Johns’ play with representation is well evidenced in the exhibition which shows 150 of the artist’s sculptures, paintings and drawings and is the first major retrospective of his work to be shown in the UK for 40 years. The flags, maps, and numbers for which the artist is most well known are all abundantly represented, as are his bright, colourful canvases with words stencilled into the background, his painted bronzes, his graphite drawings and lithographs. In each example there is an investigation into the nature of the relationship between signs and their referents that remains a central concern of the artist’s work. The complexity of these experiments vary, but they are always interesting, evidencing the turn in the 1950s towards a consideration of the nature of symbols, developed throughout the decades of Johns’ career to include attention to numerous influences, ranging from Ballantine beer to Samuel Beckett’s Fizzles.

 
Although this is interesting to consider, what stands out in the exhibition is not the artist’s conceptual play but his formal investigations. Encaustic is the material particularly associated with Johns, and his varied experiments with this mix of wax and pigment is visible throughout the show with works like Painting Bitten by a Man (1961) in which a deep and abject waxy grey surface is scraped through by the teeth of the artist, Usuyuki (1977- 8), a white cross-hatched triptych with brighter colours visible underneath the dull short lines on the surface, and Untitled (1988) one of his bathtub series that depicts a melting version of Picasso’s Woman in a Straw Hat and a figure abstracted from the Isenheim Altarpiece. More than just encaustic, this exhibition shows his experiments with the formal qualities of a range of materials. In a room dedicated to his depictions of numbers, there is included his Number 0-9 (2011). This twelve panel bronze work made more than fifty years after his iconic Flag demonstrates a similar interest in surface and material. The patination on the bronze ranges from excremental brown to blackened silver, not the smooth surface often associated with bronze, instead the surfaces are marked with drips and splodges, sometimes smooth, sometimes rough and messy. Oil paint too is examined. In Untitled (1964- 5), colour is put on display in large panels of blue, red and yellow interrupted by swatches of rainbow colour and grey stencilled letters. Skin with O’Hara Poem (1963-5) demonstrates an investigation of lithography, recording the smudged and scumbled index of his own face and hands that contrast with the neat printing of Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Clouds Go Soft’.

 
This play with form is best demonstrated in one of the most recognisable works included in the exhibition. In the room entitled ‘Things the Mind Already Knows’, a quote taken from a 1959 article by the artist on his own work, the first artwork we encounter is Flag (1958). Though not the 1954-5 original that first offered a way out of the Greenbergian cul-de-sac of flatness that was dominating the American art world at the time, still this work demonstrates much of what was so significant about the gesture. Hung in a way that facilitates a close engagement with the object itself, the encaustic with which it is painted is textured and matt, a visually rich surface that draws the eye into its details and rewards close attention. Indeed, the rest of the quote from which the title of the room is taken asserts this attention to the material presence of the work; in a 1953 edition of TIME Magazine Johns stated ‘I’ve always thought of a painting as a surface’. Seeing Flag in person allows a detailed consideration of this contention; its texture and colour, its record of brushstrokes, and the trace of the artist’s hand are made more apparent in their relationship to the assumed flatness and smoothness of flag-as-symbol.

 
The Stars and Stripes is a form that is so overdetermined in its meaning as to negate any fixed claims for its significance; even if we are dubious of its capacity to be separated from its associations with nationhood and patriotism that would render it merely a sign, hanging on the wall of the gallery it can be read as affirmation, negation, critique, such a mute gesture as is impossible to decipher. Considering Flag in light of the claims made for painting around the same time (Greenberg’s radio address that formed the basis of the essay ‘Modernist Painting’ and asserted flatness as the major condition of painting was delivered in 1960) this is a painting that proposes a way for the lessons of formalism to be brought back into contact with the world, using the flag as an apparently arbitrary vehicle for a sustained consideration of form made apparent through the insistent materiality of the surface. Seen in this exhibition, we are able to engage fully with the implications of the collision of sign and surface, investigating the interaction through sustained attention.

 
This is the strength of Something Resembling Truth: it offers the viewer the opportunity to dwell on the complex materiality of Johns’ oeuvre. Throughout the exhibition, we can see Johns returning again and again to the same subjects and approaches, combining and complicating them as his practice develops. With the amount of work on show this builds to offer the viewer a keen and valuable insight into Johns’ experimental, formal practice.

 
Rachel Warriner teaches art history at City & Guilds of London Art School. Her book, Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero, is forthcoming with I B Tauris in 2018. Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth was on view 23 September – 10 December 2017.

