Susan Philipsz’s War Damaged Musical Instruments is comprised of recordings of fourteen British and German wind instruments retrieved from battlefields over the last two hundred years, including several from the First World War. Forming part of the 14-18 NOW arts programme to commemorate the First World War centenary, the work has a particular resonance with the history of Tate Britain, as part of the site was originally a military hospital that treated soldiers injured in the First World War. The notes recorded are taken from ‘The Last Post’, the military bugle call that signalled to soldiers that it was safe to return to base – it is also commonly used in military funerals and remembrance services. The instruments are mostly ruined – crushed, punctured, surviving only in fragments – so the sounds they produce vary from barely audible wheezes to deep yet wavering resonances. The notes issue from simple white megaphones mounted high on the pillars in the Duveen Galleries. Despite its immateriality the work has a profoundly sculptural presence, plotting the architecture of the space, but also leaching out of its site and seeping into the surrounding galleries, so that, as you move through different rooms – British art of the 1950s, or the Turner Rooms – the sound follows you, insistent and inescapable.

 
Philipsz’s work raises ghosts that are almost beguilingly tragic, literally echoing to us across history. The plangent, faltering notes are deeply human in their vulnerability and evoke a pathos which the explanatory literature (that reveals the battlefield at which each instrument was recovered) amplifies. One of the instruments, for example, is a bugle found near the body of a fourteen year old drummer killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, another is an alto sax recovered from the Alte Münz bunker in Berlin in 1945. As brass and woodwind instruments are so closely tied to the corporeal, relying on breath for sound, the resulting sound-scape eloquently summons the idea of damaged bodies, evoking trauma but, crucially, without confronting us with graphic, manipulative imagery. The work is elegiac and undoubtedly moving. However, in its immateriality, and the fact that it deals with death almost beyond the reach of memory, it is made beautiful in a way that is perhaps troubling. The concept of carrying musical instruments into battle seems both tinged with romance and gallantry and also unimaginably distant. There is an argument to be made that by accepting and relegating these events to history, that such disturbing events are distanced from reality by virtue of being easily classified as ‘the past’.

 
This is the case put forward by Fabio Mauri’s show, Oscuramento: The Wars of Fabio Mauri, in Hauser and Wirth, Saville Row. This is work that stems from personal experience. Mauri, born in Rome in 1926 and who died in 2009, was an artist, writer, playwright, critic, publisher and professor at the Art Academy of L’Aquila, who came of age in the context of Fascist Italy and Europe during the Second World War. The events he witnessed first-hand and through the media left him with lasting psychological damage and severe psychiatric problems, and his artistic practice evolved predominantly as a means of resolving his personal trauma. Mauri’s work creates a vastly different atmosphere to Philipsz’s sound piece – it is at once relentlessly humdrum and claustrophobically ominous. The entrance to this huge Savile Row space has been transformed into an air raid shelter with sandbags, extinguishers and a table stacked with dirty coffee cups. The affect is of startling present-ness and immediacy; the smell of coffee lingering as if those taking shelter have only just left. Close by, another table covered with a cotton cloth and positioned next to a standard lamp, was neatly laid with hats. Tavolo cappelli ufficiali (Picnic o Il buon soldato) (Table with Officer’s Hats [Picnic or The Good Soldier]) (1998) again mixes a strange homely domesticity – the orderly arrangement, and the ordinary furniture – with the faintly absurd grandeur of the military dress: an opulently tasselled fez, a pristinely white panama hat, others stiffly peaked and bristling with insignia. Picnic o Il Buon Soldato comprises many of these found object assemblages. Mauri stacks or mounts on steel plate various mundane accoutrements of everyday life that move like a sliding scale from the domestic to the military – pillars of stacked wicker picnic baskets, shovels, blankets, enamel lamps, compasses and gas-masks. The objects were selected by Mauri for their very ubiquity, arguing that their familiarity allows us to connect with history in a more visceral way – ‘history with a small h’ perhaps – so that huge, incomprehensibly traumatic events become, somehow, easy to grasp.

