Sorcha Dallas

This is a show full of questions – not least about its title, which I imagine should be read with a lassitude worthy of Vicky Pollard. Presumably it is intended to be an ironic take on the overriding sentiment of a generation so bombarded with the irrelevancies of a consumer society that has become blind to ‘what really matters’. For that is what lies at its heart. From the short leaflet provided, what curator John Calcutt appears to intend is a call to order; a chance to re-engage with genuine reality; to renounce a worthless culture of commodities and re-embrace ‘depth, resonance…intrigue’. Calcutt asks us to think afresh about the ways in which we are able to make art using matter as basic as the earth and its products – from perol jelly to eye-shadow and, not least, the human body. His method is to take three Glasgow artists and team them with four from past generation. This is dangerous stuff and , predictably, to be seen in such august company does no favours to at least two of the newcomers. That said, and for all its faults, the exhibition does provide some thought provoking moments and is required viewing for anyone who wants to what was happening to art in a still misunderstood era. As much as a showcase for fresh young talent, this is a homage to a particular aspect of late 1960’s art: the ‘Happening’, that child of Dada conceived in downtown New York and at john Cage’s Black Mountain College by the likes of Jim Dine, Claes Oldenberg, Red Grooms, Robert Kaprow and Carolee Schneeman’s tamer artworks. For 40 years Schneerman, who began as an accomplished painter, has clung to her unofficial title of the rudest artist in the world. A prime mover in the early women’s movement, she stunned and enlivened the artworld of the mid-1960s with her hard-core pornographic films and outrageous performance pieces in which she variously used and exposed her body and most infamously unwound and read a scroll from within her own vagina. Understandably this blurring of the boundaries between art and porn made the US authorities somewhat jumpy. There is little likelihood, however, that Glasgow city council will feel the same. Up to and Including he Limits, made between 1970 and 1976, is played here on two adjacent screens, one slightly out of sequence with the other. It consists of a film of the naked artist in her studio, taken through a pleasant variety of coloured filters, as she contorts herself while hanging from a tree-surgeon’s harness. That it should be so disarmingly erotic will not surprise anyone familiar with Schneemann’s work. On another level though, it is a profound tribute to the legacy of Pollock in which, driven by the rhythms of the harness, the artist is able to make subconscious-expressionist crayon marks across the wall and floor of the studio. Next door, more historic treats await. Bruce Nauman’s silent film Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, made in 1967, is a classic of it’s genre in which the sculptor realises that to trace the exact dimensions of a sculptural space can be quite as meaningful as the object itself. From the same year, Robert Rauschenberg’s Linoleum similarly invokes the spirit of the late 1960’s New York. Both of these films run alternatingly in three spaces on the wall, along with Bas Jan Adler’s Broken Fall. Yet while it seems fair to ascribe these pieces the ‘legendary’ status vouchsafed them in the leaflet, this is not enough. The purpose of the show may be explained, but we are given no hint of the historical context in which to view it, and this assumes to much knowledge on the part of the viewer. The shows other major problem is the space. The works are crammed into just two of the CCA’s galleries. The result is something which looks thrown together. Works that were never intended to interact are forced into an unhappy dialogue, and it is all to easy to trip over the floor pieces. Surely it would have been better to have allowed the works room to breathe and to have used the building’s apparently empty upper floors? The principal area of contrast between the two generations of artists arises from the fact that some of the new pieces have the air of being props from a performance and, seen in the context of the films, this does make us visualise the working process. But on a formal level, too many fail to satisfy the primary requirement of artworks – to engage in their own right. The work is just to variable in quality and largely unresolved. Karla Black’s towel wrapped in paper and Vaseline, while imbued with a powerful feminist aesthetic, are badly shown and lack gravitas. While Mick Peter’s monumentalised dice lying on a cement frame has impact, his clay sculpture smacks more of Vision On, and less said about his Pig Tanker the better. Michael Stumpf is the most consistent of the three, and his iconic hanging Rock, though again not shown in its best advantage, invokes unsettling reminders of contemporary issues. The exhibitions is worth the trip if only to get a taste of what could, one day, be a well-researched and properly interpreted show devoted to the work of performance artists, from Dada to the present day. Then, a vital section would be given over to the many contemporary artists who remain in its debt. In the Swinging Sixties, Schneeman and her friends truly believed they were creating a brave new world of art, away from what they perceived as the tired pastiche of Abstract Expressionism and the banalities of Pop. It would be nice to think that Black, Peter and Stumpf are in some way doing the equivalent – or that they at least have the conviction to believe they are. From this show, however, it’s impossible to tell.