You hear this work before you see it. The gallery space is divided by an expanse of blank white wall which obscures the main exhibition area from view. A displaced humming noise whirs and vibrates rather ominously in the recesses of the dimly-lit interior. On the other side of the partitioning wall, at the far end of the room, a split-screen digital video is being projected. Shot close-up and from varying angles, two wind turbines are slowly rotating. The intervening floor space is occupied by twelve sculptural jet planes elevated at various heights on quadripods that look strangely like electricity pylons; their tails face the screen, their noses point at the incoming visitor. One lone jet plane sits atop a quadripod facing the projected video. This singular jet is flanked on either side by the other twelve planes, six on each side, as if in battle formation. Their shadows fall across the screen of turbines and multiply along the floor. Meanwhile, the audio track continues to throb quietly in the background. Do we hear the sound of wind turbines turning or jets stealthily flying? We are not entirely sure. The overall effect is unsettling, even a little uncanny.

 
In his essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919) Sigmund Freud explored the etymology of the German word unheimlich (which in English we translate as ‘uncanny’). He observed that the uncanny is not simply that which we find frightening, eerie or grotesque but that which we specifically encounter as unhomely. In other words, implicit in experiencing something as uncanny we are aware that we once knew it and recognised it as ‘homely’. He writes:

This uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed … an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full function of and significance of what it symbolises. (Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ [1919])

The homely and the unhomely are powerfully set in tension in this installation. Hayes manages to make the form and propellers of the wind turbines unavoidably reminiscent of the form and propellers of the blackened and bronzed sculpted jet planes, yet the textural surface of the objects – the planes sculpted and the turbines projected – doesn’t allow for too easy a fit. The monotonously drumming audio track – at once the sound of circling wind turbines and the hum of planes – further disturbs the placement of and conversation between the objects. The interplay of sound and form seems to suggest that the planes and turbines are one and the same object, but not quite. Overhead, the glass apex in the roof sheds no natural light. Instead, the space is artificially lit, softly, by a few roof-mounted spotlights which cast a diffused light over the oily, pliable texture of the twelve planes modelled from wax and the burnished lustre of the single plane cast in bronze. The shape is the same but the textures seem to be interrogating each other. Adding further textural and denotative intrigue, Hayes has sculpted the surface of the wax planes to mimic polystyrene. The use of wax – a natural hard-wearing yet impermanent substance capable of mutating between both liquid and solid form – and the evocation of polystyrene – a man-made, brittle, non-biodegradable material suggestive of industrial process and fabrication – highlights pertinent issues such as temporality and sustainability. Still, the wind turbines continue to circle and though their form harkens toward that of the jet planes, the turbines themselves remain austerely white and strangely petrified on the enormous video screen. They continue to rotate mechanically, reliably, and rather beautifully in the background. They are pristine, bright and gigantic. There is something rather Orwellian about the whole scene.
 
Homely and unhomely. Hayes’s installation brings a heightened awareness to the objects on view. The wind turbine is purportedly the harbinger of a new, environmentally enlightened age and the plane is symbolically emblematic of relentless industrialised energy consumption. That is the official line. Hayes’s installation places such presumptions in contention. The ideological and political discourses concerning energy generation and consumption, which situate our energy use and abuse in a paradigmatic binary, are being critiqued. In heralding the wind turbine as a saviour in the face of progressive ecological global devastation are we simply trying to find a quick-fit, desperate cure-all? Is the wind turbine an ecological panacea or a political placebo? Or simply a marketing ruse?
 
Hayes’s work asks us to question our own complicity with the ideological discourses that enable us to soothe our conscience regarding our interactions with our planet and, thereby, with each other. The questions his installation raises are not so easily answered but they are concerns worth raising. A week after seeing this work, the droning of turbines (or jet planes?) is far from a distant memory. I suppose that is a good thing.
 
 
James Hayes: Looking into the Light of Dark Matters was on view, 3 September – 4 October 2010.