 
In the centre of this huge space is a life size waxwork tableau of the Italian war cabinet. Oscuramento – Il Gran Consiglio (Darkening – The Grand Council) (1975) is imposing but also unsettlingly kitsch, as if lifted wholesale from a small town history museum. The dusty mannequins in full military dress are slightly ridiculous, the bodies a little too small for the heads, the wax faces deeply ruddy as if wearing too much makeup. The tableau is a reconstruction of the last session of the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo (Grand Council of Fascism) that took place on 24th July 1943, which sanctioned the arrest of Benito Mussolini. Mussolini is represented here, along with the highest ranking members of the fascist council, although not all of figures are actual portraits of real historical figures. What’s striking is the banality and claustrophobia of the scene – its smallness and ordinariness, despite the swagger of the uniforms and the stertorous hectoring of the piped oration. Hannah Arendt’s observation of the ‘banality of evil’ obtains powerfully here – the military glamour is tawdry, the players small and unconvincing.

 
Oscuramento brings Italy’s fascist past back as a readymade, and we are forced to confront how ordinary the everyday cultural life of totalitarianism can appear. In contrast, Phillipz’s sound piece has potent affective force, which impacted on this viewer at least in a profoundly somatic way and created a powerful emotional charge. Brian Massumi argues that ‘affect’ acts as a spur to critical reflection and deeper engagement. However, Mauri’s explicit address to our critical faculties, presenting us with the ways in which fascism as imbricated into everyday life, asks us to engage with a different, and perhaps a more lastingly troubling set of intellectual problems. Mauri’s gesture is one of demystification, whereas Philipsz’s haunting installation is almost romantic in its melancholy, essentially aestheticising the war dead it commemorates. Oscuramento offers no such gentle consolation.

 
The Wars of Fabio Mauri was on view 11 December 2015 – 6 February 2016. War Damaged Musical Instruments was on view 21 November 2015 – 3 April 2016.

 
A key figure in the avant-garde London Film-makers Co-operative in the 1970s, McCall’s earliest films are documents of outdoor performances, represented here by Landscape for Fire (1972). The film records a field of small fires systematically kindled in the darkness, and neatly marries the elemental with the haute-modernist grid format. McCall has described Landscape for Fire as the catalyst for his light projections. The experience of making the work prompted him to investigate the processes of film – to look at the sculptural qualities of projected light rather than simply to think of film as a means of documenting his performances. And so the now legendary Line Describing a Cone was devised in 1973.

 
Frame by frame, a thin, arcing line gradually coalesces to describe a complete circle. Over the course of thirty minutes this line of light traces the circumference of the circle as a projection on the far wall while the beam takes the form of a cone of sculpted light. The rigorous geometries described by the projected beam recall the mathematical rigour of Fred Sandback and Sol LeWitt, while the (seemingly) tangible line extending through space chimes with the material and spatial interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark or Brian O’Doherty. But while Line Describing a Cone occupies this territory between drawing and sculpture, McCall himself describes these solid light projections as performative works of minimal cinema, where the screen is eliminated and audience is cast as the performer or participant. As McCall articulated in an interview event conducted in Lismore Town Hall in April, Line Describing a Cone is ‘a film that happens in the present tense, in the audience’s own space, where they are invited to turn their back on the screen and to look instead into the three- dimensional void – and watch this three-dimensional cone growing in space.’

 
What is exhibited in Lismore Castle Arts, however, is Line Describing a Cone 2.0 (1973 – 2012). When McCall originally began showing these light sculptures in the 1970s, his venues were often grungy warehouse spaces, where people could (and did) smoke, and the air was thick with dust. This palpable atmosphere allowed the beam of projected light to manifest as a tangible thing, taking on weight, allowing him to cast lines and seemingly solid planes out of the air. However, as his work moved into more traditional gallery spaces, and the air became cleaner, the light works became less easy to realise. It was only in the 1990s, when he discovered hazer machines – a kind of dry ice emitter – that he could re-stage and revisit these works, this time using digital projectors rather than 16mm film. The haze machines lend the light works a distinctively aestheticized quality in comparison to (what I imagine to be) the rougher magic of the 1973 iteration. The controlled emission of oil- or water-based fluids imbue the projected light with a gorgeous, mobile surface quality, like flumes and eddies of watered silk.