 
Also in the first room were more canonical works: the Automobile Tire Print (1953), which Rauschenberg made with John Cage by inking the tyre of Cage’s Model A Ford and driving it over sheets of paper in a more-or-less straight line; a White Painting (1951) — three canvases painted white with a roller so as to achieve an entirely flat painted surface that could act as a register of the space around them (‘airports for lights, shadows and particles,’ as Cage described them); and the infamous Erased de Kooning Drawing, Rauschenberg’s successful attempt to create a drawing by the method of erasure. Erased de Kooning Drawing particularly brings to mind the ways in which initial readings of Rauschenberg’s practice as neo-dada nihilism have since been refined to see his work as part of a playful but serious engagement with the art world of his moment. The small paper support, gilt-framed, shows us the remnants of a work donated somewhat reluctantly by Willem de Kooning, which Rauschenberg then painstakingly erased, reducing this crayon, ink, pencil and charcoal drawing to a mere residue. The project’s success—reliant on the undeniable status of de Kooning’s drawings as ‘art’—demonstrates Rauschenberg’s attention to the conditions of the art object: this is a drawing only because there is a visible absence, the index of Rauschenberg’s labour foregrounded in the same way as the scribbled mark.
 
The combination of key works of Rauschenberg’s oeuvre with less considered ones was not unhelpful, but the room felt overly busy, to the point that Rauschenberg’s photographs of Cy Twombly from their trip to Italy in 1952-53 were stacked over Automobile Tire Print. There were also some strange choices in the presentation. Erased de Kooning Drawing, for example, was accompanied by a visible light scan of the work by Ben Blackwell, which recovers a spectral trace of de Kooning’s original for the viewer to see. It speaks to a sense that the work requires mediation, a curatorial need to soften the gesture for the viewer so that any implication of art historical impertinence is tempered. Of course, curiosity about what Rauschenberg erased is reasonable, but it points to the wider problem of this exhibition in that is seeks to create an historical narrative around the practice at the expense of the encounter with vital objects that you might expect when viewing Rauschenberg’s work. Here, his oeuvre was presented in order to be understood art historically: a chronological and explanatory survey that focuses on giving the viewer a sense of the overall significance of the individual artist with art works illustrative of key moments in the course of his career. For many artists this approach can be productive, but for Rauschenberg the works themselves are so much about the experience of viewing that if this is not foregrounded in their presentation the energy and vibrancy of the work is diluted.
 
Exemplifying this was Monogram (1955-59), arguably the most literal incarnation of what Leo Steinberg described as the ‘flatbed picture plane,’ which alludes to ‘any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion’ (‘Reflections on the State of Criticism’, 1972). Standing on the centre of a wooden platform collaged with fabric, bits of paper, metal, and the rubber heel of a shoe is a taxidermied angora goat. The goat’s long fur falls neatly almost to this painted ground, patches of colour are daubed on its face, and a rubber tyre wraps around its middle. The goat both stands atop and forms a part of a field of contemporary detritus, exemplifying the ‘shift from nature to culture’ that Steinberg asserts is Rauschenberg’s major innovation. Monogram is a work that demonstrates the ambition and energy of Rauschenberg’s project, at once a serious and convincing aesthetic proposition and a witty engagement with the tropes of postwar American painting: where Pollock laid his supports on the floor in order to create his action-driven all-over canvases, Rauschenberg makes his horizontal to create a meeting place between objects and signs; the seriousness of the former undercut by the combination of the mundane and the bizarre that litter Monogram’s wooden support.
 
However, in this presentation of the work, the wit and life of Monogram was literally contained by the thick glass vitrine—presumably due to conservation concerns—separating it from the viewer. Not part of Rauschenberg’s original presentation, it is now enclosed and preserved, an archival specimen for our investigation. In a display case to the side of Monogram were ephemera that demonstrated the work’s development before the key aesthetic decision to place the goat on the horizontal canvas. Again, it was a treatment that asked us to look at this work through an historical lens, presented as an artefact designed to be indicative of the late great artist’s innovation rather than an object designed to trigger associations and spark our own readings of the incongruous whole.

 
Robert Rauschenberg was on view at Tate Modern, 1 December 2016 – 2 April 2017.

The two exhibitions on view in Edinburgh offered a survey of Bourgeois’ extensive oeuvre. Exploring a chronological range that starts in 1947 with her early book of delicate engravings He Disappeared into Complete Silence, and includes pieces made up until 2010, the year of her death, this selection of works demonstrates the extraordinary range and compelling wit of this major artist. Together, the two exhibitions illustrate both the breadth and detail of her practice in a valuable curatorial collaboration that enriches the experience of both.

In the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Bourgeois’ manipulation of material is aptly demonstrated. Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968- 99) is one of her latex and plaster phallic objects that dangles on a string away from the wall. Its brown, dehydrated surface implies both fleshiness and mortification. Her bronze patinaed Tits (1967) emerge strangely from each other. Their pointed, hard ends look almost animalistic. The 1996 fabric sculpture Couple I consists of headless pyjamas which are stuffed and hanging, seeming to embrace. Conscious and Unconscious (2008) is constructed of two towers, one a steel pole topped with a rubber cone punctured by needles that connect to spools of thread, the other tubes of knitted fabric stacked on top of one another. The allusion to psychic states is mysterious, but the forms seem poised and loaded with meaning.