In any case, with a high strip of windows on the wall opposite backlighting Untitled (1965), the momentary effect upon entering the building is of seeing in black and white. The staging is highly calculated to say the least, right down to the step up and back down to floor level necessary to cross the threshold from outside to inside. What strikes one as so curious about the work and its placement is how supremely unaesthetic it all is. I would not hesitate to characterize it even as an object to be disregarded and bypassed for other more interesting works—the red coloring of the two other floor boxes are both real temptations for the eye. The brown colour is the main motor here. In addition to making the work extremely difficult to see, one cannot help but condemn the artist for his poor choice of palette. The tabletop itself concentrates these problems. Unlike the sidewalls, which pick up the stable values of the concrete floor, and take on a uniform hue that one wants to call true to the material nature of the hot-rolled steel that Judd uses in this work for the first time, the horizontal surface of the recessed table top refuses to settle down into a homogenous brown. The high-gloss finish catches all manner of stray light. It is mottled and darkened by shadows, glare from the ceiling bounces off it, and, last but not least, it showcases a dazzling array of natural light that floods in from the opposite strip of windows. This play of shadow and light is supremely distracting and strikes one as not properly of the work. However, in contrast to the darkly shaded inside surface of the two-inch inset that frames the flat, it is clear that the mobile play of pink, blue, and white light is intentional. The rigidity and stability of the two inch rim quarantines the play of reflections, puts the incidental nature of reflection in specific tension with the intrinsic qualities of the brown surface coat, and even brings to a focus the possibility that looking at the table top is the work’s primary purpose. Despite the relative simplicity of Untitled (1965), especially in comparison to Judd’s earlier floor boxes, there is a complexity of effects that is not only dazzling, but which has gone completely unnoticed in the literature. One just cannot fail to note that there is a transparency that inheres in the light brown colouration, that the dark brown of the inside rim takes on the characteristics of an appliquéd strip, and that the coloured highlights take their place on the recessed surface of the tabletop as an illusionistic focal point. Untitled (1965) provides nothing less than an analytics of surface effects.

 
Judd’s basic trajectory away from painting toward work in three-dimensions is well known. What Untitled (1965) makes perspicuous is also his difficult, even cryptic, return to painting—one might call it his return to modernism in a minimal way. The crucial experience in face of this object—and, we should add, in face of the other two floor boxes in the West Building— is focused in and on the tabletop. In the encounter with Untitled (1965) specifically, the beholder looks into as well as onto the surface of the recessed tabletop as one would a death’s-head in an open coffin (an effect even more pronounced in the wall-mounted progression Untitled [1964] in brass and blue lacquer on galvanized iron). The image appears as the most fragile and coveted of things. Recessed to a depth of two inches relative to the rim it takes the form of a precious thing once lost, here Donald Judd: Untitled (1965) conjured back to life, and now miraculously held as if in cupped hands. The anthropomorphic character of the combined illusion and support is precise; the image only appears as a function of the safety and distance provided by the rim and the obdurate sidewalls that make up the minimalist cube. The illusion of depth on, and, impossibly, as surface, the illusion of a positive world of color—of pastel pinks, turquoises, and whites—conjured out of and as the color brown, is breathtaking.
 
The upshot of all of this amounts to a fairly dramatic rereading of Judd’s practice, which I will not go into here, other than suggesting four telescoped points. 1) Relative to existing Judd scholarship, all of which uses the artist’s famous text, ‘Specific Objects’ (1965), as a primary point of departure, a very different picture of Judd’s minimalism emerges from confronting his actual works. 2) In a work like Judd’s Untitled (1965) we see a particular moment in the development of a very tense relationship between what we can call the ‘inert support’ and conversely the ‘localized illusionistic surface.’ 3) If in 1964-65 this ‘inert support’ is a distinct modality of the object, describable in objective terms and separate from an aesthetic mode of reception keyed to ‘localised illusion,’ within a year these terms will become impossible to disentangle from one another. The principle reason for this being that if this tension was intrinsic to the object in 1964-65, it will in a very short time, undergo an expansion to the extent of ultimately embodying the relationship between the object and the mis-en-scène of the gallery, with the object serving as inert support for the illusionistic activation of surrounding space, and vice versa. 4) In its largest sense Untitled (1965) amounts to one attempt in a string of attempts to reinvent the notion of a medium, a project Judd will return to again and again and again. Marfa tells us this and much more.

Rock’s creed is fun. Fun forms the basis of its apocalyptic protest.
Dan Graham, Rock My Religion

Walking up the stairs of Cork’s architecturally stunning but certainly not rock and roll Lewis Glucksman Gallery, you are met by Marc Bijl’s Teenage Kicks (2003), a gloriously aestheticised drum kit that is adorned with deep red and black artificial roses, candle light bulbs surrounded by dripped wax, a plaster cast skull, and spray painted text saying ‘Live Fast Die Young’ spewed onto the wall behind it. This play with the visual clichés of rock music provides the perfect frame to this extensive consideration of the relationship between the visual arts and pop music. The artists whose work is represented in the Mixtapes exhibition explore the relationship of pop music to its fans not by examining the music, but instead by exploring the varied accessories and associations that surround that spectacular industry. Music is at best a sideline, to paraphrase Matt Packer, the co-curator of the show, for an exhibition about music; it’s quite a quiet experience.
 