 
All of this imparts the work with a certain uncanny glamour; the impalpable is made apparently solid as air is given a weight and density, like an aesthetically seductive fog that haunts the room. The affective impact is beguiling and the performative aspect of the work is still very much in evidence – children dance in and out of the sheets of light, and people dip their fingers in the beams. Swell (2016) picks up where Line Describing a Cone left off in 1973, and one could argue that there is little development between the two works, bar the fact that digital technology allows him to achieve more intricate and complex progressions. One could also argue that the formal simplicity of Line Describing a Cone, its gradual evolution of the cone of light, familiar from cinema projection, has a satisfying conceptual neatness, whereas the later work is more elaborate, but re-treads much of the same ground. These works are utterly spectacular, with all the ramifications this word implies in terms of size, scale and visual pleasure – and they are achingly beautiful, aligning sheer sensuality with satisfying rigour – but the overwhelming sensory impact induces an almost narcotic effect, as borne out by the nearly hysterical, physical joy exhibited by the visiting children. A certain nagging, curmudgeonly voice whispers that this veers close to a mere entertainment, but it is a wholly transporting one at that.

 
The curators have chosen works that neatly bookend McCall’s career so far – Landscape for Fire (1972) is counter-posed with Crossing the Elbe (2015), a massive public intervention in Hamburg. Here, McCall’s beams are writ large against the sky as arc lights carve the city into quadrants in a way that could only be fully appreciated from the air. There are also inevitable connotations here with search lights and the Allied bombing of Hamburg during the Second World War. Arguably, each of these works stages drawing as performance. This is made explicit in a rather po-faced (tongue in cheek?) Five Minute Drawing (1974/2008), staged before an audience. Here, McCall and an assistant carefully affixed sheets of paper to the wall, fastidiously adjusting the angle of a taut length of string before snapping it against the paper to leave a sharp charcoal trace, to resounding applause. This piece seems somewhat arch and a little flat in comparison to the spectral poetics of the solid light works. The difference seems to stem from the lack of interactive possibility; Line Describing a Cone and Swell extend a beguiling invitation – to play with light made palpable. That work of such economy can be alternatively categorised as ultra-minimal cinema, solid light sculptures, or interactive installation, testifies to the continuing richness of McCall’s interdisciplinary practice.

 
Anthony McCall was on view, 2 April – 15 October 2017.

Expanded Traces is a small show but, sensitively curated by Eimear Redmond, it presents a thoughtful and often witty exploration of contemporary approaches to drawing that challenges received ideas about what drawing is or can be, while focusing on approaches that are frequently in dialogue with art historical precedent. Shane Murphy’s site-specific installation, Untitled (2014), rehearses a strategy of extending drawing into three dimensional space, first explored by Marcel Duchamp with his Mile of String in 1942, and furthered by Eva Hesse in the 1960s, and by Gego, Gordon Matta-Clark and Fred Sandback in the 1970s. Murphy’s installation more specifically brings to mind Anthony McCall’s projected beam of light in Line Describing a Cone (1973), albeit updated for the digital age. In a corner of the gallery he constructed a cat’s cradle of taut filaments to make a series of intersecting screens. These were interposed by suspended cubes made in wire, and the whole assemblage was shot through with a projection of spinning linear elements. The work was pixelated, immersive and visually complex, but also beguilingly retro, like stepping into an early computer animation or CAD drawing. More simply, but no less effectively, Emma Roche’s playful tactic in the cryptically titled, There’s Nothing Complicated About a Bed (2013), is to project a tangle of coloured cable from the wall on a wooden cross bar, illuminated by a raking light that flattens the mass to draw its shadow on the wall. Looking closer, the cables turn out to be strands of extruded paint, it’s a clever jumbling of media – paint repurposed as a sculptural medium, but used here to trace an immaterial shadow.

Laura Kelly uses the gallery wall as her drawing support, marking it with a faint blurred track as if made by a bicycle wheel, and interspersing this with vivid orange embroidery hoops that hold softly crimpled newsprint. Disposable Boundaries (2013) seems to zoom in and out of focus, the pale track tracing in the abstract the outline of a jagged summit and the hoops containing minutely detailed drawings of fir trees and rocky peaks. Perhaps obliquely referencing unmarked geographical borders, Kelly’s piece also calls to mind Caspar David Friedrich’s evocation of the romantic sublime through landscape. More prosaically, with A Malin to Mizen Head Approach (2012), Susan Lynch plots her walk between Ireland’s northernmost and southern most points on the gallery wall – cleverly inverting Paul Klee’s quip of drawing entailing ‘taking a line for a walk’. She uses a pleasingly scribbley line about a centimetre thick made with a hard, sharp pencil to transcribe a map of her journey, which is punctuated by text messages received along the way. Her exploration of drawing as a tactic is multi-faceted: it is a map, a record and a timeline, as well a diary that connects threads of conversations.

