ARTISTS TALKING

Norwich School of Art and Design, Norwich
3 July ? 21 August

Last week I saw the painting exhibition ‘Russian Landscape in The Age of Tolstoy’ at the National Gallery, London: all shimmering snow drifts, crystallised Christmas trees and unspoilt wild flower meadows. I then hopped on a train to Norwich for the fourteenth ‘East International’, selected by Neo Rauch and Gerd Harry Lybke. Also comprising photography and video, the exhibition is mainly painting in the age of ‘Reality TV’. No sun–dappled woodland glades here, only deserted wastelands in Etienne Zack’s Things Never Look Better, blighted by the detritus left behind by whom? Maybe Alicia Paz’s monster Last week I saw the painting exhibition ‘Russian Landscape in The Age of Tolstoy’ at the National Gallery, London: all shimmering snow drifts, crystallised Christmas trees and unspoilt wild flower meadows. I then hopped on a train to Norwich for the fourteenth ‘East International‘, selected by Neo Rauch and Gerd Harry Lybke. Also comprising photography and video, the exhibition is mainly painting in the age of ‘Reality TV’. No sun–dappled woodland glades here, only deserted wastelands in Etienne Zack’s Things Never Look Better, blighted by the detritus left behind by whom? Maybe Alicia Paz’s monster mutant Bête Belle starlet, or the beautiful model of When the machine stops, trapped in the body of an alien/space suit with a silver head and melted hands? These babes sure as hell ain’t gonna get a date; not unless they transform into a fifties–style Barbie to match the suave Ken sitting in a car with its oval headlights beaming in Ridley Howard’s movie style Spanish Wall; The number 9.

When landscapes are presented it is often with a nod to a Hitchcock–induced dream: rooms, streets and hillsides are empty, seemingly just before or after a sinister event. Tilo BaumgÄrtel’s Arch ' an unmanned pink boat rocking on a choppy river beneath a house on a hillside under a sky charged with the pink and yellow hues of an electrical storm ' could be the aftermath wreaked by another crazy chick; the red–lipsticked babe wandering through a hotel lobby in Rosa Loy’s Rezeption perhaps, carrying what could be a barrel machine gun, or the woman in overalls in Versteck, raising her arm to machete off the heads of a bunch of flowers. Is this what TV does to our perception of reality?

Many of the works play with a notion of staging. Jakub Dolejs blurs fact with fiction via both method and matter: crossing painting with photography he highlights the spoof element of Escape to West Germany (an apparent re–staging of his mother fleeing with him as a baby) where a woman is photographed before a painted background. In September 4th 1972 Trish Morrissey mixes up roles and gender: Trish and her sister re–enact her version of their parents as a courting couple in the 1970s, one of the sisters cross–dressing as their father. The two characters are photographed standing proudly in front of a VW Beetle, all wing–collars, roll necks and Crimplene trousers.

TV, the internet, and the stellar ascent of all forms of media communication have given us so much access to people, places and culture that we are now literally swilling in our own re–run vomit. In Simon Collins’ Jasper Gastro the protagonist lies comatose on a table, up to his neck in custard, his vomit swilling around a white trash version of a still–life; but it’s not without acknowledgement of its heritage: a strangled pheasant has hit the deck too, along with a gutted fish, and a spilling pomegranate, with the added accoutrements of a very bent banana, a couple of phallic red candles, a yellow plastic duck and a penile drinks stirrer in a pint of beer. The landscape of life in this day and age may be littered with louts and debris but, as the title of another of Simon Collins‘ pieces states, This Cake’s All Icing Baby.

Andrea Mason

Andrea Mason is an artist and writer currently based in Norwich.