A highlight is Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) (1989- 93). Demonstrating Bourgeois’ attention to detail and aesthetic play, the mirrors reveal parts of the large structure that are hidden from us by the cube of wire fence that encloses the installation. The stone shapes, rounded and doubled, become eyes, breasts and buttocks in the various reflections created by the combination of mirrors. However, despite the evocation of flesh, the hard, cold stone negates any sensuality. Instead, the mirrors lead us to a language of fetishism, presenting an uncomfortable, fragmented and alienated body that is removed and distant. Throughout the exhibition, formal and thematic coherence is established among the works, which means that even though Bourgeois takes a variety of technical, material and intellectual approaches, the work is experienced as substantial and satisfying. The Insomnia Drawings at the Fruitmarket Gallery were created between November 1994 and June 1995, made at night as a result of the artist’s sleeplessness. These beautiful works are made on lined paper, musical manuscript, notepaper from the Pompidou Centre, and headed paper from the artist’s studio. Comprising both text and image, the 220 drawings demonstrate the range that makes Bourgeois so exceptional. Created with red and black ink and pencil, they feel less like a series and more like a single project that expands to fill any paper surface it comes across. Their display along the centre of the gallery highlights the formal consistency of their delicate lines and carefully sketched shapes. Sometimes scribbles, sometimes illustrations, sometimes texts, the vastly different types of picturing seem to flow in and out of one another. Both geometric shapes and figurative drawings seem to work in the same way, representing something obscure but evocative. #170, for example, is made from an accretion of cursive lines that looks almost like a hydrangea, building in such a way as to make something that evokes the beauty and delicacy of petals. However, the shape is repeated so many times that it seems entirely inorganic. A huge amassing of lines, it is edged by large red polygons, coloured in with scribbled ink. Marked on both sides of the page, Bourgeois has made a note on the back. It reads ‘sudden change of mood / dark red’. This play between beauty and excess recurs throughout. The scribbled pencil oval of #180 implies a compulsive repetition. #72 shows bare-breasted women, phallic shapes, plants and rabbits, and scrawled texts in French; the page is over-filled, its scratchy doodling suggesting a late-night purgation.

That the Insomnia Drawings are marked on both sides of the page creates an enticing viewing experience. Because the paper is thin, the lines on the back are sometimes visible but never clear enough to be fully discernible. The analogy to her practice is clear: something is revealed but kept at a distance, nearly forming in our vision but remaining just out of reach. Importantly, however, it does not feel as though Bourgeois is keeping it from us. Embroiled in her own aesthetic and conceptual expedition, we are shown the artist’s attempts to grasp at meaning. What is displayed are Bourgeois’ ever-developing efforts to understand and represent her own psyche, or at least a version of it. In a text contained in a vitrine displaying the artist’s poetry and prose at the Fruitmarket, there is a short list composed in 1958, which delineates the artist’s sense of her own failures. ‘I have failed as a wife / as a woman / as a home hostess / as an artist / as a business woman / and I am 47 – / as a friend – / as a daughter / as a sister – / I have not failed as a / truth seeker / lowest ebb – ’, she tells us. Maybe she fails to find the truth, but what is on view here is just this search, and it is as compelling and beautiful as such a quest can be.

Gioni’s biennale suffered from a similar sense of bathos. Inhabiting the Central Pavilion of the Giardini and the enormous Arsenale, it contained a vast range of interspersed artefacts and artworks, ranging from key pieces by contemporary masters, to collections of objects by past artists, to what are best described (with due attention to the problems of the term) as examples of ‘outsider’ art. However, beyond a few abstract themes, it was hard to grasp what stakes were raised by this exhibition in relation to the wider world of contemporary art; it felt as though this was an exercise in inclusion and display rather than a coherent and conceptually robust proposition.

An interest in both spiritualism and the unconscious dominated Gioni’s curatorial interpretation of ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’. This dual theme came together in the opening gambit of the exhibition: pages from Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book displayed in an octagonal room at the entrance to the Central Pavilion. Jung did not intend for his book to be exhibited as an artwork; instead it was a record of his own personal cosmology, a document of his visions and fantasies that laid some of the groundwork to his theory of individuation. Bright and intricate, a relationship to illuminated manuscripts is clear. The pages include legible, figurative drawings, and feature images of the natural world made strange: the sun explodes in pointed and twisting rays, and fire spews from the earth. After this introduction, the threads of the unconscious and spiritualism are present throughout the exhibition; work such as that of Hilma af Klint, Harry Smith, Dorothea Tanning, Augustin Lesage, Arthur Bispo do Rosário are just a few examples.

