Reviews
.’~/,l)l,l"ljio1. JUDIWS ROGER ACKLING Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until Wed 3 Nov 00..
It I’) often said that great things come in small packages and this is certainly true of Roger Aekling's site-specific sculptural norks. V‘Jhat appears at first glance to he an empty gallery is in fact full of llll,’ wooden objects wall mounted onto miniature plrnths — door knobs. clothes pegs and balls retrieved from skips. beaches and river hanks. On every item. Aeklrng burns lrrres onto the surface of the object by focusing the sun's rays throrrgh a small rrragriifyrrig glass. I,_aelr rrrark is a small black sun. It's an extraordinary process and one which Aekling has devoted the past (5:3 years to [)(3lf(:(;llllfj.
Aeklrng's first solo show at the Ingleby Gallery is a meditative experience. It's rnrnirrral. guret and yet powerful. Whrle deciphering the object's previous incarnation. you are reminded of the Journey of the sun's ray to the earth. vrsrble in the burnt rrrarkings In the rear gallery, he works With the architecture of space. arranging blocks of angular wood into the corner of the room. As the sun streams in through the wrndow. rt casts rrrterestrrrg patterns on the wall. The addrtrorr of rnapprng pins and rubber bands to all the sculptures distracts somewhat to this most usz of practices but does reveal a playful rneetrng of the rnan-rnat‘le and the natural. (Helen Monaghan)
LIGHT INSTALLATION GARY ROUGH
INSTALLATION SIMON STARLING The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Fri 5 Nov .000
In France there’s a phrase, bricoleurs - ‘do-it- yourselfers’, but without the suburban overtones. Simon Starling is the ultimate example: an artist whose work consists of contraptions Heath Robinson would have been proud of. But he’s by no means the first artist bricoleur. That was Duchamp. And in 19605 New York, for example, Gordon Matta Clark hacked yawning slits into the fabric of buildings, transforming them into sculptures. Starling continues a grand tradition of subversive thinking around the ecology of objects.
He builds things and then he gives them a history, a narrative which takes them beyond formal sculptures. In his new installation, he presents an object and a large watercolour painting inside a Perspex display cabinet. The ‘object’ is a moped built out of two Raleigh bikes, powered by hydrogen gas bottles strapped to the frame. There are pipes, wires and transistors connecting to a fuel cell, and an exhaust tube dangling into a drinking bottle.
Sorcha Dallas Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 6 Nov 0..
The idea of 'drawrng in light ends up smacking of early exerted forays into photography or animation lone thinks of scratched film being dragged frenetrcally over an electric light bulb). but it is a description that seems to fit New York-based Scottish artist Gary Rough's work very well. Neon a/ways overwhelms the form and the idea: rt is diffiCuIt to utilise wrthOut being totally dominated by rts superfrcral power. By reining in the coIOurs of the light and still letting rt hrt the viewer wrth an initial
'wow'. Rough attempts to worthrly walk the tightrope of over-glitz and kitsch. closely followrng the American neon werdsmiths Joseph Kosuth and Jenny Holzer.
Thirteen lightening bolts in various cool col0urs rain down on the gallery invoking a curse that pulsates over the vrewer. Everyday Superstition permeates from a ClLlaSl- Kantian sublime. the lightening bolt of awareness and reason is made manifest. and Zigzags out from a COrner of the gallery. dripping down the walls like molten metal. This work explores the new sublime wrth rts tongue in its cheek and its middle finger raised: rt presents a clear rbut slightly ungainlyr aesthetic Without being overly didactic.
Retigh SlllitllialleOUSIy harnesses electriCrty and its Cipher. exposing and electrifying the philosophical wrring under the board of the Romantic nocturne tradition. But the Viewer needs more than a hyperbonc gesture towards this movement in order to feel it; 8 he could be standing in mock awe. trapped in the false daylight of the post- Enlrghtenment and not know it. (Alexander Kennedyl
Visual Art
Simon Sterling's moped in the Tabernas desert
It’s fairly evident that the waste product of this engine is water: hydrogen plus oxygen. But what we can’t divine without the artist’s explanation is that Starling drove his hydrogen-powered moped across the 41 miles of Spain’s Tabernas desert, and then painted a watercolour of a cactus using the waste water he collected along the way.
If the abstraction of the object from its narrative (by putting it in a display cabinet) is an interesting new development for Starling regulars, it really doesn’t add anything to the experience. Perhaps it betrays the artist’s ongoing experiments to build a narrative element into his work without overdetermining how the work can be read. But this is a diversion. It’s the fusion of object and narrative in the main piece that matters, conjuring an image of Starling as a kind of eco- adventurer: Biggles crossed with Bob the Builder; the Boys' Own bricoleur. His adventures bring the piece to life. It is charming; a nod to surrealist jokes overridden by a gently earnest social conscience, but beyond the oddball charm, this installation underlines his deadly serious ideological concerns. (Nick Barley)
2‘ OCT—A No; 2904 THE LIST 105