Mark Hansel at Jack The Pelican: Sept 7-Oct 7

On the other hand..
'Youth is Wasted', a show by Mark Hansel at Jack the Pelican is a waste of time. Poorly executed with vacuous subject matter, this show encapsulates a lot of things I don't like about the current art scene. There are artists that deal with youth well - Ryan McGinley for one in his depiction of transient moments and aspects of youth that slip beyond our grasp. But here Hansel merely offers bland idealized stereotypes that smack more of the extended childhoods of Williamsburg 20 somethings (and 30 somethings for that matter) than any real celebration or evocation of youth.

Jim Torok at Pierogi Gallery, Sept. 7-Oct. 8

This is a surprising show. Reading the press release I was very sceptical: "Jim Torok is schizophrenic, completely insane, and loves his mother. His one saving grace is his keen sense of humor. Torok is known for two bodies of work—both based on acute observation, but that is just the beginning. In one, he makes cartoon-style storyboard drawings that range from self-doubt to political correctness. These narratives are simultaneously hilarious and sobering, innocently optimistic and cynical. The other consists of his small, skillfully rendered portraits. This exhibition of new work will bring together both sides of Torok’s split personality".

I mean, I don't want to sound P.C. but I thought we had gotten over equating schizophrenia with split personality disorder a decade back or so. Also, I am suspicious of art that needs mental illness to justify it. Too often it is just a cynical attempt to either cash in on the buzz around outsider art or to pass off lousy work as interesting. Or both.


However Torok's work is both impressive and utterly charming. His cartoon strips are affecting in their simplicity. Reminiscent of Harvey Pekar in their resolute everydayness they are distinguished by the ability to bring a tighter focus to the minutae of life than Pekar. Those works that deal with the artist's uncertainty about global issues are tales familiar to many of us but I preferred the works that deal most directly with the artists life. The narrative arcs of these stories are often slight - e.g The artist goes to see a band. The end - but are all the more effective for that. To this end they often have the paradoxical result of almost producing a still-life - a small detail frozen and preserved.


This idea serves as the connection between Torok's cartoon work and his really quite superb portrait work on view in the back room. For these portraits too almost become still-life. The small dimensions and mainly black and white rendering immediately brings to mind Victorian death jewelry and lockets containing photos of the deceased. This is primarily an effect of the size of portraits and their relation to the white paper around them. They seem to freeze their subjects in a strange manner that isolates them and reduces to a memento or keepsake.


It is obvious by the careful rendering and the relaxed easy poses that most of the subjects are close to the artist (including himself, the closest of them all!). In this light it is interesting therefore that by transforming them into art, Torok's work also render them lifeless. The effect is becomes even more apparent when the miniature black and white portraits are contrasted with the larger color portraits which, though they recall both Chuck Close and Thomas Ruff's portraits, work according to a more traditional logic of portraiture.

Fragments of Europe: Neo Rauch at the Met

The Neo Rauch show currently at the Met is a strange beast. Not least because the Museum has chosen to cram about 10 paintings, all reasonably large-scale into a very small mezzanine gallery. The low ceilings and tight hanging of the canvases may perhaps add to the atmosphere of oppression and foreboding that many of the works produce, but it also serves to undermine the monumental character that not a few of the paintings suggest.

The term monumental here refers not to a judgment of the worth of the work but rather indicates the manner in which the paintings reference (amongst many other things) social realist art and its attempts to elevate the proletariat to the highest levels, or at least maintain the illusion of its elevation. Die Flamme is a good case in point here. At first glance the subject has the determined gait of the archetypal good worker making his way to the factory on time. Flags held in both hands suggest patriotism and loyalty, while the featureless face makes of him an Everyman. One thus imagines the paintings suspended high on the museum wall, with little distraction around it, demanding our awe and submission.

Such a mode of display would throw into even greater relief the ambiguities and fractures at the heart of the work for these in my view are what is at stake. If we are to take Rauch at his word, then his paintings do not express single, coherent meanings. Much of their content, so he says, consists of dream imagery. On the individual canvases the images are not made to integrate but rather blur at the edges, shading into each other as if the paintings were collages with the hard edges painted over.