The display of Rudolf Steiner’s blackboards near the entrance to the Central Pavilion, together with Jung’s manuscript, sum up the kind of spirituality that is central here. Neither representing institutional religion, nor New Age spirituality, this is a somewhat outdated mysticism, prevalent at the start of the twentieth century, which considers investigation into the spiritual world through imagination, creativity and visionary experience to be a scientific endeavour. This implication of some kind of scientific approach permeated the organisation of the exhibition and its accompanying literature, and it felt as though objects were presented to us for assessment, but without the classifying system being made clear.

In parallel with this, Gioni’s curatorial attention to the darker drives of human sexuality spoke to the complementary theme of the unconscious, which avoids the spiritual and instead places human psychology under pseudo-scientific investigation. The works associated with this topic, which are in a minority compared to those allied with Jung, connected more closely to a Freudian tradition, which posits a mind that is riven by psychosexual drives. Hans Bellmer’s series of prints, Petit traité de morale (1968), are beautiful and unsettling, the intricacy of the engravings meaning that body parts emerge from a tangle of lines and colours. Evgenij Kozlov’s ink drawings illustrating his fantasies of sexual encounters during his teenage years show a latent adolescent curiosity that verges on the misogynistic.

Exhibited in the same room, Kohei Yoshiyuki’s series The Park focuses on voyeurs spying on couples engaged in sexual activity outdoors. The pictured intrusion into a private moment, which is in itself extreme, is made worse by our own voyeurism as exhibition viewers. We see the bodies of the lovers in near-graphic detail, and as such our viewing did not feel much better than that of the leering and reaching men who sit a few feet away from the couples. The theme of a sexualised and deviant unconscious mind felt more pertinent in the context of the biennale and its relationship to the art world than the emphasis on Jung, in that Freudian psychoanalytic theory has had such an influence over twentieth century artistic practice and arguably resonates more keenly with contemporary cultural production.

Gioni’s biennale included works made by professional artists, amateurs and people who never considered the work they made to be art, describing this inclusion as “tak[ing] an anthropological approach to the study of images, focusing in particular on the realms of the imaginary and the functions of the imagination.” On display were a variety of found ‘artworks’, the inclusion of which did not seem to follow specific criteria but instead welcomed an array of different types of making. These consisted of crafted relics, such as the Shaker Gift Drawings and Haitian Vodou Banners, but also Morton Bartlett’s uncanny dolls that he made as a hobby, and which were found amongst his possessions after his death, and Oliver Croy’s and Oliver Elser’s collection of architectural models (originally the creation of Peter Fritz) purchased from a thrift shop. Artefacts of devotion, of craft, of personal entertainment and of fetishistic indulgence were embraced.

The inclusion of Ed Atkins’ video work The Trick Brain (2012), which examines André Breton’s collections of books, artefacts and paintings, Cindy Sherman’s found photo albums, and Roger Caillois’ collection of stones seemed to be a gesture of justification for the inclusion of these artefacts not made to be art: if past masters can find inspiration in the (extra)ordinary then so can we.

Although there are fascinating objects and images that come into this category, the way in which art objects and non-art objects intermingle felt unsatisfying. This can be elucidated by returning to Auriti. The catalogue entry accompanying his model for the Encyclopedic Palace of the World states that “Auriti’s dream remains a timeless one: to embrace and encompass the unruly, multifarious universe, and to give it form.” It is precisely this giving form that made the double exhibition feel distant and to some extent insubstantial. Because of what felt like an open and genuine curatorial impulse to include both art and non-art works on an equal footing, the context that normally gives us coordinates was lost. We know the feat of collecting and organising is impressive and we know that there is much of interest included, but here it felt inaccessible. Fascinating objects and artefacts from the past lost what makes them interesting, and artworks became just more stuff: neither enhanced the other. Instead what was revealed was a collector’s urge at work: more things, more inclusion.

The sheer volume of work bears this out: Gioni included nearly double the amount of artists as were involved in either of the last two biennales, meaning it was easy to feel lost among his presentations. More importantly, without context the political power of some of the artefacts was removed. This felt like a remarkably apolitical exhibition for one that is at the centre of the art world. Even explicitly political works became curiosities rather than statements. Dahn Vo’s imported church is a good example. Installed in the Arsenale the colonial era church was transported from Vietnam and reconstructed. Hanging from the walls were cloths imprinted, through years of being bleached by light, with the silhouettes of religious artefacts. The result was a kind of Turin shroud of religiosity; it felt as if we are looking at something mysterious, ancient and distant from the contemporary world. However, despite its obvious resonances of colonialism and evangelism, these themes were minimised and the piece became another part of this mammoth collection. As with those objects shown by Atkins’ camera, things that were designed to be affective and effective were reduced to the quality of trinkets.