There are various strands that run throughout the exhibition. Certain artists included explore the sociocultural aspects of pop music’s relationship to society. Dan Graham’s video essay Rock My Religion (1982-4) explores the spiritual connections between the early use of music by religious groups, most notably the Shakers, and the later explosion of the rock, hippy and punk music scenes. The moment where footage of religious frenzy is combined with Sonic Youth’s Shaking Hell creates a persuasive image of a spiritual experience through music. Alejandro Cesarco’s The Ramones (an autobiography) (2008) consists of a black background with the titles of every Ramones song that begins with the word ‘I’ printed on it in white. The piece creates an odd conversation with the viewer; the repetition of the word ‘you’ making the listener-turned-viewer into a confidant, the object of both affection and repulsion. In focusing attention on the turgid phrases that are used in naming songs, Cesarco highlights the overwrought emotions that are so often assumed by the rock industry. Mika Tajima/ New Human’s 2008 collaboration, Holding Your Breath (Taking the Long Way), references Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil by using a similar recording studio environment in which performers Tajima, C. Spencer Yeh, and Vito Acconci improvise a distorted and affecting soundscape. This video serves as a sort of hybrid music video, both a consideration of how the music is viewed and as documentation of an original performance. It raises questions about the relationship between performance and documentation, particularly through the direct reference to the Rolling Stones in the context of the mass media and the glorification of music and musicians.

 
This exploration of the way in which music is venerated is another theme that runs throughout the exhibition. Bettina Pouttschi’s Fans (2002) examines the collective experience of the ‘event’ of pop music, with faceless fans gathering in anticipation of a Robbie Williams concert, football style shirts showing their support for just another spectacle. Anne Collier’s Anything You Want (Black) (2006) and Crying (2005) encourage sustained looking at the visual adornment of music, the close-up images of a tearful eye in the former and a beautiful tear-stained face in the latter are both visually arresting and ostentatious. Fergus Feehily’s Lilac (for Grant Hart) and Lilac #2 (both 2007) are a more personal take on fandom that represents a third thread in the exhibition. His carefully paper-wrapped Hüsker Dü album covers are illustrated with delicate flowers and then carefully encased in glass and wood, changing them from mass cultural items into precious objects reflecting their importance to the dedicated fan. However, it is perhaps David Lamelas’s Rock Star (character appropriation) series that informs most compellingly on this exhibition. The photographs comprising the first part, created in 1974 and shown on the lower floor of the gallery, were shot in black and white; light, movement and pose all reflecting the image of a genuine rock star in concert, implying virility, excitement and passion. The second series on the upper floor from 2008 were shot in colour; instead of the young, virile poses of the first set of photographs, they show an aging rocker who has slipped into cliché, no longer idiolized, but instead outmoded and ridiculous.
 
It is the absence of the presentness of music that figures most strongly in this exhibition. Despite the distinctive approaches taken by the artists to representing and responding to the world of pop music, they are linked by a sense of failure: the vibrancy of the pop scenes that they attempt to pin down is transient, and the objects that endeavour to preserve it sadly echo this loss. Viewing Mixtapes is both an entertaining and a pensive experience, the stillness of the objects and the gallery never match the vibrancy of the subject that they are exploring. Most prominent is the mismatch between the sought after spiritual experience that Graham describes and the attempt to control, document and represent it; the impossibility of adequate response to something felt so deeply by its fans is made sorely apparent. The exhibition questions both the way in which we are asked to exalt popular music and the hyperbolic claims that are made for the industry. The quietness of the exhibition, therefore, is poignant and apt; what we are examining here is not music, but instead our inevitable separation from the apocalyptic fun that Graham describes.
 
 
Mixtapes was on view at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, 8 June-24 October 2010.

In 1997, Spiritualized released the album from which this show takes its name, and the album artwork, which replicates medical packaging, instantly suggests that the machinery for space travel may be more pharmacopaeic than physical. The title further suggests we reflect on how ‘we’ are doing the floating – is it the Earth’s natural motion? The attainment of orbit? The loss of orbit, as ‘we’ drift uncontrollably? One layer of the voices comes to us as through a distant communication device, punctuated and closed by the pings familiar from Apollo recordings. Cullen’s show crosses from material to ethereal, from majestic and properly sublime to mundane and practical, and concludes on the same note of loss for the manned space programme that aimed to land somewhere.

