Jo Higgins

June 21, 2010

Review

REVIEW: Sean Scully New Work, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Jo Higgins

June 21, 2010

Review

28 May – 3 July 2010

There’s an enormous sense of integrity to Sean’s Scully’s work. Certainly his unwavering, at times unfashionable, commitment to abstraction, particularly in the face of the ‘shock and awe’ styles of contemporary art we have become accustomed to contributes to this sense but there is also a visual integrity – in his palette and his painterly application – and the resulting encounter is overwhelmingly contemplative, beautiful and satisfying. Which is no small feat for a series of canvases ostensibly covered in large rectangles of colour.

There are only thirteen works on display in this exhibition of new work at Timothy Taylor Gallery but such is their scale, and their depth, that the experience is far from short-changing. The works are mostly new additions to Scully’s Wall of Light series and the earthy, luminous colours that were inspired by the artist’s visit to Mexico in the early 1980s are infused with a warm sense of energy that makes standing in front of them a meditative experience. The beauty of Scully’s technique – applying paint, scraping it back, re-applying it and layering in different colours means that these blocks of colour are never exactly executed and their gestural, unpolished edges allow subtle peeks of colour to seep through – a navy is offset by a blush pink, a grey blue reveals a sunflower yellow. The aesthetic effect is of a visual depth and complexity within the work but beyond that, there is also the suggestion of a conscientious artistic practice.

Scully’s work resonates with a subtle but gently invigorating energy that stems in large part from a scrutiny of the canvas. There is both effort and restraint in Scully’s work – a methodology of application and image construction that is evident in the gestural brushstrokes and yet, despite this very human presence on the canvas, there is also a spiritual, emotional quality akin to the best of Mark Rothko’s own canvases of rectangular colour blocks, where the paintings seems to breathe and perhaps threaten to evanesce. Scully’s works feel more grounded than Rothko’s in this sense, defined by its textural quality and scale, but that spiritual sense of encounter is very much alive here. In fact, viewing Scully’s work might best be understood as a sort of religious experience – not in the sense of great revelation or a chorus of hallelujah – rather, in that sense of dedication, passion and faith, and an understanding of religion as a search for beauty and grace. It is surprisingly affective and the large airy space of Timothy Taylor Gallery lends itself well to the scale and emotion of Scully’s work. Overwhelmingly this viewing experience is an edifying one, both visually and emotionally and it is well worth encountering.

REVIEW: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Barbican Centre, London

Jo Higgins

May 20, 2010

Review

27 February – 23 May 2010

There’s no denying the value of a novelty factor when it comes to bringing new audiences to contemporary art. Zebra finches playing electric guitars certainly takes novel and smashes it, like any self-respecting guitar hero might. Gimmicks aside, and this one is especially clever, there is something much more profound to be had in experiencing French artist and composer Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s immersive installation at the Barbican than might first be imagined. Yes, there are zebra finches, yes, there are cymbals and basses and electric guitars and yes, if you stand calmly enough, the birds will fly about before coming in to land on you. But it is the subtleties of the experience, as a soundscape, an environment and an encounter with nature-as-art that makes this delicate, multi-sensory experience so profoundly memorable and well worth the hour-plus wait it takes to be admitted.

Reinvigorated as a space for temporary art exhibitions, The Curve at the Barbican is a clever and surprisingly diverse space (it previously housed a mock World War Two bunker and next month will feature a modified mobile home by Berlin-based artist John Bock) and as the site for Boursier-Mougenot’s aviary it feels surprisingly natural. The first half of the narrow space is darkened and as the wooden promenade guides you along the walls flicker with close cropped video projections of fingers busily strumming guitars. The buzzing, droning soundtrack that plays overhead is not the instruments but the mechanics of the video signal being processed. According to Boursier-Mougenot this is the ‘sound of the images’. This notion of the sound of images, or indeed the images of sound is arguably what drives much of the Frenchman’s practice but as an entrée to the aviary this first installation doesn’t feel wholly connected – in dialogue or even necessarily aesthetics – to the birds and as such, on rounding the corner and entering the brilliant white space of the open aviary this initial introduction to the work is instantly forgotten.

Brightly lit, the large space has no windows but feels far from claustrophobic with the wooden promenade looping around small islands of sand and desert grass, on which Boursier-Mougenot has placed his instruments. Tiny birdhouses line the upper part of the wall but otherwise the only perches are the cymbals, basses and electric guitars. And the visitors, of course. Tuning the instruments so that each string, when touched, produces a loud, clear chord, the zebra finches territorially guard a nest built perilously on the neck and headstock of one guitar, while others peck at the seeds held in the cymbal-as-birdfeeder. And when they are not attending to such things as house-building and eating and daily ablutions in the other cymbal-as-birdbath, they are nonchalantly engaging with visitors – snooping through handbags, taking up residence in the hood of someone’s jacket or taking in the view from the top of another’s head. Novelty factor? Absolutely. And this interactive element is certainly crucial to the charm of the work but overwhelmingly it is the gently improvised score of twittering, incidental strumming and pecking that brings the work as a whole to life.

There is an ad hoc poetic quality to this aural-visual display of daily life and activity and it is not easy to reconcile the delicacy of these tiny birds producing these bold, electric sounds with the fact that musicians such as Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, even Slash, have used these same instruments to create their own unique scores.

In much the same manner as composer John Cage infamously encouraged listeners of his silent score 4’33’’ (1952) to hear the incidental sounds of their surroundings, and the influence of Cage on Boursier-Mougenot should not be discounted, the artist here has similarly drawn viewers to reflect and engage with the sounds of the ‘image’ presented here, of which the viewer is an integral part.

