Press

Whilst Alex Frost’s work has always been gallery-based, it has tended towards a municipal or architectural subject matter, so the transference on this occasion to the theme of canonical sculpture is surprising. For example the installation at Spike Island in Bristol is a homage to Robert Morris, an affectionate travesty of the Untitled (L-beams) fashioned in a lacquered or painted wood. In the same space that functioned as the artist’s studio (for the duration of a five month residency) the larger sculptures are effectively utilized as plinths for smaller versions of the same sign, made of wood, shellac, foam and gilt polystyrene.

Frost shuns the more oblique sites of reference – pop music, counter culture in favour of a patent academicism (Morris being an obvious canonical figure, trope of undergraduate dissertations etc). neither is the baroque restyling of Morris – using the materials and construction techniques of furniture and ornamental design – a radical re-invention of academic categories but a merging of opposites, a smug theoretical pun. Viewed from a distance, the spare forms of minimal art appear in a literal state of vulgar dissipation as though the larger sculptures had accumulated some brightly coloured fungal growth or cluster of geometric barnacles. Ultimately the work transcends its formalist satire to incorporate anxious aspects of surrealism as well; in particular the L-shapes drooping on the corners of the bigger plinths reminded me of Dali’s melting clocks. The use of cut foam gives a spongy, organic quality to some of the shapes, while the gold encrusted polystyrene forms in peaks and rills like stalactites.

All of this amounts to a comic meditation on the fragile masculinities involved. For revisionist scholars, Morris is the problematic figure of his oeuvre, and his Dadaist affinities, and propensity for ‘theatre’ reputedly outraged both Judd and Fried. One way to explicate Frost’s interpretation would be to say that it exposes the flimsiness of theoretical categories (to the extent of redefining Morris as a paradoxical figure of camp). But these tangled academic soap-operas seem less relevant at a closing analysis of ‘For Example’ than the subject of pedagogy itself, which extends the predilection for institutional frameworks seen in Frost’s earlier references to architecture and public art. His work is most rewarding when these earnest structures of academic and political correctness are made malleable and the objects, on the verge of losing their precise form, start to collapse inwards in scenes of nihilistic or juvenile abandon. The works Frenchie and Maverick (both 2000), were described as municipal bollards shrinking in on themselves and were quite voluptuous under their scale-like patina of shattered ceramic tiles. The L-beams of For Example have similar absurd connotations, not merely because of their sprightly phallic gesturing. Here pedagogy is identified in its most blatant and humorous forms for the sculptures also resemble pre-school toys in their bold confectionery colours and obtuse relationship to letters (one or two of the smaller beams are cut with flared edges like a Time New Roman font). Moreover the somewhat lumpish predominance of the L-shape in the main installation gives more delicate focus to the sculpture mounted on the wall, a child recreational climbing frame reworked as a tiny metallic trinket. This latter piece, entitled Insofar, is a luminous counterpart of Frost’s previous experimentation with jewellery kits and surrogate architectural forms, which were in turn related to his projects based on drop-out cultures and social experiments at Black-mountain college.

Frost himself constructed a version of R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome over a week-long open installation project at Transmission in 1998. Similarly, for the most recent installation the sculptures were designed to be mobile so that Frost could continue to experiment beyond the date of the exhibition, shifting and altering the tableau like a form of sculptural choreography. By the time I saw the piece it had been through multiple formations and wore the ragged chaotic appearance of an abandoned puzzle. This insistence on a tangible aspect of work-in-progress seems compliant with the notion of artistic practice as a form of extended studentship – which itself bears resemblance to the more inane signs of instructive play. Here an intellectual fallibility , couched as boyish or adolescent, is expressed in literally reductive forms – monuments are miniaturized, high art works made fluffy and lurid like the building blocks of infancy. But, contrary to the official implications of scale models and prototypes, the stresses placed on the weirdly chosen and combined materials produce uncanny, amorphous results.