There is of course something truly loving in George Bolster’s act here: almost resurrecting his friend, Damian Doyle, and granting him a future that he could not imagine for himself. Art, as Bolster says, again in Self erosion, is conditional on the future. Without its pull, art flounders. There is no reason, none at all, to keep pushing, to keep suffering, and certainly no reason to make any more of it. Here, Bolster recuperates Doyle’s practice, remaking his artworks from memory, supplementing them with his own, and so enabling them to live on. It is joint exhibition, but with the sad caveat that Doyle appears only in translation.

 
Of course to remake is always to recreate, to select works and to hone in on elements that might only have become relevant with the passing of time. It is a one-sided conversation. The limitations of language – how to articulate loss, and indeed how to help – are foregrounded throughout the exhibition. Shades of words and symbols recur throughout Bolster’s work, and hang heavy, also, on any interpretation of Doyle’s. The permanence of death, as an indelible ‘punctuation point’ shuts language down. It can’t work there. Bolster’s mediumistic attempt to speak to and indeed for Doyle only makes this all the more apparent.

 
It may be a one-sided conversation, but on the other hand, it is an infinite one. Memory is fallible and thus bottomless. Such rich terrain forms the conceptual horizon for the exhibition, with Bolster remaking a series of Doyle’s modified readymades, alongside some of his own artworks, which often deal with belief and its systems. The exhibition is centred on Bolster’s aforementioned Self erosion, accompanied by a series of other sculptural works, both Bolster’s and Doyle’s, remade from memory by the former, in memory of the latter. The film was made some four years after Doyle’s death. In its voiceover, he reflects on Doyle, now with the necessary distance to articulate what he could not before. It is of course a piece about death, but more than this, it is a meditation on the necessity of belief as a means of endurance. Belief in art, in purpose, but also the retention of an ‘amazement’ indispensable to life itself. With searing precision, Bolster examines how and why Doyle forgot how to live, as the title puts it, and why he himself remembered, somehow. Inevitably, this attempt comes up short: such amazement, that lets life endure, only becomes visible as it’s lost.

 
The two bodies of work are very different. And it’s of course difficult to know how well they would have played against each other in the absence of tragedy, but it’s the only reading available. Doyle’s work, as presented here, appears more rooted in the here-and-now: modified readymades, massproduced thinghood, augmented so as to trick and second-guess the viewer. Bolster’s, by contrast, is more esoteric, more centred on the visual, though using language too. Whereas Bolster’s works have the look of artworks, Doyle’s are far more reticent in making that claim, like odd bits of something that may or may not be art. Preoccupation, an act before insight (1996) consists of an entire gallery wall covered with doorstops, lending an embellished air to an everyday object of little consequence. In another work, Buffer (1996), a pair of sandals – fashioned, somewhat impracticably, from concrete blocks – sit in an aluminium briefcase. Indeed, the pair and the series dominate Doyle’s work here. Taken alone, these objects are simply strange: cumulatively, though, they become familiar, even inevitable.

 
Self erosion, alongside the abstract installation that encroaches on its projected image, and a smaller ribbon text, wall-based work – seem to gather in around Doyle’s work, sensitively granting it the ineluctability of context. However, Bolster’s work cannot be taken alone, either, but must all the time be read in its relation to Doyle. In such a way, they offer themselves up to the same mediatory moves Bolster himself assumes, with Doyle. Whilst Doyle’s work needs translation, Bolster is open to being read through him, too. There’s something beautiful in that. For if all of the work here is Bolster’s, then all of it is Doyle’s, too.

 
Amazement Insulates Us All / Memento Vivere is a steady look at loss and death, and what’s left after it. The anxiety of ‘legacy’ reverberates throughout the exhibition. And yet it deals with such subject matter without once slipping into mawkishness. At times, it is difficult to take: though rooted in a subjective experience, such anxiety is universal. Art, as I said, is conditional on a future: like life, it is only bearable through some semblance of immortality, a means of seeing and effecting beyond the limits of the self. Perhaps what is involved is an acceptance of subjective permeability: of openness, of speaking on behalf of others, and of letting others go on speaking, on our behalf. At times, the unconscious nature of this thinking breaks down, and becomes claustrophobically finite. If such a thing is possible, then, it needs to be remembered and learned anew. As Bolster and Doyle’s exhibition shows, art-making has this singular capacity – to extend and renew, to restart conversations thought concluded.

