldness, bright colours and vivacity. Drawing on a method of presentation she employed in an exhibition at the Henri Gallery in Washington, DC in 1990, a number of islands pepper the space; made from clusters of plinths of different heights and widths and displaying a range of her freestanding works that date from the 1950s through to the 1990s. Arranged chronologically, this exhibition demonstrates Kogelnik’s boundless capacity for invention and restless commitment to making.

This exhibition is curated by Chris Sharp and organised by Alfredo Cramerotti, in partnership with the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.

Photography by Mark Blower

Musée de Beaux-Arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 2020

In 1962, Kiki Kogelnik left her native Austria for New York. This change of continent was accompanied by a change of style. Her increasingly colorful works move away from abstraction to address the question of the body from different angles: social, medical and technological. Critically, she observes that the bodies shaped by consumer society have become distorted. They lose all definition, until they become empty, interchangeable envelopes. Fashion photography have reduced everything to 2D, and people are just judiciously arranged against the backdrop of the city. What happens inside is just as disturbing: organs can be detached like spare parts, and replaced to create hybrid beings, no longer quite human, not entirely machines: cyborgs. Bodies can be healed or disassembled, sent into space or scattered by bombs; this is the ambivalence of progress.

On the pop art scene, Kiki Kogelnik's recognition was equally ambivalent: she was hailed as an avant-garde muse, but her work never achieved major commercial success. Until recent rediscoveries in art history, pop art has been considered an almost exclusively male movement. Kogelnik's discreet but resolute feminism made her a marginal figure. Today, her pioneering work, both serious and light-hearted, should be saluted.

Curated by David Lemaire and Marie Gaitzsch in partnership Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.

Photography by Gaspard Gigon

Gagosian, 980 Madison Ave, New York, 2019

The first significant exhibition for 20 years in New York of paintings made by the Japanese born Arakawa (b.Nagoya 1936 – d. New York 2010). He moved to New York in 1961 and soon began exhibiting at Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles and New York, where he was included in the now legendary 1967 exhibition Language to be looked at and/ or things to be read. Over the decades that followed, Arakawa explored the workings of human consciousness, diagrammatic representation, and epistemology.

This exhibition focused on work made between 1965 and 1984 in which Arakawa worked in two dimensions, using paint, ink, graphite, and assemblage on canvas and paper to demonstrate what critic Lawrence Alloway called “the logic of meaning, the texture of meaning.”

Curated with Ealan Wingate on behalf of Reversible Destiny Foundation.

Photography by Robert Mc Keever

Courtesy Gagosin

© Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, GSAPP, Columbia University, New York, 2018

This exhibition traced the emergence of architecture as a wellspring of creativity and theoretical exploration for the artist Arakawa (1936-2010) and poet and philosopher Madeline Gins (1941-2014). 

In the early 1960s, Arakawa and Madeline Gins began a remarkably original and prolific collaboration that spanned nearly five decades. During the 1980s—a critical juncture in their careers—this line of inquiry became increasingly spatial as Arakawa and Gins together developed a series of speculative architectural projects that sought to challenge the bodily and psychological experience of users.

The exhibition examined this pivotal exploratory period through a stunning array of original drawings—many exhibited for the first time—as well as archival material and writings that illuminate the working methods and wide-ranging research interests of Arakawa and Gins. It uncovers a little-known body of visionary work that anticipated the artists’ subsequent commitment to architecture and their realization of various “sites of reversible destiny.”

Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient featured over 40 hand drawings, an architectural model, and archival material including ephemera, research materials, poetry, manuscripts, photographs, slides, and other items drawn from the Estate of Madeline Gins. The exhibition toured to the Graham Foundation, Chicago in 2019.

Organized by Irene Sunwoo, Curator, Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and GSAPP Director of Exhibitions; with Tiffany Lambert, GSAPP Assistant Director of Exhibitions; Exhibition design by Norman Kelley

Photography: James Ewing, Courtesy GSAPP, Columbia University

© Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins

Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, 2017

Arakawa, (born Shusaku Arakawa, 1936, Nagoya, Japan) was one of the earliest practitioners of the international conceptual-art movement of the 1960s, working within the media of painting, drawing, and printmaking. The work of Arakawa is now represented by Gagosian.  

Arakawa attended the Musashino Art University in Tokyo before moving to New York from Japan in 1961. Following his arrival, Arakawa began producing diagrammatic paintings, drawings, and other conceptual works that employed systems of words and signs to both highlight and investigate the mechanics of human perception and knowledge.

In 1962, he met his future wife and collaborator – poet, writer and philosopher Madeline Gins. They were married in 1965 and worked closely together in the years following. Throughout the subsequent decades Arakawa continued to exhibit at museums and galleries extensively throughout North America, Western Europe and Japan with works that grew in scale and visual and intellectual complexity.

Jean-François Lyotard has said of Arakawa’s work that it “makes us think through the eyes,” and has described it as transforming “the usual constancies of orientation into a strange, enticing game—a game of continually thinking out.” In a 1988 interview, Arakawa spoke of the relationship of image and text in his work, saying:

The language has its own world, the picture its—the gap, that is where I want to play. When the gap is enormous, the title takes on a greater importance. The title is, of course, an additional layer of language beyond or over that of the controlling sentences appearing on the face of the canvas.

Curated with Ealan Wingate on behalf of Reversible Destiny Foundation.

Photography by Robert Mc Keever and Stephen Hepworth

Courtesy Gagosin

© Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins

LMAK Projects, New York, 2015

Matthew Abbott, Carl Fudge, and Joey Kötting

Once upon a time, there were three (little girls) guys who went to the (police academy) same art academy and they (were each assigned very hazardous duties) all moved to New York, but I took (them away from all that) and I moved there too, and now, they (work) are doing a show (for) with me. My name is (Charlie) Stephen.

Matthew Abbott, Carl Fudge, Stephen Hepworth and Joey Kötting while all born in London met at Brighton Polytechnic in the 1980's studying Fine Art. Abbott, Fudge and Kötting then moved to Philadelphia to do their MFAs at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, while Hepworth went onto London University's Goldsmiths' College to do his.

Original Show Season One is a reunion of sorts, for something that never happened, an opportunity for three artists and a curator to come together and make a show. Matthew Abbott is known for his bold, abstract paintings containing swirling geometric shapes and text. His paintings are inspired by various sources including: crossword puzzles, Islamic symbols and record covers.

Carl Fudge combines digital technology with traditional artmaking techniques, creating paintings and unique prints that range from the monumental to the miniature.

Joey Kötting's films, prints, drawings, paintings and collages explore political issues and the state of the human condition. Deploying language, gesture and the human body his work is often both humorous and torturous.

Stephen Hepworth has curated over 80 exhibitions internationally. He moved to the United States in 2007 to relaunch the University Art Gallery at University of California San Diego. Previously he worked at Bloomberg Space, Jerwood Gallery, and The Tannery all in London. He has lived in New York for five years.

Wilmer Jennings Gallery, New York - 2015

Nadema Agard, Pena Bonita, Maria Hupfield, Athena LaTocha, and Melissa Staiger.

Consciously referencing a historic act of generosity, this exhibition of five Native American women artists resident in New York is the result of an invitation to a British contemporary art curator, Stephen Hepworth, by AMERINDA Inc (American Indian Artists) to venture into new and alien territory. Positioned as an explorer, he encountered an openness in the sharing of knowledge, expertise and experience reflected through the range of work included in the exhibition.

 Each of the five artists identifies to a different degree with their distinct tribal ancestry, further defined by social, cultural and geographic difference - collectively though they remain identified as Native American. While New York is now their home, the experience of being other, perhaps inevitably in a city of others (a place that is historically and geographically part of their larger home) sustains and informs their practice, especially in one that functions as a dynamic global center for contemporary art.

Through this contemporary framework the exhibition embraces the work of these artists who in turn: deploy traditional symbolism to ensure the passing forward of a continuing heritage; evoke memories of rugged landscape through material invention; question the possibility of the spiritual within a modernist tradition; echo the procedures of exchange as a performative act; and by the introduction of an adorned and embellished tree stump into a community garden creates a place to wonder and question.

Jousse Entreprise, Paris, France - 2012

Michele Abeles, Kate Costello, Sam Falls, Corin Hewitt, Matt Lipps, Elisa Sighicelli

The six artists brought together in Set-Up, all make photographs through revisiting the studio as a place for creating images. Each employs different approaches and strategies, drawing on areas such as performance, anthropology, and art history to generate images that are visually arresting while tantalizingly evasive. Photography in the United States has developed a new and fresh focus with some artists interested in exploring the technical limits of their materials and recording the process manifest in making a photograph, while others are interested in creating studio based situations, or still lives, as a way of making new and provoking images. Set-up speaks not only to the nature of the creation of these images, but also to a sense of willful misdirection.

Sam Falls straddles both of these tendencies testing the limits of what a photograph can be with works made in the Californian sun in which the trace of an object is bleached into dyed cloth, while others use the conventions of a studio and camera to index different methods of describing a subject. In these fruit and vegetables are arranged then a digital photograph is taken which is sampled to create swathes of color which are added to the image before it is printed. Finally the fruit and vegetables are cut in half and used to print ink onto the surface of the photograph, shifting it from image to object, and back again

Elisa Sighicelli continues her, often gently humorous, investigation into the poetics of light and space with a return to the studio after many years traveling the world taking photographs and shooting video in exotic locations. Here she chose to photograph mundane materials such as tape, ribbon and paper, but keeping light and its effects as her subject. These new images possess a spare elegance that often disguises their components and questions what is real, photographed and re-photographed in an exercise in contemporary trompe l'oeil.

Corin Hewitt similarly uses mundane materials in the making of his photographs. These are created and emerge as part of durational performances staged within galleries and museums. At the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2009 he constructed a fully enclosed raised workspace with a crawl space hidden below. Throughout the exhibition he constructed still lives using materials both grown and bought that he photographed before recycling, along with the resulting photographs, to stage the next image. In so doing he created an ongoing record of his activity as well as an intimate examination of transformance.  

Michele Abeles uses a restricted number of everyday items (including a male nude) to make elegant and compelling tableaus. Each element’s identity is very clear and is in a way emblematic of itself. While very formal, each photograph both suggests and evades meaning, as if a series of clues is constantly being reshuffled, the elements redeployed and recast. Her stark graphic images are made in camera, immaculately composed with a crisp depth of field that speaks of the classic photographer’s studio with its eternal white backdrop.

Kate Costello’s series Kiki and Me refers to the famous Parisian model and muse Kiki de Montparnasse. Costello collaborates with models in the creation of studio photographs in which they pose in front of a series of painted backdrops. The works reference, through the quotation of pattern and palette, a historical period that is both supported and questioned through the pose of the nude and the transitory nature of scene. Often augmented through a sculptural intervention in the space, her photographs create a sense of uncertainty through merging historical lineage with an improvised theatricality.

Matt Lipps appropriates images from Horizon, an international arts and culture magazine. Focusing on the issues from the 1950s and 60s he playfully explores what happens to the meaning of certain objects and images when they are remixed into new systems and categories – altering both content and context. Collected together in their new groupings clearly appearing as variously sized cutouts they are wittily arranged and dramatically lit as if players on a temporary stage who can at any moment be reconfigured.

UAG, University of California, San Diego - 2009

Mark Dean Veca is renowned for creating paintings, drawings and installations that portray surreal cartoons, psychedelic landscapes, and pop culture iconography while also being inspired by long-established decorative motifs. He is widely recognized for his all-encompassing installations that surround the viewer and inspire a sense of awe. Revealing fantastical and, at times, humorous imagery with frenzy and pattern-like precision, his works often resemble a modernized interpretation of toile painting. In the 1998 catalogue for Veca’s El Gloominator exhibition, Steve Mitchell asserts that “Veca works in the meticulous tradition of the fresco painter to produce an image that paradoxically evokes the immediacy of the graffiti artist.”

This solo exhibition will for the first time present a comprehensive overview of his practice, including two new wall paintings, one inside the gallery and one outside, documentation and studies for previously realized projects, paintings on a variety of surfaces and works that he has made with companies such as: Ford Motors, Nike, Burton Snowboards; editions he has produced in collaboration with museums; and works made with other artists such as the New York artist and designer KAWS.

UAG, University of California San Diego - 2009

Spencer Finch, Graham Gussin, Gabriel Lester, Takeshi Murata, and Christian Tomaszewski

Fear Minus One focused on five artists who use preexisting films as their source, particularly in this selection, movies that have a sense of foreboding or fear as part of their dynamic. Through their interaction with the original its form is changed, be it as the result of translation, transcription, editing or recreation, but remains strongly referenced in the final piece. Collectively these five individual works transform the gallery into a site for the imagination, where the relationship between narrative and image can be examined and the creation of illusion explored.

Spencer Finch’s West (Sunset in my motel room, Monument Valley, February 26, 2007, 5:36 – 6:06 pm) uses the light from nine video monitors, which display a changing selection of stills from John Ford’s 1956 epic and violent Western The Searchers. The gallery bathed in this reflected light is transformed from day to night exactly mimicking, over a 30-minute period, the color and intensity of the fading twilight. 

Graham Gussin’s Dark Light Piece, Night of the Living Dead (Luminosity Wave Form) uses the entire film, Night of the Living Dead (1968), as seen through a light-measuring screen used on edit suites. This translation turns the images into a kind of ectoplasmic landscape, through which the movement of the camera and barely recognizable figures become enhanced yet are abstracted. 

Gabriel Lester similarly reworks Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) in the form of a computer controlled light installation. 50 individual lights bathe an open sided room in a range of colors and hues that evoke the moods and scenes of the film as its soundtrack plays in its entirety. 

Takeshi Murata twists and stretches sequences of the classic Italian horror movie Black Sunday (1960) using a technique he calls “VideoSlime.” Each frame is digitally rendered sifting black and white images through graduations of abstraction in fluid motion while hyping up the menace redolent through out the film. 

Christian Tomaszewski has previously reconstructed parts of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) in real space: exploring the ability of architectural fragments to convey dramatic narrative. Through his installations he superimposes two different structures, the one belonging to the film and the one of the architecture, which together become a third reality. For Fear Minus One he turns his attention to Giulio Berruti’s Killer Nun (1978).

UAG, University of California San Diego - 2008

Shaun Gladwell’s practice critically engages personal experience as well as wider speculation upon art history and the dynamics of contemporary culture. This range of interest and sources is explored through a variety of mediums, but in recent years most particularly video installation. His recent projects in video have made discursive links between historical models and understanding of the body in space such as the flâneur and contemporary cultural figures such as the skateboarder, the motocross rider, the freestyle BMX rider, the graffiti artist and other physical and street performers. The work generally deals with performative figures in space, disrupting the social and architectural programming of urban spaces in particular. As this ongoing investigation of spatial articulation has deepened and gathered momentum it has begun to more closely inform and be reflected in the installation structures of the work itself, with an increased experimentation with multi-channel formats and architectural features as projection surfaces.

Gladwell’s work also experiments with certain traditional or established representational genres and concepts. For example, the genre of the romantic landscape and its association with traditional concepts such as the sublime is handed over to – or co-opted by – contemporary practices such as skateboarding or break dancing. However, his practice does not attempt to either simply update or recuperate traditional models. On the contrary, the traditional model and current cultural practice cross-infect each other, nor is the continued use of ‘street’ or ‘subcultural’ activity directly claimed within the category of ‘art’. Rather, the popular projections of such cultural activity are both destabilized and transformed. The fast and furious MTV jump-cut editing of these popular representations are resisted through the use of slow motion and ambient soundscapes. The results are poetic, hypnotic and meditative representations that open the represented activities themselves to a wide range of readings not immediately associated with either their sources or my apparent subject matter.

UAG Outside, University of California San Diego - 2008

Joey Kötting has been using his body as the subject and the material for his art for many years.  The images he makes are at times humorous and torturous, often taking on the appearance of documentation of performance art from the 1970s. Kötting, responding to an invitation from the University Art Gallery, has chosen to use the external walls of the Mandeville Center to temporary put up self-portraits that are both confrontational and introspective. These images are intended to be ambiguous in their references and sources: appearing perhaps on one level to reference European painting of the seventeenth century, on another the work of nineteenth century French absurdist writer Alfred Jarry.

Made simply with colored paint poured, wiped and splattered onto his own face, he photographs himself adopting a number of different moods and personas. These images are then blown up as large-scale digital prints, the smallest comprised of 40 individual sheets, which have been pasted directly onto the concrete walls of the University building. This method draws on the street culture of flyer posting, be it for the purposes of advertising, propaganda, or protest. Kotting's aim, however, is to be generous and open rather than tied to a single cause or idea. 

Over a relatively short period of time, in the sun of Southern California, the image of these heads will start to fade and the edges of the paper on which they are printed begin to curl and brown, marking the temporal nature of most images. Similarly, Kottings project does not have a preset end date, as it is intended that they should disappear as suddenly as they appeared, and their presence will pass into the remembered rather than the seen.

UAG, University of San Diego - 2008

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Fikret Atay, Yto Barrada, Yeal Bartana,
Johanna Billing, Ulla von Brandenburg, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Emily Jacir, Hassan Khan, Sigalit Landau, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Steve McQueen, João Onofre, de Rijke/de Rooij, Bojan Šarčević, Zined Sedira, Mariana Vassileva, and Mark Wallinger

A selection of 18 video works from the collection of French collectors Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître. For the last seven years these London based French collectors have been collecting almost exclusively video work. The collection includes artists from all over the world and at the latest count numbers 80 works. This selection includes work by artists originating from Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, The Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States.

Focusing primarily on younger artists the collection demonstrates many approaches to making film and video from the use of a simple gesture or intervention, the documentation of people and events, to the staged and performative. This, in turn, reflects many of the themes and concerns of today, the way social and political change is manifested and reflected in everyday life, a fascination with the negotiation of boundaries both physical and metaphoric, and a reflection of the kaleidoscopic nature of human beings, their emotions, and their lives. Collectively, they announce the arrival of a new generation of internationally recognized video artists who choose to occupy the gallery space yet talk of the world outside it.

Revolutions occupied six especially created rooms, which housed both projected works and pieces shown on monitor. Each work, ranging from 80 seconds to 30 minutes in length, was shown sequentially creating a complete cycle lasting almost three hours, and required the visitor to complete three rotations of the gallery.

Professor Yolanda Snaith working with her students from the Department of Dance and Theatre at UCSD created dance pieces made in response to eight works in the show. Each work was performed in front of a projected version of the video.

UAG, University of California San Diego - 2008

Jesus Aguilar, Ricci Albenda, Fiona Banner, Peter Davies, Tami Demaree, Graham Gillmore, Danielle Gustafson-Sundell, Emma Kay, Justin Lieberman, João Louro, Ján Mancuška, T. Kelly Mason, Dominic McGill, Aaron Parazette, Fernando Pintado, Monique Prieto, Maya Schindler, Bob & Roberta Smith, Mark Titchner and Cerith Wyn Evans.

In the Beginning takes its cue from the strong involvement West-coast artists have had with text, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, and looks at a newer international generation of artists whose practice focuses as much on appearance and form as much as what the words say.

In the Beginning features the work of 20 artists from Europe and America in a range of media including painting, sculpture and video. Collectively they reflect a cross section of contemporary approaches and subjects. For Peter Davies, Monique Prieto and Aaron Parazette words and phrases become the very thing they paint, while Cerith Wyn Evans and Maya Schindler use words and text as sculptural form that is both a representation and a physical manifestation of itself. Jesus Aguilar and Fiona Banner both compress and expand our experience of time, while Rici Albenda distorts text in order to propose new perspectives. Graham Gillmore and Emma Kay employ the layering and interconnectivity of text to evoke ideas and memories where as Justin Lieberman and Dominic McGill are concerned with its use as a tool to investigate and reveal contemporary society, politics and culture. João Louro, T. Kelly Mason, and Ján Mancuška engage with the possibility of narrative, while Bob & Roberta Smith, Danielle Gustafson-Sundell and Mark Titchner offer stories, musings and slogans, and Fernando Pintado and Tami Demaree both represent and question language as an authentic carrier of expression.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2007

Paul Morrison breathes life into the traditional genre of landscapes and botanical paintings in a skillful and multi-faceted way. His black and white paintings are characterised by the recurrence of individual plant motifs, which he presents in a range of compositions and scales. Mixing high and low culture, Morrison draws on imagery from popular and classical sources. These references range from the Disney cartoon to an Albert Dürer landscape to create abstracted and often hyper-magnified visions of landscape. Morrison makes inventive use of perspective and proportion, the classical elements of composition, to sample different patterns of perception. He slowly unpicks the act of seeing and challenges the sophisticated way we have grown to see the world.

Paul Morrison’s exhibition at Bloomberg SPACE was characterised by his continued involvement and fascination with the use of traditional printing methods to represent landscape. For each of the three galleries he responded to the particular architectural qualities with newly commissioned site-specific work. Across two adjoining walls in the front gallery the expansive image of a lake was dominated by two smoking volcanoes. Bordered by the black silhouettes of two trees this densely lined image had at its centre a large circular flower over four metres in circumference. This circular motif reoccurred in the rear gallery this time as if a huge peephole has been drilled in the wall through which a large spherical single multi-headed bloom could be seen. Finally, a medieval landscape of citadels perched on rocky mountains ran around the atrium.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2007

Soudabeh Ardavan, Matthew Barney, Jonathan Bayer, Lucinda Devlin, Rita Donagh, Nicole Eisenman, Harun Farocki, Jean Genet, Robert Gober, Grennan and Sperandio, Thomas Kilpper, Koestler Trust, Langlands and Bell, Beltran Obregon, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Prisons Foundation, Mark Raidpere, Gary Rough, Paulo Sacramento, The Simpsons, Poppy de Villeneuve, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Artur Zmijewski

Showcasing a diverse group of international artists working across a wide range of media, Prison included both historical and contemporary representations of prison drawn from the visual arts and popular culture. The subject or theme of ‘prison’ is as broad and open to interpretation as the colour of the sky, that square patch of blue through the bars in a cartoon illustration. For those with direct experience of prison (and their families) it is a harsh reality. Prison attempted to deal with art and artefacts where the concept and reality coincided. The exhibition Prison was concerned primarily with its representation – the prisoners, the architecture, the reality, the concept and society’s relationship to it. From those unsubtle cartoons with the shorthand of bars, through the Monopoly ‘Get Out of Jail’ card, to a film made by inmates of a Sao Paulo prison which subsequently had to be pulled down. The subject is so vast that the exhibition did not even try to address everything, rather it focused on artists, both inside and out, that attempt to make work that is relevant and revealing.

Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea, Rome - 2007

Shaun Gladwell, Christian Gonzenbach, Joey Kötting, Oliver Michaels

Collezione #2 is the third in an occasional series of exhibitions commissioned by Isabella Brancolini from British curator Stephen Hepworth. This instalment brings together the work of four young video artists from Europe and America that share an interest in the humour, physical comedy and technical innovations of early Hollywood cinema. Echoing the films of early stars such as: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin; they share a humour that can makes us laugh out loud while reflecting poignantly on life.

Shaun Gladwell uses urban environments as temporary stages for physical activity, such as skateboarding, freestyle bike riding and break dancing, to explore the relationship between body, activity and site. In Tangara (2003), he employs the device of inverting the camera turning it on himself inside a Sydney train. Hanging from the handrails of its futuristic interior he performs a series of movements that when played back in slow motion appear to show him defying gravity.

Christian Gonzenbach's animations give life to a range of objects and materials from clay to dead animals. In Natural History (Gherkins!) (2005), he uses the humble pickle cucumber in a video that is part Damian Hirst, part science fiction. Close-up shots of gherkins crammed together in a tank are cut together with scenes from a makeshift processing tank/nursery where proud, if agitated, 'parents' watch over the production/growth of their young. The activity is frenzied, and the Gherkins escape to 'graze' on a green hillside before returning to overwhelm the facility from where they came.

Joey Kötting's short films record the act of making paintings. Canvases painted with light sensitive paint are exposed to sunlight, whilst being partially obscured by a human body or activity. His films capture the genteel absurdity of these actions with the faded charm of a 1950's home movie. Trying to Fly Before the Sun's Too High (2001), shows Kötting sitting on top of a child's climbing frame with a large canvas strapped to his back, periodically he flaps his wings, like some demented Icarus and jumps to the ground, before climbing back to his perch and repeating.

Oliver Michaels' Tube Balloon Thing (2006), shows a rudimentary machine sitting on a table in his studio. At the end of two thin pipes are blue balloons that periodically inflate and then violently deflate. This exertion causes a variety of everyday objects to be expelled from a larger tube at the opposite end of the machine. Some items fly out ricocheting off the wall, while others appear to need more encouragement from a further blast of air. As time goes on the pile of miscellaneous objects grows, reflecting the absurdity of the machine that produced them.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2006

One of the most inventive and influential French artists of his generation, Bertrand Lavier focuses on the convoluted relationship between art and reality – where are the limits of art and how much is the look of art influenced by what we expect of it? Superimposition is a distinctive characteristic of Lavier’s work, often elevating everyday objects to the level of artworks. La Bocca (2005) stacks the iconic lip-shaped sofa (originally produced in 1970) based on Salvador Dali’s famous Mae West sofa of 1936 on top of a chest freezer, forcing the idea of hot and cold together. By filming Mark Rothko’s painting Four Darks in Red (1958) on 35mm film, Lavier attempts to capture the experience of this painting. Transferred to video and projected actual size, it is both a documentation of the original work and a piece in its own right. In this provocative work Lavier takes a popular artist, whose work fulfils prescribed expectations of modern art, and raises questions about value and exchange. Empress of India II (2005) is a remake of one of Frank Stella’s striped works in coloured neon. Lavier regards these works as paintings but in light. The shift in material makes clear reference to advertising, surrendering the art object, in part, to the world of communications and design. Empress of India II (2005) glows with an intensity that appears to leave behind its origin as painting, yet still fulfils Stella’s declared intentions of “What you see is what you see”.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2006

Keith Coventry, Mustafa Hulusi, Hew Locke, Dietmar Lutz, Mark McGowan, John Riddy, and Anne Tallentire

Seven London based artists were invited to consider the journey from their home or place of work to Bloomberg SPACE as the inspiration for making new work. The seven resulting commissions were distinguished by their very different approaches to the idea and their experiences of these journeys. They encompass the disciplines of sculpture, performance, painting, photography and film. Part of our experience of the city is formed by the way in which we move around it. Whilst London is constantly developing, certain aspects of its geography, such as its roads and rail links, appear to evolve slowly, over decades, if not centuries. The significant changes can be observed in the space between – the islands of land described by the webs of interlocking networks and the neighbourhoods in redefinition.

Keith Coventry utilised the symbolic language of early modernism in a large, white, shallow sculptural relief that features directional arrows. Mustafa Hulusi used abandoned billboards in the East End to display posters with his retinal starburst logo that also appeared as paintings within the gallery. Hew Locke appropriated the sculpture of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square which he transformed with pound-shop merchandise, an act which questions the nature of history and culture. Dietmar Lutz’s installation of impressionistic paintings captured people and vistas glimpsed on his journey from Hackney Wick. Mark McGowan showed the press coverage of his celebrity three-legged race from Peckham via Lambeth Bridge and Oxford Street to Finsbury Square (taking place shortly before the exhibition opened). John Riddy’s intense colour photographs are reflections of his meditation on time and place, surface and light, while Anne Tallentire’s twenty minute film showed the night sky growing lighter, framed by the edges of buildings and the tops of trees, as dawn breaks on her journey by car.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2006

Wilhelm Mundt, Nicholas Deshayes, Adam Chodzko, Laurent Grasso, and Lee Mackinnon

The work of the five artists included in From There involved the notion of an alien presence. All of the works addressed the notion of manifestation, its articulation, and how otherness might be described or imagined. The works suggest that they are the earthbound indications of another dimension, and that they have arrived from a parallel or completely different space. This raises questions about origin, and plays with ideas of identification, visitation, and expectation.

Wilhelm Mundt’s Trashstones are highly finished multicoloured forms each individually stamped with an enigmatic numerical code. With an internal core made from compacted discarded material, and swathed in shiny resin, each carries a suggestion of energy. The iridescent form of Nicholas Deshayes’ Rock (2005) echoes the Rosetta Stone stripped of symbols and text. The shining surface continues to carry communicative possibilities, in its association with the past as well as the future. Adam Chodzko’s glass droplets filled with bright red ‘manifestation juice’ appear to seep into the gallery. His Secretors (1992) carry an indication of movement, a force that oozes through into this world. These diminutive sculptural works, which appear where wall meets ceiling, provide a sign of a different presence. Laurent Grasso’s Projection (2003-05) consists of a video projection of an unearthly cloud moving at a highly determined pace through the streets of Paris and consuming all in its way. It is projected at such a scale that it provides an almost threatening and direct experience for the viewer. Lee Mackinnon’s video shows a crashed flaming craft that reconstitutes itself in reversed time and hovers enticingly in an urban park.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2007

For his debut exhibition in the UK, Dutch artist Gabriel Lester presented a series of three works which related to the illusions of cinema and theatre. Each work represented a different aspect of the ‘set’ or ‘scene’ – stage, scenery and sound. As such, the three works could be seen as the three basic elements of a theatrical or cinematic narrative: location, setting and action. In a reversal of the expected illusion of the performing arts, the theatre scenery wais moved to the foreground and became a sculpture itself.

Bloomberg Space, London 2007

BIG BANG (2007), a room-sized sculpture commissioned for Bloomberg SPACE, which filled the double height of the first gallery, took the form of a series of stage flats through which the visitor was invited to walk. Only upon reaching the front of the stage is the illusion fully revealed. Taking its cue from the devices employed in baroque ceiling painting, Lester’s sculpture telescopes time and space while also appearing to extend beyond the architectural framework of the gallery. By contrast How to Act (2000) takes the appearance of an empty stage. Coloured lights set into the roof are programmed to accompany a number of audio extracts that are taken from old movies. The audience is encouraged to imagine narratives or events that are evoked by the choreography of light and sound.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2006

For Olivo Barbieri’s first major solo show in the UK, Bloomberg SPACE showed three films brought together in an exhibition for the first time, alongside six large scale photographs from Barbieri’s ongoing project site specific_.

For over 20 years Barbieri’s work has focused on cities and their inhabitants. Filming from a helicopter on 35mm film and HDV (High Definition Video) Barbieri uses a tilt-shift lens – a technique of selective focus – in order to create an image which seems to contract, recede and expand in unexpected ways until the sense of distance and reality becomes confused. The resulting recent films seem to exist between documentary and fiction with the cities that Barbieri depicts appearing at first like models.

site specific_ Roma 04 shows the Italian capital’s famous tourist destinations such as the Coliseum and the Pantheon, contrasted with 1930s public housing, transport systems and the car lots and contemporary buildings on the periphery of the city. site specific_ Las Vegas 05 begins in the spectacular surrounding desert, moving to the reflecting edifices of hotel and gambling complexes, which through their architecture bring together influences from Venice, Paris and Egypt. site specific_ Shanghai 04 (A Silent Story) reveals a perpetually evolving city of skyscrapers, industry and housing sprawl fed by its river. Shown together the films become a trilogy presenting the old world (Rome), new world (Las Vegas) and future world (Shanghai).

Bloomberg Space, London - 2006

David Batchelor. Angela Bulloch, Spencer Finch, Ann Veronica Janssens, Jeppe Hein, Mathieu Mercier, Erwin Redl and Leo Villareal

Backdrop brought together eight international artists whose work uses electric light. Ranging from the experiential room-sized installation to interactive work, and illuminated sculpture made from mass-produced items, the exhibited works echoed the spirit and experience of American artist Dan Flavin, while continuing to expand and experiment with a broad range and quality of illumination.

In one of several works made especially for the exhibition, David Batchelor created a huge chandelier for the internal atrium at Bloomberg SPACE. The work, fashioned from 500 individually lit coloured plastic cleaning fluid containers, hung down through the layers of space. In Angela Bulloch’s ‘pixel boxes’, red, green and blue fluorescent tubes mixed to generate an infinite range of changing colours, combining references to film with minimalism. American artist Spencer Finch’s wall and ceiling installations used fluorescent tubes and filters to recreate the lighting conditions of specific times in particular places in the world. Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens’ mesmerising LED units both described and hid their source, illuminating and blinding simultaneously. Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s No Presence (Red) (2005) is an enticing globe covered with a filigree of red neon that switched off as the viewer approached. French artist Mathieu Mercier’s endless edition Untitled (Light Fixture) (1999) used a number of mass produced Y-sockets and different sized bulbs to create a work that was as much a sculptural object as a source of illumination. Austrian artist Erwin Redl explored and described space with strings and grids of coloured LEDs. Light Volume (1998) discreetly occupied a corner of Bloomberg SPACE with three short lines dotted with points of diffused light. American artist Leo Villareal’s Column (2004), an installation of 51 vertical computer controlled light tubes, created an enveloping environment that pulsed and changed colour, to saturate the room with an intense flow of luminescence.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2005

Snapshot was a solo exhibition of a new work commissioned for Bloomberg SPACE by 1997 Turner Prize winning, London-based artist Gillian Wearing.

Shown on a single free standing wall Snapshot (2005) appeared as a huge moving photographic album. For the piece Wearing focused on the subject of loneliness. From a girl playing the violin to an elderly woman in a residential home, seven individual screens showed scenes in the lives of seven different women, each set in a different decade of the 20th century and all at a different stage of their lives. Each film, informed by old photographs, was accompanied by a single spoken monologue reflecting one person’s life. The images remained distinct and separate as representations of innocence, aspiration, self image and resignation.

Wearing’s work uses photography and video to explore the intimacies and complexities of everyday life. Her work borrows from familiar forms of popular culture to explore deep-seated human trauma and emotion, often adopting methods similar to television documentary for her ‘fly-on-the-wall’ view of people’s lives. Her art can be disturbing and confessional, an honest portrait of the many sides of contemporary life.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2005

Stephen Buckley, Prunella Clough, John Cobb, Barrie Cook, Garth Evans, James Faure Walker, Carole Hodgson, Charlie Hooker, Albert Irvin, Jeff Lowe, Michael Mason, Genesis P-Orridge, Nicholas Pope, Tony Sinden, John Stezaker, Euan Uglow

The sixth edition of the British Art Show was exhibited in 2006. Prompted by this, the curators of Bloomberg SPACE chose to look back to 1979, the year of The British Art Show’s inception, and a time of great social and political change in the UK and abroad. 1979 brings together sixteen artists who were included in the first British Art Show or in the Hayward Annual of the same year. The artists selected included painters and sculptors as well as those working with performance, film installation and photography. Some works were actually shown in the original exhibitions from which this show has been selected, others could have been. So much of the work made at that time has not survived; some has been lost; some was not intended to survive. Some works were restaged or remade for the exhibition.

1979 is intended to be seen as a slice through time, a representation of the diverse nature and continuing relevance of these artists’ practice. Much of the work appears today as fresh and contemporary as when it was made, and shares concerns and approaches to material and form with many younger emerging artists of today.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2005

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Darren Almond, Alice Anderson, Fikret, Atay, George Barber, David Blandy, Wojciech Bruszewski, Louise Camrass, Simona Faithfull, Nayia Frangouli, Gary Hill, Patrick Keiller, Edward Lipski, Len Lye, Nicky Magliulo, Christian Marclay, Jeremy Millar, Jill Miller, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Rachel Reupke, Favien Rigobert, Damien Roach, Sean Rogg, Christoph Rutiman, Margaret Salmon, Yorgos Sapountzis, Carolina Saquel, Hiraki Sawa, Elisa Sighicelli, John Tappenden, Grazia Toderi

The Mind is a Horse (Part 2) was a further exploration of film and video that was begun with part one in Bloomberg SPACE in 2002. A looped compilation of works, lasting approximately two hours, was shown as a continuous large projection in a cinema-like space, allowing gallery visitors to walk in at any point.

Very recent and perhaps unseen film and video pieces were put together with more known and historical works creating a broad spectrum of approaches and ideas. The exhibition avoided following a pre-determined theme and instead, with its central emphasis on the shifting relationship between movement and stillness, suggested that the camera takes the mind on a journey. There are moments of complete rest juxtaposed with chaos, obsessive visions, introversion and detail mixed with expansive landscapes, and images that simply elude description through their beauty.

Bloomberg Space, London 2005

Ross Chisholm, Jack Duplock, Alistair Frost, Paula Kane, Lee Maelzer, Penny Neville-Lee, Christopher Orr

Through a major architectural intervention in Bloomberg SPACE The Valley provided a space to view and reflect on the world from a new perspective. From on high the world below looks different. Geographical relationships are recognised and new narratives developed. Time sometimes provides such vantage points, zeitgeist moments for reflection and evaluation. It has been suggested that painting can provide a metaphorical boat within which it is possible to escape to somewhere else. This sense of escape is much more about effect, vision, and defining a different role for painting, which combines a dreamlike atmosphere with the understood and familiar.

This exhibition of work by seven British painters reflected a recent tendency to make small paintings that often feature places and spaces that are imbued with a particular sense of strangeness or difference. Drawn from a variety of sources, be they imaginary, art historical or appropriated, or using the visual languages of popular culture, each artist creates their own world and brought to the exhibition a different approach from the romantic yearning of an empty space to the silent intimacy shared by a group of figures. The works in the exhibition revealed our changing relationship to landscape, where the rural has become a strange and foreign place while the city is familiar and everyday. These paintings showed a growing sense of estrangement, at times melancholic longing, and an intense affection for spaces both real and imagined.

Bloomberg Space, London 2005

Bloomberg SPACE commissioned Phyllida Barlow to create new work in response to the different character of each of the three galleries, from the double height voluminous first space to the balconied areas of the atrium. Skit was assembled onsite during January 2005. Emotional and instinctive, nailed and bound together as if broken and unstable, it existed and evolved in contrast to the architecture.

For the last four decades Barlow’s work has consisted predominantly of large three-dimensional installations in which the use of space – and our relationship to it – plays an important role. The identity of the materials she uses (wood, cloth, plaster, paper and house paint) remains visible in the completed work. Structures and forms, both rudimentary in construction and densely built, explore ideas of mass and volume. Containing references to architecture, with elements such as staircases, platforms, walls and barriers, her work triggers narratives but also demands to be read as abstract form. Barlow’s daubed application of paint amplifies the use of pattern and repetition in her constructions. Her work references painterly abstraction both through the deployment of colour and the materials she uses. By shifting scale and composition her structures and objects play with the familiar and seem to take command of a space whilst simultaneously appearing temporary and incomplete.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

Narda Alvarado, Jeremy Diggle, Neville Gabie, Robert Gober, Emily Jacir, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Tere Recarens, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Ed Ruscha, Yorgos Sapountzis, Ross Sinclair, Joao Tabarra

Plain Sight focused on the work of twelve international artists. The exhibition took as its starting point the personal or intimate set against a global background. This essentially involved a question of scale that was explored through gesture, documentation, and juxtaposition. The acts highlighted here have a sense of futility, but the simple gesture leads us to think about our boundaries, be they political, ethical, sexual or environmental Treading a line between tenderness and aggression the works do not become swamped with subject matter but find a means to escape it and return to what they are; simple gestures made in plain sight.

Jeremy Diggle (UK) records the burial of ex-military fighter planes in the Welsh mountains. Narda Fabiola Alvarado (Bolivia) halts traffic on a busy road in La Paz with the aid of uniformed police. Neville Gabie (UK) photographs makeshift football goals around the world. Robert Gober (USA), in his fabricated newspapers, contrasts stories of abuse and prejudice with images of the celebration of everyday life. Emily Jacir (Pal/USA) visits territories to enact simple tasks on behalf of Palestinians who are forbidden to do so. Jean-Michel Othoniel (France) distributes 1001 red necklaces at a festival visibly uniting a previously disparate group of individuals. Tere Recarens (Spain) arrives home in a helicopter to tell her family of the changes in her life and her future plans. Chemi Rosado-Seijo (Puerto Rico) collaborates with the inhabitants of a Puerto Rico village to paint their buildings in shades of green sampled from the surrounding jungle. Ed Ruscha (USA) introduces uncertainty and ambiguity into his painted depictions of landscapes through the use of signs and words. Yorgos Sapountzis (Greece) sets off car alarms in a street to provide a rhythm to dance to. Ross Sinclair (UK), accompanied by his daughter, revisits Glasgow School of Art where he studied. João Tabarra (Portugal) restages a standoff in Tiananmen Square using shopping trolleys.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

For her first significant exhibition in London, the distinguished American photographer Shellburne Thurber exhibited a selection of colour prints from two recent series of works. Psychoanalytic Interiors (1998 to present) and Abandoned Interiors (1998 to 2001) continue her documentary approach, which focuses on empty spaces in order to articulate the complexities of the lives of those that pass through them. 

Psychoanalytic Interiors shows the interiors of a number of different psychoanalyst’s offices in and around Boston in the USA and Buenos Aires in Argentina. These are spaces where intimate information is offered and examined in a private exchange between patient and analyst. In their absence a variety of chairs and couches stand in and the details of décor, pot plants and pictures provide information for analysis. From these observations a portrait can be drawn that reflects class values, power relationships and shows the possibility of intimacy, transference and detachment.

Abandoned Interiors further explore ideas of place and longing. These abandoned rooms where nature encroaches, reveal in the remaining fragments the presence of the families and individuals who previously occupied these spaces. Often featuring doorways and windows, Thurber’s photographs point to a world outside where life continues in contrast to the gently decaying interiors. Documenting the inner life of strangers offers for Thurber a way to intimately connect to others and explore the emotional energy between closeness, distance and the passage of time.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT - 2004

Laura Ford, Matt Franks, Roger Hiorns, James Ireland, Jim Lambie, Mariele Neudecker, Mike Nelson, David Thorpe and Saskia Olde Wolbers .

The works in the exhibition display a refreshing sincerity, marking a departure from the coolness and cheeky attitude that have characterized the British art scene for the past decade. These emerging British artists entice the viewer into a world that transcends their reality, engaging themes that are spiritual and fantastical rather than raw or shocking. Whether futuristic, mythological, or purely fanciful, the works in the exhibition stroke a strong counterpart to the British art scene's notorious Young British Artists (YBAs) made famous in the Brooklyn Museum of Art's 1999 Sensation exhibition. 

Laura Ford's theatrical sculptures depict small boys with donkey-like heads, weighed down by their own strange soft anatomy. Reminiscent of the lost boys of Pinocchio, these figures lead us into both a mythological and a strangely psychological space.

Matt Franks builds precarious sculptures carved from pastel-hued Styrofoam, and assemblages of neon-colored Perspex. In each a strange narrative emerges, and humor is at the fore as he juggles comic book references with Bernini in a constantly evolving playground of shape and form.

Roger Hiorns's dense and twisting columns of soap bubbles ooze from suspended ceramic pots in one of his works, while a growth of blue copper sulfate crystals threatens to engulf a pair of model cathedrals in another. These curious and fragile juxtapositions of materials provide glimpses of the artist's spiritual world.

