Press

The current show at the Kerlin Gallery brings together a rather disparate group of artists. As with most group shows lacking any explicit theme, the temptation is to make speculative connections, or ‘free associations’, between the works displayed. However, although such speculation might be appropriate, it is the comparative anomalies and discontinuities that are more striking here…and perhaps more fruitful.

Hayley Tompkins’ small, sparse works bring extracts of non-Euclidean geometry to opposite corners of the gallery, where they invite one to play unspecified games with lines and planes. Without any declaration, what might be offered upon ‘completion’ of these games is anyone’s guess: some provisional revelation, perhaps; or simply the temptation to begin again… It is a surprisingly unsettling game to play, a maddening one, even. Madness comes upon apprehending an impossible space, like H P Lovecraft’s protagonist in Dreams in the witch house who, troubled by a corner of his room out of joint with the surrounding walls and ceiling, sets about calculating its ‘mad geometry’, only to discover that the solving of this structural puzzle delivers him into a dark, haunted realm ‘outside’ mundane space. No such horrors await the viewer of Tompkins’ paintings, of course, only a frustrated attempt at rationalisation. For Lovecraft, the rationalist inquiry into nature, fully explored, becomes monstrous; equally, “tragedy, fully explored, becomes comedy” (Patrick Kavanagh).

This latter point is pertinent to Sebastian Hammwöhner’s works. He gives us the reanimated remains of two likely figures from German Romanticism, the Pied Piper and the Wayfarer: the former without pipe or followers, gaudily dressed, downcast among shadows, soliciting sympathy; the latter exhausted, dreaming or dead, accompanied by a hoary, vulture-like beast and assorted spectres. Both figures are isolated, melancholic, tragic, and somewhat ridiculous. The Pied Piper, of course, brings to mind the fatally persuasive power of both art and enigmatic leaders, but it also suggests the cruel social need for those who commit the great folly of being the only one in fancy-dress at a formal party. Without an audience the Pied Piper is preposterous; without the Pied Piper an audience cannot laugh at itself.

The wayfarer suggests two things: that although reverie might be associated with profundity and authenticity, such withdrawal is also a kind of death; and that the common bourgeois notion that one ‘finds oneself’ through travel might also be a way of alienating oneself from life - that the subject might exhaust itself on the road, and, looking around, see only vultures. The notion of private revelation - and, by extension, that the artist might emerge from the depths of the most sublime reverie as privileged narrator of the human condition - is presented as blackly comic. When the weight of German culture presses upon Hammwöhner, he responds with a wry, sad smile, and perhaps a will not to juggle history but to throw its parts into the air and see where they land.

Some of the occasional conceits of artists mentioned above might be the subject of Alex Pollard’s Thought crime. Upon investigation, the ‘crime’ here seems to be either that thought can be somehow symmetrical to the (art) objects through which it is articulated, that there is no remainder of what is in the object more than the object itself, or, conversely, that the objects conceived and measured by the mind can measure the mind itself. Perhaps, though, this is all in one’s head, wherein the world appears to mirror one’s thought of it (and where artists can safely fake it, breaking a few brushes in the struggle). But there are all manner of mistakes, breaks and distortions in the mirror: traces of the subject him/herself, and traces of a failed history, of what an object might have become.

The bureaucrat is a regular figure, who attempts to conserve some measure on the world, and we can therefore understand his/her drunken surprise at being the artist’s model and muse in Pollard’s Bureaucrat descending a staircase With an assured clumsiness, the bureaucrat stands proxy for the descending beauty, mechanical movement for organic grace (one might remember here that the alleged aspiration of State bureaucracy was that it would exhibit an enlightened reflexivity unavailable to the pre-reflexive, ‘organic’ peasantry). At a push, and at the risk of typecasting, one might replace the bureaucrat with the arts administrator parading art as a quick-fix, social-improvement strategy, or the vulgar intellectual drawing arbitrary boundaries just to have the full measure. This being said, making a reflexive pirouette, Pollard’s figure of fun could quite easily be his own artist-self.

Given these witty and succinct deflations of the more expressionistic or empathetic pretensions of artistic practice, the works of Varda Caivano and Silke Otto-Knapp appear rather misplaced in their mystifications and sensitive touches. Particularly in Caivano’s hands, these touches, despite their ‘intimacy’, become rather turgid, yet without any evidence of the ‘difficulty’ that might warrant such exaggerated importance. These paintings seem rather too comfortable with themselves. They are not troubled, for instance, by the question of how painting might ‘go on’. It seems an inadequate response to the current status of painting to attempt to wish away its entanglement in history, to make of history a prehistory, a “catalogue of possibilities” (James Elkins) for the artist, and to make painting that exists only because it is “rich with suggestion, association and feeling.” It all seems rather evasive. This is echoed by Caivano’s referencing of European Constructivism, in particular the figurative abstraction of the St Ives group, which itself was something of an evasion of Soviet Constructivism’s ‘troubling’ associations with the use of industrial materials, the social application of art, and with the heady political progressions of the October Revolution.

Silke Otto-Knapp’s exotic garden paradise floats, mirage-like, “in a strange and intriguing atmosphere … on the edge of becoming and dissolving” (press release). The garden is a common enough symbol for the utopian reconciliation of humankind with nature, and it has been a recurrent theme in the arts, as an Arcadian scene of rustic simplicity and innocence. But, to take one famous example, the sexual and political undercurrents to pastoral decorum and to the garden as the setting for the naturalisation of (bourgeois) culture, were exposed with great satirical wit by ?âdouard Manet almost one hundred and fifty years ago. What response does Otto-Knapp make to such ‘complications’ of her theme?

It is a mistaken assumption that atmospheric ambiguity leads directly to profundity, but it can often lead to second-rate painting. We are invited to play the pantomime game of ‘Oh yes it is! … Oh no it isn’t!’ ad infinitum, but this displays only the familiar truism about the ambiguity of visual perception, again without any development of this theme. Furthermore, what of the possibility that utopia cannot be given a positive image, even one that “shifts in and out of focus”? According to its very definition, utopia cannot be affirmed in such a way, it can only be given a negative image, ‘envisaged’ by what it is not, disrupting any attempt to give it a particular content.

Thoughts on this exhibition are given a ‘free’ rein by its lack of theme, and this is no doubt a relief given the over-determination of works in the all-pervasive ‘themed’ exhibition, but it also continues a pluralist. posthistorical perspective that cannot be upheld if these works demand serious attention precisely because of their ‘working through’ of art’s history; and such playful, free association as this exhibition promotes becomes vacuous if it does not attempt this ‘working through’. It is this history that makes painting so troubled, but, given its prominence, also provides it with an opportunity. Ignoring this misses a prime curatorial opportunity.