 
Amazement Insulates Us All was on view 2 December 2015 – 16 January 2016.

Oddly enough, it was this notion that I thought about as I traversed Sam Keogh’s solo exhibition, Mop, recently on view at the Kerlin Gallery. The exhibition takes as its starting point the figure of Oscar the Grouch, Sesame Street’s most idiosyncratic character. The show comprised video, sculptures, and found objects, all placed on the floor, which in turn was covered by a harlequinesque vinyl overlay. The objects ranged greatly in size, but all were united by a certain barely made quality: they had the look of objects that once performed a use, but were now estranged from it, in decay. Indeed, the entire exhibition didn’t really comprise singular objects, but rather lots and lots of stuff, underfoot and all around you: to consider one object as autonomous was to somewhat miss the point.

A central video work, Taken out of/put into Oscar’s Bin (2013), provided some context for the cacophony of things surrounding it. In it, Keogh reads aloud a text, a disjointed reflection on Oscar. The camera slips and shakes, perhaps as people move around the cameraman. Keogh is in a crowded place, possibly an art opening, yet there doesn’t appear to be much of an audience: people continue to chat all around him, indifferent. The text is tightly scripted, and his recital a persistent monotone. In Oscar, Keogh senses a figure emblematic of non-normative behaviour, his defiant abjectness acting as a veritable two-fingered salute to established norms of behaviour. Sesame Street appears as a microcosm of the wider world, where ‘tolerance quarantines non-normativity in a cheap bin bag.’ The figure of Oscar, Keogh believes, articulates the contingency of normativity, and of things like good taste and manners: his modus operandi is based on the desire to ‘deface the currency of custom.’ His refusal is not determined by antagonism, it would seem, but by an extreme laziness: he simply couldn’t be bothered. This gesture holds the same import – perhaps even more – as a gesture of concerted action: as Keogh says in the video work, ‘a tonne of laziness weighs the same as a tonne of enthusiasm, but it smells worse.’

In Oscar, the abject is made visible and given a voice. The inherent shitness of the world is rendered palpable: in such a way, he might be construed as an innately moral being. As I stepped around the stuff of Mop, I began to think about ‘things’ themselves. Here, the found objects occupied the same space as the sculptural works. This lack of hierarchy produced an equivalence based on the fact of their material being, their unavoidable addition to the realm of ‘things’. An artwork, like a tatty shoe, just takes up space. Thus, if Western capitalism is based on accumulation – specifically, of things – then artworks fuel this system in tandem with other, more banal commodities. Viewed in this way, Keogh’s work performs a paradoxical critique of itself: like the obsessive-compulsive, his work constitutes the performance of a kind of ill-fated hyper-morality.

Oscar is recalibrated as a kind of messianic antihero, an unlikely avant-gardist. Keogh, however, is acutely aware that art no longer has the ability to shock. Art is now a space where bizarre or repulsive occurrences are actually anticipated. Artists, in turn, lose the ability to enact any real response, and are recast as what the artist collective Claire Fontaine calls ‘whatever singularities’, resigned to the impossibility of the ‘New’. In this knowledge, Keogh looks to Oscar as one might Duchamp, yearningly and not without a hint of nostalgia. If, as Jacques Rancière says, the aesthetic regime is predicated on the fact that, ‘everything is equal, equally representable’, then Mop’s work appears to be made in the doomed hope that there exists something that eludes representation.

In the video work, Keogh casts a self-critical eye on his creative co-option of Oscar the Grouch. Aware of the parasitical relationship he has entered into with this character, he also knows that this relationship effectively tempers Oscar in the pursuit of his own personal gain. By adopting the figure of Oscar, Keogh places him into a context also governed by its own models of normativity, with its own specific conventions of behaviour and taste. The art-world doesn’t even blink at his arrival, but simply flattens him within a system of ‘mall-like’ equivalence. Keogh is certainly conscious of the de-radicalising potential of art, and of his own complicity within it. By writing about it, also, I only serve to further placate Oscar’s essentially unreasonable nature. Like the artist, I simply take him out of one bin, only to put him in another: this is the double bind Keogh successfully navigates in Mop. And yet, aware that Oscar’s power is predicated on his refusal to be within any one system, Keogh wilfully places him there anyway.

By this action, the exhibition offers a messy – yet intelligent – summation of the problem of artistic practice in a world where everything and anything – however sacred – is vulnerable to appropriation.