Many of these pieces rehearse familiar strategies: drawing emancipated from the two dimensional, explored as action, as labor, as a way of marking or recording time, narrative and memory, as a means of documenting journeys both real and imagined. But this is a show shot through with wit and intelligence, where hand, line, trace and gesture are explored and re-imagined. Moreover, Expansive Traces presented the viewer with a resonant, lively and satisfying dialogue with a history of practice.

Dorothy Cross: Connemara is the artist’s first solo show in a public gallery in the UK and it brings together old works and new, concentrating on those pieces which mine the shifting territory between land and sea. For the last number of years, Cross has been making videos and sculptural assemblages based on the scuffed relics, the skins and old bones salvaged from the shoreline around Connemara. In the context of Margate’s seamy charm, however, the works take on a heightened resonance, a pronounced, salty end-of-pier humor that leavens her absorption in the poetics of death and decay. Family (2005), for example, comprises a trio of alarmingly spiked crabs cast in bronze and placed directly on the floor, gorgeously lit from above so that their complicated shadows seem poised to skitter across the gallery. The nuclear wholesomeness of the family group of daddy, mammy and baby is sharply undermined by the insolently lolling knob sprouting from the top of ‘daddy’s’ shell, a pungent, tongue-in-cheek pun on catching crabs perhaps.

Her meditations on nature and death are often bracingly unsentimental, a clear-eyed examination of the materiality of decay shot through with mordant humour. Skins (2008) places the ragged remains of rubber flippers next to casts of feet, ranging in size from tiny child to adult – simply mounted on the wall, the work is at once poignant and chilling, recalling the brilliantly sinister Tom Waits lyric ‘let marrow bone and cleaver choose/while making feet for children’s shoes’. Whale (2011) deftly improvises a Corinthian column from a suspended skeleton and rusty bucket. Even Sapiens, (2007), a tripod topped with a pair of elegantly nesting bronze skulls (one a fetus, the other an adult), takes on the almost kitschily macabre tone of the seaside freak-show.

The playfully baleful atmospherics continue with a video piece made in response to Margate’s premier Victorian tourist attraction; for Shell Grotto (2013) a camera simply pans slowly along the twisting corridors of this strange underground folly unearthed in 1835. The snaking passages, niches and chambers are inlaid with shells arranged in complex patterns – lit by gas lamps during the height of its popularity the decorated walls are now dingy and cobweb blown. The video is compellingly suspenseful, recalling at once creepy fairground rides or weirdly arid colonoscopy footage. This work is paired with Tabernacle (2013), a video installationcome- sculpture filmed on the shoreline below the artist’s Connemara home. An upturned currach becomes a chapel-like shelter or private cinema looking onto a projection of waves rushing in to a sea cave. The boat’s contents dangle down – petrol can, holy water bottles, frayed ropes, a mattock and bucket. In the dim light, standing under the ribbed vault of the boat, painted in peeling and spattered layers of wine and blue, the correspondences with anatomical structures are amplified, recalling ribs and muscle walls, while black water rushes in to fill the ventrical chamber of the cave. The above works draw parallels, or perhaps more accurately, juxtapose the specificities of Margate and Connemara, but the lasting impression is that of Cross’s sly delight in punning landscapes or external structures with the internal architecture of the body, and its inevitable decay.

The show also bleeds into a neighboring exhibition, Turner and Constable: Sketching from Nature, Works from the Tate Collection, and the conversation between the different bodies of work was reportedly important to Cross. Two of her works bookend the show: at the entrance, standing in a corner near two small chocolate brown oils, is Fox Glove I (2012) a waist high bronze cast of the plant, where hollow tips of female fingers replace the bell shaped flowers, recalling its vernacular name Lady’s Fingers. It’s a subtle work, discreetly installed, and the surreal exchange is easily missed. Bridging the two exhibition spaces is Shark Heart Submarine (2011), one of her more oblique assemblages. A paint-spattered nineteenth-century easel supports a metre-long model of a submarine, surfaced in white gold leaf. Opaque and hermetically sealed, only the exhibition notes inform us of the poetically suggestive cargo – a shark’s heart floating in alcohol in a glass jar. Rather than linking or bridging the gap between the two exhibitions, the work effectively encapsulates Cross’s distinctive response to her environment.

