PAIN TING AND WORK ON PAPFR LOUISE HOPKINS Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 11 Dec 0...
Freedom of Information brings together key examples of Louise Hopkins' output over the past decade. From the works on furnishing fabric with which she made her name via various over- painted found images. Hopkins“ consistent application of laborious technique to economical concept produces an oeuvre that is strongly unified aesthetically and intellectually.
Her work mines the legacy of modernism's reductionist strategies — the monochrome. the grid etc —- but returns to them repressed qualities, including the decorative. and the commercial/popular as opposed to the industrial/alienated. This can be read as an effort to give modernist tropes renewed life by playing formal properties against conceptual ones -< with Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawmg, 1953. an obvious precedent. In this case. as with Hopkins' work. we become aware of our investment in visual information when it is presented as trace.
The most recent works here. such as Relief (739). feature painstakingly reworked floral motifs. with Hopkins characteristically obscuring the pattern's facile legibility with delicate repetitions and fillings-in. It is this play between revealing and concealing, effected in a complicity with pre—existing visual codes and marks which ultimately undermines them. that connects the fabric works with Hopkins‘ other signature approaches: overpainting maps. erasing comics. whiling~out music scores. blacking out nouns. verbs and adjectives from printed texts. Although the Visual impact differs in each case. the conceptual effect ~ of an obsessive engagement wuth systems of meaning that compromises their legibility A makes Freedom of Information more than the sum of its parts. (Dominic Paterson)
Visual Art
Review
INSTALLATION KEITH FAROUHAR - NEW WORK/MARK LECKEY - JACKIN’ WORLD
lnverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, until Sun 8 Jan 00” NO.”
When art examines the empty whirring of the capitalist machine (the random sexing-up of materials, and consumerism as subject matter in its own right), it can go two ways. There’s the Jeff Koons direction, where the objects produced ride the wave of kitsch and the empty reification of a dead aesthetic within the object that is now nothing other than a badge of tacky prestige, or there’s an analysis of the materialist equation this work emerges from: the ‘art versus consumerism’ question. The work shown by both Farquhar and Leckey at lnverleith House (although very different) takes the latter route, exploring these issues under the spunk-splattered blanket of homosociality.
The clothes maketh the man and the sound piece that reverberates around Farquhar’s installation lists off the items of clothing that help the modern urban hooligan blend into the general populus: ‘Nice pair of trainers, shoes, jeans and a top’ - the mantra of the looped refrain. ‘Casual’ culture is presented as an almost sexually charged relationship with good clothing (fresh, pure white Reebok Classics, leather Office loafers, Fruit of the Loom cotton and dark dyed denim). Women are always somewhere else - ‘casualettes’ in their own ‘team’, one supposes. Thirty jeans- wearing, red, grey and white hoodie-clad figures are crouched, pressed and folded against the wall, staring into the bisected urban denim landscape that faces them.
In Mark Leckey’s ‘Jackin’ World’ this homosocial theme (this time as triangulated desire for women, between men) is also in evidence. The film ‘A Bigger Splash’, 1974, is given a new sound track by Leckey’s band Jack too Jack. Art, music and fashion breed. Hockney attends a fashion show with designer Ozzie Clark, where women are safely on the catwalk/stage, as the boys judge what’s on display - the clothes. Other paraphernalia and references are installed, and a visual poem with a Leckey soundtrack to public sculpture quietly steals the show. (Alexander Kennedy)
lNSTALLATlON
WALTER DAHN The Modern Institute, Glasgow, from Fri 18 Nov—Tue 20 Dec
With some artists, you know where you are — they light upon a metier, and stick with it. Not so Walter Dahn.
Rising to prominence at the dawn of the 19808, Dahn found himself in the midst of that giddy upswing in German painting that railed against the coolly conceptual in favour of the figurative. While the Neue Wilden in Berlin had one eye on expressionism and the other on the post—punks. and Hamburg played host to Kippenberger and co. Dahn and his Cologne contemporaries founded Miilheimer Freiheit. a shared studio group whose output was characterised by defying categorisation.
This lack of tone set the tone for Dahn's career, and sparked a liking for working collaboratively — his early work was produced jointly with Czech-born artist Jiri Georg Dokoupil, and recent output includes a long series of ‘word paintings‘ made with Canadian Philip Pocock. If painting made Dahn's name, his reputation has been cemented by a free approach to media. He is set to show photographs. sculptural objects and paintings at the Modern Institute. and has long cross-pollinated his visual art practice with a parallel career in music. by repeated reference to song titles, and album cover art, by everyone from Nick Drake to Palace.
No one save Dahn himself, then, has the faintest idea what will be in the gallery until he arrives with his work. One thing is certain. though — it will be well worth finding out just what he is up to today. (Jack Mottram)
l7 Nov—1 Dec 2005 THE LIST 95