ARTISTS TALKING

Well here we are again. It’s that time of year, so it must be ‘New Contemporaries’. Now I must clear up one thing from the off: ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ is not to be confused, as I do every year, with ‘BECK’S Futures’. The former is an open submission competition for all final year degree and MA art students, featuring a selection of the up-and-coming talent straight from British art schools. Not to be confused with the latter, which seems to be all the old lags who have been around for a while and gained notoriety in their home town or region, and are deserving of national recognition before they go on to international acclaim and come full-circle to the Turner Prize a decade or two later. OK, we’ve got that sorted!

This year, works by twenty-nine artists were selected from over a thousand submissions by Jeremy Akerman, Phil Collins, and Jane and Louise Wilson, all past exhibitors of ‘New Contemporaries’ themselves. Craig Wilson’s Boss and Dog – no up tae much stole the show for me. The comical eighteen-minute DVD had me transfixed mainly for its sheer bravado and downright cheek, but also for its rough yet slick presentation. The film is the story of two buddies Boss and Dog who undertake an adventure for the bemusement and entertainment of us, the gallery-going public. Their adventure is in the tradition of many rite-of-passage stories, but done with such video trickery and humour as to bring the weary gallery-goer much needed light relief.

Martina Schuecker’s Auszeit performance is a very deceptive and deeply enjoyable piece that pushes all the right buttons for the recent appetite for slapstick contemporary visual art. It uses the age-old trick of surprise. You approach a minimalist red rectangular box with what appears to be a pair of delicately crossed mannequin legs in stiletto heels protruding from the box. Seemingly rather dull and hackneyed at first glance, I must confess I for one dismissed this piece at first and walked past to view what seemed more interesting works. But of course these are not inanimate legs but the legs of a performer protruding from a circus chest, akin to the living statue performers you find in just about every capital city on the globe performing for delighted tourists.

One of the many surprising delights of this year’s show is Robert Orchardson’s Symmetriad. A piece that refuses to be either two or three-dimensional, it carries off the trick of appearing both contemporary and retro at the same time. Symmetriad is taken from a series of wooden screens based loosely on patterns or animated sequences that appear in science-fiction films, suggesting a utopian future of uniform order and beauty. Another gem is Takahiro Iwasaki’s Differential/Integral Calculus, a work made from pencil leads, erasers, vinyl tape and thread. Look closely now or you may miss it, as this deceptively diminutive piece is actually based on the structure of a tree, a symbol often used when organising and classifying hierarchies. As with many of the works within this year’s show, Differential/Integral Calculus is the museum conservator’s worst nightmare, being made of the most transient of materials. For the viewer, this quality elevates the materials, and the work itself, to a fascinating delight.

Journeys and exploration of personal histories, political astuteness and the return of a sculptural language informed by an economy of means are the clear themes throughout this year’s chosen crop of artists.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries is touring to Lot and Spike Island, Bristol and to the Barbican Gallery, London.