James Ireland sets out to draw the viewer into a search for the perfect world hiding in the ordinary mixture of household furniture, light bulbs, plants, boxes, and images torn from magazines he haphazardly assembles. Forcing the viewer to crouch or kneel by creating a single vantage point, Ireland engages the viewer, allowing them to search for the picturesque among the mundane.

Jim Lambie is interested in redefining territories and spaces utilizing everyday materials to make sculptures and installations that have a dream-like quality. Often appearing makeshift in form and sometimes inspired by pop music, they create new and changed psychological spaces in which the viewer becomes immersed.

Mariele Neudecker's fluid-filled vitrines contain three-dimensional renderings of landscapes that quote the Northern European Romantic tradition. With the addition of chemicals, they give the impression of being shrouded with early morning mist.

Mike Nelson's works consist of labyrinths of small, but politically and symbolically loaded corridors. Each space leads on to the next through salvaged doors that slam closed behind the visitor. Sparsely furnished with found items from other peoples' lives, they articulate the patina of memory and meaning that is encrusted like dirty fingerprints on used furniture.. 

David Thorpe's work is inspired by his interest in utopian communities and fantastical architecture. His collages capture the exteriors of his imagined homes, while his sculptures give form to what they might contain. Made with passion and conviction, the work remains the product of the suburban daydream.

Saskia Olde Wolbers's video works invite the viewer into a world both fantastical and at times excruciatingly psychological. Using low-tech means, she creates desolate and distorted environments driven by spoken text narratives.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

Invited to make new work for Bloomberg SPACE, Chantal Joffe decided to work on a series of paintings on a scale that she had not approached before. The huge size of the nine resulting paintings was influenced, in part, by the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows of the gallery’s front space. The idea of the limitation of time came with the commission, the much larger surfaces on which to paint and the use of different materials and methods were both thrilling and daunting for the artist.

By contrast, Kenny Macleod makes work primarily in the mediums of video and image/text. His works often create disorientation and confusion by refusing to provide linear narratives with which the viewer can engage. He is particularly interested in ideas related to identity and the fluidity that exists between professional, social and personal spheres. Having to provide their own interpretations of the situation proposed by the artist, the viewer becomes a vital part of the work as they examine, reassemble and complete each piece.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

Eileen Agar, Tariq Alvi, Donald Baechler, Eric Bainbridge, John Baldessari, George Barber, Hans Bellmer, Lynda Benglis, Kiera Bennett, Wallace Berman, Pierre Bismuth, Stan Brakhae, Ian Breakwell, Andre Breton, William Burroughs & Ian Sommerville, Claude Cahun, Mark Cannon, Melanie Carvalho, Andrew Child, Gordon Cheung, Bruce Connor, Dan Coombs, Layla Curtis, Guy Debord, Eugenio Dittborn, Thomas Draschan, Marcel Duchamp, The Duvet Brothers, Nusch Eluard, Max Ernst, Erro, Angus Fairhurst, Gelatin, Judith Goddard, John Goto, Brian Griffith, Thomas Grünfeld, Raymond Haines, Rachel Harrison, Nigel Henderson, Nicky Hirst, Hannah Höch, Christian Holstad, Georges Hugnet, Graham Hudson, Peter Hutchinson, James Ireland, Gwyther Irwin, Andre Breton with Jacqueline Lamba & Yves Tanguy, Gavin Jantjes, Chris Jones, Ray Johnson, Lawrence Jordan, Asger Jorn, Jeff Keen, Peter Kennard, Lewis Klahr, Jochen Klein, Jiri Kolar, Udomsak Krisanamis, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Jim Lambie, Peter Lanyon, Guy Limone, Linder, Graham Little, Andrew Mania, Christian Marclay, Louise Nevelson, Chris Ofili, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Roland Penrose, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Carlyle Reedy, Seppo Renvall, Mimmo Rotella, Carolee Schneemann, Kurt Schwitters, Katy Shephard, Ian Skoyles, Nancy Spero, Charles Spurrier, Frank Stella, John Stezaker, Tommy Stockel, Jessica Stockholder, Tomoko Takahashi, Jane Turley, Fred Tomaselli, Geerten Verheus, Rebecca Warren, Tom Wesselman, Jan Wilbraham, and David Wojnarowicz.

Collage included over one hundred artists and examined the way collage has been used to explore different ideas from formal exercises in colour, material and form, to the creation of surreal spaces and the expression of political ideals. The exhibition did not attempt to be a survey or provide an overview, but included examples of key artists and movements to illustrate the role that the juxtaposition of images and material have played in the development of artistic practice. Expanding ideas of traditional cut and paste techniques, the exhibition opened up the definition of collage to show a range of approaches including examples of sculptural assemblage, film montage and work created with digital technology.

Collage is one of the central creative activities within art of the twentieth century. Initially seen as a way to challenge the conventions of art itself, found elements were brought into play with paint in a formal collision of visually tactile materials which created new and exciting dialogues. Collage is inextricably linked to the age of mass media, where images are available to all and on a huge scale, where nothing is precious and can therefore be used again and again, cheaply and with alacrity.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

Matthew Darbyshire, Edward Kay & Samuel Porritt, Keith Wilson, Gary Stevens, Nathan Coley, Adam Chodzko, Andrew Mania, Jo Bruton, Maggie Ellenby, Sally O’Rilley, JJ Charlesworth, Louise Camrass, Daniel Silver, Simon Faithfull, Jack McMillan, Phil Collins

Art School took place for six weeks within the galleries of Bloomberg SPACE. The exhibition consisted of many familiar and expected functions of an art school but carried the added element of transparency. The audience was able to witness the artistic activity and production in the form of group discussion, one-to-one tuition, collective painting, sculpture, filmmaking and writing. Artists were invited to initiate a wide range of practical workshops and investigative projects. There were also artist’s residencies, film screenings, talks and on-going displays of the work produced. In addition a weekly publication appeared alongside the exhibition that reflected and commented on the process and activities. But perhaps most importantly, all of the above was open to the public to view and engage with.

The exhibition involved teaching, observation, inquiry and collaboration. Many of the activities overlapped, crossed over and fed back into each other. There were no prescribed outcomes, instead an evolution of ideas was facilitated through the employment of different processes at different times. Through this insistence on openness, Art School provided the rare opportunity to intercept art at all stages of its existence, at its inception and through development, doubt, questioning and ultimately, display.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003

Polish artist Goshka Macuga creates installations that engage with ideas of the role of the curator, the artist and the collector. By bringing together other people’s work and collections in sculptural environments Macuga examines ideas of authorship and creativity.

Reflective of a culture where value is transitory and determined by attention and desire, Macuga samples history, movements, styles and ideas. Driven by personal enthusiasm and a sense of contemporary relevance, she gathers together borrowed images and objects for the short period of an exhibition and then returns them to their owners and personal collections. Installed on and inside the sculptural structures, and staged within installations that transform gallery spaces, the places she establishes for display pay homage to the visions of specific individuals as well as generic natural places. The collected items range from historical modernist art works to contemporary and outsider art, from antiques and antiquities to the newly purchased object. All are chosen because of their relationship to each other and how they are to be collected or shown. 

For Bloomberg SPACE Macuga created a large installation in which visitors were first welcomed and taken along by a host before continuing through the work at their own pace to explore and discover, or simply spend some time.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003

Ana Genoves, Siobhan Hapaska, Mark Hosking, Stefan Kern, Toby Paterson, Ben Mayman, Paul Ramirez Jonas, David Shrigley, Tomoaki Suzuki, Gavin Turk, Xavier Veilhan, Franz West, Keith Wilson

Work placed outside typically conforms to the material-led orthodoxies of the sculpture park, the temporal nature of the site-specific or the compromise of the public sculpture. Reflecting a variety of approaches to sculptural form, The Square Show acted as a proposal and an invitation to reconsider a familiar urban space as viable and valid place for the temporary placing of art. The exhibition utilised Finsbury Square, where Moorgate and City Road meet in front of Bloomberg SPACE, and the gallery itself to display thirteen individual works by a number of international artists.

The works in the square were installed both in the open air and within the built structures that service the car park below. Some sculptures could be sat upon, Stefan Kern’s large pink seat Haltestelle (2001), Paul Ramirez Jonas’ deckchairs You Are Here (2003) and Franz West’s bright orange Stizwurst (2000), recognising and acknowledging the recreational purpose of the square. Some works were more consciously ornamental as with Mark Hosking’s Fountain Hose (2003), whereas others were more traditional in their sculptural form and role.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003

John Armleder, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Michael Landy, Haim Steinbach, Thomas Struth

Contributors: Juan Vincente Aliaga, Nicholas Bourriaud, Louisa Buck, A.S. Byatt, JJ Charlesworth, Patricia Ellis, Heather Galbraith, Mark Gisbourne, Hari Kunzru, Harland Miller, Mark Haworth-Booth, Raimundas Malasuskas, Dale McFarland, Catherine Millet and Matt Thorne.

L’Air du Temps aimed to extend the relationship between art and writing by placing texts in the gallery along with the actual art work to which they related as equal parts of the same exhibition.

A variety of contributors were invited to participate in the exhibition. They ranged from novelists, artists, critics and curators. From regular visitors to those based elsewhere who may never have seen the show or space. Provided with images of the work and the gallery, the writers were invited to respond in whatever way they wished. Some chose to directly engage with the work, while others were more elliptical. The spare selection and installation of very particular art works encouraged the space for contemplation and interpretation.

Individually printed texts and images were freely available to be read, considered, collected or ignored by the visitor. These, along with colour reproductions of the work, allowed the viewer to extend the relationship between individual works as well as open imaginative possibilities both during and after the exhibition itself.

Contributors responded to a silver gelatin print by Thomas Struth of a streetscene in Tokyo, a wall text installation by Haim Steinbach, a small perspex sculpture by John Armleder, a wall piece made from folded tarpaulin by Michael Landy and a video work by Fischli & Weiss.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003

Kathrin Bohm, Peter Davies, Fransje Killaars, Mark Dean Veca

Pavilions straddle the boundary between art and architecture. Some are unquestionably sculptural objects that encourage the viewer to enter and explore, others are inherently beautiful in a way that does not determine their function. Deploying scale, form, and sometimes colour and pattern, they can heighten perceptions of place and dimension.

This exhibition explored ideas about perceptual space and allowed the viewer to become involved with the work by moving through it, across it, and sometimes inhabiting it. In this sense the work could be described as immersive, a form which takes on such dimension and profusion that is absorbs the viewer.

Kathrin Bohm’s poster project and millions and millions (2001) expands and develops across time and through various spaces. Working with mass produced coloured paper, hand printed designs and found printed matter Bohm created a collage which temporarily transformed the gallery. Mark Dean Veca’s wall paintings operate between painting and installation. Viewed at a distance they appear as a singular painting framed by the architecture of the space they adorn. In closer proximity they rise up with bulbous tentacles and plumes of smoke to engulf the viewer in a new and changed space.

For Pavilion, Davies made a painting of multicoloured shapes arranged into layers of shallow perspectival play that repeatedly extended across the whole surface. By contrast Fransje Killaars dealt with ideas about space, or more precisely, location. Non-Stop Amsterdam (1998) presented itself as a transparent picture, reminiscent of a train’s sleeping compartment or a shelf-lined store, where the viewer could both experience the space it provided and be viewed as part of it.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003 

Gaia Alessi & Richard Bradbury, Michael Blazy, Mathieu Briand, Jachym Fleig, General Idea, Jenny Holzer, Germaine Koh, Ange Leccia, Damiàn Ortega, Martin Walde

Our Mutual Friend featured an unusual combination of work that explored the notion of the building as host. For this exhibition, Bloomberg SPACE and its infrastructures became a body from which material, energy and ideas could be drawn, with the resultant works manifesting in radically different forms. Mutualism is another name for symbiosis, a relationship of dependence, where two or more things may grow together. These elements, entities or organisms, which might at first depend on each other, can also ultimately threaten, corrupt or even dissolve each other. 

Some works relied on the structure of the building itself to give them space and form. The Adjuster (2003), a new commission by Gaia Alessi & Richard Bradbury, shifted the angle of 4 columns within the space, to suggest some kind of structural crisis. A mass of green slime placed in the gallery by Martin Walde spilt across the space, while Michel Blazy contaminated the walls. German artist Jáchym Fleig was commissioned to make a new work, consisting of large sculptural constructions, which appeared to grow of their own accord both outside and inside the building. By cutting out part of the gallery wall, Damián Ortega obtained materials to form a sculpture, which was not just evidence of process but rather encouraged ideas of fantasy and potential.

Germaine Koh’s Prayers (1999) took data from a computer screen and translated it into Morse code, released outside as smoke signals. Similarly Ange Leccia’s Baiser (1986) brought together 2 high-powered spotlights, positioned face to face in a continually powered illumination, drawing from the electricity supply of the building, day and night. Mathieu Briand’s DJ booth provided a space and opportunity for the audience to mix music, which seeped into the fabric of an active working place. Jenny Holzer’s Erlauf (1995), an LED message board commonly associated with a corporate or financial announcement, became a carrier for a message of a different nature, confusing the relationship between the office and its occupants, while General Idea’s giant floating pills, Pharma©opia (1992) enabled the audience to re-imagine the atrium as the interior of a body in which they were held.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2002

Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt, Mark Lewis, Michael Joo, Alex Ingram, Clare Langan, Michelle Williams, Robert Cahen, Louise Camrass, Nic Nicosia, Marine Hugonnier, Peter d’Agostino, Darren Almond, Robert Morris, Graham Dolphin, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Roddy Buchanan, Dan Graham, Shaun Gladwell, Anri Sala

The Mind is a Horse was an unorthodox combination of films, presented within the main gallery at Bloomberg SPACE, which included documentaries about artists, artists’ films, exceptional footage shot during the Second World War, and a one-off live presentation by the artist Cerith Wyn Evans. The large projection wall acted as a fixed forum for a fluid approach to the use of film by artists. The programme consisted of a daily, looped, two hour compilation of films as well as individual weekly evening screenings.

The different programmes did not follow a predetermined theme or subject. Rather the works were selected with the idea of gathering important, memorable and less familiar material together – things that have stayed in the mind and won’t go away. The projection wall was, in a simple way, the only fixed element in the exhibition through which material, from a range of background, experience and position, flowed, creating a rhythm that carried the static viewer on a journey through the programme.

Arnolfini, Bristol - 2002

Michael Ashkin, Melanie Carvalho, Claude Closky, Rob de Mar, Dan Hays, James Ireland, Patrick Jacobs, Paula Kane, Clare Langan, Matts Leiderstam, Virgil Marti, Gianni Motti, Seamus Nicholson, Ester Partegàs, Torbjørn Rødland, Børre Sæthe, Dirk Skreber

View Finder focuses on the pictorial dimension of painting. Each artist in the show addresses the representation of nature, and considers landscape as a natural phenomenon, or as a social and cultural construct. The natural development in the history of picture-making from painting to photography and cinema, and eventually to video and digital imaging, is reflected in the prevailing number of lens-based works- including film, slide projections and photography

Bloomberg Space, London – 2002

Despite differences in generation and use of medium, the work of Rene Daniels and Karin Ruggaber carries the same sense of spatial promise.

Karin Ruggaber’s work asks questions about perception and function. Working with materials and scale with great consideration, Ruggaber creates works that have a sense of belonging to the surrounding architecture, and yet they carry a strange feeling that they come from elsewhere. At Bloomberg SPACE Ruggaber exhibited Fence – a work which neither played a purely functional role, nor did it delineate or prohibit. Its parts were displayed rather than functioning to create a fence that did not contain and could not in turn be contained.

Ruggaber’s second work in the exhibition, Light, was a functioning rig which illuminated the gallery with its own subtle conditions. Existing as a layer on the pre-existing architecture it added something barely perceptible, yet its scale and positioning threw everything into contrast.

Rene Daniels’ painting literally opens up the possibility of space within the surface of the painting. This geometric play with illusion, where the shape shifts backwards and forwards between spatial illusion and regular motif, does in its very simple way bridge abstract and illusory space. This exhibition provided the first opportunity to experience Rene Daniels’ painting in Britain and to test its relation to time. The exhibition was not a grand retrospective but rather the chance to see his highly influential and valuable work in an active contemporary context.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2002

Cesare Pietroiusti is interested in analysing and determining the conditions under which critical thought is formed and shared by a community. His work explores the intentions formulated by others, which he adopts as his own. He is interested in the problems and contradictions that lie within everyday relationships and which motivate our actions. For Pietroiusti ‘art offers a way to imagine doing things that are unpredictable and that one would not otherwise do’.

Cesare Pietroiusti’s project for Bloomberg SPACE involved inviting individuals to bring something to the gallery that they believed is certainly not art. These items were then sorted, x-rayed, catalogued and placed within the galleries of Bloomberg SPACE. Each participant was given a receipt which entitled them to collect their contribution at the end of the exhibition. The work focused on the inherent paradox of an art project that features explicitly non-art objects shown in an art context. It questioned ‘what art is not, rather than what it is’.

Bergen Centre for Contemporary Art, Norway - 2001; Vilnius Centre of Contemporary Art, Lithuania - 2001; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tallinn, Estonia - 2002; Museum Of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Yugoslavia - 2002; New Museum of Contemporary Art, Salamanca, Spain -2002; Turku Art Museum, Finland -2003; Brno House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic - 2003

Kate Bright, Peter Davis, Matt Franks, Jun Hasegawa, Jim Lambie, Graham Little, Simon Periton, Eva Rothschild, DJ Simpson, David Thorpe, Gary Webb, Claire Woods

Tailsliding is a new British Council international touring exhibition, featuring 12 young British artists currently creating eclectic work within the conventions of painting and sculpture, selected by Stephen Hepworth, former curator of the Jerwood Gallery, London. 

The highly coloured, large, exuberant works draw imagery from a gamut of high and low populist sources; from the gothic fairy tale to contemporary cartoon imagery, acknowledging historical influences along the way. Through contemporary materials, the artists express a joy of making, often playfully evoking ideas centred on our perception of time and place. 

Tailsliding is concerned with the fleeting nature of history. Of what went before, and how these events alter our perceptions of place and self in the present. These concerns are reflected through the exhibition title – a skateboarding term for a difficult trick. Art has many parallels with street culture. Transient in nature, erased, written over and superseded by new styles, new names, new colours. Street graffiti recognises history through the places it is written, the act of writing being both an assertion of an individual and a tribute to those that have gone before. It has its own language. Likewise, Tailsliding demonstrates that the languages of painting and sculpture are far from safe options - that they are capable of taking on an extraordinary new direction in the hands of these young practitioners.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 2001

Text by Stephen Hepworth

Alex Baker's project Movement in D Minor 2001 installed in the Jerwood Gallery and adjoining areas uses sound to describe and animate a line through space. 72 speakers are arranged in running series that swoops and curves from the external roof, down through the interconnecting galleries, and up through a ventilation hatch to the outside world. Generated from an electric keyboard a chord is amplified and then distributed through an adapted turntable. Contacts take the form of three brushes that steadily sweep across a fixed copper disc of 72 plates dispersing the notes to each individual speaker in turn. Passed from speaker to speaker the movement of the sound through the space is more like a ripple than a fixed cord.

Within the hard bright acoustic of the Jerwood Space the presence of the sound created by the piece is almost continuous although the specificity of a fixed source is momentary, giving a sense of constant renewal as it appears to circumnavigate the space. Mixed with the various sounds generated by a functioning building both specific and ambient, it is often initially camouflaged, only capturing the attention of a potential viewer when the sound passes overhead. Once announced it entrances them with an experience akin to aurally chasing falling dominoes.

Jerwood Gallery - 2001

Text by Mark Beasley

We appear to exist in the midst of perpetual future anxiety. If advertising can be read as a form of cultural signage then we'd better wake up, it's time to put the house in order. Act now before it's too late, put your name to an insurance policy, maximise the pension scheme, take that life-affirming excursion while there's still time. But what if we were to push such anxiety still further. A moment beyond inflated house prices, tube and rail strikes and the inconvenience of faulty domestic plumbing. What if we consider a post-catastrophe situation, a point at which the essential elements of food, water, electricity and housing are denied us. It's a bleak thought. It is in the realms of such arcane fiction at the point of societal collapse that Mark Hosking's project locates itself.

A few miles from the economic heart of the city of London, Hosking's studio has been put to use as a one-man factory. A series of machines sit waiting for the call to production, manned by invisible operators. As functional objects these machines have the potential to perform tasks that provide the essential ingredients for life and existence. An oversized solar hammock has the capacity to keep an avalanche victim warm; other machines heat food or produce bed springs for mattresses. Constructed from BMX bike parts and modernist tubular chairs the cultural detritus of the late twentieth century is reconfigured. Are these the blueprints for a brighter future or a mute proposition destined for the confines of the gallery?

There's a simple strategy at work here; the traditional sculpture workshop has been transformed into a factory for the objects of self-government. This is not manufacturing on a grand scale. It has more in common with the artisanship of pre-industrial workshops or the Constructivists' utilitarian socially based approach to art. Two angle grinders, an arc welder and simple hand tools create 'scratch built' objects. The scars of their production are still visible, their uses still apparent - from wing mirror to cement mixer. Quotations within the work trigger cultural memory - the colour schema of a Mondrian painting, the hand built objects of Russian Contructivist Tatlin or the interventionary physical marks of Anti-materialist Gordon Matta-Clark. This is visually literate salvage.

If the studio has become a factory then the gallery is utilised as a well lit warehouse of propositions. A series of solar powered machines for heating food sit freshly abandoned. In Solar Green 2000 a cooker mounted on rubber tyres waits to heat cans of marrow fat peas. Alluding to the cannibalistic macabre terror of Richard Reischler's science fiction film Soylent Green (1973) the object appears tragic-comic. At first glance the machine contains the body language of a postwar Geometry of Fear sculpture yet with the proposal of function such a recognition twists and consumes itself. The nervous tics of cultural history have been put to work.