By contrast, politics abounded amongst the national pavilions and associated venues. Ranging from surprising interventions to practices that straightforwardly attack the viewer with a blunt and uncomplicated message, a number of countries presented work motivated by the wish to communicate a specific political point. The Maldives pavilion examined environmental change and rising sea levels, including impressive work by Sama Alshaibi, which was both formally interesting and thematically complex. Lebanon presented a piece by Akram Zaatari entitled Letter to a Refusing Pilot: aimed at the subject of Middle Eastern politics, it was aesthetically convincing but not subtle. Scotland’s presentation included work by Duncan Campbell, which examined the appropriation of artefacts by Western institutions such as the British Museum. Shown alongside Chris Marker’s and Alain Resnais’s Les Statues Meurent Aussi, it felt worthy and blunt.

The British pavilion’s immediately problematic English Magic by Jeremy Deller felt like politics filtered through Britpop. A painfully smug and unselfconscious collection of works, it alluded to the political without seeming to think about the implications of those things that it included. For example, in images from 1972 that were posed alongside photographs of David Bowie’s tour of England and Wales, there were more pictures of the troubles in Northern Ireland than of any other subject. Ex-army members draw pictures of politicians; Russian oligarchs are lampooned. After watching a video that takes a pop at the royal family – proposed as the ultimate symbols of privilege and therefore all that could ever be wrong in the world – we went and drank a cup of milky tea from a porcelain mug, in what was apparently being presented as an unironic symbol of good, normal Englishness. To underline this straightforward dichotomy of ‘aristocracy bad/normal English people good’, there was a scene of regular folk bouncing on a bouncy-castle version of Stonehenge. It felt shallow and determinedly uncomplicated.

In comparison, Richard Mosse’s The Enclave in the Irish pavilion, addressed in some detail by David Brancaleone in ER8, was substantial. In some ways it was deeply problematic. Its inclusion of documentary footage of people living in war zones and dealing with the consequences of violence both as actors and victims, was painfully voyeuristic, but the artist seems fully aware of this. The work is beautiful to the point of being sickly. The exceptional richness of the photographic prints is brought into relief by Mosse’s trademark pink colouring, which is at once artificial and grotesquely bodily. At some points it looks like blood, at others like plastic. This felt like a practice that was proposing something morally complex, a practice that is worth arguing with.

In addition, there were works that deserve particular mention. Although quite different in their conception, all felt ambitious in terms of their conceptual and aesthetic propositions. In An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale by Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus in the Romanian pavilion, performers re-enacted artworks from biennales past. The result was witty and absorbing. Alfredo Jaar’s Venezia, Venezia presented a scale model of the Giardini that slowly sank below a murky green pool of water, only to rise again, repeatedly. Aesthetically imposing, the movement of the water spilling from the model as it rose and fell created a sense of the world being under the threat of nature. Berlinde De Bruyckere’s Kreupelhout – Cripplewood in the Belgian pavilion consisted of a wax cast of a fallen tree, its materiality creating a compelling and evocative presence. The Netherlands showed Mark Mander’s Room with Broken Sentence, which surveyed his work from over a period of twenty three years. The newspapers that cover the windows of the pavilion, constructed so as to include every word in the English language, were a highlight.

Best of all was Bedwyr William’s The Starry Messenger, which addressed space both as a mysterious outside to be studied, but also as present in the world around us and in our very fibre. An adventure through seven rooms, it was part sci-fi exploration, part domestic scene, and part science museum display. The first room contained a model of an observatory, scaled down to slightly larger than human proportions, which was lit in such a way as to evoke model making and TV specials. In another room, with large pillars at strange angles, it seemed as though you had wandered into an episode from the first series of Star Trek, seeking exit through a small and extremely dark corridor pinpointed by stars. The video work towards the end of the piece, which riffed on the experience of the figure of a dentist in a mosaic, was carefully conceived, surprising and entertaining in the best way. Considering matter as both an astronomical enormity and a microscopic foundation, it was thought provoking, occasionally grotesque and clever. The video pulled out threads present in the installation as a whole, which was carefully constructed and sharp, treading a line between the mysterious and witty that was both complex and satisfying.

That this pavilion represented Wales, exiled from the central Giardini to a separate space in the city, brings us back to the tension between the art/ world politics perennially on view in Venice, and the flawed nature of any type of totalising encyclopedic claim. In the form given to the biennale – the curated and national pavilions – there is an implicit claim to represent everything. However, this was brought into relief by the graffiti that daubed the area around Castello and the Giardini, which read, ‘Anonymous Stateless Immigrants Pavilion’. Seemingly a hangover from a project by Ehsan Fardjadniya for the 2011 biennale, it was repeatedly stencilled onto bridges, pavements and buildings. The stencils have arrows on them that point you in differing directions, although the paths they suggest lead nowhere. Despite the two-year delay, when brought into relation with the concept of the encyclopedic, this seemed all the more appropriate. Unofficial voices are not and cannot be represented here. The art world, particularly in this manifestation, is a place of officialdom, supported by national governments, or at least national art institutions, working for their own ends, which is to promote a particular political or artistic view of themselves on an international stage. The money and the power associated with the art world are in full view in Venice, entirely appropriate given the nature of the event and the reality of funding behind such a spread.

