Sorcha Dallas

The latest group show at Timothy Taylor Gallery draws together works by some of the most prominent names of the Twentieth century alongside those of a younger generation of emerging and established artists. The disparate collection of pieces on display are tied by the theme of Ventriloquism, which in this context provides a framework for exploring concepts of illusion, manipulation and the distancing devices that artists employ to mask and disguise the singular voice of the author.
Originating from an ancient practice, ventriloquists were believed to be mediums to the underworld who could interpret the voices of the dead and foretell the future. Recurrent in myth and folklore, it is a theme that readily conjures visions of necromantic communication, talking in tongues and the divine conduit or Shamanic interpreter. Through its ability to effect mysterious and disconcerting shifts in perception, ventriloquism occupies a similar psychological territory to that of déjà vu or the doppelganger. All embody a peculiar sense of ‘the other’, an other that is encountered only after a strange process of depersonalization has occurred. The very peculiar experience of otherness that they describe is derived through a simultaneous dislocating and doubling of the self, in vision, in language and in memory. Already suffused with imaginative potential, this intriguing and multi-layered concept adds an immediate tenor to the show, and a strong sense of mood quickly descends and envelopes. Vivid internal and collective symbolism combined with notions of mimicry, hybridity and fragmentation run through the works, giving rise to a strange and alluring atmosphere of magic and the occult. Half-human, half-animal alter-egos are created, fantastical realms governed by their own hermetic languages are explored and revealed, and enigmatic ciphers and imagery abound. Through its investigation of the slippages between the real, the imagined and the fabricated, and often playful relationship to the unconscious realm, Ventriloquist asserts its foundations in the alchemical experiments of early French occult symbolism, the wit of Dada, the Surrealist uncanny and the methodology of psychoanalysis. A sense of history and precedent loom large, and these fundamental influences and ideas provide a strong backdrop to the show, knitting individual works together with an air of both familiarity and currency. The exhibition takes its title from a Jasper Johns painting included in the show, and it is Untitled (Ventriloquist) from 1984 that sets the exploration of this theme into motion. Two thin slivers of Johns’ signature US flag frame an eclectic collection of seemingly hand-made pots that hover over a painted outline and densely rendered pattern of lines. The outline is that of Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ (channeled through an engraving by illustrator Barry Moser), and the vessels depicted stem from the work of the eccentric Nineteenth century Mississippi potter George Ohr, an iconic American figure who hailed mid Twentieth century as a harbinger of abstraction. Originating from such a diverse amalgamation of sources, influence and association lie next to and on top of one another to form a multi-layered interplay between construction and meaning. With its concentration on the concerns of the surface, its texture and its visual balance, Johns’ type of appropriation implies a certain deconstruction of both the image and the practice of art. Categories are established, and a careful selection is made of individual and composite elements required to make up a successful painting. Here it is, the mechanical process rather than the psychological effect of ventriloquie is under scrutiny, each element becoming a channel for a different voice or an alternative mode of expression. It is often the nature of this particular kind of distillation or deconstruction of painterly semantics to divide a painting into the sum of its parts. In the work of the younger painters in the show we see this process adopted as style and technique. In Gorka Mohamed’s General Fatale, a catalogue of marks and colours compete for space. Any solidity is congregated around the middle, where the paint is worked to form strange knitted or hair-like objects that sit against yet more gestures or flat areas of colour. A similar aesthetic is at work in Sphinx by Alan Stanners. Here a range of cartoon-like marks merge and contrast energetically around the canvas, occasionally intersecting and animating a collaged black and white photograph at its centre. This approach to mark making, that employs a range of aesthetic tools is also evident in works by Monika Baer and Charlie Hammond, though both of these display a much firmer sense of discipline. There is more space in these paintings, disparate elements are restrained and brought into check, and a sense of structural, and particularly in Hammond’s case, material balance takes precedence over a more heady and unmediated kind of formal expression. In works of this genre it appears that it is not the eventual deconstruction of the initial idea of painting that is sought, but the initial construction of a painting based on the piecing together of an often disparate lexicon of painterly styles. The premise has shifted, and we see a recent methodology operating in reverse. Rather than appropriating the signs and signifiers of popular culture, as Johns and his contemporaries did (there is a Rauschenburg on display here too), it is an appropriation of the very language and marks that preceded them that is of greater concern to these paintings. Through their use of an accumulation and fusing of different voices, these works fundamentally fit the overall concept of the show, whilst also highlighting an important formal theme currently dominant within contemporary painting. This recent trend sees the legacy of an appropriation and deconstruction trend towards a certain fragmentation