Press

Art seems to be going through a period of transition in Glasgow.* Like it Matter*s in the CCA demonstrates that there is a distinct move away from YBA egomania towards quiet confidence. There is an acceptance that even though the world could continue without art, we can’t.

The three Glasgow-based sculptors exhibiting present very different work, but each artist demonstrates significant ways in which the lessons of minimalism and performance art have been learned and developed. By utilizing non-art materials such as flour, cardboard, paper and denim, Karla Black, Mike Peter and Michael Stumpf attack the monumentality of traditional sculptural vocabularies, developing new formal lexicons that make the mundane seem poetic.

The anti-formal concerns of late moderns sculptors (such as Robert Morris with his piles of felt) are invoked in the work of Karla Black, who seems to be attempting an ironic ‘feminisation’ of Joseph Beuys. But, rather than shamanism and lard, her sculptural works consist of pink petroleum jelly and the traces of empty ritual (‘Proof of the Cure’, for example). She presents an ambivalent take on feminism, which is always a safer option.

Mike Peter and Michael Stumpf’s works are more recognizably sculptural – although both avoid the chare of sober monumentality. Peter, with his foot still in the ‘at that makes you snigger’ camp, presents a ‘Pig Tanker’, leaking black gold from its mechanized feeding stations. ‘Nope’ is less accessible but breaks Sol LeWitt’s cold grids and frames with its cracking wit: a concrete die/cube sits on a construction that looks like it should accommodate it, but nope. Michael Stumpf continues his heroic journey into a Nibelungen land. Like Peter and Black, he opts for unprepossessing, non-art materials (denim and aerosol-pain in ‘Rock’), yet his sculptures manage to charge the surrounding air with something unheimlich (uncanny – or to give the German word its exact translation, ‘unhomely’).

Transitional periods in art are always difficult to fully comprehend – there is a future-facing element in the work that bars immediate aesthetic judgement, and reactionary traces that could make you view the work too harshly. Look again.