Two hundred years ago, Turner and his contemporaries obsessively painted and repainted views and seascapes – recording their responses to changing light and weather conditions in resinous oils or chalky watercolour. Dorothy Cross: Connemara showcases a similar fascination with place and with the natural world. Her visual language is both more direct and more lyrical, however. Harvesting, fusing and reconstructing objects washed up on the shoreline, her work references the sea only implicitly. Like a negative space drawing, the sea’s presence is inferred through her scavenging and preserving the objects around it or washed up by it. Cross’s work performs a visceral, tactile invocation of place, but also manages to transcend the specific idyll of romanticized Connemara. Instead, the artist’s taste for barbed black humor and a salty pun resonate grippingly in scruffy, urban Margate.

For example, Cotter’s Once More With Feeling (2013), a scaled-up wastepaper bin that stands like a skinny Claes Oldenburg, is composed of a delicately linear frame tipped in pale pink and complete with its own super-sized bin bag made from cloudily translucent plastic. The material quality of the ‘bag’ is the most compelling element of the piece, specifically the way in which the air and light contained within gains a certain density. The plastic billows gently in the shifting air currents created by the viewer’s movements around the work, so that at times it almost pulsates slightly, like an opalescent jellyfish held in a tank, while nevertheless remaining obstinately literal in its waste basket-ness. Perhaps more successful is A Solution Is in the Room/4, (2013) which also plays with opacity and transparency, this time using ribbons of corrugated cardboard layered into spheres. Two of these spheres sit facing each other in slim neon orange frames, like a pair of fat babies in highchairs, while the honeycomb structure of the card allows a shimmer of the vivid orange to glow through the airy bulk of each form.

As a counterpoint to the allusive whimsicality of Cotter’s two pieces, Karl Burke’s Taking a Line (2012), a fold-out screen made of bisected mild steel frames that march across the concrete floor of the massive space, is resolutely abstract and linear. Moving around the work, the viewer is presented with a shifting series of visual effects, as the intersecting bars of Burke’s concertinaed structure appear to expand and contract. It is a simple and fantastically effective piece that literalizes planes and lines and eloquently dramatizes the dimensions of the gallery. Burke’s take on the severe language of high Minimalism is, at times, inflected with a certain bone-dry wit, as in Arrangements 4 (2013), where two shallow open-ended rectangles leant against the gallery wall become an abbreviated frame, surrounding nothing. However, his linear compositions are most successful when exploiting the architectural conceits of acute angles and wedges.

Sited in the upper gallery, Burke’s Poetics of Space (2013) is composed of two lofty rectangular steel frames – each bent at an angle and with squared-off corners – and frames a pathway from the entrance of the small anteroom to the tall slice of window diagonally opposite. With great economy of means, Burke’s minimal arrangement exerts a subtle tyranny over the viewer, compressing our experience of the space, almost herding or funneling the viewer to the far corner of the room. This type of work, extending drawing into three-dimensional space, is not new: it was explored by Marcel Duchamp with his Mile of String in 1942, by Eva Hesse in the 1960s, and by Gego, Gordon Matta-Clark and Fred Sandback in the 1970s. But Burke’s ascetic sculptures are nonetheless elegantly effective, particularly when drawing our attention to the ways in which architecture directs or dictates our movements.

In contrast to Burke’s steely abstraction, Cotter’s sculptures almost flaunt their domestic origins in the form of bins, sieves or vessels, which she then expands in scale or reduces to whip thin frames. Measure (2013) recalls a line drawing of a pint glass in flamboyant Schiaparelli pink, the spare graphic form made of mild steel so slender it almost quivers as
the viewer walks around the piece. Her idiosyncratic containers also draw the viewer’s attention to air, as a substance or an element suffused with light. Capture (2012-2013), for example, is again a riff on the shape of a wastepaper basket, this time with a small plastic bag of water caught like a lens or a jewel at its base. The bag of water catches and holds the daylight, but the piece also creates drama with shadow play – the fine metal and transparent, fluid-filled sack casting a shadow almost denser than its own material presence. Her use of fizzing neon accents provokes strange and almost surreal optical effects. Capture is sprayed a stinging Day-Glo yellow, which oddly flattens the sculpture, so that it appears that the skeletal structure almost reverts back to a drawing in two dimensions, as if scribbled over a photo of the interior.

