Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
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Jeanette Doyle, ‘Tonight, I am inappropriately interested in the bodies of those whom I may never meet’, enamel on perspex, 2004.
Courtesy: the artist.
Studio Voltaire, London
16 April – 30 May
Reviewed by: Nick Lambrianou
'Tonight' ambitiously brings together fifty artworks by a selection of British and international artists, including Lawrence Weiner, Liam Gillick and Elizabeth Price, within a single space in the Studio Voltaire complex in Clapham, South London. Curator Paul O'Neill asked each contributor to provide a work and a title or statement that completed the premise "Tonight, I..." thus documenting each artist's creative activity at a given moment. Process and self-reflection are the dominant themes, as artists use their work to question the boundaries between inspiration and boredom, reality and fantasy, confession and privacy, seriousness and playfulness, originality and repetition.
In accordance with the diversity of the artists and practices on show, there is a deliberately discontinuous and chaotic feel to the installation: wall-mounted and freestanding works are interspersed with hidden objects, intermittent performances and an over-stuffed wooden display unit. With the addition of Liam Gillick's and Kathrin Böhm's wall paintings, the whole has a feel halfway between a pop-art event and a conceptual art installation. Works are allowed either to exist in dialogue with each other, or not – slickly constructed neo-conceptual texts sit amongst cartoon sculptures and hanging mobiles. Perhaps surprisingly, it is the video and sound works that suffer most in this context, tucked as they are into little alcoves in the central wooden display stand. Others cleverly negotiate their position within the show by taking the meta-critical route, such as Simon Bedwell's Tonight, I Corrected the Press Release for 'Tonight', Liam Gillick's poster/list of works, or Adam Chodzko's diary of what went wrong during the show's installation.
Yet the majority of the works here fall somewhere between the 'playful' or 'didactic' strands of contemporary neo-conceptualism, for example Bob and Roberta Smith's dumbly colourful text painting, Cornford and Cross's object lesson in artwork as self-critique, Pavel BÜchler's poster work that gives the show its title. Many others display their art historical references proudly, if a little crudely at times – perhaps too many works do little more than remind one of John Baldessari, Jasper Johns or the inevitable Duchamp. Of course, for many artists the impossibility of 'originality' simply is the only available subject matter, and playfulness or art historical appropriation therefore becomes tinged with resignation or cynicism. Mark Pearson's 'homage' to Nam June Paik remodels the steely technological feel of 1970s video art with cheap and cheerful faux-antique furniture and a plastic hi-fi; Caroline McCarthy's Tonight, I Bring New Life to Cold Dinners takes dinner-for-one frozen meal containers and makes a miniature garden out of the photographed greenery on each box; David Blamey's Tonight, I Looked at the Sky similarly negotiates the distance between the mundane and the sublime by taking a grey office noticeboard and turning it into a constellation with drawing pin 'stars'.
In such a show, one has to be careful not to miss the more subtle works. Markus Eisenmann's Tonight, I Read The Classics consists of three baseball bats, which are in fact meticulously painted bronze sculptures. Whilst Eisenmann is not the first to exploit the contrast between 'high art' material and pop-cultural form, his title indicates another level of cultural and historical critique. Classicism, just like his 'fake' bats, moulded ancient material (tragedy) into 'modern' form. The baseball bats imply that such cultural anachronism is as menacing as it is playful, a potentially violent 'game' that transforms not only the material it appropriates but also the viewer it seduces. It is this tension between the knowingly 'unoriginal' yet beautiful object and the empty pleasures of irony that gives Eisenmann's work its critical power – a willingness to take its playfulness seriously. Shouldn't everyone's 'tonight' feel like that sometimes?
Writer detail:
Nick Lambrianou is an artist and writer living in London.
Venue detail:
Studio Voltaire
1a Nelson's Row, London SW4 7JR
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