However, with the presence of so much political work in the national pavilions, and the claims made for the central exhibition, it is important to bear in mind the way that politics works at this level. It is here that the art world’s collusion with power is at its most problematic. Official versions are the order of the day, and even those things that seem to be critical are often bolstering some form of propagandistic promotion for their institutional backers. Art’s ever-murky relationship to politics is again brought into focus: Venice shows us myriad ways to approach and avoid culture and society with art. However, and Deller’s crushed Landrover is firmly fixed in my vision as I say this, there is a strong sense at present of art quashing the urge to real political activism by means of small gestures of resistance. Even with so many different approaches present, no one tactic – not even Fardjadniya‘s unofficial intervention – seems effective. Maybe Gioni’s curation bears on this.

Just as the socio-cultural concerns of objects are neutered by their display, perhaps the consideration of complex political questions in art spaces allows those questions to be separated from everyday experience: a further degeneration into segmented and detached neoliberal existence. It is hard to imagine that a political message can be effective at changing anything within a context as officially endorsed as the Biennale, and the super yachts that line the quays near the Giardini certainly do little to mitigate this suspicion.

a cliché is not to be despised: its automatic comfort is the happy exteriority of a shared language which knows itself perfectly well to be a contentless but sociable turning outward toward the world.

… Soft as an Easy Chair, the result of a residency with the Cork Film Centre by recent Crawford College of Art graduates Robert Power and Rachel Barton, is an exhibition of video and drawing the premise of which – the well-worn themes of love and heart-break – inhabits this somewhat complicated world of attractive and comfortable cliché. Relying on the shorthand of ‘serious feelings’ that the subject matter implies, this exhibition exceeds the limitations of sheer triteness and, through experiment with form, manages to create something that is at times sharp and engaging.
 
Robert Power’s most substantial body of work consists of a number of pieces dominated by I Love You, a short film made of appropriated film scenes. The piece is bookended by extracts from You Only Live Twice and starts with Bond in his Sean Connery incarnation falling through a trap door onto an unsurprisingly convoluted steel slide to arrive – unperturbed of course – in the secret underground headquarters of Tiger Tanaka. There follows a short exchange between the two where Bond drawls ‘If you’re Tanaka, then how do you feel about me?’ to which Tanaka replies ‘I… love you’. This sets off a fast paced section of video which splits the screen in four and consists of minute extracts from films wherein the characters say ‘I love you’. The result, reminiscent of Dara Birnbaum’s appropriation works, is a montage of very short clips from familiar films – Brief Encounter, The Wizard of Oz, Rocky, When Harry Met Sally, Anchorman, for example –ranging from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. Power has organised these clips largely chronologically, creating an interesting effect where the formal conventions of particular eras, in terms of the sharpness of image and the colouring of the film, are foregrounded in their repetition. The rapid movement from one era to another creates a patchwork of textures and hues that highlights the formal qualities of film. Most memorable is the sound created by the multiple ‘I love you’s: ranging from restrained and trembling to screeching, it creates a soundscape that is peppered with tiny bursts of music, dialogue with other characters, and background noises, but taken in such small sections and overlaid so as to create a dissonant and overwhelming noise. The multiple ‘I love you’s make the sentiment seem entirely meaningless; though in not limiting his clips to stereotyped love scenes, but rather including declarations of love between friends and sarcastic jibing, filmic convention comes to the fore and any expression of love seems entirely overplayed and drenched in affectation.
 
Adjuncted onto this film are pieces narrating a break up. In Text Scroll, a small television nestles on the floor scrolling bitter emails sent from a jilted lover to their ex. The text moves so fast that it is barely legible, but small snatches can be caught: bitter expletives, desperate entreaties, harsh reprisals. In a connecting room You Left …. plays; the screen is again split into four. Showing a black and white close up of the mouth and nose of a man who speaks to an ex-lover in hackneyed terms, the image is presented in such high contrast that the figure is abstracted and at times he is almost totally effaced. The same footage is repeated in the four sections of the screen, but they are set at a short delay, meaning there is a round robin effect which destroys comprehension of the language being spoken. Although subtitled so as the speaker’s message is still coherent, the destruction of communication created by too many words too earnestly spoken creates a critical distance between the timeworn sentiment of the speaker and the artist’s inclination.
 
This collection of works pushes at the boundaries of the clichéd and expected. Although heavily reliant on the kind of contentless expulsions that Riley describes, Power seems aware of their emptiness yet still allows there to be authentic emotion behind them. Acknowledging the way in which the concepts of love and heartbreak are by their nature pedestrian and predictable affairs, Power seems to leave room for redemption; in You Left …. there is a moment where the sound is faster than the images that accompany it. This leaves the words ‘love you/as much/as I do’ only to be read as subtitles without the discordant soundtrack, creating a brief moment of clear, quiet and genuine sentiment in the midst of the babble and blather that accompanies the personal experience of conventional feelings.
 