The Apollo missions have represented, for a long time, a retro-future, a lost promise, a steampunk future that had the strange fate of actually happening. As this vision warmed again to the prospect of the projected 2020 Moonbase and subsequent Mars mission, Obama cancelled these ambitious programmes, and the Apollos settled into the dusty sublime of a handful of 70s space travellers once again.The first part of this show centres on drawings, of skies, of a nebula (the ‘iconic’ horsehead’, I believe, captured by the Hubble telescope), an observatory, and obsessive renderings of starcharts in various media. These latter are fine, except the lightbox versions, which raise them from the bringing down to earth achieved by the drawings into some sort of mundane wonderment. The second part, upstairs in the ESB substation, brings the starchart idea into explosive purpose as the stars puncture the wall. Back down below, the observatory pictures are neat, their ricketiness a nice reflection of drawn observations of planets (Patrick Moore’s famous Moon drawings of over 50 years ago), a tribute to the stretching of means that has stretched human interaction with space.

Climb again. This time pause at the museum-like installation of Sleeper Cells (2010) – fourteen tin foil sleeping bags, emptied and shaped in different exit poses of their presumed departed inhabitants. The foil itself is a product of the space programme, an evocation of the scientia povera used to justify the space programme on grounds of its immediate terrestrial use value. It also recalls the limited version of the Spiritualized album, which came as 12 cds, one for each track, in blister packs, backed in foil. The emptied beds are a soft monument to the passing of Apollo, the heat of discovery dissipating as the astronauts disembarked. Or – the giving up of this programme marks the move to another type of space travel – as William Burroughs often droned, ‘we are here to go, into space’, and to do so would mean leaving behind the literalism of rocket-propelled-metal-box physical travelling. These metallic cauls are as mysterious as the actual space mission artefacts, or the Easter Island statues – why did someone do this? Why did they stop? Or – what gave birth to this, and oh my god, WHERE DID THEY GO? WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

So it matters little whether we start by viewing Robert Morris’s Column fall dramatically from upright to prone exactly half way through the seven minutes of the filmed performance; announcing, just as it did in 1960, how static sculptural objects were hence to be viewed as subject to time, and to the presence of bodies. This moment repeatedly punctuates the gallery with its loud bang, reminding us of Minimalism’s roots in performance through Morris’s participation with the Judson Dance Theater Group in New York. The original column was Morris’s first sculpture, built as a prop out of painted plywood for an event which actually took place on 14th Street, at The Living Theater. The choice of the Judson Church as the setting for Byrne’s footage links Morris’s piece with the habitual collaborations that took place there, and back in turn to their source in the work of Cage and Cunningham. Morris had originally planned to be inside the sculpture, and so it is his absent body that the filmed column conjures: standing and falling in the empty church, forever repeating a parody of death and resurrection, to the ticking of a watch.

 
Alternatively, the film at the other end of the gallery space posits another origin for Minimalism. An interview with architect and sculptor Tony Smith, published in Artforum at the end of 1966, included a brief but influential description of his journey on the unfinished asphalt of the New Jersey Turnpike at night. The trip itself took place in the early fifties when he taught at Cooper Union, but Byrne’s film collapses the moments of the journey onto the time of its recollection, which we experience through the sound track. The aesthetic of the film closely follows Smith’s eulogy of ‘artificial landscape without cultural precedent’ as we travel in the car with him and his students, experiencing for ourselves the vast darkness outside the car windows, ‘punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and coloured lights’. The temporal slippage between sound and image is made more evident by the use of a mechanical shutter, which is choreographed to pass in front of the film as it is projected in the gallery, and break our absorption in it.
 
The effect of this process is that, as with minimalist art itself, one is made aware of Byrne’s work as an inherently performative as well as cerebral experience. One might discover the hard way, for example, that the only place to hear Judd, Flavin and Stella discussing their ideas in an interview with Bruce Glaser in 1964, which forms the sound track of another film in the installation, is to stand precisely under the speaker provided. Sitting on the floor, or moving away will result only in minimalist mumblings. The voices are relayed into the gallery as a column of sound into which the viewing body must move and stand, echoing Morris’s sculpture perhaps, but also embodying the precision with which the disembodied words of the dialogue are being chosen. The intimacy of listening to the original broadcast is once again tempered by doubts about its status in relation to the participants on screen. We watch actors performing in a radio museum in Dublin, but never actually see them speak. Instead, the camera slowly trawls over the equipment in the smokefilled studio in a kind of technophile reverie, teasing our desire for what is absent into reading a glimpse of herringbone tweed trouser as a cipher for Frank Stella.
 