in painting, not only of image, but essentially, of idea. When this fragmentation extends from the formal realm of the picture plane into idea, we easily loose grip on any core conceptual underpinnings in the work, thus allowing the painting to quickly loose its grip on us. This language is countered by other works in the show that take a more reductive approach, distilling meaning into a singular image. One such piece is Frnacis Picabia’s Untitled (1948-50). A graphic abstraction of bold lines contains solid earthy tones of brown and red to form an almost primitive image of a phallic head. Resembling an ancient totem or pre-Cycladic fertility image, the symbolism is clear, and its direct quality offers a refreshingly uncomplicated purity of vision. Made towards the end of his life, the work suggests that, like so many artists at the latter end of their careers, this infamously unconventional art world maverick favoured a return to simplicity as a means of expression and provocation. A series of five small inkjet prints by Jens Ulrich also use primitive imagery as a vehicle for more direct and uncluttered communication. Cut out images of carved sculptures and cave paintings depicting animals are superimposed over scenes of animals culled in the wild. These figures stand over their brothers in proud defiance, perhaps squaring up for a stand off with our contemporary western fascination with artifacts of this nature, and the faith we place in their ability to provide access to a version of the natural world that we perceive to be well beyond our reach. Here it is, the archetypes of the primitive, the ancient or the animal, that by virtue of their essential separation from our daily reality, become conduits charged with delivering us to a more ‘authentic’ level of understanding and experience. The Shamanic potential of the animal is an ancient concept that finds itself repeated throughout art history in the form of metaphor and allegory. Lying next to Ulrich’s series, in Picasso’s Minotaure Caressant Une Dormeuse, the Minotaur’s seduction of a young woman alludes in no uncertain terms to the primitive nature of sex. Violence and pleasure collide in an amplification of the raw energy evoked by the animalistic encounter. Only by becoming animal is man able to side-step social rules and conventions, and again, it is through the adoption of a different voice that access to an alternative space of being is permitted. In order to occupy both these psychological spaces, hybridity becomes necessity. Be it figuratively, such as in Steve Bishop’s sculptural uniting of a taxidermy fox and concrete doll, in Monika Baer’s collaged paintings, or in the amalgamation of materials and objects that make up Daniel Pasteiner’s constructions, the notion of the hybrid form is able to occupy multiple spaces, bodies and states reoccurs throughout Ventriloquist. Like Picasso’s Minotaur, self-styled animal communicator, Marcus Coates explores hybridity through man’s transformation into animal. Footage of ordinary people mimicking the sounds of their favourite local birds is accelerated to form a dawn chorus of twittering and tweeting humans. In Local Birds, Coates delivers a playful experience of ventriloquie that is firmly rooted in the humour of the mundane and the everyday. Although simple in its means and subject, the content in Local Birds highlights a key aspect of the show, that of mimicry and role-play. Not only is this theme deeply imbedded in the concept of ventriloquism itself, but the role of the artist as mimic is consistently repeated in the show. We see its manifestation both in individual works that take it as its subject matter, and also in a recurrent mimicking of past movements and ideas. The delicate layering floating forms and inconclusive dream-like imagery in Volker Heller’s series of watercoloured etchings are highly reminiscent in method and mood of the drawings and collages that came out of Surrealism’s interesting automatism and the unconscious, in particular works by Max Ernst and André Masson. Ulrich’s images too, have much in common with Dadaist artist Hannah Hoch’s powerful and enigmatic photomontages. The major difference being that photomontage as a genre was largely formed around Hoch’s initial experiments with media and imagery; these artists were there at the beginning. The commercial and institutional framework of the art world is such that we are little used to viewing works by young and old together in the same space, separated as they largely are by both chronology and location. One of the major delights of Ventriloquist, is its breakdown of the separations that usually govern display, and consequently, appreciation. Here contemporary pieces are not viewed in isolation from their influences, they sit alongside the originals. At times the newer works reinvigorate past pieces and a certain reciprocity ensues: the presence of established artists lending gravitas to the younger works, while they in turn add a level of currency to the works of their elders, assigning them a deeper pertinence within the context of current debate. As fulfilling as these comparisons are for the viewer, the anachronistic perspective offered by the show adds a level of scrutiny that many of the younger pieces cannot withstand. There are some notable exceptions, in Heller, Bauer and Hammond to name just a few, but on the whole, the presence of young with old, mimicking old, only serves to reassert the quality and depth of the predecessor in contrast to that of the successor. When judged within the same parameters, as Ventriloquist encourages this shortfall is to some extent, inevitable. And although this process brings with it an exciting sense of democracy, comradery even, in this particular game of ventriloquie finally it is mimicked and not the mimic whose voice we remember, perhaps reminding us that art-making is a much longer game than recent contemporary trends would have liked us to believe.