In Freestyler 2000, the components of a BMX bike and tubular steel furniture have been reconfigured to form a machine for the production of wire bedsprings. Lost teenage hours spent perfecting aerial 'cross-ups' on a BMX have been captured and grounded in a machine that provides the components for bedding. Chrome handle bars are utilised as a place for the operators feet; vivid orange Mag wheels turn, twisting wire to form mattress springs. Reminiscent of the activity of children gathered on a street corner creating ramps from old doors or planks of wood from a building site. What at first appears to be an activity born of frustration is a way of making sense of the world around; a poetic-kinetic sensibility that contains the potential for societal change.

In Turning Out/Turning Into 2000 a BMX has been converted into a treadle wood turning lathe. A tyre has been filled with concrete to form a fly wheel, while the elastic power of a bike inner tube turns a lathe for crafting baseball bats. What possible usage could the artist have for such a machine? It could supply the equipment for a sports game but its proposed mission appears knowingly subversive - a machine to arm protesters or an inter-school battle. Is the proposition one of resistance, 'tooled up and turning out for the cause', be it versus global capitalism or in defence of a more socially based artistic practice.

The products of high modernism have also been put to work. A conversion kit of eight orange brackets combined with a Marcel Breuer Wassily chair, converts it into an emergency stretcher. The chair has evolved both literally and culturally, Wassily A & E 2001, proposes a radical new function for what has now become exclusive foyer furniture. The project proposes a new ethos for living, a self-sufficiency born of a reexamination of the cultural debris around us.

Hosking's Project for ECAL-Living 2000 follows the 'design for life' ethos through to one of its possible conclusions. A sheet of steel and carpet laminated together is fed through a machine and via a process of choreographed activity folds to form a seating structure. The simplicity of such a treatment - made in forty minutes and at a cost of forty pounds - and the result propose a new format for cultural output. Former sites of heavy industry are being transformed into shopping centres, galleries or media centres and the sons and daughters of industry now man the checkout desks of Pret a Manger and Virgin Records. Living reflects the rebranding of Britain from manufacturing to cultural industry.

An inbuilt duality is key to the work of Hosking. As machines they are caught in stasis somewhere between functional and cultural worth. We are presented with a series of objects that initially signal formal sculptural values; a lineage that is indebted to the aesthetic physicality of Anthony Caro, Richard Deacon and Tony Cragg. Indeed it was Cragg that described his work as 'thinking models to help you get through the world'. Yet, these objects stem from a pragmatic response to need, albeit fictional. What does it mean for an object that exists and functions in Sierra Leone to also make it's home in the gallery. The work is held on the brink just before it folds back into the world. The perversity of such activity doesn't appear entirely lost on Hosking. It questions privilege, those everyday moments taken for granted, the turning of a tap the easy access to food. Cynically it hits the viewer where it hurts, a barb for collective middle-class guilt.

Hosking's project demands attention, it requires the viewer to establish their role in relation to it. Viewer value and user value push against each other with uncomfortable consequence. The seemingly worthy nature of such a project conflicts with the knowledge that these objects will probably never function. Never cook food for the hungry, never supply the homeless with a bed or offer protection for the defenceless. Maybe the point of cultural impact is the imagined moment these objects hit a stand at a Sotheby's auction. These aren't objects destined to solve the ills of the world. This is science fiction at it's darkest, a Logan's Run with an end point that appears irreconcilable with it's beginnings. As many practices push further into corporate culture seeking to create new alignments for the production and distribution of their work, Hosking appears to resist such a stance. Instead, selecting the gallery as his primary platform, choosing to throw culture back at those that claim the right to define it.

The writer and researcher P.D. Dunn comments in his publication Appropriate Technology (1978) that in a 'subsistence economy' there is very little margin available for risk taking. As a kid on a custom built BMX spends hours perfecting the flick of a wheel or the push up and over an obstacle, so these machines freestyle their way into usefulness. Rather than a direct form of social intervention it could be argued that one of the roles for art and artists is that of the proposal maker, a catalyst for change. Many activity's falter under the weight of bureaucracy and the need to be accountable. Hosking's project proposes art as free space to explore and examine the world as he finds it, in the role of a post-catastrophe Robinson Crusoe.

Jerwood Gallery - 2001

Text by Gemma de Cruz

Catherine Yass first became known for her portraits of people who were associated with institutions and social structures. Exhibited in spaces related to those portrayed they offered a critique, questioning how a role could affect the identity of a person, and in turn their relation to a greater network. The way that she distorted the original image seems to be a further visual twisting of what is seen. Yass refined the process of taking a positive image, flipping over the dark slide and exposing the second sheet of film, which is then processed as a negative, a concertina(ing) of time. By overlaying the two, she blocked out the light with dense areas of blue produced by its negative. The effect of the colour manipulations was a way of exposing nervous energy, like revealing the veins or tensions that run beneath the surface. It is a technique which enhances the impact of the image by destroying its realities. By questioning the rules of conventional photography and subverting them, her early involvement with sculpture and "mistrust of photography" led her to find a way to add physical presence to a photograph without relying on pictorial illusion. The use of lightboxes draws attention to a three dimensional quality which is read as an integral part of the work providing physical depth and weight.

The series Portrait: Springfield 1995 marked a shift that would move Yass away from the discipline of the portrait and expand other concerns within the work. Initially the Springfield portraits were prompted by Yass's reaction to how photography had been used in science during the 19th century, specifically in the way that photographs of mentally ill patients had been labelled by their particular illness, reducing the value of their life to an illustration. At Springfield Hospital, a psychiatric institution, Yass made six portraits of residents, outpatients and employees. In effect the series shows six random people but creates a incisive guessing game as to 'who does what'. Yass makes the point that whatever politics might occur inside an institution, when mediated through her interaction with it her position can only ever be subjective, rather than representative. Until she started the project at Springfield a central component of her practice had been to offer a critique, to arrange visual scenarios which had levels of meaning based on structures of power. Those cared for by Springfield were the first individuals of an institution who were unable to offer Yass and her camera the classic sitter/photographer exchange. Their sense of self in a state of flux combined with the processes of assessment, diagnosis and treatment meant that the traditional roles for both parties were void. In preparation for the portraits Yass photographed the hospital corridors to use as backdrops. On their own these interior passages found a sense of identity within the context of a place rather than that of a sitter. She didn't need an associate of Springfield to be there in order to make 'her' portrait. These photographs offered a way of engaging with the institution on her own terms rather than through a critique of its systems, to picture the complexity of the subject, while retaining a visual seductiveness. The absence of people gave her greater scope to explore the elements of abstract language existing within the planes and perspective of interiors and landscapes. Yass was at home with a synthetic aesthetic and pushed the process to a point where the distortion that occurred looked more like painterly concerns than photographic effects. Floors and walls shimmered with light, as if they were layered with molten metal or glass. Her involvement had become more apparent and the result more fluid.

The arch and foreground in her Metro: (series) 2000 make them similar in composition to the corridors. Yass uses Prague's metro architecture, separating out the complications of space and form. The wall at the back of the image has a soft pattern similar to op art which Yass has literally coloured in. What we see is a strong geometric pattern framed by a physical space at the foreground of the image. These are not easily recognisable settings, so as a result you stop struggling to find the representational clues of the image and start enjoying its artifice. Despite its abstract qualities, the Metro series rejects the use of pretty or conventional colour to seduce the viewer in favour of screaming greens, lush orange and midnight blue.

The use of such an artificial process to layer colour, and the actual combinations that are produced has always given the final image a space-age/sci-fi feel. The idea of lending that aesthetic to a city which already has futuristic connotations was realised in her Invisible City (series) 1998. Yass gives Tokyo a further sense of heightened reality as the city's neon and nightlights blur with the distortion. Tokyo offered a way to invent a fictional space playing on what is actually there: a place that already has dream-like connotations because of its advanced technology. Formally, it looks as if tangible blocks of colour and light have been poured over sections of the image. Bright colours are made brighter and lights are outlined by a blurred glow and brought to the surface of the image, as if hovering above the buildings. In Invisible City: North West 1998 Yass literally colours the electricity of the buildings, cars and street signs; every area of activity is illuminated by fizzing daubs of colour like lit circuits running through the city. Tokyo's own glittering lights and futuristic systems makes it difficult to define what has been exaggerated and added.

Yass was also drawn to the capsule hotels in Tokyo which provide individual mini units for a single person. The capsules are stacked in twos and numbered, emphasising their sterility and seriality. These capsules are presented as places of both privacy and anonymity, alienation and meditation. The beds enclosed are like tightly squeezed bunks of a cabin ship; presented front-on they seem to offer entry to a place of isolation rather than relaxation. The image which frames the shiny metal door to the capsule gives the impression that there is a vacuum inside, that this small confined area would feel claustrophobic rather than peaceful.

In a recent series made for the New Art Gallery, Walsall, Yass returned to portraiture using video. She chose to portray people who were already engaged in an activity, not posed for the camera. The DVD loop Town: Boxing 2000 shows a little boy watching a training session. The sequence is roughly two seconds of footage slowed down until it is approximately eight times slower than its original speed, effectively no longer than it would actually take Yass to make a regular still photograph of the same scene. What you see in the projection is what we miss in real life - the reflexive scanning movement of the eyes flitting from side to side, something that would actually happen so fast that we wouldn't normally register it. As with her photographs the videos introduce time in an altered form, stretched rather than sandwiched, while the colour manipulations are subtle rather than extreme; softening the surroundings makes the image dreamy rather than hallucinogenic.

Yass extends the tradition of photography by both accepting and rejecting it through an exploration and investigation of process. Traversing the disciplines of portraiture, architecture and landscape, and the mediums of photography and video, her additions of colour and distortions of time redefine generic places, revealing them as intimate yet anonymous, general but specific. In their duality they are otherworldly, places of secrets and the subject of dreams.

Jerwood Gallery - 2000

Paul Carter, Annabelle Dalby, Louisa Fairclough, James Ireland, Daniel Jackson, Bob Matthews, Sarah McFadyen, Obuabang, Matthew Smith (curated by Louise Trodden)

Text by Louise Trodden

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills... (i)

Birds singing, the gurgling of water, a cottage, a wishing-well, the bridge over a river, a garden shed, a lake-shore... sounds, objects and places which seem comfortably familiar, away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Escape maybe a banal ideal for some, a yearning for an unobtainable dream, but one nonetheless with which some artists seek to engage. Visions where notions of escape are intertwined with evocations and representations of landscape. A sentimental and slightly melancholic search for a 'perfect place' , tinged with a self-conscious humour.

The experience of cinema is traditionally perceived as escapist, giving oneself to the dark and the enchantment of the silver screen. Landscapes have become memorable and iconic stage-sets. The Western gave America the 'Wild West' and the chance to continually re-forge the American dream, while Braveheart and Rob Roy filmed against the dramatic background of the Scottish Highlands now proscribes a template for Scottish tourism. Post-war, the idea of England as a 'green and pleasant land' was increasingly mythologised, a vision of an England which never actually existed but still persists today as a yearned-for place; a parallel to the wide open spaces as portrayed in the Western. Matthew Smith takes the bright yellow lettering of 'The End', from the closing sequence of a Sunday matinee Western, and films it 'Hollywood Sign' style against a sunset backdrop in the Lake District. Conflated and cross-bred The End (2000) promises something alluring and secure; although tinged with a sadness and nostalgia which only sunsets possess, marking the end of a day and the passing of time.

Romantic and escapist fantasies of landscape are spun to us through a prolific number of sources. The sunny destinations shown on TV holiday programmes- rarely is anywhere filmed in the rain - entice us 'to get away from it all', whatever 'it all' may be. These destinations never end up as untrammelled and unspoilt as they appear in our imaginations or as promised to us by guidebooks; existing as disembodied images rather than actual experiences. Glossy places laid-out solely for the tourist to enjoy, their pared-down identity displays no ill or unsightly effects.

In Lifeboat (1999) Sarah McFadyen moves clumsily across the edge of the sea that surrounds her home in Orkney. Using two office chairs as stepping stones she pits herself against the ruggedly picturesque. A momentary incursion against a greater force destined to be only fleeting. Paul Carter too proposes and questions a greater force. A self-confessed agnostic his work parodies and tests the faith of others. God Radio (1998) is a small wooden lean-to, reminiscent in its utility and simplicity to the 'bothies' dotted throughout the Highlands of Scotland, in which an operating Citizen Band radio is housed. Proposing a direct line to God, with echoes of the confessional box, it sporadically emits a babble of voices offering the viewer the possibility of participation and inclusion. Astonishment at the epic beauty of nature either questions or confirms belief (or its absence). There is no irony in this, but rather pathos, a sense of what can never be reconciled.

Louisa Fairclough documented her epic bicycle journey to the Aral Sea on video. Returning she chose to represent the experience with a tiny fragment/moment of the whole. Steppe (2000) is a long, low video projection. Meeting the floor, it offers a never-ending horizon-line, a shimmering panorama. Anonymous but utterly specific it combines memory with desire in an unending exchange. The fantasy of escape resides in this exchange. The promise of finding the 'perfect place' spans the near and far, from the palm trees and white sands of Caribbean beaches to succulent green pastures. Such landscapes are often the settings for adverts, selling the latest product and promising versions of possible dreams. The far-away 'exotic' presents the possibility that 'away from it all' you can reinvent yourself. The succulent green pastures and misty hill-sides offer us the familiarity and safety of belonging. These are landscapes which cosset and reassure, seemingly timeless and untouched. They are nostalgic constructs shot through a Vaselined lens.

Such mythic representations of landscape, evoke a mood or ambience, generic places which can stand for a promised state of being: stereotypical places which have come to represent certain experiences. The individuals staring out to sea in Annabelle Dalby's Places of Exposure (1999), look like they have been caught in a moment of personal reverie. Their blurred, soft-toned colours are reminiscent of a 1960's family holiday snap-shot. Every photograph's a fallacy, an assemblage of many stories. Dalby's photographs are both 'found' as well as staged and without knowing there's no way of differentiating between the two.

Like the holiday photograph the picture postcard too is a souvenir of landscape. Standardised images which carelessly repeat conventions derived from the development of pictorial devices within the tradition of European landscape painting. Think of Gainsborough, Turner and Fredrich. Each used different compositional devices to build their vision of landscape and draw the viewer into the picture. Tonally layering the landscape to recede into the distance, placing objects or people to guide the eye, changing the viewpoint on the landscape or staging various weather effects. James Ireland's scenarios trigger the recognition of these conventions from the barest of components. Unremarkable everyday objects, stools, buckets, light-bulbs, bin-liners are staged and lit to create idyllic scenes often referred to in picture postcard images. In their hot-potch amateurism, they are playful yet knowingly pathetic. Suggesting that the mass-produced images of the picture postcard are generic, poorly replaying the most banal of pictorial devices. They remark on the stereotypical recognition of the view above a subjective and personal experience, yet offer a different if parallel delight in the finding of new, if constructed views.

Our desire to believe is tainted by our need for hope. A hope that there is some place some where to escape to, somewhere constant and secure. Our perception of landscape is informed by our evolving relationship with our environment. Imagining what landscapes of the past looked like, perhaps speaks of a desire to preserve a vision of rural landscape as constant and unchangeable. A wish to believe in an imagined sanctity and purity, set apart from the real experience of landscape. Sculpting and re-modelling landscape suggests a way of distancing and controlling the more disturbing repercussions of nature. A benign rather than an effecting and powerful force.

Within the urban imagination, golf courses have become an acceptable representation of the countryside, laid out to reveal and hide 'picturesque' views. Daniel Jackson's Eighteen in One (2000), based on Wimbledon Golf Course, presents an unsettling perfection - pure blue sky, green grass and the sound of birds singing. More than a humourous and witty pun on the golf course's artificiality, it's a remark on man's striving to control and mediate nature. Within this mindset landscapes have become the cultivated (digitally arranged) backdrop to our pursuit of leisure and pleasure. Settings in which to: relax, play golf, pot-hole, rock-climb, ski and hike. Achieve that perfect leisure experience that perfect round of golf - the unlikely prospect of eighteen holes in one! Bob Matthews also makes digitised versions of nature. Pieced together from memories, his images of huts in sun-dappled gardens and on hillsides are drawn first hand on the computer rather than taken from photographs. The only reality is the palate they are drawn in, the colours are sampled from scanned in grass, leaves, bark etc. Genuine pigment digitised, translated into binary code and deployed in idyllic fictions. 

Obuabang's The Incredible Nature of Loss (1997/2000) transplants the idea of an outdoors indoors, constructed out of chipboard and plaster it is the ultimate fake (a shallow) wishing-well. Giving nothing back except a memory of once promised dreams, it is staged within the gallery as an effective prop with a mirrored base. A corrupted remake of a fairytale object, it is energised by the desire of those who peer over its sides in the role of a portal to somewhere else. Rather than picturing it proposes in the purest form an idea of desire to be somewhere else: in the mind of the viewer, the rightful place for Eden. Here in small space, is the wonderland of childhood's dreams, ... its enchantment grows with passing years and quiet eventide is enriched by the haunting sweetness of dear memories ... (ii)

(i) William Wordsworth, I wandered lonely as a cloud, 1807. Inspired by his sister, Dorothy's account of walking on Gowbarrow Fell above Ullswater in the Lake District. (ii) A. Wainwright in the introduction to A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, Book One: The Eastern Fells, 1955, Westmorland Gazette, Kendal.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 2000

Paula Kane, Ian McLean, George Shaw

Text by Edwina Ashton

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot "Little Giddings" Four Quartets 1943

These three artists have seen something which they go on to paint again and again and again. Their identifiable subjects fit into genres; catagories defined, perhaps, by size: very large (landscape), moderate (portraiture), smallish (still life). Showing them together follows an elderly set of conventions which, like painting itself, conceals quite how bizarre it is. The artists paint with a careful naturalism - close to photography, reminiscent of other painters and supposedly neutral - which lets all manner of religious, political and social opinion sweep over it, according to your make-up. This maybe, is the point, because in the face of particular remembered things (the scenes of a childhood, a woman, bottles) what do you do with biographies or objectivity? Could you, the observer, possibly see the same things as they do ?

Each of these artists, after returning from working in other media, see painting conceptually. All have understanding of slightly camp, teeth-gritting, Vaudeville-esque performance. Their work shares popular illusionism and accomplished display. They paint figuratively. The seeming subject, painted over and over, stretches the immediacy of looking and of seeing - watching, waiting, eager to convince, never convinced, always wavering, looking away, thinking backwards then forwards. What is portrayed becomes quiet, grand, knowable and something else; an expanding but isolated focal point, returning close attention onto something which, worth little, would otherwise be lost in a flush of stuff and time.

George Shaw makes paintings of loss and recovery. Those grouped as 'The Passion' are set where he grew up, where he remembers his Catholic parents standing in their parkas with four children trailing round the sports field reenacting Christ's sufferings. He uses recent photographs, omitting bits. The places he portrays are tightly descriptive and vague: without recognisable events and identity. They are the featured landmarks of telephoned directions - buildings you wouldn't notice until found. They loop cause and effect; reminding you that memory doesn't just mist up views of home but informs everything up until now. His paintings imitate this, carrying love and mundanity, making do, stumbling round, being made, becoming what you recognise, reflecting back (the workmanlike, visionary, a good drawer).

These small, tender, retracted views are seen close to. An outside world is kept at bay by walls of scrub, trees or wet roofs. Dark areas, light openings, ponds and pathways give you somewhere to fall, through solidity, flatness and directionless filling in (of paint, time, space). Redemptive light casts an electric dusk after rain. The paint's inertia and the small impolite brushstrokes chaff a hemline between ghoulish, ridiculous imitation and expression.

Enamel paint - produced to last on signs and models - is reflective. Shaw's landscapes show how representation infiltrates the world (shallow puddles the colour of sky, bits of writing in the underpass). The literalness of his painting taunts allegory. It is littered with legibility - signs of unspecified activity, empty space and emptied time which touch on other people, other stories. The amnesiac detail reflects a love of Pre-Raphaelite symbolism and intricacy. In being visible, showing likeness and impenetrability, these images become models, both in looking and painting, of how an image forms. They signal mutual recognition and incommunication - how lives, sensations and bodies are different.

lan McLean's portraits of a girl are recognisable a hundred times over, but unidentifiable. They are pictures of internalisation. He uses light and style as props, the disingenuous filters through which to see someone. The make-up, haircut, androgyny and kirby-grip slip between now, 40's cold cream, and 20's mannequin. Partly exploring how light falls on skin, on magazine paper or celluloid, the flow of paint aspires to a perfect sheen of film idols or silicone gel. It soaks the material just so and describes the face sparely in an ideal of photographed and intimate distance.

Indelible folds run through the polyester. This skin is porcelain-empty, washed out in a cosmetic palette of creams, pinks and grey on blue-white ground. The eyes, always dark (green, brown) are enlivened by chunky highlights. These define and break through eyelashes, lids, lips and irises. You couldn't say much about her character or the relationship, except perhaps that they paint infatuation with a subject, painting, being an artist.

McLean paints cinematically. He maps slide projections in darkness. The face might be in close up, on wide screen, remembered and invented with a focus on her eyes and lips; the nose is a little vague; the ears blurry; the squeegee-streaked hair looks soft as mouse fur. These paintings are made quickly. McLean believes this informs their reception - that labour on detail is morbid and conquering. The wide brushstrokes, indifferent accomplished caresses, seek a glance, an instant of vision. The glossing over, dexterity and conspicuous subject become a way of looking at any face - how your nose fixes your eyes; the curve of your cheek; your temples.

