Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Various venues, Sheffield 13 October – 24 November
Reviewed by: Robert Clark
Over the last couple of decades art students using photography, film or video have tended to be conceptually concerned with the shadow play of media conventions and manipulations. Yet the culturally questioning and even politically subversive intentions of much of their work often seems creatively tamed and contained by a prevailing air of academic sobriety and intellectual self-consciousness. Photo galleries are cool and sophisticated places. Uncertainty is discussed as a concept but rarely embodied as a perceptual phenomenon. In such an atmosphere of theoretical accountability risks are rarely taken. It seems almost a truism to say that all that changed on 11 September 2001. Political, cultural and experiential uncertainty flooded back in with images that were painful with an inescapable, if decidedly dreamlike reality. We might henceforth sit around and discuss the metaphorical nature of those images of the twin towers, but we might also feel pretty stupid doing so.
So an exhibition like 'Immediate 2', as professionally curated as it undoubtedly was, suddenly looked somewhat outdated, almost indicative of a tail-end of an era. Organised by Sheffield's Site Gallery, 'Immediate 2' was the second yearly survey of lens- and computer-based work emerging from MA fine art and media courses in the north of England. This year the show was selected by artist Monika Oechsler and Tate Modern curator Emma Dexter and took place at venues throughout Sheffield's flourishing Cultural Industries Quarter. The work was varied and representative of all aspects of recent lens-based trends. Social stereotypes were parodied; advertising techniques were adapted; social routines were lifted out of context and rehearsed as forms of minimalist repetition; traditional picture-making genres were subjected to pastiche; portraits were imbued with a subtle domestic disquiet. There was a prevalent air of modest and thoroughly ironic absurdity.
Although one could hardly expect any of the works to live up to cultural changes that were generally unimagined at the time of their creation, some of them did indeed show promise of something amiss. Chris Poulton's video follows the protagonist dressed from head to toe in a daft orange bodysuit and big-ear headgear as he takes refuge in a state of amnesiac oblivion, from the shock of a road accident. The work refers to Freud's recognition of fugue states of memory repression through a casestudy of a shell-shocked messenger who suddenly forgot the message he was supposed to deliver. Obviously that lone messenger could be equated with just about any artist working almost anywhere today. Maybe we have lost the thread and can only mimic forms of apparently meaningful or popularly accepted communications? Anthea Hamilton films herself attempting to emulate the escapist persona of Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Simon Blackmore's installation is a lovely old 1970s caravan that has been converted to show a series of scenic slides as if viewed through its end window. Marco Salotti's photographs capture men in poses of peculiar vulnerability, and Kim Clarkson's portrait subjects are pictured in moments of uncomfortable self-reflection. Steve Hawtin sets out directions with no destinations and James Brown systematically documents streetlights that have been wastefully left on in daylight.
Sometime soon art students will need to come up with something less detached and somehow more engaged and committed than this. Let's look forward to seeing what on earth it is.
Writer detail:
ROBERT CLARK
is an artist and writer.
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