Stella’s work, Tuxedo Junction (1960), shares its title with Byrne’s exhibition publication, and also appears in the fourth film, shot in the chilly November light that pours into the galleries of the Van Abbemuseum; bringing ordinary daylight, the ideal viewing conditions for minimalist artworks, indirectly into the darkened spaces at Lismore. This was the first venue in Europe to collect and display Minimalist works in earnest, and as we see, is the final resting place of many of its objects, braced and wheeled around, in the ballet that is curatorial care, a reminder of the ultimate fate of art, and all us mortals. Before we succumb to being dusted around, like the Judd pieces in Byrne’s film, reflection on a final layer of this intertextual dance might furnish a potential key to this film, one which provided the initial cue for the whole project. The position of Michael Fried’s famous critique ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) as both antagonistic towards Minimalist theory and yet also a central text in its formation, had always struck Byrne as compelling. Even in this film, where the artworks and the camera appear to have their closest encounters, Byrne ultimately places his own viewpoint on Fried’s arguments out of reach. In this way he avoids closure, and instead offers minimalism to us as unfinished business. Both as source and resource for the art-making and art theorizing of the future, its texts remain open to interpretation and re-interpretation just as its objects are potentially available to us in an endless cycle of fabrication and re-fabrication. The silence and melancholy that pervade these measured works, as in Tacita Dean’s filming of art and artists, seem ultimately to offer us little we didn’t already possess, except perhaps the knowledge that the more forensically we probe and document the past, the further it recedes from our grasp.

 
A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not formed part of Gerard Byrne’s recent exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts, which was on view 24 April – 30 September 2010.

On Duty leads to the series Guard (2009). This time, security personnel are shown standing. We do not know whether they are in the business of protecting property or safeguarding lives, and it does not matter. This is a reworking of the German photo-documentary tradition of classifying subjects according to their trade. But Chernysheva produces difference rather than similarity, deliberately failing to provide evidence for the physiological characteristics of a type. The guards are a diverse assortment of men, formally unified only by virtue of appearing alone in the work-spaces that frame them. It is a moving study of alienated labour and masculinity, of resilience, resignation, and withdrawal, induced by hours of standing. The men’s body language is unnervingly revealing as we scrutinize their shyness or bravado.

 
Russian Museum (2003) is screened on a loop in the adjacent room, its mesmerising but melancholic ‘zen meditation exercises’ spilling out of that space. Through Chernysheva’s lens we look into people’s thoughts as they look, reflected in the glass. We see them gazing into exquisite 19th century genre scenes and landscapes, oblivious to a patriotic guide’s running commentary, recorded on location. The guide confidently offers a collage of didactic absurdities alternating between the meaningless, the offhand, and the outrageous: ‘the psychology of art is inseparable from geography, do you understand?’; ‘only the warmth of Greece could produce such an upspring of human creativity’; ‘humanity is still chewing over these achievements like a piece of chewing gum’. But this is not what people see in these paintings. They lose themselves. Represented and lived time fuse: an ancient guard taps her feet, an adolescent girl in beige earnestly scans the flesh-coloured brushstrokes of a painted child’s cheek. Visual silence successfully exceeds the din of museum traffic. The contemplation of masterpieces is best pursued in isolation, and the museum, such as it is, is clearly poorly suited to providing the conditions for individual communion. The privileged pursuit of the contemplative life necessitates an extensive economy of guards. There are multiple museum attendants, and soldiers laughing and stamping their feet outside in the snow. But if guards and attendants are everywhere, they seem too halfhearted in their presence to proliferate and to become the nightmare they do in Kafka’s trilogy. They are just workers wrestling with boredom until they go home at the end of their day.
 
Installed diagonally in the basement, we find black and white photographs from the Moscow Zoo museum in light boxes, themselves like artefacts. Amongst images of prehistoric skeletons and delicate boxes of dead birds are photographs of a spectacled man busying himself with something from behind a strip-lit tank full of cactuses. The hero of Cactus Seller (2009) has set up shop in the museum and tends his treasures against a backdrop of frescoes resembling one of Komar and Melamid’s Most Wanted series – oversized stags in action, pictured in a forest landscape. The cactus tank is a microcosm in a nest of parallel realities: the world of the tank, then the bizarre world of the museum, then the strangeness of post-Soviet Moscow. Inside, life carries on calmly, at many removes from what others, outside, might think of as reality. Time does not stop in these worlds, it carries on. Nothing much changes here. The metro attendant below the ground, the guard above ground, the cactus seller, the melancholic inhabitant of the one-room apartment in Chernysheva’s reworking of Pavel Fedotov’s painting of someone lounging in bed holding out a stick for a dog to leap over (Intermissions of the Heart [2009]), the market stallholders in the watercolour series Blue-Yellow (2009); each an island in an invisible market that has been edited out of the scene – these characters exist within their own reality. Chernysheva respectfully studies these isolated experiences. Whether society is broken or the individual has been liberated from belonging to a type is left as an open question. To each her own reality, for now.