These portraits look at banality and the threat that only sadness is profound. They repeatedly reveal the abstraction and dislocations of making an image or recognising a face. Often much bigger than life-sized, self-consciously empty, they pursue vitality, half tender, half blank. Paula Kane's paintings, like lan McLean's, take place in a horizonless space, but in a nameable terrain. Even with the labels peeled away you have a hiccup of (tedious or delightful) brand name familiarity - Daddie's Sauce, Comfort, Toilet Duck.

Her pictures question how to find or make an object - how you might carve it from its surroundings by looking, identifying, separating, loving, buying it. She paints like a photographic process, working from observation in the dark using spotlights. Glass and plastic, opaque and transparent, are represented in thin emulsion glazes. Photography would be both too precise and too vague. Because Kane's objects have uneven focus, photographic distance is too steady. In the larger arrangements, objects are lit and recorded in clusters with unrealisable shadows, then presented as an imaginary whole.

Her paintings rub together the incompatible. The paint liquefies and dries out solidness. Bottles and jars glaze over linen canvas. Their commercial evocation of summer perfume and pine glades is recast as ungraspable light. In painstaking layers of paint, translucence, milky colour and pasty little highlights differentiate plastics and glass. Paula Kane grew up as one of six children, in a house where things were picked up, borrowed and often lost. These paintings allow unheroic objects to became a way of holding onto and staking out regained space. 

She tries to make the generic curves, the pathetic anthropomorphisms (designed by an expert to appeal to you), empathetic. They are cleaned and arranged to relate to each other. The background is painted last, around their shapes; its neutral greys are made by mixing the surrounded colours. This dimness acknowledges the kitchen sink but is closer to the soft damp light in empty churches. Against this, exquisite sickly glazes mimic the flattened pattern of stained glass. Brilliantly coloured shadows seem as real as their objects. Gaps stand as solidly as substance. Kane seeks to make them sentient; their interchangeability another way, perhaps, of wishing value into things, and so upon the world. 

In his short story An Encounter, (collected in Dubliners - Penguin 1992) James Joyce describes a sinister 'josser' who gives the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit. These painters make insistent returns but have it both ways - going back, going over but not repeating. They fake it and believe it. They use, but avoid, habit, imitation and what is familiar. Each in different ways takes up the opulence of photography to remember, see and present their world in paint. These result in terrible, comforting, ordinary things which by prevarication, evasion, and indecision make the fragility of seeing disarmingly visible.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 2000

Lolly Batty, Enrico David, Roger Hiorns, Richard Reynolds, Eva Rothschild, Polly Staple, Geerten Verheus.

Text by Michael Wilson with Stephen Hepworth

Stephen Hepworth: It is a dispiriting grey wet London day. I have just opened my third orange invite in as many days to a preview of Tate Modern, inviting myself and a guest to one of three previews of the galleries, on a choice of any three days. I'm starting wonder if they are like Tesco Clubcard points or air miles that will entitle me to upgrade, to a pink or blue invite.

South London: blitzed, subjected to urban planning of ideological willfulness, then degraded by neglect and economic impoverishment, it is the antithesis of the planned city. This area's psychic identity is best typified by the vile arterial routes that traverse it. Travelling down these road reveals to either side a scene one part northern industrial city, one part first-world barrio, one part backdrop to a Schwarzenegger film. This is a heady mixture; its visual texture, repellent and strangely beautiful. Somewhere nostalgia lost its charm; somewhere in this mess of the urban present a kind of excitement is discovered. This milieu is urban, combative, unstable, cosmopolitan. ...a shifting culture of contest.

Nick de Ville, MA Fine Art Catalogue 1990 Goldsmiths'College, London.

...comes the spirit

The air hangs heavy with incense produced by the slow burn of Eva Rothschild's sculptural accompaniment to her woven and darkened images of melancholic psychedelia, as Roger Hiorns suspended glazed ceramic pots gently extrude columns of dense foam: think of Brancusi's Endless Column as a manifestation of cancer.

Starting out is a problem. "Each new generation of artists - they now appear every two or three years - endures the frustrating feeling that everything has been done." That was Harold Rosenberg, in his book The Anxious Object, back in 1964 - a remark made nearly 30 years ago, about the predicament of young American artists, but one that nevertheless seems relevant in England [Britain] today. The difficulty - call it Rosenberg's problem-still remains, and could even be said to become more acute for each successive new generation of new artists, wherever they are working. The past is a legacy, but it is also a burden, and this is especially so for the visual artist (compared with, say, the novelist or poet) because modern art is a cultural tradition almost exclusively founded on the mythology of avant-gardism, of revolt against the tried and trusted.

Andrew Graham Dixon, Broken English, Serpentine Gallery, London 1991

SH: At current count I am are up to Generation 4, my Generation D or the "Heart and Soul Generation" in comparison to others' A to Zeel?] To talk of numbers or letters can only be anecdotal up until it becomes the disputed territory of historians, one that is fleshed out by titles, individuals and memories: Freeze, Wonderful Life, Something's Wrong and Heart and Soul; 1988-1999. Broadly speaking, each of these exhibitions sign-posted a next generation, although of course these generations flow into each other and artists I think of within these groupings emerged somewhere in between, and often weren't in any of these shows. Similarly there is an evolving narrative of spaces.

...comes the spirit

Richard Reynolds' wall drawing of a tree trunk and root system commands the gallery, reconfiguring its proportions and perspective, while Lolly Batty's flawless crystalline white sculptures look solid and heavy, but are actually flyweight confections of hand-carved polystyrene and filler.

SH: I always think of these narratives as a conversation, where someone has their say, and then someone else responds: a process of remembering and forgetting is essential in this. For me this is an on-going conversation that is primarily attached to the geography of London, that occasionally goes on trips to Glasgow, or perhaps some other more exotic location. It is a conversation about both style and content. It can be spoken by any type of space, public, commercial, and alternative in all their vast and ever changing diversity. It is by and large a self-sustaining conversation, which does not exclude any artist or space, as it is not one conversation but several, and it is not the volume that counts but who is listening, and perhaps most importantly how they are listening. There is of course a saturation point, a level that can be reached after which more really means less. Perhaps then, at that point, the conversation implodes, and all goes silent... until the whispering starts...

MW: In his infamous Baudelairian novel A Rebours (Against Nature) 1884 J.K. Huysman unleashes his supremely decadent vision of modern man, the tortured but utterly stylish Duc Jean Floresas des Esseintes, on a then overwhelmingly incredulous readership. The last remaining member of a once great family, des Esseintes fails early on in his search for a kindred spirit. Following a heedless but ultimately unsatisfying immersion in every available form of social pleasure, he decides at last to pursue a solitary existence in a house designed without restraint; the ultimate aesthete's hideaway. A lengthy consideration of colour schemes leads him to 'that most morbid and irritating of colours, with its acid glow and unnatural splendour - orange', and in order to bring out the colours of a new oriental carpet he orders a living tortoise to be gilded and encrusted with pearls.

SH: Lifestyle seems to be a predominant growth area in Britain at the end of the 20th century, noted and recorded by the multiplying and ever growing supplements in national newspapers and newly launched full colour niche market magazines. A garden of earthly delights which perhaps in the spirit of des Esseintes is evoked through the mapping of a pleasure that is perpetually shadowed by ennui.

...comes the spirit

Enrico David's embroideries feature fabulous but enigmatic transgendered figures derived from fashion magazines that are the epitome of glamour, anonymous and evasive. Polly Staple's extravagant displays of flowers, video of cheerleaders and the serving of pistachio ice-cream ("because pistachio is a beautiful word and pistachio is a lovely colour") walk the tightrope between the authentic and contrived, while Geerten Verheus offers the simple prospect of pleasurable immersion in a room of colour and light.

MW: A launch is a celebration, and the appearance of celebration is invariably followed by a turning away, a masking, a curious reserve. It is never exactly confrontational, but nor yet is it entirely unselfish. It betrays a profound suspicion of the great outdoors, yet simply couldn't live without an occasional bouquet. It reflects the shared experience of popular culture but hints as much at sheer disorientation as a matey empathy or hard, honed critique. It is in love with music and perfume and light, but knows deep down the saddest songs are always the best.

...comes the spirit

It features the work of seven young artists, brought together for one exhibition, in London, in the year 2000. This grouping is undoubtedly transitory, a snapshot of one fleeting moment amongst many, but no less important for all that. The psychological and cultural landscapes which it describes are not easily conveyed or assimilated. Maybe it is a world to be slammed down hard and swallowed fast with salt rather than contemplated from an armchair. ...Perhaps not.

MW: The spiralling layout of ...comes the spirit demands that you repeat the experience of looking at it at least once, in reverse, and perhaps find yourself the victim of a strangely accelerated nostalgia.

SH: Disorientating, but non-threatening it is the adult equivalent of a child's playroom filled with beguiling multi-coloured toys. Angelic delight, before the numbing, gliding, cloying sensation of pleasure.

MW: In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's hero is lent a copy of a novel later identified as Huysman's A Rebours 'It was quite the strangest book that he had ever read,' he writes ' It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 2000

Text by David Crowley

The main character in Leopold Tyrmand's now-forgotten novel The Man With White Eyes (1957) is nameless and incorporeal. He lives as a shadow in a devastated Central European city after the Second World War. The dark spaces of the city - ruins, wreckage and gloomy cellars - afford this ambiguous character spaces to operate. The sensual life of the city takes place in heterotopic shadows, beyond the scopic register. However, the city is undergoing reconstruction, with bright, wide streets being laid across the decaying ground of the past. As each street is finished and a rhythm of order is brought to the city, dark space diminishes. As his habitat disappears, the invisible character is drawn into the light. Eventually, he loses his anonymity, acquiring a name and a visage. Tyrmand's tale appears to reverse the Enlightenment arrow: new streets do not free the city and the movement of its inhabitants, but lock in a grid to regulate life.

Echoes of these themes appear in Martin Boyce's work, not least in his reference to the grid. When Now is Night (Wallpaper) is a monochrome grid which both contains and extends the space of the galleries in which it appears. This wall-covering effects both spatial and historical relations. Of course, the grid has been a characteristic structuring device of much twentieth century art, though not one, in works by modernist painters such as Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers and Agnes Martin, which assumed a correspondence with external reality. In fact, as Rosalind Krauss noted, the grids of modern art mapped little except for the surface of the work itself and became ghettos which trapped their most ardent disciples: '...the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricised, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal.... the grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that' (i). However, Boyce seems to return (though not according to the principle of à rebours) to an older use of the grid as a spatial and ideological map. One hardly needs to recall that the 'discovery' of linear perspective in the Renaissance suggested a new conception of space that was rectilinear and abstract. On the surface of a canvas, the grid represented not only distance, but man's capacity to impose order on the world. The velo or veil of grids that Alberti used to depict space in De Pittura, positioned the viewer at the centric point. Painted scenes were organised for the eye of the sovereign viewer, a geometric point of origin in an imaginary relationship with real space. Even without the exaggerated perspective of a vanishing point, the regular metre of the grid in Boyce's work still accentuates the position of the spectator. Near and far; here and there; above and below, are made more certain, or so it seems. However, the ambiguous injunction 'Disappear here' - a text composed into the grid - can be read both as a challenge to the viewer or to a network of parallel lines that never meet.

Boyce's reference points, however, come not from antiquarianism of the quattrocento (nor from the introspection of modern art), but from the utopianism of the Modern Movement. The tilted grid, combining a true vertical axis and angled horizontal one, which appears to recall Saul Bass's famous opening title sequence for Hitchcock's film North by Northwest (1959): the animated lines locking in a manner that alludes to the buildings and busy streets of New York. Bass's short film within a film was a précis of modern ideas of the city, a rich vein of urban aesthetics. The grid has long been a geometric representation of the ideal city: coherent, legible and ordered. It suggests a street map inscribed into virgin ground or, perhaps, the effacement of the past. One might recall the controversial destruction of Paris's medieval footprint by the intersection of motorways and skyscrapers proposed by Le Corbusier in his Plan Voisin of 1925 for the car/aircraft cartel of that name. The grid is the city viewed from the lofty, sovereign viewpoint of the planner or authority that Henri Lefebvre called the 'immobile perceptual field'; a single viewpoint above and elsewhere, rather than manifold and within. And entry into the life of the city - perhaps, as Boyce proposes, to 'disappear here' - requires a change of perspective. However, in shifting our viewpoint from city-plan to the street the grid does not disappear. The architectural vocabulary of the modern city also includes the curtain wall, a geometric skin composed of window mullions and in-fill panels characteristic of International Style architecture. This aesthetic was epitomised in Mies van der Rohe's designs for corporate headquarters like the monumental Seagram Building in New York of 1958. The grid formed the basis of a new architecture of power and prestige: mathematics regulated architecture, geometry appeared to contain life. Narrowing our focus further still, we might look for respite inside the modern home. But the grid underlay ideal designs for furniture too. Le Corbusier's casiers standards, modular and moveable cabinets that would replace walls in the free plan, bought a rectilinear geometry of voids and masses inside the home. The grid suggested the perfectibility of all orders of space.

By contrast, Boyce's grids display flaws. In earlier works like The City is of Night (1998) the tilted grid was reproduced as a wall drawing. Lines which are perfect and regular in two dimensions gather and strain on meeting the tangible, three-dimensional space of a doorway. They take on the drawn-out appearance of a web or a net. In When Now is Night (Wallpaper), Boyce's grid is accompanied by traces, like shadows on an x-ray. These grey strokes approximate an' alternative rhythm in the city. They are not as readily comprehensible, nor do they lend themselves to ready measurement of time or space. They hint at the possibility of fragmentation of the grid or, perhaps, like an inefficient palimpsest, traces of an older way of living.

The grid also appears in Boyce's Now I've Got Real Worry (2000). A celebrated piece of high modernist design, the Eames Storage Unit (1950) secured its position in the history of twentieth century furniture after being exhibited (in prototype) at MOMA in the late 1940s. With its emphasis on furniture as tool (hence the masculine designation 'unit' rather than 'cupboard' or 'dresser') and on the names of its renowned American designers, Charles and Ray Eames, the original design illustrates one of the paradoxes of the Modern Movement, that it was a commonwealth of celebrity egos committed to anonymous design. Originally manufactured by the Herman Miller Furniture Company, it is now available - in the curious form of a hand-assembled 'reproduction' of an object designed for inexpensive mass production - as a 'design classic'. Boyce has reworked the object. The modular character of the original design which allowed sliding panels, drawers and shelves to be combined is denied: white and brightly coloured panels are now fixed within the chromed steel frame. The sealed unit cannot divulge what is stored within it. Like a miniature building designed by Mies or the Eameses, this is not a cabinet of curiosities but is rendered curious itself. And, as Susan Stewart reminds us in On Longing, miniaturisation is a kind of idealisation which erases disorder, nature and history. It is axiomatic that things come closer to perfection when they are scaled down. Stewart says, 'The reduction in scale which the miniature presents skews the time and space relations of the everyday lifeworld, and as an object consumed, the miniature finds its "use value" transformed into the infinite time of reverie (ii). Now, it seems, our relationship to the structure is fetishistic, rather like that of the architect to 'his' building. 

It is something to be looked down upon; to be set down at a co-ordinate on the city grid. Boyce's Now I've Got Real Worry exaggerates the fetishistic character of the Eames Storage Unit today in another way. Extending the 'logic' of the collectable piece of furniture, it is divested of its function. Just as stamp collectors search out the 'perfect', unfranked stamp, this storage unit is made perfect: it cannot store the things for which it was designed. Impregnable, it is a pure dark space.

Boyce's When Now is Night (Web) (1999) refutes the dialogue of light and darkness on which the grid is based. It makes use of the standard-issue lighting found in public spaces, passages and halls. Organised as the ensnaring pattern of a suspended web, these fluorescent tubes of noisy light turn the entrance of the galleries in which they appear into the bureaucratic space of a foyer. They illuminate nothing, they enlighten no-one, yet everything is visible. The quality of light is amplified rather than improved by this arrangement. In fact, the light here is not metaphorical but palpable. Boyce's arrangement of modern lighting - of the kind specified by architects for public institutions - coincides with Michel Foucault's conception of light as a kind of trap. Being in the light produces the effect of visibility in which all actions become knowable and, as knowledge, controlled. Or put simply, 'Visibility is a trap' (iii). By contrast, a kind of freedom to disappear can be found in the shadows cast in the city, in darkness.

In its reference to the period of late Modernism, Boyce's work looks back at an age of certainties, yet it is not nostalgic. Claims about the technological and material improvement of the world, particularly within the setting of capitalism and consumerism, appear hubristic today. The history of the modern project, as Boyce reminds us, is now scored with shadows and ambiguities. People are not 'improved' by the things which furnish their lives. Cities are not entities which can be perfected by dreams of order.

(i) Rosalind Krauss, Grids in October, no. 9, 1979, pp. 51-2. (ii) Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1993, p. 65. (iii) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1986, p. 206.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

Jason Brooks, Benedict Carpenter, Anya Gallaccio, Jim Hodges, Virgil Marti, Jason Minsky, Jo Mitchell, Simon Periton, Jean Noel Rene Clair, Bridget Smith

Text by David Barrett

A Pointless Existence We must begin by looking at nature. Not the constructed versions that we have surrounded ourselves with, but the brutal, unreconstructed nature that existed before we imagined it. This can be difficult to do; so used have we become to reading meaning into 'sublime' landscapes, or message-laden flowers, or demonic reptiles - everything is so significant - that it is difficult for us to come to terms with the utter senselessness of nature.

We are creatures that deal continually, consciously and unconsciously, with the play of meaning. We assign it to everything, and there is nothing to us which is devoid of meaning. Ironic, then, that in order to mask the pointlessness of our own existence, we simply refuse to recognise the blunt senselessness of all nature. Is our existence really pointless? We are, on the whole, a society without religion, and without religion there is no meaning to be found in the universe or its inhabitants: it is a truly meaningless domain. Sure, we understand how nature operates - Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Watson & Crick told us this - but as for why... well, that is a question that cannot be answered without recourse to metaphysics.

To show how much we assume meaningfulness in the world, simply count how many times ! have to use words that end in '..lessness' throughout this essay. This proves that the natural state - that of a lack of meaning - is automatically expressed as a negative, that is: the opposite of the assumed state.

But surely we do find meaning in nature? Well, yes, a semiotic study of nature will reveal a myriad of signified meanings - red roses mean love, oak trees mean ancient dependability, etc. - but these meanings have merely been projected onto nature by humans. Such connotations are in no way innate.

This is not to say that our actual living spaces are also empty of reason. Quite the opposite; our urban environment is totally designed, every inch of space the product of conscious thought. And this is the point. Urban dwellers find it difficult to believe that there are places in the world where things have simply grown, rather than having been planted or introduced or protected. We stretch a layer of metaphors over nature to protect us from its stark senselessness. Pulling away this shroud of meaning reveals the universe for what it is: an accidental, pointless playing-out of mechanical rules. And our consciousness has always had a problem with that.

The Rise of Simulation So the function of our constant generation of meaning, of assigning significance to objects, is to protect our psyches from the uncomfortable truth of meaninglessness. And this helps us to understand the well-documented drive towards virtual realities, controlled environments and simulation. In a sense, the perfect worlds we produce are merely an attempt to play the part of God, now that He is no longer here to guarantee meaning. (i)

But it is not simply perfect environments we're after. No; they are simply a consequence. The real perfection that we crave is a perfection of meaning, of signs. Everything should look exactly how we expect it to look, and no different. It is not perfect nature that we want, but perfect signs of nature, that is: nature acting as a sign for itself. We have produced a fairytale universe where each element simply presents the connotations that we expect it to have. A world where we can be sure to instantly recognise everything, and everything is precisely what it seems to be. No shocks, no alarms, no surprises. Just archetypes. A grotto should be magical, a golf-course should be lush, a biker-girl should be sexy (but in a retro, non-threatening way). Pure signifiers. Both Bridget Smith and Jo Mitchell know this.

Consider Benedict Carpenter's Flocked Objects. These Rorschach blots - epitomes of the ambiguous and unknown - become crystallised into physical objects. The unknown is exorcised through a process of visualisation. Every Horror-film director knows that a monster is only scary when you can't see it. The Flocked Objects control the unknown by presenting it to us in the cold light of day. We can begin to rationalise the objects, pin meanings onto them, discuss them. What's so scary about that? Precisely nothing.

There is no end to this seamless fiction of meanings. Even pure signifiers like the Nike Swoosh are just another part of our environment, as Jason Minsky's Victory shows, just as his picnic hamper/air purification plant Breathing Air suggests that the oxygen we breathe ought to be manufactured by chemical apparatus. Everything is re-designed, re-made, re-presented, re-duplicated. (ii)

Of course, no life can grow from this claustrophobic fiction; the violent, chaotic animal-exuberance of creation has no place here. Our quest for hermetic meaningfulness is stifling, just like You: Jim Hodges' silk flower curtain. Perfect, beautiful and utterly lifeless. Not dead, of course, because the concept of death presupposes life. This is just lifeless, that's all.

Controlling Excess So our controlled simulacra deny the irrational, the chaos of meaninglessness, make it a taboo. Everything is a perfect sign for itself in this sanitised, corporate-endorsed reality. There are no unwanted ideas. But this is an uncomfortable truth, we don't want to believe that our world is quite so stifling. This is why we crave absurd fantasies like Disneyworld: building a crude, obvious fake makes our everyday simulacra appear more convincingly real.

Simulation is the culmination of the need to bracket our universe within the realm of reason, of work, of production and consumption. Simulation is against violence. And yet excess - and the transgression that this implies - is required to justify such all-encompassing reason (why would we need reason, logic and order if there was not chaos and meaninglessness?).