As such they bring to mind the work of another German, the writer W.G Sebald, whose books concerned themselves with a similar inability to integrate memory and history, to make the fragments of the past cohere into a life. Both artists use what we might call a method of alignment to create echo and reverberation within and between the works. In this way the fragments of history can start to indicate what has been left out by outlining aporias, the shapes of what is missing.Think too of the name of the show 'Para' which suggests many words (paraphrase, paradox) without necessarily reconciling them.


Of course this attempt brings with it the question of the author's/artist's position within such a history. This is why painting and the artist are so often referenced in the works on show here.In both Jagdzimmer (right) and Paranoia there are paintings in the background. In Vater a man holds a camera, that points not at the man-child in the fathers arms but at the smoky indeterminate space between light (candle) and man (father).
Most significantly, in die Flamme the figure is astride over a trough containing paint tins, while the planks of wood lashed to his legs make an absurdity of any manoeuvre.

Thus the painter's dilemma is that of the European of late Modernity. It is the question of how to reconcile Europe's highest achievements and aspirations with its worst excesses and degradations. Monarchy and socialism, tradition and innovation, urbanism and pastoralism, classicism and modernism. Can one respond or is it a sisyphean task? We shall see. In the face of uncertainty, conservativism is always a temptation and Rauch has indeed described himself as conservative. But one can also cast light on the uncertainty of where we stand in history in the hope of least appreciating, if not understanding it as Rauch also seems to do. Rauch is ambiguous about his position, but then again, such ambigiuity is wholly in keeping with the dilemma.

Cive Murphy - Scapes - Magnan Projects

This is a short piece written for Murphy's first solo exhibition in New York. It contains elements of a longer essay which can be found on an earlier post.

Clive Murphy - Scapes



The work of Clive Murphy concerns itself with both site and surface - not only the position of the individual within an increasingly ‘mass’ oriented environment but also the contours, the landscapes through which this environing is revealed. Exploring themes of hierarchy, inter-relationality and meaning formation, he infiltrates sites of visual signification with a combination of pathos and incongruity, reconstituting ideological, cultural and rhetorical systems in an effort to situate anew a sense of human space.

Murphy’s practice draws from the peripheries of visual culture, mining such diverse sources as porn spam, folk art, found audio cassette tape, technical drawings and fairground inflatables. He appropriates and reconfigures familiar signifiers in order to explore their wider cultural resonance, uncovering new ground for the proliferation of diverse meanings.



His methodology centers around the expansion and abstraction of the concept or genre of ‘landscape’ as it relates to environment in a cultural and semiological sense. And while the conscious embrace of low culture displays a debt to Pop Art it also points beyond this by illustrating relationships between Pop Art and landscape

Operating in a characteristically lo-fi manner, using materials and techniques that exist quite far down on the artistic food chain, he strives for ends greater than the sums of their parts in an effort to elevate and democratise.

Murphy’s work has consistently engaged with questions concerning the individual’s position within the sheer mass of information facing us, the gravitational pull of these signifiers and sites of meaning, and the way in which the individuals relationship to their environment is colored, if not wholly determined by the social and cultural forces with which we may negotiate but rarely control. Yet despite these sources of alienation, Murphy displays no resignation. His work precisely embodies a negotiation with these cultural forces, a negotiation that, despite the seriousness of Murphy’s intent, is shot through with a playfulness that creates a space for reconfigured modes of interaction and new possibilities of artistic experience.

Gordon Matta-Clark at the Whitney Museum

A retrospective of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark could not fail to pose a serious challenge to any museum attempting such a task. By its very nature - conceptual, often-site specific and, in an unfortunately high number of cases, impermanent - the work defies the strict limitations of institutional space. It is a credit to the Whitney then that this show is a success. The work is astutely curated in a manner that emphasizes the focus and coherence of Matta-Clark's work without sacrificing its urgency and socially engaged dimensions. The show is experienced almost as a puzzle, the disparate pieces we initially encounter, coming together to form a cohesive vision of living space in transformation, freeing itself from embedded practices and institutionalized constraints.