 
Olga Chernysheva was on show at Calvert 22, 1 July – 29 August 2010.

On the evidence of this exhibition, Garaicoa’s chief interests lie with architecture and the city, and the ways in which they embody political ideologies and artistic ideals, often providing a material rejoinder to the abstraction and rationalist self-assurance of those same implicit ideas. Paper cut-out architectural forms, undetached from the sheet from which they were cut, but raised up into the third dimension, occupy a zone between the planner or architect’s drawing-board and the reality of lived space (Bend City (Red) [2007]); silver mini-replicas of buildings associated with political repression and persecution scale-down and subvert the power invested in the originals while maintaining a fetishistic aura (The Crown Jewels [2009]); the artist’s collection of books on architecture, textual anticipations of real organised space, extend out of the textual and begin to architecturally order space themselves (My Personal Library Grows-up Together with My Political Principles [2008]); in a small animated video a figure stands, apparently with a feeling of wind-in-hair liberation, on top of a modernist tower, before throwing himself suicidally forward, only to reappear at the top of the tower as the video loops (My Public Obsessions [2009]).

 
Despite this clear centrality of the architectural, bringing into play Garaicoa’s wry critical eye for the simultaneous failure and fundamentality of twentieth century modernist utopianism, it was a different quality of the exhibition that set me thinking. A lot of this work brought the word ‘poetic’ to mind. This was understandable in the face of works like Untitled (La Internacional) (2009) which quietly altered (with an added layer of thread mesh) texts found in public spaces to suggest underlying, unspoken realities, as if an urban unconscious was being teased out by an artist-psychoanalyst. But with a work like Loss (2006), which contains no textual element, the fact that the word still felt apposite had me puzzled. Loss is an assemblage of Japanese-looking paper lamps, laid out to resemble a model of a city, or rather – as no one-to-one correspondence between the piece and buildings and streets seems likely, and the illumination of the lamps introduces a certain vividness – a three-dimensional image for a city. The work could be described as ‘post-conceptualist’ (i.e. part of an expanded practice, working in various media, throughout which certain recurring concerns are perceptible), but it quietly refrains from communicating any specific issue, nor is there any risk that its aesthetic qualities might immerse the viewer, splicing retinal effects to conceptual motors, as often happens with work made since the eighties with a conceptualist awareness. Instead, a certain language of ‘city’, and ‘global city’ hovers about the piece, as well as, of course, the connotations of the work’s evocative title. They are held in check, however, by the simple facticity of the lamps. No matter how much one thinks in terms of urbanism or globalisation, or homogenisation or the disappearance of the local, in other words, the viewer is still left with the lamps, and their ‘lampiness’, as it were. This feels somehow ‘poetic’ to me, a quality I suspect to be bound up with a particular realisation of post-conceptual art, and one which appears to be particularly at home in recent Latin American art.
 
I first came across this use of ‘poetic’ at the same 2002 Documenta, where it was associated by the exhibition’s battery of texts with the work of Argentinian artist Victor Grippo. In this case (in the piece Tables of Work and Reflection [1978 – 1994]) the proximity of poetry was made explicit by including poetic quotations on the eponymous workman’s tables (so explicit that critic Cameron Irving complained of the repetitive appearance of the actual word ‘poetica’, and the amplified ‘poetic feeling’ in a review of the piece for Frieze magazine). It was not an entirely convincing introduction to ‘poetic conceptualism’, being a little heavy-handed and issues based, but it did manage to embody a certain constellation of ‘poetic’ elements: the use of modest found objects, aesthetically untransformed, but artistically translated by their association with text that showed an awareness of Latin American literature, combined with a leftist sensibility. Over Garaicoa’s IMMA exhibition the twin stars of Jorge Luis Borges, practically a literary conceptualist himself, and Italo Calvino (admittedly Italian, but born in Cuba), preside. Less explicit, but none the less an influence, is the strong, concrete alliance of Latin American poetry (Neruda, Paz, Vallejo, etc.) with left-wing political action: while Brazilian conceptualism could take a public stance against the lack of engagement shown by Joseph Kosuth’s essay ‘Art after Philosophy’ (1969) – both the essay and the manifesto denouncing it were published in the magazine Malasartes (Rio de Janeiro, 1975-1976) – there were no such doubts about poetry. And the use of modest objects, more mundane even than the consciously ‘basic’ affairs used by Arte Povera or Joseph Beuys, brings to mind a statement by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, that he wanted ‘to disappoint the expectations of the one who wants to be amazed . . . it is only then that the poetic can happen’ – in other words, withholding from the spectacular, from aesthetic immersion, is an essential part of this ‘poetic’ practice.
 