So the rationalisation is here to protect us from the violence of animal irrationality. But since we are created from precisely such irrationality, we find such unending orderliness asphyxiating. In short, we need a vent to let off steam, hence our little moments of transgression are prescribed. (iii) Which is why it's okay for Jean-Noël René Clair's idealised photographs to lapse into pornography. In fact, it's required.

Spiralling Simulations in a Closed Loop But in this digital age, where universes are constructed entirely within rational systems, where is the vent? There is nothing in these systems that hasn't been put there for a precise purpose. There is no vent. The system is a closed loop. It spirals into vertigo, producing its own excess, reaching its own ecstasy. No growth. No future. No past. Just an endless contemporary instant, buzzing with overloaded information.

Eventually, the volume of information becomes so superabundant that it engulfs the very possibility of meaning. This is precisely the point of Anya Gallaccio's coins: signs proliferating into excess until they flow like water under our feet. Or Simon Periton's entangled doilies of signifiers, alluding to a self-reflexive galaxy of information where free-floating signifiers refer to nothing but themselves. Or Virgil Marti's over-stimulated wallpapers that tingle with nostalgia for the obviously fake.

Our compressed environment cancels itself out, like Dr Oliver Sachs' 'sleeping' patients who, it turned out, had the shakes so bad that they froze.

So Here We Are How will anyone live in the year 2000, with all that future stretched out before them? An unbearable, inconceivably vast amount of time. A thousand years can only make a human lifetime insignificant.

Not like now, not like our current preoccupation with the contemporary moment, living instant to instant, uptight in thrall to a random number, convincing ourselves that our time is special, portentous. (Millennium fever sounds so thrilling but, actually, fevers are times of stinking delirium).

As we hyperventilate in preparation for gasping in, and then indefinitely holding our big last breath late on the 31st, everything slows down until every moment seems a lifetime. Numb with over-stimulation and hyper-awareness. Every detail appears preternaturally clear, as if through a thick lens. Ultra vivid. A buzzing visual noise. A vibrancy, a self-perpetuating overload. A white noise so frenetic that it cancels itself out, becoming still. A flat chasm of emptiness.

And what would this state look like? Take a look around; you're already seeing it. Not just in artworks, but in the streets, on the tv, down the wires, crackling through the airwaves. But perhaps the epitome of this dizzying void is the work of Jason Brooks. These hypereal wreaths, so over-burdened with meaning that they become meaningless, making a mockery of meaning. Their vacuous stillness simply makes explicit what Brook's work has meant all along, that we have fought ourselves into the corner of a Möbius strip.

"What if death is nothing but sound?" "Electrical noise." "You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful." "Uniform, white."

White Noise, Don DeLillo

(i) pacé Jean-Paul Sartre. (ii) The bulk of this essay, including the concept of simulation and the free play of signs, is indebted to Jean Baudrillard. (iii) This concept of taboo and transgression is taken from Georges Bataille.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

Text by Alexandra Bradley

A perfect, shady tree glistens with brightly coloured fruit, punctuating the well-proportioned architectural box of an elegant concrete courtyard. Once an hour, the courtyard fills with the sounds of shrill alarms - a mixture of short consecutive beeps or a slightly longer wake-up call - resulting in a random, digitally controlled symphony. When the alarm bells ring, Pointless creates an aural moment in time, immediate and unconditional.

Jason Coburn frequently marries quite unexpected elements in his work, responding to the contextual parameters of a given situation, with a subtle and infiltrating approach. Pointless, in this way, is quite typical. The small beech-like tree, bearing the strange fruit of chunky digital watches has the appearance of normalcy, as if it had, perhaps, always existed. On closer inspection however, this 'tree' reveals itself to be artificially manufactured, a made-to-order idealised plant, assembled from the imagination. Its constituent parts - branches, leaves and trunk - have been designed to precise but unrealistic specifications.

Pointless intimates our human relationship with nature, but it also has specific, sentimental connotations. On a recent trip to Girona, the artist experienced a similar sonic moment when, on a night time walk, he heard the vivid cacophony of singing frogs, whose extremely clear sounds are akin to digitally produced beeps, displaying a surprisingly synchronised side of animal life.

In Pointless, a tree, elemental symbol of nature, is subjected to a series of regular hourly beeps that reflect the controlled habits of human nature. But in this case, rather than signifying the need for an incidental, specific action such as waking up, setting the video recorder or timing the supper the alarm beeps are there simply to provoke an unexpected encounter and thus are in essence, pointless. In an immediate way, Pointless directly responds to the function of its site, a meeting point used by the dancers in the surrounding building after rehearsals or by office workers in the immediate locality, who come to loiter in their lunch break. In short, a space for the regularly timed relapses that are imposed onto the structure of our daily routine.

Synchronicity is a key element in Coburn's work which frequently explores notions of random versus controlled experience. In Around the World (1998), an installation in Brick Lane, the artist placed six electronic organs in a darkened room, illuminated only by an angle-poise lamp. The organs were programmed to play different rhythms from international music standards: the march, blues, a waltz etc. Each rhythm was played very quietly at the slowest possible tempo resulting in a continuous monotone composed of collective melodies that cancelled each other out. Another work, Service (1995), also explored the possibilities of variants within a controlled structure. The artist placed a tennis ball service machine, setting its output to a regular speed, behind a door in a confined corridor. The viewer encountered the repetitive sight and sounds of ejected tennis balls hitting the facing wall. Service like Pointless made references to its site in more ways than one and had a kind of mad logic which hinted at the original use of the building: a hospital for the mentally infirm. Both works also exemplify an economy of means, a distilled physical effect that evolves out of a simple, repeated pattern. 

Experimentation within a standard format is, of course, the underlying activity in music making. Electronic music in particular, defines itself by repeating and originating within a strictly limited series of beats and loops - a format which in fact provides endless possibilities for innovation and for a rebellion against its own rules.

The World Will Listen / Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1997), is a fully functioning DJ booth made from steel, corrugated plastic and wood. The box is designed for the specific needs of a DJ, with neoprene, shock-absorbent system that responds to the practical nightclub specifications. As a designed product and a work of art, the visitors are invited to play any track from the music provided and 'perform' for as long as they wish. Confronted with a free element of choice, the viewer can engage in a moment of absolute self-indulgence, creating their own hedonistic space, quite apart from the energy of the artist who originally put the piece into being.

As a musician, curator and a visual artist Coburn's work inhabits widely discursive forms. But like many contemporary artists working in an interdisciplinary manner, he makes no differentiation between the cultural fields that his artistic production might inhabit. In this way, with no immediately apparent formal links, the work seems to gain limitless conceptual possibilities. The World Will Listen / Box with the Sound of its Own Making exemplifies his flexible approach to art with an adaptable, everyday currency. Working in this vein means that even the most insignificant of daily events can be material for a valid work of art. Coburn's Ongoing Accidents project, developed from just such a humble premise. He set about meticulously documenting minor accidents, such as cutting a finger or bruising an elbow, that happen to him. The resulting series of words and images rests on the simple, yet effective paradox that minor actions can become profound, can take on the meanings of greater potential when documented in this way. (Ongoing Accidents also, of course, makes a light-hearted comment on the traditional notion of the heroic artist suffering for his trade and reflects an attitude of art as enjoyable 'play' rather than 'work').

More recently, the artist has been placing a series of fake adverts in the "Artists Showing Abroad" section of Art Monthly. Coburn noticed this list, with its seemingly innocuous information, is taken quite seriously and as such, seemed absolutely ripe for subversion. After devising a series of imaginary exhibitions with superbly hyperbolic titles, Coburn sent exhibition dates to the magazine and found himself being listed each month. The exhibition titles came from the chapter headings of Roland Barthes' Lovers Discourse and the galleries were anagrams of common phrases - such as liar', 'boring' or 'unfaithful' - retorts that people call each other during relationships. The work existed for as long as the editors took notice, in this case approximately 6 months. Like Ongoing Accidents, the project prioritised art as a sense of play, with its viral approach to linguistic subversion and its infiltration of a set of quasi-serious circumstances. This 'illicit' work, which revels in the sensual pleasure of its own secret and logical language, reflects the artist as ultimate controller of his own fictionalised scenario.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

Text by Jennifer Higgie

Nothing and no-one in Sarah Jones' photographs is innocent, but what they might be guilty of is never stated. Every person looks intensely preoccupied, while rooms and gardens throb with a hushed significance. Caught in a nether world between action and inaction, the atmosphere in these images - including the ones in which people are absent - is thick with a human expectancy that refuses to state its purpose. Silent girls inhabit silent rooms, their faces and bodies frozen into enigmatic gestures and inscrutable expressions; empty couches used for psychoanalysis bear the melancholy trace of anonymous bodies and worried minds; discarded pillows look as sinister as quicksand; still trees are as secretive as eavesdroppers; an old white table in a South London garden supports the weary hands of a man who touches its surfaces like a friend while blank-eyed children lurk in flowers and bushes, beneath heavy, indeterminate skies. Traditional hierarchies of value are blurred - objects are as significant as people, while people are as inscrutable as objects.

In Jones' world everything is a possible conduit for feeling, but it is a feeling which is constantly deflected, thwarted or internalised. Reminiscent of Beckett's stripped back absurdity, her photographs explores similar gestures, facial expressions and locations again and again, but it's a repetition predicated on the fact that nothing can, in fact, ever be literally repeated. She may have photographed the same girls in the same environments over a period of years, but still they insist on growing. The same couch may be photographed over a period of time, but every photograph reveals the traces of different people. As a result - and despite their crisp physicality and often cool minimalism - her photographs are saturated with an intangible atmosphere that references the past as much as it describes a strange allegorical present. Quiet complex histories and feelings are expressed in the most oblique of languages: in the awkward hovering of two feet above a bedroom floor, in the intense blue of a wall, the unfocused gaze of a child or the relationship between a hand and a mouth.

An elegant young girl in a privileged home hides beneath a table with the stealth of a trapped animal caught in a surreal, interior cross breeze, while another girl, her face hidden behind her hair, sits behind her on the stairs with her arms crossed; a couch is vaguely printed with stains; highly polished objects reflect nothing but the anxiety of an unfocused gaze; suburban gardens explode with blossoming weeds. Although almost uniformly middle-class, Jones reveals the order that upholds these environments to be innately unstable or elusive - be it the ordering of a mind on a psychoanalysts couch, the ordering of nature in a garden, or the ordering of adolescent confusion. Which is not to say that she represents ordered environments as necessarily negative ones - the homes that provide the settings for the girls, although possibly repressive are also protective of their inhabitants, while the gardens, despite being confined and suburban, offer the refuge of urban Arcadias. The couches too, have a complicated relationship to control - palpably imbued with the discontent of faceless patients, they can also be read as sites of refuge, a rare place where a troubled mind is, for once, welcome.

Many of the environments in Jones' photographs look intensely artificial or staged, as if everything natural has been emptied out of the images only to be replaced by their approximation. Strangely, however, everyone and everything is who Jones says they are, and - apart from lighting and choreography - she rarely interferes with the environments she photographs. As result, what constitutes reality becomes increasingly unclear - it is difficult to know whether you are looking at an actual person or at someone doing a good impersonation of who they might be expected to be. But then, these photographs are not portraits, or at least not in the traditional meaning of the word - Jones makes pictures that resist any attempt at naturalism, using her camera not to reveal any particular truth, but to mine possible physical manifestations of certain states of mind. The girls, despite their individuality, come to represent all girls tangled in the awkward transition between childhood and adulthood in the same way that the couches reference the idea of psychoanalysis rather than any particular psychoanalytic school or belief system. Jonesis photographs inhabit the volatile space between fact and fiction. It is not the constituents of personality or the description of an actual place that interests her, but rather the infinite combinations and metaphorical descriptions that might indicate certain complex conditions of human-hood.

Jones' photographs shift between the confines of intensely - and very English - controlled domestic environments, to a place where nature is as closely, but never completely or successfully controlled - the garden. Myriad ways of representing nature have emerged as one of Jones' most potent indicators of confusion and dislocation. Adolescents - intensely aware of the loaded potential of physical gesture - are often adrift in a kind of emotional Diaspora. At best sheltered and nurtured in their parents' homes, they are nonetheless often uncomfortable in them - restless and full of secrets which reveal themselves in their aggressive yet supplicating posturing. The unsettling, almost schizophrenic duality is subtly reflected in the way Jones' shows the girls interacting with the natural world - for example, one girl stands transfixed by the overly pruned stump of a tree while another hides beneath a bed in a spotless room whose curtains are decorated with a regimented pattern of flowers. In a sad reversal of fortune, nature, so often used by artists to signify instinct or a kind of carnal freedom is pictured here as something sanitised and disempowered. In another image a young girl - arms crossed and wearing a shirt covered with cartoon flowers - stands on a garden path, surrounded by thick green foliage and delicate flowers. The silhouette of a large building looms over her with an almost gothic intimation of dread - a underlying, inarticulate sense of something or someone haunted by something beyond their control.

The garden creates a link between Jones' photographs of the girls in country houses and the South London back gardens. In both sets of images, the idea of nature and the way it functions for us, is as intangible and essential as a mirage, an image our culture has tried, and failed to control; a conflicted place of solace and alienation. In the South London pictures any kind of growth is framed by walls and gates and, despite its abundance, kept in check with pruning. In this sense, these nature representations are as equally ambiguous as their image-counterparts in the country

The rooms we live in and the furniture we choose to occupy those rooms are integral to the shaping of our experience in the world. Over time, these places and things can become littered with a kind of psychic debris, the build up of accumulated feeling within a confined space - stained with the imprints of invisible hands and bodies, invisible impressions of anonymous lives. The significance of rooms was something the best Dutch and Flemish painters of the 16th and 17th centuries understood - how the silent relationship between places, objects and the people who used them or moved through them in their slow, staccato dance could be as expressive of intense feeling as any Greek drama. Jones' photographs often reveal a similar type of gravitas: a sense of waiting and anticipation, expressed in a language where the smallest shifts in body language reflect major shifts in mood. These are images that reiterate again and again the idea that the things we surround ourselves with palpably interact with the people who use them or look at them - tables and highly polished metals throw back distorted human reflections while flowers and trees present an image of colourful abandon tempered by pruned and often mutilated branches.

Jones' strange narrative could develop over a long time to come, continuing in the same way, moving from space to space and mining the gaps between things and people. But even as they indicate the next possible frame, every image also, (and this accounts for the slightly elegiac air that infiltrates many of her photographs) reiterates photography's role as a kind of obituary - that when it captures a moment, it also, in a sense, registers its death: that what and who the photograph reveals no longer exist in the same way. Which is not, of course, necessarily a bad thing.

As Jones reveals more and more details about the people whose interior lives she documents and choreographs, her images begin to interact like the dream-like chapters of a book with no conclusion. When a man sits with bare feet, his head in his hand and his eyes half closed at a garden table in Charlton, as if in a parallel universe, he is united in mood and introspection with two pubescent girls, also with bare feet, deep in thought on a picturesque old wall in the home counties. It would seem that some people look out at the world in order to look all the more deeply inside it. Reverie: one of the few cross-cultural and cross-generational links we can be sure of.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

Mark Cannon, Ana Prada, DJ Simpson

Text by Martin Herbert

Everyday life routinely outdances works of art; for sheer vitality, art hasn't got a chance against the inchoate, lazy mess of quotidian experience. Everyday life has flexibility and unpredictability (no discourse to fit into or reject); kinetic immediacy; natural coherence; and doesn't require suspension of disbelief. Plus, and most helpfully, we've spent the last century aestheticising the everyday, partly via the training ground of artworks rooted in it. Shooting ourselves in the foot, perhaps, since the two opposites seems to need each other, but the die is cast.

The result is you. Homo aestheticus, an art viewer with a multi-tasking eye, who appreciates the visuality of, say, construction sites; who has seen the 'Sixties idea of an art of the 'real' (happenings, self-mutilation etc.) discredited, at least in theory; and who is versed in contemporary art which favours a filtered real; a real which is staged, quoted from. A viewer addicted to the editorialising logic of art and the chaotic drift of not-art. Between these two reciprocal zones lies the unpredictable area where Formerly sites itself. It's an enquiry into the possibility of entwining two intensities; the ever-present frisson of the real (by incorporating aspects and objects from the detritus and consumer overspill of the outside world) and the lingering vibration of abstract art; linking the two with conceptual rigour, sardonic wit, and painterly harmonics. Formerly uses the spectrum of post-war painting, some of it very recent, and so this is also a show about the current state of painting. Is painting - here, specifically abstract painting - now a language which can be referred to without its presence? If so, what does that suggest for painting's future? There is very little in the way of brushwork here, sometimes no paint at all. And yet Formerly reads as a show stuffed with a heterogeneity of painterly references, a persistent malignancy or persistent idealism, depending on your view.

What we face are the implications of being aesthetically overeducated. And what we get, accordingly, are not holistic artworks but gnarly mutations, test-tube brews, recombinant strains in momentary stasis. Often centreless, they are structured around sets of dialectics - high/low, decorative/functional, violent/pacific, aleatory/composed - different measures and mixtures combusting in the engine of each artist's work. That no artwork is primarily one thing or another seems partly the point. There is a suspicion of master narratives and categories here; also of midget narratives which, rolling down history's hill, have snowballed.

Mark Cannon collects panels of Formica-clad board, cuts them to equal heights and different widths, and abuts them to make multi-panel pieces structured around colour relations. One hesitates to call them paintings, but they are steeped in the language of post-painterly abstraction; late-period Barnett Newman; Ellsworth Kelly's 'pure colour from the world', Brice Marden's and Sean Scully's panel works. The same effect, with offhand flashiness. Cannon's method is in many respects opposed to theirs, and doubtful of the narrow, Greenbergian emphasis on pictorial flatness which adheres to some of these artists' work. While combined for their sharp colour harmonies, Cannon's boards are often dirty, graffitoed, splashed with paint and otherwise redolent of their base origins. (Cannon gets offcuts from builders, uses old billboard frames, scavenges from anywhere and everywhere, and sometimes freshly bought pieces).

Yet they are, in their own way, conceptually rigid. Cannon's obsessiveness about preserving the patina of filth on them makes them paradoxically delicate. Splashes of paint - a singing red against deep blue, a slash of orange on white - appear to have been foregrounded for painterly reasons. Graffiti gets sliced in halt, divided by a band of another colour, and attains weight as a signifier, a foreign element patched into a deceptive organisation. For these are careful works. The boards are divided according to the Golden Section, the system of proportion (approx. 13:8) which theoretically ensures an elegance of appearance. Cannon, in using the grubbiest materials, is testing this theorem with some severity. In his hands it is also a generative system, since any piece which he cuts off in fitting these works together will become the basis of another work, a potentially endless series. Cannon has commented that he wished to make objects where all the compositional decisions were fixed in place - hence the found colour and use of Golden Section proportion; which question the authority of the composing artist.

And yet Cannon is no callow, disengaged ironist. There is in his work a productive tension between painterly and sculptural realities; a questioning of form, in the sense that these objects are neither truly sculpture or painting. And, finally, perhaps most important in that these are objects with a seductive presence, there is a concern with tonal harmony, a desire to find the balance point between kitsch colour and the purely beautiful. They are, shall we say, unstable.

These boards have a history, of course. They are not pure, but corrupted by use-value, by the past. Similarly, Ana Prada's stylish assemblages are positively compromised by material considerations. Prada's pieces take the form of decorative-looking designs, yet are in constant significatory motion. Not only do they fall between the cracks of several artistic practices, they are constructed from basic consumer goods such as teabags, candles and toilet-rolls which, through fastidious manipulations - often involving the painterly medium of coloured silicone gel - achieve an opaque elegance. And, like the consumer goods they are made from, these works have a limited shelf-life. Often fastened directly to the wall, Prada's works are all made site-specifically and typically destroyed once the particular show closes; thus, a disjunction exists between the transience of each artwork and the profound efforts which go into its construction. This is not wilful perversity. Rather, it suggests a brief apotheosis of the often-overlooked, a mayfly status which urges each artwork to burn extra-brightly during its short lifespan.

Through these tactics, Prada's practice situates itself in the interstices between painting, sculpture and performative activity, relishing its contrariness in the pursuit of dislocation; a sensation doubled by Prada's apparent desire to gift each piece with formal individuality. Besides a tendency to organise around multiple units, no two pieces look alike, a condition apparently determined by Prada's reaction to the protean possibilities of each new material. It is the least referential work in Formerly, preferring a poetic associativeness to an engagement with existing art. Apart from a gentle pathos, what activates it is the frictive mixture of languages - the humming, neutral affectlessness of the very familiar materials she uses and the unpredictable logistics of the sequences she creates with them. She plays on our willingness to take on board the aesthetic capacity of the domestic when viewed as serial units - to enjoy the spectacle of a production line - and also to cross-relate that seriality with abstraction, to see in such activity a low-budget, almost parodic sublimity. And yet, as each assertion about Prada's slippery work tends to expose its inverse, this placidity conceals an undercurrent of violence - the notion of damaging something (a wall, an object) to get somewhere strange and new. In a previous work, thousands of nails were hammered into a wall in strict pattern; Formerly includes a wall-mounted arrangement of candles split lengthwise, an invasive, yet exploratory action which has the effect of physically flattening out the objects to create a relief, bringing the previously sculptural object close to the domain of painting. Such reversals position Prada's work as an structure of opposites dancing rapidly around each other to deliver an illusion of continuity.

