Visual Art
The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand ls Blind by Douglas Gordon
PRINT AND VIDEO WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN Glasgow Print Studio, until Sat 28 May 0...
in When the Sun Goes Down. both Detiglas Gordon and the brothers Chapman revisit. reconsider and expand upon past work. When the Momart warehouse fire destroyed ‘Hell'. Jake and Dinos Chapman's vast. gut-wrenching swastika-shaped tableau. the brothers were blase. saying: 'We‘ll make it again. It’s only art.‘ They were true to their word. and here are four little Vignettes in which the battle between miniature mutants and trouserless NEVIS continues. Wllh an emphasis on grisly sexual torture. But these tiny reminders are sad. rather than shocking; mere mementoes of the lost work that spawned them.
With their series of etchings. titled ‘lvly Giant Colouring Book'. the Chapmans are also on familiar ground. juxtaposing sickly innocence with sick experience. A post- operative teddy bear spills his guts. gleeful children gaze at a muddle of shapes that sprouts hair. and a doe-eyed princess flees the castle she has just blown up. (One wonders. too. whether these etchings are a reversal of the Chapmans' ‘lnsult to lniury'. this time defacing childhood treaSLires instead of ‘rectifying' Goya's ‘Disasters of War'.i
Like the Chapmans. Gordon has long looked on the struggle between good and em. whether screening the transformation of Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde or. as here. staging battles With his own hands. Of the three Video pieces presented. two are twins. showing a right hand shavmg a left hand. then daubing it With black ink. and vice versa. The third shows two hands. in skin-tight black gloves. holding each other in a death grip. or. iust possbly. a deadly embrace. iJack Mottram)
by Santibo Sierra .1,
104 THE LIST 1? at; Ma, 1230:”;
SCULPTURE RACHEL HARRISON
Transmission, Glasgow, until Sat 14 May 000
High art and trash walk hand in hand. teetering on giant i<>;,'i\ i. ti!i(;f'llt; at the Transmission Gallery. where New York—based scu‘ptor and instal’atiw artist Hacliel Harrison has assembled Quasi-brutalist sculptures. (:aitilxx‘iiii t,<)X(;-‘;. mittuial oddments and a video of Kiss (1976). It's hard to take this iiisita’f.it.t>ii i,£2.’;t)tl?;i‘,’ this seems to be Harrison's ponit ~ the metallic hunting and the ceiize ltista :xig see to that. But the sad anti-form remnants of the (:ariii‘.a:t;:.<iiie let ‘,()ii the party is over.
We are told in the gallery text that Harrison's work resists egis‘, mating tossed gauntlet if ever there was one. It is not that the work is <i‘.i’fi<;iilt. it is i. it‘ll, confused. not even confusing. The 'maxiinalist' apiticacli to iistal'atxin a's .'.'!ll‘. fit,-
.t l. . .t,.,
minimalist gestures frozen under the plastic frosting i5.” eased ().t;t tint,- a'ii:_itiiie of tie sculptures. This tension is interesting and simple: you don't need to think l()t) liaiil. Like an artist at a fancy-dress party. yOu are supposed to ‘.'-.'ender if it's art or fun. as if the categories were exclusive or you gave a damn.
An untitled monumental red figure is placeu on a <7az<lh.:.aul hex ixriih. Iii-.2
construction. created out of block-like tom‘s. falls Lil).'.’£i.'(l t.) a fliKEl/(J ::<;_~,-.;- attached
to its ‘face'. Two lemons nestle like something sexual at the feet of a gre, green sculpture. reminding the viewer not to mistake abstraction lc' seizuiisness. 8;;iiea'.:.t “part-objects litter the space. thwarting Clllll'SliCKltlg ttit‘.(1«;;::;,;t3f;. ',<.-t tints .'.()l'i\ l(:fl.if;lf; being funny 'sfrange' or funny “ha ha'. (Alexander Kennedy»
GROUP SHOW THIS PEACEFUL WAR Tramway, Glasgow, until Sat 22 May
In cherry-picking from the Jumex Collection — some 1200 works purchased by the director of Mexico‘s leading soft drinks company — curator Francis McKee has allowed his eye to fall on work that concerns itself with the political. Santiago Sierra is both the best-known and the bluntest artist represented. His documented actions are capitalism in microcosm - the poor are exploited for the profit of the rich, as in ‘Documentation of an 8 Foot Line Tattooed on Six Remunerated People’, in which the six are unemployed boys from Havana, given a meagre $30 to have their bodies marked.
Simple, complex, and vile too. Francis Alys goes in for densely layered gestures as well, albeit, here, on a grander scale. His ‘When Faith Moves Mountains’ documents the infinitesimal relocation of a sand dune outside Lima, shifted four inches by volunteers with shovels, nodding to the inexorable expansion of the adjacent city, and, with vast effort expended to next to no effect, a testament to human co- operation.
If politics is the theme of ‘This Peaceful War’, then video is its medium. Alongside Smith, Doug Aitken’s ‘Diamond Sea‘ clashes the beauty of desert landscape with the razor-wired structures of the Namibian mining industry in a video installation that is decidedly filmic, from the tense soundtrack to the suspense-filled editing techniques, more unguessable mystery than cool documentary. Anri Sala’s video, ‘Arena', 2001, is tense too, a slow look at Tirana’s decaying zoo, standing in for the post-communist city that surrounds it. This is a quietly insistent exhibition, then, in which the avowedly political work gently skews the more meditative, less explicit pieces, making for a thoughtful and thought-provoking, if somewhat dry show. (Jack Mottram)