For all of the visual effects detailed above, The Air They Capture Is Different is a resolutely serious show, which, although beautifully choreographed, verges on the ascetic. However, both artists’ conceptual explorations of internal volume or the architectural interior are absorbing, and bring to mind the French theorist Henri Lefebvre’s model of space, which counters the commonly held notion that space consists of the empty areas between objects, or, ‘that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it’ (The Production of Space, 1974 ). Burke and Cotter’s works don’t so much occupy space or contain a spatial volume, as themselves hold, demarcate, and structure space as both volume and atmospheric medium. Rather than space being something that we experience passively, these two sculptors, in their best moments, make the viewer physically conscious of its presence. They offer us, in the words of Juhani Pallasmaa, a ‘strengthened sense of [the] materiality and hapticity, texture and weight, density of space and materialized light’ (The Eyes of the Skin, 2005).

Amongst the drawings are some early examples of her sculptural work. Taking advantage of the machinery that littered her new studio space, these works recall Duchamp’s assisted readymades and are informed by a sly playfulness. Cool Zone (July 1965), for example, is one of the least ‘worked’ of these pieces, but contains within it many aspects of what would become her signature sculptural concerns. A circular metal plate with three spokes that converge at the centre like a spindle is fixed high on the gallery wall; threaded through it is a length of rope that hangs limply, its ends precisely trimmed. The sculpture marks a further literalization of the drawn line – if in the painted reliefs Hesse’s line evolved to painted cord, here the line moves completely free of the support to take melancholy, pendulous form. The extension of the line away from the page and into three dimensional space was a formal device explored more widely in the 1960s by artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Fred Sandback, but whereas Matta-Clark and Sandback used line to change our perception of space, Hesse’s concern here seems different – it is the quality of helpless ludicrousness that seems most pressing.

 
In the show’s final gallery space, an anteroom off the main gallery, are housed some small sculptural works along with an example of her later mature work in fibreglass, Sans II (October 1968), a translucent honeycomb of gently irregular hollow rectangles. However, there is also one very large work on paper, No Title (1964), almost a metre high, which seems to contain all of the ideas that she would work through in her time in Germany. The upper half of the sheet is filled with cubes, colored a pale blue or rose; some of these are filled with busy networks of intersecting forms, hatches and striations, but in a blurring liquid density of color. The bottom half of the sheet is filled with an unintelligible circuit diagram, replete with obscure numerical notations and a busy network of arrows. Such works may recall Picabia’s drawings or Dada’s malfunctioning machines, but Hesse’s drawings do not seem to allude to a broken mechanism, only one whose purpose is utterly unfathomable.
 
The layout of the gallery dictates the hanging of the show – an obvious point perhaps, but it also explains the exhibition’s (arguable) flaw. The viewer enters the exhibition by drawing back a heavy curtain to the largest room, in which are hung both the paintings and relief works. Depending on which direction the viewer chooses to circulate, she enters either the little anteroom containing small sculptures, as well as Sans II – or a gallery liberally hung with her drawings, most of which preceded the relief panels.(Hesse would describe the reliefs as “contraptions” that grew out of the drawings.) So there is a sense that the viewer follows Hesse’s train of thought in a rather distorted way, reinforcing the conventional – and in this case not very accurate – view of drawing as merely preparatory or subsidiary to her exuberant painted reliefs. However, witnessing the evolution or distillation of her concerns through her changing drawing style is, arguably, one of the most illuminating aspects of the exhibition. This is, admittedly, a minor quibble in reference to a truly thrilling show – one that allowed the viewer a privileged glimpse into the thought process of an artist poised on the brink of monumental aesthetic breakthrough.
 
 
Eva Hesse 1965 was on view 30 January – 9 March 2013.

The show also includes a range of video works of varying levels of interest. Declan Rooney’s Untitled (Towel), 2011, for example, is pretty much as the title describes – it shows a white towel falling against a black backdrop, the vignette looped so that the towel appears and disappears with erratic swiftness. The grainy quality of the image, coupled with the blur of the falling towel lends it the appearance of a flawed or damaged piece of analogue film, capturing a mysterious, slightly ghostly event. On the whole however, the simple premise only briefly holds visual interest. In contrast, Angela Darby’s and Robert Peters’ video work, I ain’t no kinda hustler, 2011, records a similarly inconsequential episode – two black refuse sacks looped over the top of public waste bins – resulting in a much more engaging work. The camera focuses on the bags which swell with air and writhe manically in concert, until finally one of the pair fatally deflates, exhausted. The filming is resolutely deadpan, but the refuse sacks’ uncanny animation is compelling and oddly disturbing, as if the transcendently dancing shopping bag from American Beauty has been condemned to some kind of abject slave-like existence, chained to a public bin.