This combination of violence and beauty also occurs in the work of DJSimpson, albeit in a more self-contained manner. Simpson prefers to wreak havoc on prefabricated sheets of MDF or plywood which have generally been painted a single colour; ad-hoc colourfields, ripe for desecration and rehabilitation. Using an electric router, Simpson scores deep, unhinged traceries into his surfaces, and by doing so reveals the structure of the material itself; in his plywood works, Simpson's conjurs a fusion of abstraction with archaeological dig. We can see the variant layers of wood which have been cut into, their differing textures and shades, an effect Simpson has lately exacerbated by using a router which cuts at an angle, so that the different layers seem to descend into the picture plane in a stepped fashion. So it is a confrontation with materiality, a reminder that whatever an art object is within a system of meanings, it is first of all a material artefact, a lump of something, some stuff on some other stuff.

Simpson seems to be constructing a negative image of painting. Gesturality is there, sure; but associated with the whinnying motions of a machine. While these works have some correspondence to the absent-minded abstractions of, say, Jonathan Lasker, which debase the value of the gestural mark, they are also in practical terms the complete opposite; a removal, an excavation rather than an addition, following the trail of a gesture in order to purge the surface of it entirely, to cut it out. The technical activity finds associations in craft, and in sculptural activity too; the pure category of painting is, here, about as debased as one can get.

The fact that Simpson's works have a previous existence (that they refer to a mundane reality of DIY and construction) buffs their bastardised status. But it also provides a frame of low expectation within which the surprising attractiveness of his 'images' gains a theatrical effectiveness. As painting, these works sneak up on you; they have a sinuousness of line, a desire to find non-painterly analogues for a huge variety of gestural marks. A typical piece will encompass fizzing, wayward little strokes; yawning gouges; curling, lackadaisical motions; stiffly geometric scoring, and areas of lightly worked surface-scraping which seem like delicate finesses on a finished work.

Formerly, then, is characterised by a melting of boundaries, a sociable all-inclusiveness. What makes these artworks run is their rich categorical instability, their willingness to exploit the numb thrill of the real in pursuit of the dazzling indefinable, and to lose form in the process. If they espouse any value-system, it is one which accepts that each category contains and is defined by its opposite - the rareified and the prosaic; the beautiful and the banal; art and the outside world. They are also a lot of complicated fun. If the recent history of self-reflexive abstraction has been one of would-be Elmer Fudds peering down dark rabbit-holes, Formerly comes on like a triple-headed Bugs Bunny, disguised as a brickie, sneakily kicking them in the backside.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

Text by Ian Hunt

It was Leon Kossoff who talked about the possibility of painting as though photography had never been invented; something neither he nor Frank Auerbach has achieved. It is nonetheless a marvellous phrase that can be allowed (I hope) to recall a conversation-stopping remark made in Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons: that the automobile was "an invention that had no business being invented." The apparent attempt in the works of Auerbach and Kossoff to disavow the relationship between painted and photographic ways of seeing and to seek, particularly in painted portraiture, some final authenticity of response was not achievable, as they assuredly know. Photography, like murder, will out; it is the vehicle for a wider distribution of art that both advertises the existence of originals and transforms them from within. It has thoroughly transformed our ways of interpreting images. But it is tactless at this stage to lecture Kossoff and Auerbach on the relationships of their work to photography, or indeed on the rhetoric of authenticity. Glenn Brown's adaptations and re-titlings of Auerbach's works remain strongly tangy with irreverence (he likes to point out that the Indian yellow he favours for transparent glazes is derived from the urine of oxen) and his work is animated more broadly by what might be called an anticlerical spirit. But he is not in the business of simply wronging the ancientry. If he was, why would he have to do it so devotedly?

The first repainting from an Auerbach (Atom Age Vampire) was in 1991; it was preceded by paintings of architectural subjects and details of the surface of the moon. In Saturday Night Fever from 1992 the animation of Auerbach's zig-zag slashes are revealed as ambiguously legible as the banal exhilarations and weekend heroisms of the dance floor, absurdly captured in mid-strut. By the end of the decade, although Brown's range has been expanded, Auerbach's works remain a source. They still provide for the Glenn Brown idiom an image, contaminated by mock-heroic and irony as it is, of struggle with the material of paint and with the presence of a single human figure. Witness Death of a Disco Dancer, included in this exhibition, and painted in black and white. In Auerbach's work the figure is portrayed as an image of solitariness, who is yet bound to the observing painter by the expenditure together of hours in the studio. This labour is then reconfigured by Brown in his own studio, using his perversely accomplished technique. Working from a photomechanical reproduction, the wrinkles and gashes are smoothed out and sealed in a varnish. Artists' studios remain places, however one thinks of them, where a certain amount of existentialism comes with the turf. They are places where artists train themselves in being alone for long periods and learn to be their own taskmasters. As it has appeared in print before I don't mind repeating that Glenn Brown (in his youth an enthusiastic reader of Sartre) often works at night. Somehow this piece of studio lore seems an appropriate image to bear in mind. These are night-pieces, albeit with a soundtrack.

In his most recent return to Auerbach, the bluish-grey painted backgrounds isolate the figure within space much more thoroughly than the originals do, and other changes of orientation of the head within the panel reinsert Auerbach's works into the framework of more overtly historical portrait painting. The blank backgrounds of many historical portraits are, for modern viewers, strange, ambiguous and attractive expanses; we cannot help but see them, anachronistically, as part of a subdued abstract composition. Velasquez certainly sensed something in these backgrounds, an emptiness that is not recoupable as a positive concept of abstraction. Brown's recent employment of such backgrounds to isolate the heads has effected a considerable shift in the impact of the works: the heads are illusionistically defined as blobs realised in space. The portraits - certainly in the context of Brown's other works, after Chris Foss, depicting floating rock satellites and colonised asteroids - become alien life forms or aberrated humanoids, made out of paint yet perhaps remembering a former life, soliciting from the viewer some wished-for recognition as human. Mark E. Smith as Pope Innocent X gives the original a 90-degree turn, which with other alterations of emphasis means that the head looks at though it is missing a section at the back, though it remains oblivious of this deficit. "We are the hollow men, the stuffed men" wrote the pope of modernist verse, T.S. Eliot. Later in the century Mark E. Smith's lyrics for The Fall, which the painting's title insists we hear, made a despairingly funny public poetry out of the materials with which we are stuffed: "Kwiksave was there, and his friend Bugs the Bear". Secondary Modern, in contrast, attains a kind of grandeur or panache. Although the expression is tortured, it is also knowing and camp; could Brown possibly be making sly homage to Annigoni's portrait of Queen Elizabeth, reproductions of which used to hang in so many homes and public places? Perhaps not, but it is the kind of unexpected historicization that Brown's works train viewers to seek.

Though in all this it should be recognized that the continued recourse to Auerbach's work and the conflating of it with the act of posing is ambiguous; it is not simply critique. The use of smooth surfaces is an expressive choice also: "What would otherwise be an impasto surface has become sheer, impacted, opaque, sinister and involuted. Directed inwards not out, the paintings seem to rebuff one's gaze..." wrote Stuart Morgan in a fine essay published in frieze in 1993. There have been strange moments of interchange between Auerbach's work and pop culture before: Japan, the not very memorable synth-pop band of the 1980s, once selected an Auerbach portrait as an album cover, as though looking for something they were lacking. Brown's works after Auerbach may also be asking us to locate our own unease with a culture of surface; by going deeper into what a life that was all surface might actually be.

In contrast Brown's idiom includes works after Chris Foss, which are transformed and executed on a large scale. They become realised as a popular art form evoking wonder, strangeness and also violent social dislocation, and become continuous with the achievements of John Martin's nineteenth-century epics. The scale of Foss's original illustrations is not known to us, as the images circulated on paperbacks. Neither do we, as viewers, have much sense of how the originals may have been painted. The scale floats unanchored, as the motif itself does in Böcklin's Tomb, which is the second version of this subject and has been laterally reversed. Science fiction is often described as an optimistic form. Brown's works in this style, reinserted into a high art context, are perhaps his most morbid and disturbing. Behind the perfectionism of the technique can be felt a pressure of social dereliction; again we may speculate on how Brown's labour on these works is itself a part of their subject, how his voluntary detachment from the world to paint them remains as part of their subject when they are finally exhibited. It is a relief to come back down to earth to study the social dislocation and the uncertainties of works pre-known and tagged as masterpieces, such as works by Rembrandt. I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper (1996) puts a romance theme back into its subject, which is a ruby-lipped, bonneted, androgynous and overdressed young man, wearing pearls, posing and looking at himself with some satisfaction.

Zombies of the Stratosphere (1999) is technically a departure, in that it is a painting constructed to stand independently of the wall, on a metal support, but Brown's interest in things that float has prepared the way. It is painted after the Basel version of Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead; there are several versions of the painting, with its extremely disturbing white rectilinear blocks amongst the rocks and cypresses. We probably cannot avoid knowing that it was one of the most famous paintings of the late nineteenth century, but may not have actually thought about why or had the opportunity to see it. (Böcklin seems to have been a strange man; he had an interest in flying machines and forsook art to work on them for some years.) Zombies of the Stratosphere is painted as a cut-out. This does not entirely disturb the illusionism but it does have the effect of making the island even more unreachable, trapped in two dimensions.

The other artist in whom Brown appears to have a particularly intense interest is Salvador Dali. The repaintings from Dali are less numerous, and have focused on the period before Dali's conversion to Catholicism, which was described in one of Brown's titles as 'tragic'. Oscillate Wildly has been altered from the original in several ways: it is painted in black and white, it has been laterally reversed, and it has been anamorphically stretched. Its scale is that of a history painting, and its proportions are also immediately recognizable as those of a wide cinema screen. Brown has mentioned the impact of the dream sequence designed by Dali for Hitchcock's Spellbound, the shock of finally seeing a Dali in black and white. The proportions are also precisely those of Picasso's Guernica; the impressive scale is actually just one quarter as large. The new work has a gravitas that almost never appears in Dali's work, even when as here we can hardly avoid knowing he was reflecting on the Spanish Civil War (it is part of the Dali legend that at certain points he was being serious). Guernica was just as much the product of a personal symbolism, but Dali's personality is still pungent in his civil war works in a way that many viewers persist in finding disturbing. Autumn Cannibalism is culturally sanctioned as one of the works by Dali where viewers are meant to suspend their judgement on the artist and, who knows, think about history. I suspect many fail to do that; this defamiliarization of the work in black, grey and white is perhaps a renewed attempt to help us think about history, even if it is finally only art history. Brown's attempt to reinstate Dali alongside Picasso forces us to reimagine the circumstances of Dali's failure to make a history painting, if failure is what we have decided it was. It also reopens the question of what a 'successful' response to this historical juncture would have been, and why Picasso's nobler sentiments have been preferred. A paradoxically cinematic and painted space opens up, where for a moment the past is not something from which viewers feel fully insulated. It is one of the most striking examples of how Brown can effect a change in his source, or rather how he demonstrates that the past is in fact restless and apt to change as one tries to examine it.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

Text by Lisa Panting

Presented with the work of two artists in the form of an exhibition, one is invariably compelled to compare and contrast. It is like being presented with a puzzle to unravel, about which one can infer great truths from the pairing. In fact what you may encounter is a stage which acts as a narrative in its own right, furnishing the visitor with the ability to engage with the works at hand. In the presentation of the work of Jacqueline Donachie and Alison Gill this is particularly relevant, as here narrative and storytelling are in evidence to an overwhelming degree. Rather than functioning as a set of self-referential works, Donachie and Gill prompt you to enter into their subjectivities. This is by no means a competitive act. Rather, it is clear that they both function in this territory, whether that be based on observation of the most direct kind, or straying into the realm of the imagination. Materially, Donachie and Gill make use of exceedingly different forms of visual language within which narrative, the performative and methods of staging are considered.

Jacqueline Donachie's style of making borders on reportage, specifically using materials that will articulate the topic at hand. Positioning herself as an anthropologist, she describes actions and presents evidence. Her practice depends on an ongoing interaction with the subject, an interaction which in the first instance is fuelled by curiosity, an interest in genre, a belief in folk and popular culture, and the desire to communicate through these languages. This sometimes occurs by placing a performer within the exhibition space, in other instances Donachie has spoken of presence by presenting an audible trace of a performance. Country and Western music is a favourite, as is traditional and folk based performance. She recently invited a group of strippers to perform on a platform in the main stairwell at the Edinburgh College of Art above the classical sculpture that sought to elevate this thoroughfare (Live Breaks 1997). One senses that for Donachie story telling and the reporting of narratives is a way of life. For her, incident, anecdote, and action are most revealing; the trace of a footstep, the sound of a voice. The significance of these performed histories are the relationships established between perceived aspects of 'high' and 'low' culture as in the introduction of the strippers to the recesses of a 'high' art environment.

Sword 1999 grew out of Donachie's observation of classes of teenage girls practising traditional Highland dancing in both Glasgow and London. During these rehearsals, she made both photographic and audio recordings. Combining these elements with architectural structures she creates situations that articulate the intensity of the process, where the performative element is made present to the utmost degree.

Platforms have been built that stand high above the entrance to the café and down along a long wall at a right angle. From these the rhythmic thumping of the feet of several girls practicing their sword dance steps emanates into the exhibition space. It takes other clues to divine the origin of the sound. Photographs of the rehearsal are presented further stimulating our senses. We need to reassemble the information heard and seen in sequence to envision fragments of the initial act. This fragmentation points to a lack of completion, the inability to see or comprehend a whole, and to the ephemerality of most of our experience. It also serves to express the loss associated with the ephemeral and the impossibility of recapturing a moment gone.

Sword relates to physical engagement, not only for the teenagers inside the work, but also for the audience beyond. There is an estrangement as well, an oddity, one might ponder on the actual activity we are being asked to address. Why precisely are we being asked to consider teenage girls and their sword dancing? Perhaps this is related to the cultural phenomenom of fetish, why and how we become interested in a practice. The why, where, and how we seek out ritual and folklore with which to create our own traditions. Memory is powerful in this way, not only personal memory, but the collective memory we attempt to create, where we seek to form the personality of our choice. The search for authenticity has become a competitive act; nowadays we are in business from the earliest age, affecting ritual and seeking traditions to which we can join our sense of being.

Swords engagement with the structure of the building will also affect the different users of the Jerwood Space for the period of the exhibition. During this time they will have to adopt and navigate these platforms; for they are placed in such a way that they will have to be encountered. Outside a suggestion of a stage tilts off a courtyard wall. Lit from below it communicates impos-sibility, while underneath, the potential for occupation exists. Donachie has inverted the idea of a stage, illuminating instead the social mechanisms at play. The viewer has the possibility of becoming an exhibit, of providing a spectacle, and creating their own staged story. She gives us all an opportunity to become part of the construction of a narrative. In this way it is the utmost in egalitarian art making. For in this part of the work the sense of the everyday, the banal, self-reflection and self-actualisation, are at their most visible, reflecting directly back on the viewer. And it is here that a sense of the space that Donachie inhabits is also at its most exposed, where she operates as a translator, harbinger, and as an interface between inside and out.

That Alison Gill has always been curious about altered states of mind, the fantastical, and the imagination, is apparent on the first viewing of her work. Her visual language and method of making completely serve this enquiry. There is an inherent quality to the works on view, a handmade but intricate level of production which is in some way reminiscent of prop-making, where props assist in the creation of a story. Unlike props, though, they function more as complex stages in their own right, and rather than completing a scene or narrative these works totally initiate the experience to which you become bound. Unlike the delusion intrinsic in prop-making there is an impression of exposure as the materiality of the works deliberately reveals itself.

"Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes." So comments Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, first published in 1963. This text based on the experience of taking mescaline, had great influence on the popular imagination. During this era drug culture had a major impact on the general perception of, and desire for, altered states of mind. It was as if the body could now achieve some kind of actual spatial transference. Visual culture as a whole absorbed these tenets and changed the landscape of its language forever.

Transporter 1999 by Gill is a five-metre high golden staircase that operates as part of this dis-course, acting as a route to another plane of consciousness. The doubtful nature of this possibility is manifest in the structure itself, as the complexity of its engineering would seem to undermine this quest. Its construction was achieved by laser-cutting each layer, then meticulously gluing these pieces together, resulting in a seemingly solid object of cardboard. The nature of ascent into a dreamscape, and the impossibility of an actual journey up those stairs, leaves a mental image of a body dashed to the floor; a vision of the toppling structure, the disappearance underfoot, a collapse, the incongruity of the weight of a body on this heavenly gateway. The work grapples with the metaphysical and the infinite, and journeys into the realm of the symbolic where we can exist momentarily before being plummeted back into a world of empirical expe-rience. There is an inherent romanticism in this sensibility, the desire for which seems almost anachronistic in this cynical age. As contemporary experience has increasingly relegated the use of our imaginary faculty to the back burner, it becomes almost a shock to encounter an artist working so immediately within this trope.

Spatial relationships experienced at an early age are impressions that are brought with you into adulthood. These impressions serve to ground perception in later life, which can, when re-encountered, in some way induce a sense of the uncanny. The sense of being overwhelmed by spatial relations and childhood fantasy are devices used by Gill in her second sculpture, Amplifier 1997. Larger than life, eleven papiermaché 'magic' mushrooms, in differing proportions, are clustered together to form a troop. The psiliocybe semilanceata has hallucinogenic properties when consumed. Each is carefully reproduced, the hue and spores exact, lightly glazed to affect the dewy mist-ridden atmosphere of the forest. The fragility of these things induces a hallucinatory haze, where their conceptual whereabouts conflict with the nature of fab-rication. The materiality is in a sense completely ordinary, it is paper, transformed paper, paper meshed together and moulded and carved. Historically, this material has always been a source for complex object making, and especially object making of the most imaginary kind, speaking of deviation, of transformation into a paper dream. These fungi also happen to be called Liberty Cap, recognising the power of naming, and opening up further possibilities for the imagination. That there are endless potential narratives then seems the point of visual culture. That is its role as arbiter, jammed between these worlds of our inner consciousness, imagination, and the domain we inhabit.

In The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin writes " ...one can go on to ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftman's relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of oth-ers, in a solid, useful, and unique way." Perhaps not solid, nor unique, but it is one of the ways in which contemporary art works at its best, that is, as a set of prompts that allow the freedom to create individual and collective narrative.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 1998

Sybille Berger, Kate Bright, Ana Genoves, Jun Hasegawa, Dan Hays, Graham Little, Sarah Morris, Paul Morrison, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Philippe Parreno, Alessandro Raho, Daniel Sturgis

Text by David Barrett

One word, lower case 'd'. What could promise less? Dumb: stupid, voiceless. Unable to say what's on your mind. Because nothing is. Pop: popular, popular culture, taking-what-you're-given, going-with-the-flow, accepting the Lowest Common Denominator. Happy that the corporations have made sure everything you ever wanted is available on the high street. And that everything available on the high street is all you ever wanted.

So dumbpop is a corporate Grail - an everyman of global capitalism - buying into every advert and believing in every product. At its heart lies acceptance, muted by endemic mass-consumerism into a state of total, submissive acceptance. And hence complicity.

What a way to start - does this mean that all of the works presented here are fatally flawed; compromised in essence through utter submission to corporate values? Should we walk out before we even enter?

No.

Why? One: dumbpop is the collective show, and not the individual works. It serves to thematise their diversity, bringing out shared concerns while noting idiosyncrasies. Two: dumbpop may not be quite what it pretends to be. It is a good rule of thumb that you should treat with suspicion anyone who announces their own dumbness. Like anyone who feels the need to state their own honesty or trustworthiness. If you are able to proclaim your dumbness, then you are lying. We know this, and the artworks do too.

Recognition of this is the first step. Once we accept this notion, then we see that there is a certain knowingness within the work: a stance, a playing-of-roles, coyly pretending to be something that they are not. And yet, we know... that they know... that we don't believe them. The game has to be played on both sides.

But then why would any work want to play dumb? One strategy of engaging with the dominant culture is to mimic its form and its attitudes. A close resemblance then allows any slight shift in emphasis to imply a critique.

Take Paul Morrison's paintings, for example. What could be more dumb or more pop? His landscapes are stylised to such a level of sentimental blandness that even Walt Disney would cringe on seeing them. Within the images a paradise of charming naiveté awaits us, a veritable nirvana, beautifully and uncomplicatedly black and white. Or is it? If it is really so uncomplicated, then why does it jar? Why don't the different elements recede evenly into perspective? It just doesn't add up. The promised-land can't keep its promises. But thankfully we, the viewers, aren't actually in the landscape; for there is a fence in the way. And this fence - flat strips of rustic psychedelia - cuts us off from the scene. Negotiating the fence must involve giving up a certain rationality: that is, we must embrace this madcap patternation. And if we are irrational enough to do this, then perhaps we are already there, on the other side of the fence, in our own endless, obvious idyll.

So we see that, by aping the dumb, Morrison's work need only move a muscle to question certain assumptions from within and, ultimately, turn the whole shebang upside-down. Another example? Well, this technique is also subtly deployed by Dan Hays. Taking images from catalogues, his paintings re-present the desire-inducing commercial scenes with photoreal lucidity. Through this an extraordinary flatness is achieved. The product in question becomes illusory, empty as light, while the landscape, whose roots are romantic, is exposed as heartless. Again, by adopting the dumbness of popular culture, the work is able to critique that same culture through the simplest of means.

Mimicking popular culture results in good-looking works. Sometimes elegant, sometimes silly, but always pleasurable. So, why do these works want so desperately to please? And what happens when we tire of their immediate charms? The first question is easy to answer: they all want to please in the same way that products do, like new shoes sitting on an angled shelf under halogen spots. This is where their immediacy springs from. And their pop: not through celebrating popular culture, but merely through appropriating some of its looks and tactics. This is how we know that Sybille Berger's hard-edged horizontal stripe paintings are not really the formal abstractions that they appear to be. They are not painting-as-painting. They are painting-as-photographic backdrop, or in-store decor. A game of subliminal packaging to be glimpsed out the corner of our eyes. Philippe Parreno, though, explicitly acknowledges his pop predecessors while extending the discussion into contemporary issues. His empty speech balloons fill up the space, elegant comments on the sheer volume of our babbling media culture. Another take on this is evident in the paintings of Sarah Morris. Her single word images overwhelm with their colour and blunt language. We are compelled to construct the scene that has prompted this outburst, an ambiguity usually denied us within spoon-fed TV information (Cindy has come on to tell her husband that she has been sleeping with his brother).