Rachel Barton’s drawing and animations approach similar subjects but sometimes without the critical distance shown by Power. Make Shift Hearts and Rusty Spines is an animated film that narrates the break-up of a relationship. Portrayed with eccentric, ugly-but-attractive doll-like characters the narrative is familiar: the end of a relationship marked by both a nostalgic affection for one another and the knowledge that there is no future. The characters, though present in the same quirkily constructed room, are distant and clearly lonely; at one point they dance together, but it is a sad clinging on to something lost rather than the easy affection of a current relationship. Barton illustrates the emotional weight by animating a small silhouetted elephant moving across the walls of the room. Although charming, this piece fails to interrogate the clichés that it relies upon. The elephant in the room metaphor feels heavy-handed, and the scenes, though beautifully depicted, feel incredibly and uncritically familiar.
 

Her three line-drawn animations are more interesting, particularly Biddy with the Big Diddy and Fleeting, Shadowy, Misty Strife. Biddy with the Big Diddy shows an absurdly big-breasted woman aiming and squirting her breast milk onto an anthropomorphised tree. This seemingly causes the tree to start to hallucinate breasts with legs running across the screen, single breasts suddenly appearing in the air and after becoming linked disappearing again. The piece is short and intense, the way images melt and transform is evocative of Alice Maher’s animations, but Barton puts more emphasis on lightness and narrative within her surreal set-ups. Fleeting, Shadowy, Misty Strife shows a couple waltzing. The figures look almost as if drawn by a child; idealised representations which could be a prince and princess from a fairy-tale, they twirl and glide across the screen for almost a minute, finally kissing. After the kiss the female figure seems to collapse in her partner’s arms and then melt, falling away to become a puddle on the floor which then floats upwards and off the screen. As she melts the male figure walks off, seemingly unconcerned about his lover’s sudden liquescence. These short pieces are witty and sharp, their consideration of female subjectivity forms an integral part of the joke.

 
Despite its heavy reliance on a deeply clichéd subject matter, … Soft as an Easy Chair comes out well. The strongest moments in both artists’ work come when they acknowledge the problems of trying to speak within a language always already spoken, and either use repetition and embrace of cliché to carve out some kind of an authentic subject position as in Power’s work, or with light-hearted mocking of expectation erupting into the surreal in Barton’s. Although the artists are not always successful in their negotiation of this difficult line, this work is full of promise.
 
 
Soft as an Easy Chair was on view 17-31 May 2013

The material for this exhibition comes from objects created for decoration: sparkly hanging things, patterned clothing, carpets, wallpaper, curtains. However, Angela Fulcher treats something potentially trivial with intelligence and delicacy, intervening with a touch light enough to avoid a kind of kitchen sink drama of scattered interiors and instead only implying a human narrative of the domestic as lived space, and one primarily focused upon the strangeness of its artefacts. Untitled (Crystal Cabinet #2), a photographic collage, is the only direct imaging of people in the exhibition. Small black and white photographs of what appears to be a dinner party sit underneath flocked wallpaper, cut to give a glimpse of finely dressed figures who seem strangely dissociated from each other. It is a good example of the way in which form is used to resist hackneyed narratives, the sharp geometric cuts into the wallpaper which reveal the image below allow both elements to exist materially and conceptually, creating thematic coherence, but avoiding straightforward conflation.

 
What is interesting in Fulcher’s treatment of her materials is that it is the material itself that really comes to the fore; this exhibition is compelling because of the unexpected sharpness and precision with which she approaches familiar objects. One of the standout pieces is the three-metre triangle of carpet that sits in the centre of the gallery. Simple in its conception, this worn piece of patterned carpet is inset with a smaller triangular section of similar pattern that highlights the geometric against the ornamentation of the original. This intervention is seemingly straightforward, but it does much to such a loaded artefact. Fulcher chooses a section of carpet that is patterned according to the ubiquitous fashions of the recent past; it is strikingly familiar but equally nonspecific. That the pattern is cut into in an exercise of precise shape-making means that the busy visuals of the carpet are sharply brought to a halt, the contemporary popular interest in clean straight lines obliquely superseding the more florid decoration of the past. The wear and fraying that subtly mark the material makes it seem lived with, perhaps for too long. This treatment of materials is repeated in Untitled (Crystal Cabinet #3). This synthetic satin curtain material is carefully scored with sharp lines, a regular and repeated pattern that is echoed in the strange wallpaper construction that sits on the floor in front of it. Looking more organic than synthetic, the folded wallpaper resembles an origami hedgehog in pale pink. Again, the curtain is marked by age; rust coloured stains discolour the cloth, barely perceptible from a distance, but complicating the surface of the piece from close up. Where it would be easy for Fulcher to emphasise the kitschness of the materials she chooses, encouraging disdain for chintz and tastelessness in her viewers, instead she considers these things seriously, showing them as everyday items well used, appreciated, but also loaded with meanings not often regarded.
 
