Press

Craig Mulholland Bearer On Demand

Craig Mulholland’s last exhibition, Plastic Casino, was a whopping great thing, filling a disuse factory space with work that attempted to tackle most of art history, the nature of consumerism and a few more weighty subjects besides. This time, in the twilight of Transmission’s basement, Mulholland, instead of pouring out swathes of work, seems to have become a distiller, boiling down his themes – economics and computer viruses, roughly speaking – into a sticky goo of cross – reference, allusion and repeated forms.

A video work sees deutschmarks, dimes and one-penny pieces dance through a landscape drawn from dollar bills. The Queen’s profile is overlayed with the face of a bespectacled man, probably Bill Gates. A viral pile of badges, entitled ‘Virus (Please Take One)’, seeks to propagate itself outside the gallery.

There is too a merger between the means of production and the end product, or, perhaps, a hostile takeover of the latter by the former. French curves – those wiggly, pre-CAD draughting tools – are everywhere, both represented and presented as sculptural forms. A bent printing plate, too, is shown as sculpture. There is even a hand, the most basic implement in the artist’s toolbox, cast in transparent resin.

It’s not entirely clear what Mulholland is up to hear. There’s a queasy horror of the commercial aspects of the art world, a hint that the work here is a carrier, like the Trojan Horses wrapped around computer viruses, and a strong sense that Mulholland is seeking to forge a system, but one as incomprehensible to most of us as the voodoo that powers international finance or the lines of code that wreak havoc on our hard drives. In the end, transformation and alchemy seem to be key, whether in terms of capitalist transactions, artistic endeavour or compiled code, all of which Mulholland seems to see as vampiric, the turning of good into evil.

Unsettling, murky and confounding stuff, the, and all the better for it.