There's nothing so direct as Jean-Michel Othoniel glass sculptures. Hanging languidly they are a little fruity and a little retro-ornamental. But mostly they are a little sexual. Drooping with nostalgia, they hint at a mythical free past in the hope it may return. And to make a return, it must first be concealed under a vail of irony. As with Kate Bright whose grand vista - so long discredited - glow with kitsch. And what happens if we forget the irony? Then we see the glitter-laden works do not snigger at the kitsch of Christmas Cards but they revel in their possibilities for glamour. If we are condemned to the vast emptyness of the seas, they seem to say, then at least lets make a party of it.

So if this is pop, then it is pop that has been arrived at via conceptualism and commodity critique. Not so dumb. But it still a void at heart, and this hollowness is essential to the meaning of the work. It is vital that this coldness lies beyond the bright surface, an emptiness to block our visual enjoyment, stalls it, brings us up short and forces us to take another approach. This is why Alessandro Raho's paintings toy with the imagery of style-mags. The level of perfection, of finish, ultimately leaves us dissatisfied. Annoyed, even. We recognise that visual enjoyment is as exciting and meaningless as a blank cheque. Like Graham Little's pairing of 60's art and fashion - Minimalism and garish candy stripe - which leaves us wondering if we have ever seen anything sillier, or the paintings of Daniel Sturgis which get equally frenetic when sampling graphic patterns. His designs end up running away with themselves, like Wile E. Coyote frantically pedalling in mid-air, levitating purely on the fact that he hasn't looked down yet.

Teenagers and twentysomethings are painted flawlessly, inanely flat, by Jun Hasegawa. Bland as teen magazines. By rights they should be interesting for about two seconds. But there is something compelling about them, something that keeps our interest, keeps us looking. Perhaps because they seem so at ease, even in the thick gloss paint, they convince us to look further than their shining surface. They convince us that they are, in fact, more than mere surface. They aren't, of course, but their soft amiability is uncannily convincing.

This term 'uncanny', remember, was originally linked to the idea of the automaton: an object with the spark of life, like Frankenstein's monster. So has Hasagewa created a monster? In a way, yes; her images, culled from the most inane of sources, have gained a life of their own. A faint life that we project, but a kind of life nonetheless. And to breed life from such compromised sources? Imagine working in McDonald's, smiling at customers every minute of the day. Now imagine taking off your uniform and finding that your natural smile is somehow impoverished by the institutionalised charm. You can never smile normally again. This is what Hasagewa's folk are like: off-duty professional charmers.

The uncanny is at work elsewhere too, but this time in its familiar-yet-strange guise. Ana Genoves makes work which operates almost entirely at the level of simulation. Her sculptures rely on a kind of too-perfect realism that probably has more to do with an idea of the object than the actual object itself. Like modelling something on computer, Genoves strips her sculptures down to a few simple parameters, avoiding the level of complexity that marks natural objects out as part of the chaotic, physical world. So her snow is white like real snow and lies like real snow. But it is not made up of individual flakes like real snow and nor does it melt like real snow. By adhering to certain characteristics with great verisimilitude while at the same time ignoring others, Genoves produces objects that mesmerise through their strangely arbitrary realism. Taking from computer simulations and department store dioramas (imagine Santa's Grotto), these works explore the various levels of unreality that we are supposed to accept as representing the real thing. And we do, too.

So Genoves work, functioning almost entirely at the level of simulation, gives us a handle on the show as a whole, a clue as to how we might understand it. dumbpop is filled with surface beauty, a joyful, exuberant playfulness which is both infectious and photogenic. Drawing upon consumer society and designer chic, the works achieve a remarkable level of unreality. Everything is as idealised as a lifestyle choice: take your pick, choose your image, hide your mistakes, live life as a surface. Let your purchases do the talking. The artists here won't mock you; they are part of it too. The culture of complicity is dominant - even all-pervasive - so we cannot step outside of it. It is truly the stuff that surrounds you. dumbpop knows it, and knows that perhaps the only way forward is to explore it, critically but positively.

And if we were to accuse the show of falling into the very same vacuum as the culture that it purportedly critiques? Well, perhaps its best defence is that it has no defence. Claiming no superiority it gladly leaps into whatever voids it can find. After all, if it didn't fall into the hole, how could it ever find its way out? To this end dumbpop embraces popular culture. Yes. Embraces it like ivy embracing a tree.

Feeringbury Manor, Feering, and Firstsite, Colchester, UK - 1998

Don Brown, Jason Coburn, Keith Coventry, Jeremy Deller, Ana Genoves, Jun Hasegawa, Stephen Hughes, Richard Kirwan, Mariele Neudecker, Obuabang, Brendan Quick, Kerry Stewart, Gavin Turk, Jessica Vorsanger, Mark Wallinger, Catherine Yass

Originating in the 14th century Feeringbury Manor is set in extensive gardens, whose features include formal lawns, ponds, wooded areas, pathways both official and found, a riverside meadow, and various ornamental features, such as iron gates, a pergola, water features and a swimming pool. However they remain within the scale of the domestic; this after all is someone's home, rather than the epic extravagancies of a turreted stately house. Each are spaces in which one feels comfortable inhabiting, or could even presume to live.

For the majority of artists emergent in the last fifteen years in this country, placing autonomous art in the open air has not been a concern, preferring instead to rely on the negotiated neutrality of the white cube or focus on the evolving discipline of installation and the site specific. Art in the open air in Britain is perceived by this generation as having the orthodoxy symptomised by the material led traditions of the Sculpture Park, or the associative restrictions of the public commission. This territory once considered central has now been lost and its rich heritage has become stale with repetition.

Taking the work of sixteen artists, Feeringbury VIII utilises work that has previously occupied, or is intended for the sanctuary of the white cube and re-deploys it within the terrain of the garden. Treating the spaces as a given in the way that the architecture of a series of rooms would determine the installation of works, the same strategies are deployed. A corridor becomes a lane, the view across a room now occurs across water, and the surprise of unexpected placement around a corner becomes one set in undergrowth. While some artists employ traditional materials they do so with a critical awareness, while others bring the material and strategies of other areas of practice.

A garden is a form of sanctuary. It is a delineated space that is cared for and looked after, it too is a safe space. The flowers, shrubs and trees are fed and watered, pruned and deadheaded. The new are introduced and nurtured, while others sometimes forgotten are re-bedded on their inevitable way to the compost heap. It is a place equally for poetry and for violence, capable of encompassing many such opposites, although always with the residue of memory, be they cultural, or experienced. Perhaps familiarity would allow the presumption of neutrality, but this is not a possibility for those urban souls caught up in a reverie of Pre-Raphaelite romance.

Cultivated is an act of introduction and nurturing, away from the windy hilltops and woodland trails, the faux marble halls of the shopping mall and PR hard sell. It seeks to plant the possibilities of revisiting, reactivating and extending a barren area of practice, to reintroduce the external as a component in the vocabulary of a your urban British Artist. The works in the exhibition still remain distinctive as in their previous lives, but here in the gardens of Feeringbury Manor and the garden of the Minories art gallery the settings and context allow new interpretations to sprout and their differences to mature. Fundamentally they look at home.

A project by Curtain Road Arts in association with firstsite, Colchester.

The Tannery, London - 1997

Patrick van Caeckenbergh, Paul McCarthy, Mariko Mori (curated by Melissa E. Feldmann)

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The Tannery, London - 1997

Lolly Batty, Smadar Dreyfus, Rachel Evans, Judith Goddard, Sarah Staton, Catherine Yass

Catherine Yass explores the relationship between the photographer and subject. "Portrait: Chairpersons of the City of Salford,” 1994, simultaneously flatters her sitters by depicting then in colour saturated back-lit transparencies while setting in motion a critique of the structures of patronage.

Smadar Dreyfus makes video installations of private human experiences. Projected huge, a detail of a woman's face lying awake both fascinates and intimidates, inviting the viewer to examine their own responses and conduct.

Rachel Evans installation of drawings brings together perceptions of pleasure. Referencing the erotic, expressive painting, and home decoration, they play with ideas of the feminine.

Judith Goddard's video projection explores the nature of perception and beauty. Dissolving the video screen "Mira" replaces it with the virtual depth of an animated computer screen saver.

Lolly Batty fuses together the organic with the mathematical in large three-dimensional sculptures. Carved from polystyrene and other synthetic materials, their lightness and pliability evokes play, while exploring the territory between realism and abstraction.

Sarah Staton remakes the everyday. Changing scale and material the normal becomes extraordinary, fascinating in their bilious transformation they explore Ideas of boredom, fashion, and nationality.

PROJECT SPACE ¬¬- CHUCK NANNEY: BEARDED LADIES

"I have always had a fantasy of a man dressing as a woman, and then over that dressing back as a man: a woman dressing as a man and then over that dressing back as a woman. A man in drag as a man. A woman in drag as a woman, But isn't this something like the way we are in everyday life?" American artist Chuck Nanney was included in "Bad Girls" at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

The Tannery gratefully acknowledges Viewpoint Gallery, Salford: Galerie Jousse Seguin, Paris; and Harkness Hall Ltd. for their assistance in realising these exhibitions.

The Tannery, London - 1997

Pierre Bismuth, Laurence Crane, Sarah Dobai, Peter Fillingham, Margarita Gluzberg, Pat Naldi & Wendy Kirkup, Simon Starling (curated by Andrew Renton)

B.c.c. stands for Blind Carbon Copy. Although carbon copies are no longer use in offices, the meaning of the term is still current in our vocabulary, becoming a metaphor. It is understood that the more copies made simultaneously the poorer the quality of the reproductions. It is this process of transformation, if not degeneration, that distinguishes the copy from the original.  With digital transmission a blind carbon copy has become a copy that is sent to a destination of which the other recipients are unaware.

B.c.c. is an exhibition that will take place twice, on two sites simultaneously. Rather than being an exhibition which spreads itself over two location of The Tannery and Cleveland it will attempt to remake itself in two distinct spaces. Each version of the show will be a self contained experience, formed according to the individual space. Yet both parts of B.c.c. will reflect the other setting up a dialogue between the works and their different contexts.

Pierre Bismuth portrays himself on a video projection accessing verbal descriptions of popular movies by the touch dial facility of a multiplex cinema. There is a flattening out of the superficial film narratives by the transcription from a visual to the audio experience, which is further translated from one language to another.

Laurence Crane has composed a piece of music for a various number of electric organs originally recorded onto DAT tape, before making a succession of re-recordings to play at The Tannery. As these recordings are overdubbed they degenerate, becoming unrecognizable from the perfect template. The music manuscript will similarly undergo a series of transformations and hence deterioration.

Sarah Dobai's The Chase uses a reduced visual vocabulary to create a minimal suspense movie. The projected double-image video develops a fascination with picturing fictive, and often theatrical dramas, within actual sites in the city. The subject is portrayed as a fearful victim of potential danger, real or imagined. The looping of the sequences constantly defers the expectant viewer from a conclusion.

Peter Fillingham takes moulds of 18 & 24 inch meteorological balloons to create repetitive fibreglass casts. The exquisite detail deteriorates during the process as a slightly different tone appears on the surface of the objects. The sculptures, configured of both the casts and the actual balloons seem to spontaneously reproduce, re-appearing on each floor.

Margharita Gluzberg's meticulously detailed pencil drawings of lady’s wigs and fictional characters investigate notions of artifice and beauty. Taken out of their everyday context and disembodied, the wigs possess a surreal and eerie quality. Re-productions of storytale characters have a peculiar relationship to these functional items that is both comfortable and disturbing.

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup use the medium of sound to cut through the three floors of The Tannery, uniting the space as the operatic trio continues its endless cycle and potential degeneration. The vocal parts from this excerpt from Orpheus & Euridice by Gluck have been separated out leaving the visitor to piece together their own performance.

Simon Starling continually uses found objects and the processes of re-production in his work, usually with a frame of reference specific to the geographical context. For B.c.c. he has created replicas of the Eurocoin, a token used for access to the nearby Design Museum. These replicas allow visitors free admission to both sites, a rhetorical exercise as there is no entrance charge to either exhibition venue. Replicas of a Charles Eames stacking chair have also been made, one for each person involved in the show, artists and organisers, pursuing the idea of a 'collaborative' exhibition.

The Tannery, London - 1996

Attila Csörgo, Mark Firth, Annabel Howland, Stephen Hughes, Dante Leonelli, Tim Meacham, Mathieu Mercier, Tim Olden, Christopher Pauling (Guest curated by Christopher Pauling with Stephen Hepworth)

Computer World takes its title from Kraftwerk’s album of the same name and references a future when innocence and wonderment with science and technology are still possible, unlike our own computer world where such possibilities are banished to the banal limitations of the keyboard, mouse and screen.

Exhibiting the work of five British and four foreign artists, Computer World explores an alternative world through objects, light, sound and movement. There is not one computer in the show.

Tim Olden has installed four floor to ceiling Theromins, which translates the movement of the viewer into the language of sound, offering an alternative mapping for the spectator within the space, while referencing early science fiction film sound effects.

Dante Leonelli's "Neodome Series", originally realised and exhibited in the 1970's, echoed the 70's futuristic styling and a 2001 positivism that now reads as a kind of naiveté and wonderment. The domes gently pulsate with internal lights as the neon tubes respond back in some secret dialogue.

Mark Frith is obsessed and fascinated by a technological overload. His metal sculptures look as if they have fallen from a UFO. Mysterious in their origins they are etched with disparate formulae, maps and diagrams which both explain the object's origin and disguises its meaning. In "Computer World" he will show a piece which retains a radioactive core and a Geiger counter, emitting the random clicks of potential contamination. It both fascinates and terrifies.

Annabel Howland is also concerned and fascinated by contamination. Taking bank notes, she enlarges their detail and rearranges them in installational form, creating beautiful flowerings of viral landscapes, attractive both in their source and their derived manifestation.

Attilo Csorgo's work is a visual representation of the phenomena of physics. Often employing motors and lights he makes the tangible become intangible, the comprehensible - illusive. An Illusion is created as a glass sits glimmering on a tabletop, proffering an explanation while evading certainty.

Tim Meacham's" Mae West" consists of 200ft of clear plastic tubing filled with water. Inside a tiny plastic figure is pumped around its internal labyrinth. The viewer watches both fascinated and appalled at the figures dilemma and identifies with its fate.

Mathieu Mercier approaches science as a true innocent. He painstakingly constructs little support balconies for every leaf of a large household plant that he has grown, and creates strange assemblages of light bulbs, that take simple pleasure in the light they emit, while acknowledging the eventual redundancy of such an object.

Christopher Pauling's Kinetic sculptures humorously inflate and deflate mimicking some kind of biomorphic function. Their actions are triggered by human presence, they are both enticingly beautiful and threatening in their absurd function - he will create a cube of 3 meters with twenty-seven individually inflating units.

Stephen Hughes's "Gate Crasher" is a cast of an actual meteorite found in the collection of The British Museum. Remade in luminous resin, it casts a contaminating green light onto the viewer and it’s surroundings.

The Tannery, London - 1996

Sean Dower, Georg Herold, David Powell, Liv Rygh, Martin Shiel, Georgina Starr (curated by Sean Dower)

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The Tannery, London 1996

Ralf Berger, David Regehr, Jeremy Whitehurst (curated by Jeremy Whitehurst)

Center[e]dge presents the work of two German and one English artist who studied together at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in the early 90’s under the professorship of Gerhard Merz and Klaus Rinke. Still resident in Germany they represent a younger generation’s continuation of the tradition of exploring the conceptual and formal relationship between art and architecture. 

Center[e]dge is derived from Robert Smithson’s list of ten points of difference between ‘Sites’ (edge) and ‘Non-sites’ (centre). The artists will construct three different spaces that constitute individual confrontations with the architecture of each floor of the Tannery; moving backward and forward, within and without, the two forms of aesthetic practice. Architecture seen as a metaphor, as transient, and absence.

Ralf Berger perceives the ground floor of The Tannery as a "Tunnel;” this is echoed by his journey to London through the Channel Tunnel. Berger's work is primarily concerned with the body in space, in this case the body moving through the architectural space of a tunnel. Using video, objects, and performance he will create a temporal matrix within an architectronic room.

Jeremy Whitehurst creates individual text works to the dimensions of the walls on which they are displayed. They are presented on structures veiling the walls for which they have been made, just as the texts themselves veil meaning in favor of their objectivity. Whitehurst proposes an unending exchange between the structure of the building, the text, and the object.

David Regehr's work examines the idea of "moving architecture" and becomes perceptible through the components of movement, thought, and their exchange. His wall drawing installation stems from a series of technical drawings executed during a ten day walk of buildings along the Via Appia, between Rome and Capua; and is the latest in a series including New Mexico, and the Alps.

The Tannery wishes to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Galerie Luis Campana, Cologne; and Galerie Sophia Ungers, Cologne.

The Tannery, London - 1996

Frances Carlile, Kate Davis, David Foster, John Hilliard, Katrine Hjelde, Nicholas May, Graham Revell, Lucy Wood (curated by David Foster and Graham Revell with Stephen Hepworth)

The cultural critic Walter Benjamin saw in the detective story a popular literary form that identified a way of recovering the individual, through the trace, after they had disappeared into the crowded populace of a new industrial society. The artists in Tracer offer a series of clues/traces that invite consideration of the artwork not exclusively as an object or surface but as a site where meaning may be constructed.

The cultural critic Walter Benjamin saw in the detective story a popular literary form that identified a way of recovering the individual, through their trace, after they had disappeared into the crowded populace of a new industrial society. The artists in Tracer offer a series of clues/traces that invite consideration of the artwork not exclusively as an object or surface but as a site where meaning may be constructed.

Graham Revell's television screen projection of an area of the gallery wall records it's periodic dusting in a search for or erasure of clues, falling flakes of paint creating paths of light that accumulate to reveal the final resting place of the debris.

David Foster makes paintings by means of processes that emphasise the surface by casting and question it by presenting fragments of existing surfaces as evidence alluding to other possible spaces.

Frances Carlile alters and arranges fragments of the real world, using drawing and modelling to manipulate objects so that shadows or the handprints of an unknown person are in fact built into works that invite reverie on memory, loss and absence.

Nicholas May creates trompe l'oeil abstracts formed from a collision of material and mark making. They evade possible deciphering of authorship by the erasure of the trace, leaving instead a conundrum of making.

John Hilliard proposes his work as a scene for detection. Scenarios are carefully staged and photographed in which fragmented narratives are proposed, whose reconstruction is left to the viewer.

Kate Davis uses sculpture to describe states and events at the edge of consciousness. Images and objects are brought together colluding to achieve meaning and the possibility of knowledge.

Katrine Hjelde's high gloss, low relief painting installation pictures rooms from the Wallace Collection in low relief. Abutted at right angles they implicate the viewer in an ever-shifting world of reflection into which they can never enter.

Lucy Wood invites the viewer's participation in a deadly exercise. A gleaming full-size trampoline has been manufactured, it's canvas replaced by a single flawless sheet of glass: A crime waiting to happen…

The Tannery, London - 1995

Glenn Brown, Jeremy Dickinson, Gregory Green, Stephen Hepworth, Brendan Quick, Andrew Renton, Paul Stone

Obsession is an exhibition which charts and explores male preoccupations. These range from the hobbyist to the neurotic, from the erotic to the dull.

Paul Stone is interested in exploring and questioning the ideas and values we are taught during our childhood and school education. He has had the handwriting of his teachers analysed by a graphologist whose psychological profile he displays next to their reports on him in a work that questions power structures and so perceived notions of what constitutes the correct.

Brendan Quick is preoccupied by fantasy, the seedy fantasy of grungy film making saturated with the brittle undertow of 70's bad fashion chic; through his deconstructed stagings he offers a lament for a decade no one wants to remember, and wishes they could forget.

Glenn Brown makes versions of other people's paintings, which he adopts as part of his own cannon. The expressive gestures of Auerbach, the Surrealism of Dali, and the airbrushed sci- fi fantasies of Chris Foss are painted in tromp l'oeil style, altering scale and colour, focusing on detail and changing orientation; these are then hung in spaces painted a single bright colour indicating a place where things are ordered as his. In his piece "Exercise One" he has taken a found anonymous presumed self-portrait of a school girl, this has been photographed and enlarged to menacing proportions, and hangs in a claustrophobic white walled space reproduced five identical times.

Andrew Renton is best known as a writer and curator. For Obsession he will offer an internal critique of the show, in the form of a fax project transmitted from 1st December (the start of Advent) throughout the show from London and Jerusalem; which will combine with an interpretation of a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud from the Compendium of Jewish Law.

Stephen Hepworth explores ideas of language and desire, through the adoption of his role of a translator. Using visual signs and existing language forms (shorthand, Morse code, and braille;) changing their scale, material and form, he proposes and eroticises another reader who is other and different.

Gregory Green is an American artist who is interested in the processes of individual and collective empowerment. His various projects extend from the researching, building and distribution of the means of localised and mass destruction, through the democratisation of the radio and television channels, to the creation of a new country: The Free State of Caroline.

Jeremy Dickinson paints super-real renditions buses. These he displays as trophies lining the walls of galleries, a document to his collectors zeal, and a telling record of the uniqueness of types and liveries which we locate and indeed transport ourselves.