The photographic collage Untitled (Crystal Cabinet #6) shows images of the front walls and gates of northside estate houses, the little details that individualise the photographs: pillars, cars, gates and satellite dishes again portray mass design and lived in and personal. Cut across the images is a thin white line, scoring a gap into the representation of familiar environments. It is a line thin enough that it does not obscure that which it represents, but instead reminds the viewer of the representational, the white of the gap echoing the white of the gallery wall. Again, loaded and familiar imagery competes with formal concerns, the straightness of the line highlighting a grid like pattern in the work, the vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines of the photographs become visual echoes of the patterns that Fulcher scores onto materials elsewhere.
 
In this way Crystal Cabinet is a coherent and condensed exhibition. The precision of line and pattern in the interventions that Fulcher makes to all of her materials (whether found, like the carpet and curtains, or made by the artists, as in the photographs), a visual language is established that repeats across the detritus used to construct the exhibition. Fulcher’s skill is to make familiar items strange enough that we can perceive them without being overwhelmed by their initial associations, but not so strange that these resonances are removed completely. In this way we are given a means to approach these ubiquitous objects so that we can appreciate their peculiarity, but we are also invited to analyse, connect and reimagine them within new aesthetic and symbolic frames.
 
 
Angela Fulcher: Crystal Cabinet was on view 19 January – 23 February 2012.

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.

The concept of the reservoir is presented, in both Whitney Chadwick’s foreword and in Maher’s introduction, as being associated with the way in which sketching is a means to preserve thought. It suggests that each new line of text, each new image, adds a scrap of an idea to a body of work. Looking at it in this way, every page adds another angle to understanding the process that Maher undergoes in developing her ideas. The first double page stands as an example. On the left hand side, transcribed directly onto the pink, scrapbook-like paper is the phrase ‘everything in the world has a spirit, which is released by its sound…’ On the right hand side is an image, sketched in what looks like black ink, of a nude female figure with thick black hair that balloons out, almost resembling a mushroom cloud. She is covered in blue, purple and red paint, which is thin and watery and filters out into fragile lines over the top of the image. The wateriness of the paint makes it feel as though it is dissolving out into the page: the black of the hair is covered in round, white drip-like splotches; the entire image looks as though it has been rubbed over, smearing the paint off to the right-hand side.

If we are to think of this book as representing a reservoir of creative ideas, as is suggested, then this pairing demonstrates how this store works. The combination of text and image is evocative, the lines that channel away from the figure seem to be almost illustrative of the escape of spirit which the text suggests. However, they are separated by their presentation, obviously curated into proximity, the difference between the transcription onto the page and the reproduction of the original making the editor’s hand visible to the reader.

Not simply recording the development of a practice over the course of the seventeen years represented in this selection, Reservoir is a document of how we are to understand Maher’s practice at this moment, in the wake of the 2012-2013 retrospective Becoming at Earlsfort Terrace.

With this in mind, the themes of the book are familiar ones. There is a focus on gender, with female nudes who transform into mythological creatures and natural objects dominating the iconography. The image of La Mujer Sierpa traced in green ink with a head that splits into four almost featureless serpents serves as an example. Disembodied feet and hands stand amongst images of curled turds or above unidentified organic-looking mounds. A gnarled form that resembles a diabolic Christmas tree is labelled ‘the devil’s spine’; water seems to flow from the windows of alienating houses; a child is born from a giant hand. On one double page, mirrored cubes stand on either side of the page divide. On the left, a female figure seems imprisoned by vertical lines; she is accompanied by the text ‘give squatting a geometric shape’. On the right, the figure is absent, leaving only the vertical lines behind. The text that captions this image reads ‘the room of thin and fat hair: le fièvre’. This image points to one of the pleasures of this book, seeking the connections between the sketches and Maher’s best known works. The allusion to Keep (1992), which is constructed of human hair threaded downwards in vertical columns from a steel frame, is enticing.

As an addition to Maher’s oeuvre, Reservoir suggests very little that is new, merely reinforcing the major themes that are already established in her sculpture, films and drawings. However, this beautifully produced book is enjoyable, a concentration of Maher’s ideas into a satisfying document. In her discussion on the work of American artist Nancy Spero, Hélène Cixous – whose concept of l’écriture féminine Maher invokes in the introduction (although she mistakenly attributes it to Luce Irigaray) – uses the phrase ‘drawing is dauntless’. In these terms, framed by Cixous’ dedication to a female creative practice that is bodily and expressive, Reservoir certainly succeeds.