So what is at work here? In its ‘disappointing’ character this art seems to me to have a consciously counter-capitalist aesthetic: spectacle, marketing, the seductiveness of design are all quietly side-stepped. In its maintenance of the facticity of modest found objects it also resists the powerful metaphorical working of ideology, a complementary step away from left-wing domination. The object is never dissolved into the working of the idea, as happens in propagandistic statement, but remains within its separate existence while maintaining an afterlife, as it were, through its figurative connotations. This seems to me to be the crux of the matter of the ‘poetic’, and an operation of metaphor in the face of ordinary phenomena that naturally takes place in societies with strong cultures of poetry. Lastly, this proximity of the literary or figurative brings in a ‘memorative’ dimension, distinguishing it from the ‘what you see is what you get’ immediacy of first generation North American conceptualism: a distance is kept in which pensiveness, light irony, the elegaic, humour, etc. can be brought into play.

 
Carlos Garaicoa was on view 10 June – 5 September 2010.

Does this show aim to confront the question of how painting might go on as a cultural form still capable of responding meaningfully to contemporary conditions? There are clearly many possible modes of such response, and painters continue to demonstrate the huge resource that the history of the medium affords in sustaining powerful new contributions. When the paintings in the present exhibition are attended to as art, then the burden of such a self-reflexive engagement with the history and conventions of that practice is implied. The achievements and narratives of art history loom up, offering a testing measure against which new efforts are set. A whole history of the invention, exploration and, perhaps, exhaustion of pictorial problems and idioms spreads out. This last issue of the exhaustion of painting was crucial to the dismantling of the Modernist paradigm in the 1950s and 1960s, and an opening onto an ‘expanded field’ of practice.

 
Whether or not one supports such ‘expansions’, the point is that pictorial styles and forms are historical, and so a question that such an exhibition as this leaves is: why this particular mode, now? This impressive new space will enable the Crawford College to demonstrate its agenda; Cork eagerly awaits more indications of what the current stakes of art are for the city’s major art school.

 
Frank Phelan and Donal Moloney was on show at Wandesford Quay Gallery, 13 September – 2 October 2010.

[…t]his is not language ‘transformed’ into art or literature […] or even a language that is experienced […] but rather, experience as simply experience—something that is private, amusing, serious, abstract, unpoetic. […] Language does not have to communicate to affect, to be ‘touching’ (14).

Emma Kay’s Worldview, successfully negotiates the schism between the humanist drive and the conceptual compositional strategy where language is assembled, not written. Worldview is nothing less than Kay’s exhaustive history of the world from the Big Bang to the year 2000 written entirely from memory. Worldview is highly personal, but rather than dwell on experience, and the inherent ability of language to represent meaning, Kay writes in the flattened, infallible tone of a high school textbook, Kay’s history of the world is created not through import, or sociological subject matter but purely on the idiosyncrasies of her own (faulty) memory:

A scientific breakthrough resulted in the discovery of the basic structure of human existence, Dino Nucleic Acid or dna, often known as the double helix. Scientists had been searching for years for the basic building blocks of life, and in 1953 a team of scientists in Cambridge University, with the help of Scandinavian research, isolated dna and saw that it consisted of two intertwined helical chains of genetic material. (107)

Worldview, spends only the first 75 (of 230) pages of the history of the world until the 20th Century, focusing on the encyclopedic reiteration of history primarily from the artist’s lifetime. Worldview works as the non-site documenting the site of Kay’s memory— while appropriating the flawless tone of cultural authority. A sample section of the index to Worldview reveals Kay’s own selective sense of history:

HIV, 156, 181
Holland, 45, 57
Holliday, Billy, 113
Hollywood, 86, 99, 145, 190, 195 Holocaust, 92, 95
holograms, 129
Holyfield, Evander, 197
(220).

Worldview is a maddening text, as it testifies that a contemporary artist could actually conceive of a world where ‘Aerosmith’ (p. 132) and ‘Archimedes’ (p. 16) have the same historical credibility. Kay presents a text which is both encyclopaedic in purview, but also centered on the fallibility of personal recollection.
 