 
Doireann O’Malley’s A dream of becoming 24 eyes, 4 parallel brains and 360 vision, 2012, is a much more technically involved work. A seductive and beautifully textured paean to moths and dusky shadows, O’Malley’s study has a distinctly gothic inflection with a whispered voice over and the richly grainy look of decaying film stock. In this instance, the sturdily lo-fi presentation of the video pieces, displayed on stocky Beko televisions sat on office chairs, detracted from the viewing experience somewhat, as such a visually gorgeous piece would have benefited from being shown on a larger screen.
 
On the whole, though, it is the works that focus on the opacity of language and difficulty in communication that prove to be most conceptually rich and satisfying. Helen Horgan’s giant wall mounted Apostrophe, 2011, magnifies said punctuation mark in raised, textured black plastic. Unanchored from language, the mark is rendered meaningless and the resultant sculpture takes on an oddly comic cast, recalling a kind of sinister, looming Pac-man cartoon with a strange gaping mouth. Similarly, Sarah Amido’s video piece explores the theme of frustrated communication in a satisfyingly involved way. Initially, When I’m explaining something to you, 2011, appears to be quite straightforward: an attractive, open-faced girl speaks directly to the camera, recounting what seems to be a complicated anecdote in a relaxed yet animated manner. However, the sound track only intermittently links up with the image on screen as the script or transcript is haltingly read. Compounding the confusion is the fact that the script seems to be jumbled, so that it becomes impossible to follow or even to discern the thread of a narrative. The result is deeply disorienting, belying its surface appearance of legibility, the work jars and misleads, stranding the viewer in a morass of uncertainty.
 
Perhaps the result of the open-ended nature of the exhibition’s curatorial premise, if it can be so called, is that the show is something of a mixed bag, albeit with moments of real inventiveness and intrigue. Ultimately, however, what is most striking about this exhibition is the sense of resourcefulness – the sense that artists and gallerists both are operating with minimal budgets yet producing work that is compelling and provocative.
 
 
In The Black was on view 18 October – 13 December 2012.

Indeed, this disorienting instability of language is the starting point for several of the exhibiting artists whose work seeks to stage problems of legibility and the ways in which meaning changes over time. Takahiko Iimura’s video projection, White Calligraphy Re-Read, reflects on the temporal development of language by recycling an earlier 16mm film work. Characters from an archaic Japanese script were scratched into the film’s surface and then the projection accelerated to a blur. In his 2010 re-working of the piece, the artist retrieves a level of legibility by digitally slowing the film at points and pronouncing the newly intelligible characters, thus dramatizing the act of translation, not only from the visual to the verbal, or between languages (from Japanese to English) but also between analogue film and digital media.

 
Some works were arguably less successful – Kay Rosen’s Phantom Limb for example, again tackling the mysteries of legibility and coherence, reduces the works title to the letters P and B painted in white against a black background. The aim of the work is to provide a visual co-relation to the linguistic meaning; here, to recreate the phantasmic sensation of a missing body part by equating it with the viewer’s groping search to ‘fill in’ the missing text. The mirrored ‘p’ and ‘b’ also refer to V.S. Ramachandran’s treatment of phantom limb pain, which uses simple visual mirroring to trick the brain into believing the work exists. This level of theoretical richness is rendered with such drastic economy of means, however, that I would argue much of its complexity is muted. Equally, Cerith Wyn Evans’ contribution, So To Speak; white neon quotation marks, framing nothing, seemed irritatingly glib, but perhaps that is a measure of the sly effectiveness of co-opting such a vacuous gesture. By contrast Peter Downsbrough’s site-specific interventions, also modest in their means, are highly effective in their dramatization of the gallery’s inimitable architecture. Apart uses adhesive lettering and slim metal pipes to enact a transition between wall, ceiling and open space, bringing about a new proposition for reading the interior.
 