The centerpiece of the show, and the work that one first encounters on entry is 'Splitting' from 1974. It is the best known work and here we have not only the familiar documentation on collaged silver gelatin prints but also the four corners of the house on display. These, along with other large pieces of masonry from various projects, add a visceral element that is lost with the simple viewing of photos.

Matta-Clark was himself aware of this as evidenced by his method of collaging photographs . With this move away from simple representation, the sharp edges and non-intuitive manner of their construction comes to echo the fundamental undermining of accepted structures at work in 'Splitting'.It is a process of disorientation and re-orientation, what Matta-Clark himself attempted to label as 'Anarchitecture', that we see again and again throughout the show.

The Armory Show Part 2: Photography

There seemed to be a huge selection of photography available at the Armory and much of it large-scale work of a consistently high quality. First up: Enrique Metinides at the Anton Kern Gallery. Metinides is best known for his accident and crime-scene photography. Metinides' work is notable for his use of wide angle lens and daylight flash, which result in action photos that are strangely static. But the pieces on show that I saw were a departure from the work I associate with Metinides. Two diptyques, the works which alas I could not find on an internet trawl, juxtaposed images of people with images of physical space. The exceptional feature of this was the close relationship between the lines within each pair of photos. At a purely formal level the photos were almost identical, yet in content they differed not only in degree but in kind.

At the Project NY Gallery Coco Fusco impressed. Arguably not a photographer, strictly speaking, the photos on view here document Bare Life Study 1, a group street performance using routine methods of humiliation in military prisons as choreography. The phrase 'bare life' is a reference to the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who argues in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life that modern politics works by de-individuating people - a process of reducing them to a basic biological entity, one that can be tracked, identified and, ultimately, tortured. As such he sees modern politics as a culmination of a process that found it most overt manifestations in the concentration camps of WWII. Fusco's work emphasizes the role of humiliation in this process and seeks to overcome the marginalization of detainees by presenting her work as performance. Confrontational and aggressive, the documentation gains strength from the urgency of the project.

Catherine Yass at the Alison Jacques Gallery displayed large-scale photos mounted in light boxes. The work has a stillness and is scrupulously composed, clearly representational with no ambiguity as to subject matter but by virtue of the light box and use of filters it has an unearthly, otherworldly feel. Lars Nilsson's photograph 'Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood' (2002) at the Milliken gallery also has an otherworldly feel, achieved through a meticulous staging of his imagery (see it at http://www.millikengallery.com). Both provocative and unsettling, the photo draws as much attention to the viewer as to itself, with it's suggestions of voyeurism and observation. It's rich palette however detracts somewhat from the power of the imagery, by placing it in an almost fairytale environment. This merely serves to blunt the tension in an otherwise strong work.

Bellwether Gallery obviously have great confidence in Trevor Paglen as he was their sole artist on show. Perhaps this is understandable as his photos undeniably have a power, one that is greatly increased upon closer viewing. Shot with a high powered telescopic lens, the photos record the comings and goings of CIA aeroplanes as well as documenting alleged CIA black sites.
The work is highly charged, its nature emphasized by the surreptitious nature of the photos, and it succeeds in concretizing aspects of a new social geography that is often denied by those involved. Like Willie Doherty's work on the North of Ireland, we see that nothing is neutral and little is innocent. The nature of visibility and invisibility is also interrogated here. For the work suggests that invisibility is less an ontological determination but more a question of proximity. If we cannot get near such sites, who is to say they are there? What is real and what is not becomes radically subjectivized and open to negotiation - or abuse.

At Peter Blum Gallery the photos of Kimsooja stood out, as did Sabine Hornig at Galerie Barbara Thumm and Elger Esser at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. The latter's filtered and sometimes painted over pictures are almost classical in their attention to balance and measure. The yellow filter is also reminiscent of the autumnal colors favored by Turner in his landscapes. Other honorable mentions were Ryan Gander's photos at Annet Gelink Gallery, utilizing pieces of silver affixed to the images; Olufur Eliason's incredible set of 42 photgraphs documenting the changes on a single view over 24 hours and Frank Thiel's images of decaying surfaces at Sean Kelly Gallery.

