Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow 26 October – 23 December
Reviewed by: Mark Dawes
The Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) has finally moved back to its original home in Sauchiehall Street. The new surroundings look impressive and feel optimistic with an ambitious programme to accompany the new environment – including music, film and education work. The core of the old CCA was visual art and performance, and these are still at the heart of the place.
The title of CCA's reopening show, 'Words And Things', is neither cryptic nor revealing. The premise of the show, curated by Francis McKee CCA's Head of Digital Art and New Media, relates to the drive for artists to make objects and the drive for people to look at them. Bearing in mind that contemporary artists seldom produce objects with purely aesthetic qualities, and contemporary viewers approach art from a position of media-saturated fatigue, this premise invariably leads away from questions about the nature of the object to issues relating to the cultural connectivity within which objects are suspended.
Simon Starling tackles the material facts of the manufactured object head-on. His handmade reconstructions of mass-produced objects are executed with real dexterity, such as Black stack, thirty-two handmade copies of the industrially produced 1950s fibreglass chair. Meticulous in its representation, this massive tower of plastic chairs is easy to ignore at first. Close inspection reveals a surface satisfyingly peppered with the tiny flaws and rough edges that betray human creativity – the careful fingerprint of a skilled hand in the production of these 'designer' objects. However banal they appear in their recontextualisation, these chairs are compelling because of the absurd amount of labour invested in their making. If Duchamp had handmade a copy of a urinal for Fountain almost a century ago, the controversy stirred by his readymade would have been less intense. Now that machines can ubiquitously meet any human need for manufacture or communication in the post-industrial society, it appears like a labour of love that human hands should engage in crafting an object like a chair.
Spanish internet rebels JODI seek instead to highlight the anomalies of information culture. Computer-game programming codes – the objects of their reconstruction and recontextualisation, are invisible without the medium of computers to energise their presence. By modifying the existing code of the shooting game Quake, JODI have taken steps towards illuminating the dichotomies and inconsistencies of the digital illusion.
In dealing with performance and video footage as an object, Cheryl Donegan employs painting to record activities that have traditionally used photography to manifest their presence beyond the duration of the event. Donegan's paintings actually appear to be a return to a form of still-life painting – creating a subject from the constructed relationship of objects. But the objects are not vases or flowers – the objects here are moments of performed action, reflections in mirrors and mediated video imagery.
Victorian scientific rationalism and the theories of nineteenth century British physicist, Lord Kelvin haunt Mark Dion's installations and pseudo-experiments with nature. Black humour also pervades his work, as in the reconstructed worktable of an amateur palaeontologist showing the discovery of fossilised burgers and fries rather than dinosaur bones. His largest piece here, Deeptime Closet (for Lord Kelvin and Robert Smithson), metaphorically demonstrates another Kelvin experiment while nimbly manipulating spatial and temporal realities. Within a tall stepped structure, Dion creates a planetarium that somehow feels simultaneously vast and claustrophobic. Dion's reference to Kelvin's blurred boundaries between liquid and solid states is manifested by great swathes of black pitch advancing down a pristine white stair. This typifies the contemporary art object, which in meaning is neither liquid nor solid, constantly mutating in relation to its surroundings.
Writer detail:
MARK DAWES
is an artist based in Glasgow.
Venue detail:
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