Worldview’s non-interventionalist practice is typical of much conceptual writing, as the filter between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’ becomes a theoretical one. Kay accumulates language and representation in a way that foregrounds the materiality of text, but even more so the documentation of experience. Materiality here is not one of humanist poetic — ‘the stuff of poetry’ — but rather one that is developed through the sheer mass of the extraordinary ordinary. It is typical of Conceptual writing that the author should work with extant material to re-contextualize and refocus an already existing genre (typified by what Kenneth Goldsmith refers to as ‘uncreative writing’) with a focus on materiality, collection and accumulation. It is the documentation of processual writing, as exemplified by Kenneth Goldsmith’s No.111, Craig Dworkin’s Parse, Rob Fitterman’s The Sun Also Also Rises and Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy’s apostrophe.
 
Sol LeWitt, in his ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ — thirty-five sentences published in 1969 which operate both as a manifesto and as a piece of conceptual art in their own right—postulates that

28.Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly.[…]
29.The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course. (222)

This shared processual base for conceptual art and conceptual writing is not to suggest that conceptual writing is a temporally-displaced adjunct to conceptual art, but instead that the two share æsthetic values, and that conceptual art can be understood as a moment of Oulipian ‘anticipatory plagiary.’
 
LeWitt wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but a generation of writers later, these statements have taken on new weight. His statements on mechanical procedurality in visual art are also vital for conceptual writing, as ‘[t]o work with a plan which is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity’ (LeWitt ‘Paragraphs’ 214), while his resistance to humanist subjectivity seems even more relevant. A comparable stance, referring directly to literary work, can be found in Robert Smithson’s 1968 statement ‘Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’: ‘poetry being forever lost must submit to its own vacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustion rather than creation’ (107).
 
In his famous defence of Joyce’s Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett argued that ‘[h]ere is direct expression—pages and pages of it’ and chides the reader that ‘[y]ou are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other.’
 
Beckett’s defence of Work in Progress is temporally adaptable to become a slogan for conceptual work in general: ‘[h]ere form is content, content is form [.…] this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. [… this] writing is not about something; it is that something itself’ (502–503).

The range of people in her pictures reflects the scope of her nebulous social world, encompassing family members, friends from the art world, and local acquaintances from greatly varying economic backgrounds. Neel’s approach appears thoroughly democratic, bestowing equal importance upon art critics and house cleaners from her local area (a rare exception is a grotesque of collector Ellie Poindexter, produced in a fit of enmity). Even when she paints strangers such as a cheerfully tragicomic salesman there is evidence of a probing observation, as is she is capturing her subject unawares. Her paintings seem simultaneously private and public, perhaps due to her lifelong practice of portraying colleagues, friends, and family. Images of mothers with children are numerous in the show, but Neel’s take on this traditional subject is hardly conventional. Indeed, there is a definite radicalism to her focus on close relationships that tacitly question the authority of the normal family unit, and her group portraits, whether of gay couples, single parents or her sons and daughters-in-law, emphasize the potency of bonds that disrupt a patriarchal order. In the sole family portrait the father (John Gruen) sits centrally but without authority—his manneredimpassive expression is over-shadowed by the assertive and acute glance of his partner (Jane Wilson) and the quietly searching look of their gangly daughter. Neel’s portraits are never neutral reproductions concerned with likeness or painter/sitter affinity but interventions into the social, and the relationships between Neel and her subjects and amongst the sitters themselves have political substance.

 
Although Neel was closely connected to the communist movement in the 1930s (less actively thereafter), and produced some fabulously moody street studies for the WPA arts project, her politics were personal and intuitive rather than formal or doctrinaire. This related in part to her negotiation of a tough life as a mostly single mother and a woman artist— and not least a female portraitist amidst the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism and the attendant machismo of the colour field, during the period from the 1940s to the 1960s when figurative art was the straw man of High Modernism. Her late but no less welcome success from the 1970s onwards marked a revision of both elisions, but this exhibition demonstrates that her commitment to her work transcended the vagaries of critical fashion.
 
In her long career, Neel created a neighbourhood of personalities that ran parallel to if not against orthodox family values, a constellation of everyday people stripped naked, whether figuratively or not. Perhaps the over-arching emphasis on the personal relationship of artist to work occasionally veers into inappropriate psycho-biographical explanations, so that two paintings called Fire Escape of 1946 and 1948 are described as metaphors for Neel’s restricted life as a mother working outside of the structures of the gallery system, an overly literal mapping of Neel’s frustrating predicament onto the images. Nevertheless, this is a minor complaint against a brilliantly realized exhibition that pays tribute to an artist whose extraordinary paintings are imbued with an irreverent yet deeply inquisitive and sympathetic sensibility.
 
 
Alice Neel: Painted Truths was on view at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 8 July – 17 September 2010.