The Armory Show Part 1: Drawing

So, last weekend I went to my first Armory show to watch the feeding frenzy that is the New York art market. It is a vast affair with many, many stalls representing all the major New York Galleries as well as those from across the globe. As such, walking through it is a rather draining experience. It is impossible to see all the galleries in one visit, especially at the day goes on and more and more of "the public" (as Darragh Hogan from Dublin's Kerlin Gallery rather disdainfully put it) arrive, querying the prices of work in tones meant to suggest that, 'why yes, I might just have $300,000 to buy this Thomas Ruff photo'!

The most surprising thing for me, though this is based solely of my lack of experience of Armory shows was the amount of old work for sale at the fair. It seemed like every second stall had a few Robert Mapplethorpe photos up for grabs. Of course it is the preserve of the other more alternative fairs like Pulse and Scope to concentrate solely on younger, less established artists, but it is still surprising to see so many established artists like Damien Hirst being represented by work that is 10 years old or more.

The fair is also dominated, understandably enough, by product orientated art and of this, illustrations and drawings were certainly to the forefront. It is of course apparent from even a cursory trawl through galleries in Chelsea and Williamsburg that drawing is the achingly hip art-form of the moment. And I must confess to being for the most part unimpressed by such work, especially the more colorful, busy work that apes the obsessional detail of outsider artists like Madge Gill or Martin Ramirez. The drawing on show here seem to lean broadly in two directions - geometrics and cartoon. David Zwirner Gallery unveiled their prize scoop - a series of works by Robert Crumb, but there was also the stylistically looser, yet more self-conscious work of Michael Cline at the Daniel Reich Gallery. Peres Projects from Los Angeles had work by John Kleckner (above)- technically impressive but somewhat vacuous. Claims situating him in a mannerist tradition are well and good but his work reminds me of nothing so much as 1970's prog rock album covers - things best forgotten.

A more adolescent and angsty style (also hip commodities at the moment) can be seen in the pastels of Moyna Flannigan at the Sara Meltzer Gallery. At their best they have a grotesque, exaggerated feel akin to the paintings of John Currin, while at their worst they are like illustrations to a smutty version of 'Alice In Wonderland'.

Examples of the more geometrically inclined works could be seen at Pierogi Gallery. Michael Schall's graphite on paper drawings (below) are, again, impressive but somewhat empty upon sustained examination. His imagined worlds are actually surprisingly unimaginative, bearing strong marks of a kind of David Lynchian industrial chic, but cleaned and sanitized to such an extent that the drawings undermine their own internal logic. These are stuctures devoid of any human touch and as such lose all sense of either foreboding or aspiration that might otherwise have been attached to such images.

Of all the drawings I saw, those that appealed most to me were the works of Markus Amm at The Breeder Gallery. Their simplicity and clarity are an antidote to the more over wrought work of his contemporaries. However, since then I have seen a larger body of his work of his online and it is apparent that his drawings in color lean towards an increasing content. Nonetheless these too manage to work against the odds.

Ron Mueck Nov 3 2006 - Feb 4 2007

This week I was lucky enough to see Ron Mueck's mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. I say lucky because the Museum was closed to the public and so the eeriness of his sculptures was heightened considerably by the fact that I was the only person walking through the two rooms devoted to his work. Mueck is an Australian artist who worked in animation and puppetry (for Jim Henson Studios of Muppet Show fame) before turning to sculpture. He was picked up by Saatchi, and displayed 'Dead Dad' in 1997 garnering him instant praise.