The success of Boursier-Mougenot’s installation at the Barbican lies not in the charm of the zebra finches and the rare chance to engage so closely with them, but in the after-effect – the heightened sensory awareness of the non-art life. Sounds, surroundings, even smells feel brighter and more richly realised and you leave feeling more attuned towards discovering joy and beauty and song in the details of the everyday. You really can’t ask for more of an art encounter.

REVIEW: Decode: Digital Design Sensation, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Jo Higgins

May 16, 2010

Review

8 December 2009 – 11 April 2010

There’s something quite alluring about the concept of art dressed as play and Decode: Digital Design Sensation at the V&A offers the ultimate interactive playground. Luddites need not be afraid – this is high-end technology with a heavy dose of fun as viewers are necessarily encouraged to engage with the works as participant, performer and ultimately, as creative collaborator in the realisation of each work, in terms of both its form and its interactive potential.

Loosely divided into three thematic areas: Code, Interactivity and Network, Decode presents a range of genuinely engaging works, both literally and intellectually, and overwhelmingly the exhibition succeeds in liberating the notion that technology – as design, animation and sophisticated, complicated software – cannot be considered as authentic an artisanal tool as the paintbrush.

The exhibition starts beguilingly, with a dark pathway, either side of which appears to be overgrown plastic grass. As is regularly the case in Decode, it takes a small enthusiastic child to demonstrate its function. Running up and down the corridor, grazing her palms across the tops of this swaying ‘grass’ the action activated some sort of light sensor within them and they came to life, like a dormant plant at the start of spring.

It’s an engaging beginning that perhaps unfairly sets expectations quite high for Code, the first thematic section of the exhibition to be encountered. Code explores how computer code is being increasingly used as a design tool. While undoubtedly clever, it lacked the kind of wonderment – and the tactility – that would define the rest of the exhibition.

Curatorially it was no doubt clever to begin with these works, which perhaps for a more tech savvy audience would have had more resonance, but for this viewer, felt clinical and a bit slick.

From here on however it is an intoxicating mix of joy and astonishment. It is silly, funny, involving and often, surprisingly, also quite beautiful. The distinction between ‘Interactivity’ and ‘Network’ seems occasionally indistinct, both within the space and between the works as ideas of response, engagement, communication and trace can undoubtedly be located in most of the works here.

Exquisite Clock by the Italian communication centre Fabrica is exactly what it says on the box. Using unusual images of numbers found in the everyday and constantly uploaded by members of the public, the clock keeps real time, with the image-numbers changing as the seconds, minutes and hours tick by. Watching time pass has never been so arresting, if you’ll excuse the irony.

Ideas of time and trace are central to Aaron Koblin’s Flight Pattern (2009), itself a work of and about time and its passing. Koblin has taken complex computational data from the American Federal Aviation Administration on 205,000 flights that occurred on 12 August 2008 and made visual these journeys with tiny threads of colour that stream across the screen. It’s an exquisite work visually and reflecting on the enormity of what each of these threads represent – cargo, passengers, hours of check-in – makes its simplicity all the more breath-taking.

In the installation Dandelion (2009) by the UK and Danish design studios Senep and YOKE, visitors confront a dandelion clock on a large screen, swaying gently against a bright blue sky. Taking a hairdryer and blowing it, gun-like, toward the screen, a concealed infrared light mimics an extremely stiff breeze and scatters the seeds until they fall gently to the ground. In Mehmet Akten’s Body Paint (2009) it is human movement that activates the work. Akten has created a custom software program that converts gesture and motion into a very space age paintbrush. It’s all very Jackson Pollock as viewers flail their arms in front of the screen to produce wild thrashes of colour against the otherwise blank ‘canvas’. It’s both liberating and inspiring, in a genial sort of way, to realise the creative potential in an otherwise unexceptional physical gesture.

Updating the very traditional art of portraiture, random International’s Study for a Mirror (2008) creates a temporary portrait of each viewer as they stand in front of the blank photosensitive surface and their visage is captured in ultra violent light. Like a nostalgic exercise in revisiting old memories and photos, the portrait never entirely holds and the light eventually fades, taking the image with it before the next visitor stands and the process is repeated. The stillness required of the viewer while their image is being captured and the gradual nature of the image’s realisation feels as odds with the at-times dizzying sense of progress and innovation at play within the wider exhibition (never mind the world at large), but it provides a moment for purposeful reflection and a neat lesson in the value of pausing occasionally to reflect on the magnitude of such technological development.

One of the works that arguably best reflects the relationship between interactivity and network is Ross Phillips’s Videogrid (2009). A large double-sided screen featuring 25 squares that each play a one-second loop of film recorded by participants, Videogrid, is a series of animated portraits and simple storylines – think eight year old boys channelling Charlie Chaplin and Punch and Judy – that evolves and constantly updates with freshly recorded contributions from participants. The short films are recorded against one side of the screen and projected on the other, with the 25 squares presenting a dynamic, kaleidoscopic network of moving images.

Even the most hardened of technophobes would be hard pressed to deny the popular and critical success of Decode as a highly memorable art experience. With such a slick subject matter it could have risked seeming more like a technology expo than an art exhibition but the sensitivity to realising a whole host of original images and the overwhelmingly holistic approach to image and image-making – taking into account the use of colour, composition and even texture – made it so much more. What Decode successfully proves is that art, even today, remains open to endless reinvention.

REVIEW: Sean Scully New Work, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

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REVIEW: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Barbican Centre, London

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REVIEW: Decode: Digital Design Sensation, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

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