Other artists played with the materiality of text – playing being quite an apposite description here given the witty inventiveness of much of the work. Michael Stumpf’s Massive Angry Sculpture for example appears to literalize its title with a hulking black sprawl that colonizes much of the floor space of Gallery 2, but on closer inspection, the posturing bellicosity of the title is undercut by the brightly coloured scaffolding that props up the flimsy construction. Similarly there is a strong element of subversive humor in Semâ Bekirovic’s video work How to Stop Falling which explores the breakdown of text by hurling polystyrene letters from the top of an office block in a manner reminiscent of a anarchic Seasame Street reading exercise. In contrast, the fractured casings of Niamh McCann’s cinema sign, Snippet II, are pregnant with a melancholic romance that adheres specifically to the physical character of a type of urban signage fast disappearing.
 
Despite the witty playfulness of some of the work on show, there is serious scholarly impetus driving the exhibition’s curation – a collaborative exercise between Graham Allen, Professor of English at UCC, and Matt Packer, curator at the Glucksman. Allen’s textual ‘provocations’ interject literary and philosophical references which serve both to prick the viewer’s experience and to structure the show’s thematic strands of legibility, monumentality, and ‘wall-writing’ or subversive intervention. The Glucksman’s location in the heart of a university campus means that it is surrounded by people with an investment in the written word – either grappling with academic tomes, trawling through digital databases of research material, or striving to produce their own textual contributions. In such a context, the written word as a medium is usually looked through to get to meaning, or woven to create meaning, clarity and transparency being goals. At its best then, this exhibition, by seeking to dramatize the visual power of language, to make us look at rather than through it, is both liberatory and subversive. Text is un-harnessed from univocal meaning, reading is made problematic and opaque, and the viewer is re-acquainted with the written word’s slippery, unstable nature as well as its capacity for formal beauty.
 
 
In Other Words was on view 22 July – 3 October 2011.

In contrast, the technically exquisite canvases of Gillian Carnegie are ostensibly more conventional. Carnegie’s work attends with almost compulsive focus to the traditional still life theme of the vase of flowers, her subject here a decidedly shrivelled and bedraggled bunch lodged in a truncated plastic bottle. Carnegie has made some twenty studies of the arrangement, four of which are exhibited. Ranging from the subtle opalescent grey green palette of Fleur de Huile (2001) to the crepuscular, low contrast grey-scale of P104 (2008), Carnegie’s canvases suggest that she submits photographs of her still life to various digital treatments before painting them. In a subtle rhyming with Price’s plastic panels, Carnegie’s paintings also grow into three dimensions; two canvases have been partially built up into a thick impasto so that the brittle and desiccated arrangement seems to grow or lean out into the space of the gallery, making the dead materiality of the flowers manifest in our space.

 
Decay and transience are implicit also in Richard Wright’s site specific work set deep in the castle grounds in the fantastically named Monkey House. Wright, who won the Turner Prize in 2009 for his temporary wall drawings, makes a considered and thoughtful intervention in this dramatic architectural setting. The Monkey House is a turret-like folly entered through a gothic arched doorway, mirrored by a deeply recessed niche, and further articulated by another wider doorway and a slender arrow slit. The walls have been smoothly plastered and white painted to within a foot of the poured concrete ceiling, where the even precision of the finish gives way to ancient, pitted stone. Wright has colonized the white walls with a continuous pattern of black isosceles triangles, convex on both diagonal planes, as if to mirror the elegant lozenges of the leaded glass panels above the doorway. On closer inspection, each element has been patiently hand painted, revealing small imperfections and individualities. The damp conditions are already causing the mural to flake and peel, it is ultimately fated to be painted over at the show’s end, only to exist as a photographic trace or memory.
 
Wright’s mural and its melancholy fate form a fitting end to a subtle and elegantly devised show that wears its conceptual nature lightly. Despite the rigorous re-negotiations of the nature and status of the image, and the sometimes-claustrophobic intensity of each artist’s exhaustive scrutiny of their subject matter, there is much here that is playful and visually compelling. The sombre curatorial concerns of transience and absence are counterbalanced by each works’ dramatization of the evident pleasures and absorptions of perception; ultimately the show’s pensive meditation on decay and finitude is leavened by its celebration of the joys of looking.
 
 
Still Life was on view at Lismore Castle Arts Gallery, 9 April – 30 September 2011.