The notable feature of his work is the contrast between on the one hand a skillfully precise rendering of his subjects, which has seen his work categorised as realism, and on the other hand the scale of his work, alternating between minaturist and gargantuam. Indeed, the catalogue for this retrospective is at pains to emphasize his position with a tradition of realism. While there are merits to such an interpretation of his work, it does however force Mueck's sculptures to function simply as representations. Because of his almost exclusive concern with human subjects (I believe he has sculpted dogs, which were not alas on view here), this has meant that his work is generally understood as depictions of what can be broadly categorized as the human condition. Thus a scupture like Big Man or Spooning Couple become merely representations of alienation and ennui - existential themes writ large. Important themes sure enough, but haven't we been here already? Art has been expressing man's alienation for a good century now if not longer. Surely there is more at stake here.

And indeed there is. For walking through the deserted gallery one's attention is drawn again and again to the sense of vulnerabilty of the cast of characters Mueck provides. Wild Man looks not so much wild as frightened; despite his immense size, Big Man squats in a corner in a position that is defensive and suspicious. Both look like nothing so much as detainees who have just been stripped and are awaiting their future with an infinite dread. Conversely Spooning Couple also achieves this look of vulnerability, only this time it is by virtue of their diminutive scale.

It is this vulnerability that is I think the key to Mueck's work from Dead Dad right through to his newest pieces here. And the crucial issue, what raises his work above simple realism is the implication that such vulnerability is not merely a reflection of the human condition but is directly linked to the act of observation. These characters by their positioning within the space of a gallery become objects for the spectators gaze. They are naked and exposed to our God's eye view and we in return, experience nothing but impotence. Why? Because beheld in the gaze of another we too are powerless. As in Hegel's master slave dialectic, through our position as autonomous viewers, we are in fact paradoxically revealed as powerful and powerless.

It is no accident that the two least successful works on display at the show are both works which empower their subjects. In Man In A Boat, the subject seems to be in fact on his way out the door of the gallery. His positioning in a boat lends itself to superficial metaphorics of isolation and the journey of life but in fact it points to an attempt to escape the gaze of the viewer. In In Bed the fact that the subject is covered and not naked lends her a dignity and privacy, which while admirable, leaves little to wonder at except Muecks' technical ability.

Nonetheless it is significant (and this is certainly one of the few strength of the curators' approach) that she is being observed by the malicious eyes of Two Women. In fact the show's central motif is the omnipresence of eyes. Almost every sculpture either observes or is being observed by another. In this manner Mueck provides the clues to his work and it demands that we place it in a tradition, not of realism, but of spectatorship, surveillance, and the politics of objectivization. Is Wild Man the true modern man or is he the cast in a circus show touring bourgeois museums and art fairs? Is Boy and Mirror our inner child, frightened and alone, or is he the exotic feral boy held up to be studied for our edification? It is a touch of ironic cruelty that his attempt to hid from our gaze is thwarted by the mirror.

The museum has long been the traditional home of the vitrine display case and the diorama. Donna Haraway has eloquently argued in Primate Visions that the work of the museum has always, despite its best intentions, been to objectivize its subjects according to dominant narratives which dissimulate and obscure other equally valid narratives. It is this taut relationship that Mueck's work serves to indicate. We see here how despite our hopes and modernist desires for art to bring us face to face with the new, it is our own viewing power that corrodes this newness.

As such art faces the impossible task of offering itself to our gaze and resisting its power - a power to dominate and demean. The radicality of such a position may be better appreciated if we remember that one of the most dominant aesthetic theories is Kant's notion of disinterestedness. With this in mind we should ask ourselves whether such disinterestedness can ever be possible. For Mueck shows use that the gaze is always powerful and powerless, always effectual and ineffectual, always political but for ever isolating. We are as vulnerable as others are to us.

Clive Murphy: Making Space

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of the shutter release buttons, the rustling of crank of levers that advanced the film.
“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now”
He seemed immensely pleased by this.


In Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise two professors consider the spectacle of THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. It is the index of a world in which meanings proliferate and take on a life of their own but yet nonetheless implicate the invisible community of people required for such a world to be possible. So too does it point to the irreducibly social dimension of the Event, its creation and activation through the interaction of people ‘here’ and ‘now’. But DeLillo’s words may also serve as an index to the work of Irish sculptor and visual artist Clive Murphy. For Murphy’s work has consistently engaged with questions concerning the individual’s position within the sheer mass of information facing us, the gravitational pull of these signifiers and sites of meaning, and the way in which the relationship between individual and environment is colored, if not wholly determined by the social and cultural forces with which we may negotiate but rarely control. And yet despite these sources of alienation Murphy, like DeLillo’s character who is “immensely pleased by this”, displays no resignation. His work precisely embodies a negotiation with these cultural forces, a negotiation that, despite the seriousness of Murphy’s intent, is shot through with a playfulness that creates a space for reconfigured modes of interaction and new possibilities of artistic experience.


Ferdinand de Saussure has argued that language consists of both a signifier and a signified, whose relationship is arbitrary and ultimately conditioned by location within a system or a cultural context. As such there is no essential connection between words or images and their meanings. Murphy’s early work in the Inflatable Cardboard Box series displays an acute awareness of this and investigates the role and position of the viewer, the point where signifier and signified coalesce. His alteration of printed information on a number of these inflated boxes is a sly subversion of the forces of marketing and consumer demands, opening up a space where the viewer/consumer is freed from the binding relationship with the object promised to be held within, while also bringing the viewer face to face with the nature of these forces. The inflated space within the box holds promise, the object of our desires, while also promising literally nothing. To open is to deflate.


While such an attention to surface and the conscious embrace of low culture displays a debt to Pop Art, Murphy eschews quick productivity and mass productive techniques in favor of what he himself calls draughtsmanship . Like Tom Friedman, much of Murphy’s work is painstakingly constructed from the most unlikely materials, cardboard boxes, cassette tapes patiently rewound, black bin liners joined into sculptures. Furthermore his apparent concern with surface and superficiality is underpinned by an acute sense of spatiality. His series of street signs, utilizing American mid-west sermon titles extend the manipulation of physical space in Inflatable Cardboard Box to the manipulation of social and cultural space. The appropriation of space for ideological ends by religious billboards is defused by Murphy’s acts of de-contextualization. Language itself is rescued from ideology, or at the very least is offered as fair game to all competing ideologies. The significance of these actions becomes more pronounced in the context of Belfast where Murphy lived and worked for many years. The sectarian murals, banners and slogans there are a testament of how language and space is politicized - where one’s geographic and symbolic location can only be accurately gauged by ‘the writing on the wall’.

The symbolic life of landscape and the environment is further investigated in Murphy’s Untitled piece, from 2005, constructed from found audiocassette tapes, amplified and spooled along the gallery walls to delineate a primitive landscape. The personal history of the cassette tape, the legacy of mix-tapes, sharing, and their evocation of a specific period in the history of sound at once indicates the life of the individual and a shared past. The public and the private are brought together in the strands of tape collected and reworked, implicating collective memory and, like Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks of the West, pointing to the evocation of real and imagined social milieu through sound.


While Murphy has understood his more recent work on bouncy sculptures and castles as “a revisit to the world of the inflatable”, there is a very real sense in which it a natural development from and a deepening of his earlier work. All his work has a subversive edge, and both his bouncy sculptures, such as 2005’s I want to be you, and his bouncy castle unveiled this year at Mercer Union Gallery in Toronto, with their defined lines and austere black appearance, mimic the pretensions of modernist architecture and the self-conscious severity of artists like Malevich. Yet this mimicry is extended and transformed into critique by Murphy’s development of his work toward an aesthetics of the Event. The invitational aspect of I want to be you – not only its title, but its rising and falling armature, beckoning and luring the viewer into its midst – becomes central in his 2006 bouncy castle. The bouncy castle is there to be literally bounced on and as such becomes an interactive social event and an opportunity for new configurations of human relations. As such it distances itself from the aloofness of modernist and late modernist/minimalist aesthetics by reconsidering the art gallery as a site for unselfconscious social interaction and by questioning accepted distinctions between high and low culture.

Furthermore, the black plastic and rubber surfaces of these works have an unmistakably fetishistic feel, a theme that can even be extended back to Murphy’s untitled piece, in which the shiny black strands of cassette tape are stretched along the walls of the gallery, in a manner not too dissimilar to the walls of a dungeon. Both Marx and Freud have emphasized fetishism’s capacity to create distance, in that the object of the fetish comes to insinuate itself between two terms of a relationship by symbolically replacing one of those terms. In this light, it is apparent that much of Murphy’s work can be understood as an effort to engage with this distancing. From his early inflatable boxes, in their concern with mass production right through to the bouncy castle and its emphasis on human relations in the ‘here’ and ‘now’, a strength of Murphy’s work is its power to indicate sites and strategies whereby this distance can be indicated, subverted or altered.

Yet it is for this very reason that, despite such serious considerations, Murphy’s work is not overbearingly earnest or ideologically driven. Through the subversion and parody of social and aesthetic ideologies, he himself refuses to accept any ideology. Like his street signs that were appropriated in Brussels in 2003 “as the battle cry for a group of immigrant residents living in an area allowed to sink into dereliction by property developers” his work refuses single meaning by being open to all. His work is characterized by this openness and an immediacy that gives the work its particularly inclusive nature. We, like DeLillo’s speaker, should be immensely pleased by this.

Callum Innes November 9 - December 9, 2006

This show at the Sean Kelley gallery is over but, as I did not have a blog then...

Callum Innes is a Scottish artist born in 1962 and shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1995. Although at first glance he appears to fall into that already overcrowded category of abstract minimalism, on closer examination he is quite removed, even critical of the complacency apparent in both the tyranny of formal abstraction where intention, absolute control and artistic will dominates (despite any claims that might be made for the role of the unconsious) and geometrical minimalism, which often sacrifices three dimensionality in favour of exploring more lateral relationships between objects, shapes and colors. On entering the gallery one first encounters his early works on paper. These oils, dating from 1990 and 1996 are exceptional for the way in which they draw attention to what is behind the paint. Its uniform application makes for impressive surfaces and allows for a more random pattern development when, in Innes' signature technique, the paint is treated with thinning solution, as it is less lightly to follow the vagaries of the artist. 'Untitled from 1990', (see first image) predicting his later works is executed in a dark grey/black to achieve a stripped, shuttering effect reminiscent of a Francis Bacon background that draws attention away from the paint as much as towards it. Like Merleau-Ponty's ideas of the visible and the invisible, the work suggests that the canvas (or in this case the page) functions in a corporeal manner like flesh, as a chiasm between presence, absence and becoming. As such we see the work in a paradoxical manner as both complete and incomplete, moving away from the blank page, yet frozen in that move.


This relationship between presence and absence becomes more overt in the new works from 2006, perhaps even pointing to a certain figurative dimension. More precisely perhaps, it is the ghost of figuration as forms are revealed through the application of paint remover to the canvas. Monochromatic applications of greys and dark violets are stripped away to reveal the onion layers of the paint, a history or genealogy of the canvas itself. Out of this appears the ghosts of the artist's movements, reminiscent of sharp unforgiving landscapes or gaunt Giacometti style figures approaching in the dark distance.


Of all the works on show, I felt at the time that the geometrical paintings were the least successful. However, it is interesting that Innes also applies his stripping technique here too, though in a highly determined and significant manner. In 'Exposed Painting Cobalt Green' for example (see the last image above ), it is apparent that each monochromatic square is composed of layer of different colors, much in the same manner as Sean Scully's heavily layered stripes. But while Scully's work reveals the history and process of an artist in search of balance, in Innes' work it is these early layers which are allowed to bleed down over the bottom right of the canvas, exposing the apparent self-contained identity of the cobalt green above as a ruse. Uniform colors are thereby split into multiplicities. The names of the geometrical paintings are telling in this light (Cobalt Green, Cadmium Red etc) indicating as they do a history and life to color. They are not simple elements but are complex forms in their own right. In this Innes I feel is questioning the valorization of color and relationship that we see in so much minimalism, suggesting that these fundamental units of the spectrum are not to be taken for granted.